Guess what we did this week.
Really. Guess.
No, I didn’t quit coffee. (Are you kidding me?)
I’ll tell you before you get any other crazy ideas. I had the utter joy of introducing my whole family to one of my most-loved books of all time. On the weekends, over a month, I read it out loud, and during the week I was sick, Vince took over and read to us.
The long platform was almost deserted; the only living creature in sight being a girl who was sitting on a pile of shingles at the extreme end…She was sitting there waiting for something or somebody and, since sitting and waiting was the only thing to do just then, she sat and waited with all her might and main.
We finished it a few days ago. All of us, even Vince…especially Vince…we read it all together. I hadn’t read Anne of Green Gables in years, since I was pregnant with my own red-haired, grey-green-eyed girl, and blew through the whole series for the umpteenth time over the second trimester.
The Avonlea school was a whitewashed building low in the eaves and wide in the windows…
This book has always comforted me, ever since being introduced to it by my fifth grade teacher who retained her title as my favorite even after I graduated high school. She read Anne aloud to us, and had one of my classmates take over the reading for one particular chapter toward the end (you know the one) because she could never get through it without crying.
There are some authors that can look into a room and describe only the trash, the filth, the greasy lifestyle (this is why Steinbeck and I are not friends) and there are others who can look in the same room and see the hardworking mother, the hopeful child, and the steaming bowl of broth on the table that, admittedly, probably still needs to have the crumbs and spills from the previous meal wiped off of it.
We find beauty by looking for it. Even when the windows are dirty.
The east gable was a very different place from what it had been on that night four years before, when Anne had felt its bareness penetrate to the marrow of her spirit with its inhospitable chill. Changes had crept in…
The velvet carpet with the pink roses and the pink silk curtains of Anne’s early visions had certainly never materialized; but her dreams had kept pace with her growth, and it is not probable she lamented them.
Sometimes I am so caught up in the dirt and laundry and pain and bickering. I forget something.
A month ago we went to a barbecue at our dear friends’ house. As we always do in large groups of people, we spent the evening on high alert watching Andrey and Reagan for attachment issues, while still trying to carry on adult conversations on a somewhat coherent level. We intervened when a child hugged a total stranger and wouldn’t let go. We pulled a child out of a game for following another adult around instead of actually playing. We held a child after she kept trying to seek out attention from another Mommy. In the midst of catching up with wonderful friends, we were a little harried and constantly on the lookout for red flags, trying not to make anyone else feel they needed to walk on eggshells around us. I don’t know if we succeeded.
We gathered our crew to go home. I was walking away and a friend stopped me. Over the course of the evening she saw many of the issues we dealt with and we had talked at length about all the gory details. Her glasses were not rose-colored.
She smiled at me and said:
“I just love watching you guys…you are doing a beautiful thing.”
needlework: a gift from my dear friend Jeanette at Wordz For Life
I had forgotten. Her reminder was a gift. And…tears. Still.
“Dear old world,” she murmured, “you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.”
– L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
I forget that two kids who were fighting hammer and tongs until last month are now playing cards and laughing together.
I forget that Reagan, who was mostly non-verbal a year ago, now speaks in halting English phrases, and sometimes even sentences.
Afton is not just playing with Legos; he is building a machine with a rag attached to it…for scrubbing the floor. Awesome, yes?
Sophie, my almost constant companion, loves me so much that she interrupted me last night while I was writing to nuzzle my pen. An ink mark on a white kitty’s nose is pretty unforgiving, and it will remind everyone for the next few days that I am her favorite human.
In the middle of circumstances and inconvenience, between the chaos and the cacophony…we forget.
We are living something beautiful. Sometimes we need a reminder to keep looking for it.
