"Coming home"

I need help with this. I'm not completely happy with it, but I can't exactly say why. Maybe I say too much? Need to leave more to the imagination? Or is it all too out of context? Thoughts and criticisms are appreciated, I am not a good fiction writer (yet, anyway).

His feet barely rose from the hard ground.

“Stand tall,” they used to snap. “Don’t shuffle,” they’d say. “Lift your steps high.”

But that was when his hair was dark and thick and waving in the wind, when his back was straight and his eyes bright and his heart full of hope and love and promise for the future.

That was years ago. Decades ago.

The old man shuffled slow, now, puffs of dust rising from under boots worn and cracking and caked with the mud and dust of mile upon weary mile. His back bowed under a faded and patched sack, only half full. Strands of gray, thin hair escaped from his shapeless hat.

Now he came to a crossroads, where the dirt road crossed a paved highway. A truck rattled by, breaking the quiet. The old man paused, looking one way and another. He shielded watery eyes against the glare of the midday sun, to where the highway disappeared in the curve of the horizon.

The road was empty again.

“It’s the same road,” he said softly, looking at the ragged-coated dog at his side. “The same road, but it’s not the same, somehow. It’s all grown up…”

He trailed off. The dog whined. But when he looked back there was nothing there. Just dirt and weeds and sunshine and an abandoned stone house, crumbling back into the earth.

He crossed the road.

***

She sat motionless in the recliner in the front window, face turned full into the sunlight, hands resting in her lap. A blanket was tucked around her feet.

A clock ticked loudly from the mantel, beside a framed wedding picture of a girl with straight, black hair and a boy with piercing eyes. The picture was old, yellowed even under the glass.

“I’ll be fixing your lunch now,” the nurse called from the kitchen, but the old woman did not stir. The nurse watched her from the doorway, then reached for the phone.

Still the old woman looked into the sunlight with unseeing eyes, hands folded. She felt the warmth, but long ago she stopped seeing it. But as the world around her grew dim, things far away became clear.

How long had it been since she took up her post in the window, watching and waiting? But she was young then, the boy a child. Always she sat there in the afternoons, watching for him to come home from school, she told him, but everyone knew different. And the years passed and the boy grew into a man and still she watched.

“Either he’s dead or he found himself some far-away woman and isn’t ever coming home,” a young woman told her aunt one summer afternoon when the two passed on the street. “And there she is, still watching. It’s time someone told her the truth.”

But the older woman shook her head.

“He didn’t forget her. Never did a man love a woman the way he did her. Death took him for sure.”

And they did tell her, each in turn, walking gravely up the walk to her front porch. They told her it was their duty, that she was clinging to false hope, that it was time to accept what God had willed.

And she’d listen and nod with gravity and refill their glasses and show them to the door.

And she refused to wear the black of mourning.

But she never told them that at night she looked for him, running over far-away beaches in her mind, searching among the bleached bones half-buried in the sand. She searched through jungle vines, peered into vacant eyes of countless men on crowded city streets. And on some dark nights when her spirit was heavy, she searched lamp-lit homes in case someone had stolen his heart from her, too.

But she never found his bones among the others, and so she clung to hope.

Now she was old, and long ago she stopped speaking of him. But still she watched. Some people wondered if she even knew what she waited for.

But this day was different. Her anxiety was palpable. Even the nurse kept glancing out the window, wondering what the old woman knew.

She couldn’t see the robins scratching at the soft earth after last night’s rainfall. But now she saw him in her mind. And now she watched his slow progress, watched him pause at the crossroads, watched his foot catch on a rut in the old road. And with each step she willed him forward.

And when he turned off dirt road and his boots crunched on gravel, she stood, her feet following paths worn deep into her memory. She stepped out the door, down two steps, along the narrow walk, out onto the road. She stumbled forward, arms outstretched. The sun was hot on her face.

A car swerved around her, someone laid on the horn. And now the world around her was intruding, and she couldn’t see him anymore. She wavered, legs trembling. She couldn’t remember which way to go. She felt the tears come; she was too weak to stop them.

And then she felt his presence, smelled his sweat and heard his footsteps. And the old man’s steps were lighter, when he took her arm in his and turned her back, toward the old house.

“I told you I’d come home again,” he said the words soft.

***

The son walked quickly through the kitchen, to the front room where she sat day after day.

But her chair was empty and the front door stood open. And on the old porch swing he saw them, the old man’s arms wrapped around her. Both were smiling, and the years had rolled away, and he recognized his own face in the old man’s, and wondered how he missed his mother’s beauty all these years.

“Mother?” he asked, but she did not speak again.

“What did I tell you?” the older aunt asked her niece, now graying herself, at the funeral. “Such a wedding that was, years and years ago. I was just a child but even I could see the way he worshiped her.”

And when the sod laid back over the fresh-dug dirt and the chairs packed away and the flowers moved back to the house where he had played and grown, the son stood alone at their grave, reading words scrawled across pages of old and faded notebook paper, on the back of receipts and envelopes, on drawing paper and blank-paper books with the spines cracking: Words that told of a lifetime of coming home.

That gate was meant to protect...

We bring her to a new house with new corners to explore and a whole pile of boxes perfect for hiding and a rug rolled tight into a tunnel for ambushes and sneak attacks, and all Vesper wants is to jump the low fence into the kitchen, where appliances hide death motors on their dark undersides.

All she saw was the dark coolness calling her, a sort of tunnel her instincts told her to seek out. I saw the motors, the fan blades.

I spent all evening near the fence, pulling her down time and time again, a short-term solution to a long-term problem. I tried distraction; I tried scolding. But the only place she wanted to be was the one place I said she couldn’t go.

My husband said he thought animals must have sin natures, just like us.

And standing there against the wall, watching her obstinate attempts to cross to a place where I knew injury or death was waiting, I thought of all the times I blindly flung myself against a closed door to get something I was convinced I needed.

And I wondered what was on the other side that I couldn’t see; and what dangers lurked in the shadows of what I thought was good.

“Do not be like the horse or like the mule, which have no understanding, which must be harnessed with bit and bridle, else they will not come near you,” the psalmist writes.

Or like a ferret, also without understanding, who runs headlong into death.

Sometimes God puts obstacles in our paths to grow our strength, so that in fighting through them we become stronger, more battle-ready.

Other times it’s a closed gate to separate us from disaster.

I just hope I’m in tune enough with Him to know the difference. And that he keeps pulling me down from the fence when I get too close to the edge.

Of wild mint and berries, a bouquet of grace

It’s hot, and I’m hot, my gray tank top is clinging to my back and my calves are spattered with mud from the water-logged trails of the forest I just left.

It’s cooler in there, under the countless leaves of countless trees, where ferns grow thick and moss clings to bark and stone and sunlight falls in patches. But I ended up on the wrong trail and it dumped me out here, on a winding road in the hot sunshine of a July morning just before noon, still blocks from home.

I have to hurry, which just makes it worse, because I have $2 left of this week’s grocery allotment and I want to spend it at the farmer’s market behind the bank; it closes at noon.

And I’m frustrated because I had so many good plans for this morning. I was going to hike up the ridge behind my house, find a bench or boulder to rest on, and commune with God surrounded by His handiwork, then head back down to home before the morning was gone.

But then I had three paths to choose, and I knew the left one went home but I’d been there before so I took the center – and now it was late and I never found that boulder and my own silly head narrated every step and made the silence loud.

It is the flowers that I notice first; white and lacy and, while common, pretty in a simple way. I pause to pick first one, then another, trying not to bruise their stems while I break them off, trying not to crush them with sweaty palms.

Then I see the berries, mostly red but some black, sweet with the taste of childhood summers spent fighting the fire ants and green brier for dewberries along the fence. I step further into the ditch to pluck one, and it was the smell that caught my attention this time.

The entire ditch is growing mint, tall and spindly but so aromatic as I crush the leaves, taste one, and feel the heat recede at its freshness. I’ve been dreaming of mint ever since an enterprising organic farmer handed me a leaf at an organic farmers’ market in Pittsburgh. I’ve been dreaming of planting it against the house, where nothing grows except weeds because it’s rocky and the water pours off the roof and beats down anything that tries to grow up.

And the rest of the way home I’m happy, steps lighter, smell of fresh mint added to my small bouquet giving me energy I didn’t know I had.

I’m still not sure how something as small as wild mint and fence-row berries could make my day, but they did. I spent the rest of the walk home dreaming of chilled white rum poured through crushed berries and garnished with mint; planning future visits to gently pry a few of the plants out of the ditch, carry them home; wonder how many cups of berries that one bush will give me, if there’s enough to freeze or just to top my morning yogurt-and-granola.

Now I’m still dreaming of that drink – I had to head in to work this afternoon and it wouldn’t do to mix those – and I’m also thinking how even though I’d failed to spend any time with Him this morning, anytime reading that Bible I carried through the woods or even talking with Him while I walked (my head chattered too much even for that), He still gave me the little things to make my day beautiful.

I think that’s a little piece of grace, don’t you?

(Photo credit: by me. The nectarines have nothing to do with this post, they just didn't want to be left out. More of my forest adventures are detailed here.)

A greeting and introduction

It’s hard to know how to introduce myself, to decide what about me is so vital that you must know it to understand what I write, and what is periphery, a distraction. But with time against me (and my own conviction that as a newly-invited author to this community I owe you all an introduction sooner rather than later), I’ll keep this short.

My name is Heather. I am a writer by trade, but am falling in love with words all over again in my spare time. I live in coal-mining territory in the hills and valleys of western Pennsylvania with my husband of three years, work as a reporter at a daily newspaper while he begins a doctorate degree, and spend afternoons on my living room floor with Vesper and Alaska, my ferrets.

I once thought I had a fairly decent handle on this journey we call life; but I know now that what I thought I understood must be relearned. I have been shattered, and am slowly being rebuilt into a more useful tool for service in the hands of my God. And I am coming to understand that the growth is worth the pain.

So that is who I am. I’m looking forward to being a part of this far-flung community.

- Heather

P.S. I'm not familiar with the font, size, or tagging requirements for posts - please let me know if I need to change something!