One of life's simple pleasures is having breakfast with people you love. Not too long ago, I got to do this with my great-grandmother. You need to know two things about her. First, I firmly believe she must have been a red head in her younger years, because she is one of the spunkiest, fiercest people I know. And second, she is 95 and can still get down on her hands and knees to play with her great-great-grandkids. Grandmother has lived through almost all of the major events of the 20th century: she was a young wife in the Great Depression and kept a victory garden during World War II. Her sons served in the military during the Vietnam War. She remembers when astronauts landed on the moon, and the Cold War, and September 11th. Over cherry pie and coffee, on Thanksgiving afternoon this year, she told me about her early life in Kentucky, about not having a car and so hitching a ride out to Illinois when she and her little family decided it was time for a change. She told me about air-raid drills during the wars, about making her own clothes, and about her prize-winning vegetables. In her little home there is a shoebox filled with yellowed newspaper clippings, each announcing a largest pumpkin or sweet potato. When I was little, I would go over to her house to help her can vegetables from the garden. Harvesting, cooking, labeling jars, stacking them by group on the long, sturdy shelves in the basement. Homemade jams--rhubarb, raspberry, apricot, strawberry, blueberry, and blackberry--line the pantry. Laundry hung on a rigged-up clothesline near the washer, plants spilling out of their pots, propped up on ground-level window sills, retro clock ticking away after all these years from its perch on the concrete wall. Working our way around crates and old handmade chairs and straw brooms, we could find Granddaddy's workshop in the darkest, furthest recesses of the basement--ancient looking hoes and plows mixed with sawdust and nails. Finishing pie, stacking plates: Grandmother has invited us over for breakfast the next day. She says she will make everything; I feel bad; we stop at Bojangles for a bucket of biscuits, our meager offering to the meal. When we arrive she has the frying pan on, but hasn't made anything because she wants to take orders: some eggs fried, some scrambled, some over easy. Sausage, bacon, coffee, and those homemade jams already sit on the table, white plates with pastel flowers resting nearby. We wander around the house that hasn’t changed in 40 years. My dad spent his childhood Sundays here--he says that even as a kid, coming here was like stepping into a time machine. Same basement: some of those vegetable soups were probably ones I helped can, the bright red and blue mesh baseball cap, straight out of the 80s, still hangs on a peg by the stairs leading back up to the kitchen. With Grandmother's help we find the Rubbermaid full of my old dolls and little fairy Barbies that I now show Amy and Kate. They are charmed. We find the old Barbie sports car, the quilts I helped wash and stack, and the cars Ben and Sam used to play with.
It's a rare treasure to know someone very old. I may not speak for everyone, but I for one am fascinated with all things historical. I love period dramas, historical novels, learning about the past. It often seems so distant and completely unreal; it's hard to imagine anything ever happening except the very-present now. But conversations with an older person create a tie to the past. These are real people with real stories and memories from a time when things were different. They are living history books, full of experiences we love to watch on TV shows but don’t seem to have the patience to hear in a nursing home room or prolonged chat. When my dad was a young doctor he worked at a little hospital called Edgefield; when I was only three or four he would take me with him on his over-night shifts to visit with Mrs. Hurlong. She and I would prop up with pillows in her hospital bed and munch on trail mix while watching Jeopardy. Around 8:00 my dad would come in and check on her and then carry me back to my sleeping bag on the floor of his room. At the time I mainly cared about the free candy Mrs. Hurlong “shared” with me and the chance to watch a few hours of TV, but now I see that my parents were helping me learn to care about the stories and lives of people not exactly like me. They were trying to help me listen better. Most of the time, I fail. But this particular day I wished we had longer to enjoy the retro rhubarb jam and fried eggs and the conversation seasoned with the wisdom only old age can bring.
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Panera is bustling with people who seem to know what they are doing. Everyone on social media has a plan, is following their dream, is starting grad school or graduating from nursing school or having children or loving their job or learning so much from this season. And I'm over here crying because I don't have a clue what I supposed to do with my life. Like actually I have mascara running down my face and a raging headache because I've been weepy since I woke up. Because I just have no idea what I'm supposed to do. I feel like I should be passionate about something. Culture tells me to follow my heart and chase my dreams and keep looking up. Heck, the majority of my friends say that too. But what happens when you don't know what your dream is? I don't want to go to grad school, right? Right! But do I? Or even if I did, how would that help anyway? Should I go to nursing school, despite it being impractical for our life right now? Am I supposed to be a mom right now? Should we actually start having kids? Can it really be that I cannot imagine what I'm supposed to do? Shouldn't there be something huge and important and special for me to do? Why on earth would God want me to just sit around working a desk job that I don’t care about? I know I don't love it, but the trouble is that I can't figure out the alternative love. I've never had that one thing that keeps driving me; never had a career goal; never had a MUST HAVE. I should be excommunicated from New York for uttering such shameful words. I have found that people assume I have big plans by the mere fact that I went to college and now work in the City. Oh my, nothing could be further from the truth. I have one particular friend who is the Anne to my Diana. We joke that we go undercover every time we step through the doors at our arguably slightly prestigious jobs. "Why did they hire us?" we ask ourselves over iced teas (yay for the South). "They have no idea--we aren't supposed to be here. They don't know that we don't have a clue." Because we really don't, or at least I don't. I have absolutely no idea why God called me to this place. Or why he seemingly changed my mind senior year of high school. Why I gave up the chance to go into nursing. I don't know why I have a liberal arts degree and a job in publishing. I wonder why I got married young. I wonder what the next stages are. I wonder what I care about sometimes. I wonder if other people ever feel like this. I would love nothing more right now than to have a clear path of pursuit towards a clearly defined goal. But despite that wish, I am in a murky place where my wants and needs and desires and goals are jumbled up. |
Authorwife to a med student and mama to three under three, seeking the joyful and learning to live by faith. Find me on Instagram and Pinterest or shoot me an email. I'd love to hear from you!
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