Author: Tamara Belanger (Page 9 of 74)

I sat in church yesterday and let the words of the songs run down my heart, the parts that felt raw like salt in a carpet burn.  I held the bread and juice of the communion in my hands and felt like the beggar at the tableside.    I’m just back from visiting my daughter and her beautiful family this weekend.  They are carving out, so intentionally, the landscape of their lives. The little girl she was, the lover of nature and beauty, the feeler of feelings deep, has become a keeper of her own home and it reflects those little girl lost qualities.  It’s lovely and gentle and strong and good and it warms me to see the good seeds being planted.

I gave her, early on, the job of decorating the table for family celebrations.  From my seat in Panera Bread, where I’m typing these words, I can see her run for the door in the theatre of my mind,  returning with hands full of pine cones and flowers and weave them  in with bits of lace or things found around the house that she found beautiful.   She still does that.  I walked past a vase where she’d kept a sprig of their first full sized Christmas tree from this year.  That is so like her to think of that.

I watch her with her own little girl now and I am transfixed.  She chooses toys, wooden and purposeful and lovely in their own right.  She reads her a bible story each day while Bea plays around her on the floor.  She makes oatmeal paint colored with natural food dye and lets her paint in the bathtub.  She feeds her good, whole food and makes most everything from her own hand.  She is a marvel to me.   So, it astounds me that I could have wounded her so deeply from my own hand.  The divorce, and my own subsequent slide off the track for a few years, cut her heart up in pieces.  Her pain comes out in quick, sharp comments from time to time; memories she carries.  She doesn’t mean to hurt.  I know that about her; but I  feel myself quietly implode when her scars become verbal.

It’s a difficult thing, sitting beside the scene of my own crime.  I can feel the bumpy parts where the scars grew on the  skin of her heart, see the lingering distrust in her eyes.  It’d hard for her, I’m thinking, to see me love her girl and remember the shots I fired into her world when she was a girl and not want to make me pay still.  It feels heavy in my gut those times when I want to explain but can’t craft anything to say that changes anything.

So, I sat listening to my pastor remind us that the Holy Spirit is about the business of eliminating barriers that keep people from hearing the truth.  I lock back tears as I stab at lies screaming at me and force open my clenched up chest to let Him breathe His truth to me.  I am forgiven.  I can allow myself to be forgiven.  I will look on the horizon for His freedom and freely take the bread and the cup offered to me.  And take up the basin and towel to wash the feet of my daughter.

I’ve been reading a lot about being minimal; in diet, possessions, technology,  mind set.  What do I really want, really need that adds the most value to my life?   It’s quite personal, the answers to those.  My body, my thoughts, my emotions nudge me to pay close attention these days.  The future doesn’t seem endless like it used to.  I’ve gone past my “hunting and gathering” days and I find myself shedding what has hung off like barnacles.  I wonder how I’d have chosen differently, had I thought to ask this question more urgently in my younger years.  I throw even that  off, though, and walk on.  I don’t have time to harness myself.

I live in a 150+ year old house, the rooms built all in a row.  I’ve created sort of a first floor “attic” in my living room, where the shedding has begun.  I’ve piles of books, trinkets, and furniture that seemed like a good idea at the time.  They’re in there together now, mingling  like a roomful of old men smoking cigars and slapping each other’s backs, reminiscing.  I’ll wait for spring to set them out on my front lawn and invite others to peruse.  I’ve pushed and scraped things into place, emptied out shelves and drawers.  I start to feel differently.  The tether to things is loosening.  It is easier to let go than I thought.

I got up this morning, and sat in company with my coffee.  I have right now.  What shall I do with it?   It’s these thoughts that often bind me up.  I can’t think of anything that seems important enough, big enough to matter.  I’m reading The Oregon Trail, A New American Journey by Rinker Buck.  A desire bigger than a dream pushed him into action and he and his brother recreated the trek that so many other brave and deliciously reckless souls before us saddled up for.  I picture them in my mind; nameless, faceless, lost to anyone’s history, doing every day chores, thinking every day thoughts.  And one choice at a time formed a life lived.  Whether I know about it, whether anyone remembers?  It mattered then.  It matters now.  And I decide to lay my fretful notions of grandiose in the same room with the old men relics.

I decide to decide, one choice at a time.  I grab my camera and go for a walk.  Outside fills my lungs and my mind with oxygen.  My world becomes bigger, bigger than me, and there’s room for joy and bird songs and the beautiful in the every day and I take notice and snap it quick so I can remind myself.  I wonder what the Oregon Trail “ghost” people would have left behind, had they had cameras.  I wonder if they would have thought we’d have cared.

I pay attention to the colors and sounds around me, I notice the smallness and the big, in equal measure.  It all weaves together, color blocks, life quilt.  I take my fullness home and make more choices, small decisions.  I read to my girl and stop to look up things we wonder about to find answers.  We gather up Christmas gift cards and go to hunt some tennis shoes for walking, shoes I could not afford, save the blessing from a friend.  I need these shoes.  My feet are beginning to feel age and wear that younger years betrayed me into thinking would never happen to me.  The pain, though, reminds me.  Nothing taken for granted, nothing too small to be grateful for.  I slip into my new kicks and wear them the rest of the day, floating on a cloud of relief.  It is good to be loved, to receive, to feel the ripple of kindness with each step I take.

The girl and I make lunch together, all chopped onions and spices and we pile our plates high and look across the table from one another.  Time spent eating, simple acts.  “I love this day, mama.”   My heart warms to her words.  We’ll forget this particular lunch, this particular moment.  There will be more of them.  But this choice to sit and savor?  A good one.  I wash up the dishes clean and leave them to dry.  We walk to the feed store down the street, the Mayberry flavor that makes you look to see if Aunt Bea or Sheriff Taylor is just behind you.  We gather up suet cakes and cages to go with them and take them back home to hang on our Christmas tree, now relocated to the back yard, to give it new purpose, a new kind of living.

The day is ending now, the “doing things” part of it, and I find myself feeling on purpose.  Intentional.  And I decide I’ve found my word for the rest of this year.  I will look for the value in what I am doing, saying, thinking, reading, eating……how I consume the currency of my time.  I will live on purpose, content with the lack of grandiose, and take the next step.  I will decide to live to enrich and be enriched.

I will walk without barnacles.

I never get tired of it; the mornings when I can savor quiet and move slower, when the calendar and the clock aren’t my dictators.   I take the time to make my scrambled eggs fluffier and more flavorfully complicated, all spices and Tofutti.  I pour myself a fancy glass, not the everyday mason jars, with organic juice I found marked down enough so I can have it and still pay my light bill.  The ingredient list has beets and pineapple and carrots and turmeric and I feel very grown up and I light my candle and sit down at my speckled kitchen table.  That’s when my dad always shows up.

He loves making breakfast on Saturday mornings.  He has on a white undershirt,  gray sweatpants, brown house shoes;  stirring and scrambling and frying.  The bacon sizzle competes with his whistling.  My eyes gaze down at my breakfast and I realize I’m daydreaming.  Dad’s in heaven two years now.  But he’d have loved this cold, blustery Saturday.  I think to take a picture and look at it closely.  There’s lessons there.  Dad was vibrant and happy and made friends wherever he went.  He loved coffee and crossword puzzles and would find new places to go and sit and do both….and talk to people he’d never met.  He loved kids and would never fail to bend down and look them right in the eye when he was talking to them.  For some odd reason, he loved to look for four leaf clovers.  I can still see him now, out in my yard, looking down and walking slowly.  He’d come in the front door, my kids swarming all around him and hand me his discovery with a smile on his face.  He’d done it again.

Dad loved to challenge himself and learn something new.  He read voraciously and would send letters to the authors and let them know he enjoyed their book, many times receiving answers from them.  He wanted to learn to fly so he did and then bought himself a small plane and took me flying.   He was fueled by current events and loved politics.  So he entered the ring; sometimes he lost and sometimes he won.  He brought me along to campaign with him and meet others campaigning.  He’d always wanted to see the ball drop on Times Square so one New Year’s Eve he bought a ticket and flew to NYC.  He made his “always wanted to” happen.

My dad was life brimming over.  He’s the last person you’d expect Alzheimer’s to invade.  But it did; brutally, quickly, mercilessly.  It robbed him blind this side of heaven.   I sit looking at this breakfast and I take it all in, one bite at a time.  I don’t forget to remember that my legs walked me into the kitchen with no help from anyone else.  I know where things are; the pepper sits king  in it’s place in the cupboard, my favorite white plate perched on top of the pile at the ready;  waiting to be chosen.  I scramble and chop and mix.  I know how to.  Except whistle.  I can’t whistle.   It’s all familiar.   My home is not  a stranger to me.  I pick up my fork and I know what it is;  put it to my mouth and notice that I can, all by myself.  The tart of raspberries and hot of coffee taste just the same as they always have and they comfort me.

My father taught me that things that you think will always remain….don’t.  You can forget how, forget who, forget why, forget what.  You can stop knowing, stop tasting, stop seeing, stop hearing.  He taught me to grab hold hard and wring it out dry.  He taught me how to live.  He made breakfast mean something.

#alzheimers #lifelessons #joy #fathers