snow tracks

I stood at the back window this morning staring at a vast sea of whiteness beyond the glass. It’s not possible to describe how much I love all this snow.

While staring and sighing and thanking God that He had the foresight to create something so spectacular, I had a memory of another time. I remembered how my sisters and I used to guard our backyard from fun-seeking friends. “Don’t step on the snow!” we’d order. We weren’t very old; I was probably eleven and my younger sisters eight and four. Our friends would look at us oddly. Snow is for trampling, I could all but hear their thoughts. What’s wrong with the three of you? When they’d persist, describing the snow angels we could make out there, or the snowmen we could build, the three of us would growl and snap. “No one takes one step in the backyard!” I don’t remember ever meeting for planning discussions or analyzing why this was so important to us. We just knew. We knew on a unified level. At least in that one area of the world—an area we could control with fenced-in protection—the snow must remain untouched, pristine, pure.

I never understood the origin of all that fervor until it dawned on me recently that this was our way of controlling at least one small something in our world. This was our way of staking a square bit of peace—where no chaos reigned, where no bumps showed, where nothing got trampled or messed or ruined.

Our lives back then were in constant flux. We never knew where we’d live next week, or how much food we’d find in the cupboards, or who might next trade their last name for the rights to our mother’s bedroom, or what craziness might next tip our world. Nothing made sense, nothing was predictable. But when the snows came, and created a landscape of pure, unsullied beauty—ours for the taking—we guarded it with a fierceness you don’t often find in the young.

I’m all grown up now, and I’ve learned that it’s only possible to keep your backyard untouched if you permit no people in your life. As the scriptures say, “Where no oxen are, the trough is clean.”

My trough is a mess. In keeping with my metaphor, you might say that my backyard is a mess. The door to our backyard is open, you see—wide open. I’m a pastor’s wife and a mother. And I belong to Jesus. My life is not my own; I’ve been bought with a price. So there’s no sense trying to keep the gate shut. I can’t guard it twenty-four hours a day; I don’t even have that right. People burst in. They sneak in. They crawl in. They claim favored parcels and far corners and unpack their baggage, and like it or not, the snow gets trampled. Once settled, the gloves go on and the snowballs start flying. Sometimes they’re aimed at fellow yard-dwellers; sometimes they’re aimed at me.

My backyard now is littered with footsteps, the bedraggled trails of those who have come seeking refuge and acceptance. Here and there, spots of purity still wait, untouched and undisturbed. All the rest is crisscrossed with the evidence of life and activity and chaos.

But oh, the angels we have made together.

family

Katie is six. Her hair is white-blonde, and she's missing four front teeth. I barely know the child; after all, I've only been in the house three minutes, and this is only the second time I've seen my cousin's daughter. But I know already that I'm about to be delighted.

"Let me show you my Christmas gifts," Katie says. "First, I got this great Snoopy shirt," she says, holding out the hem of her dog-adorned shirt to help me get a better look. "And this Dora-the-Explorer doll ... and this puzzle book. It looks hard, but I think I can do it." She then gestures Vanna-style toward an impressive Barbie pool, where the stiff girl and her friends are lounging awkwardly.

Katie then comes closer. "You have to see this," she says, holding out her tiny arm so I can see the silver charm bracelet around her wrist. "It's from my Auntie," she explains. And then she cautions me. "Be very careful--it already lost a horse. Don't make it lose another."

She gives the room another glance, and when her eyes spy the tip of a plastic pink cell phone peeking out from beneath a magazine, those eyes widen and she draws in her breath. "And this!" She yanks the cell phone out with a flourish, holds it before my face, and announces, "This is my most favorite thing. You can actually call people, but they won't answer."

I must have given the appropriate gasps at the appropriate moments. I must have expressed just the right amount of enthusiasm at the properly spaced intervals, because Katie decides to bless me with a hug. Arms extended wide, she walks her wispy-haired, tooth-gapped self toward me, but just before she enfolds me in a waifish, six-year old hug, she stops short.

"Wait ... are you part of the family?"

I remember her mother, Larri, when she was Katie's age, and I was a four-year old pest. I remember following Larri through our grandmother's house, wanting to talk like Larri, walk like Larri, flounce my hair back with that exact Larri-panache. I remember climbing trees with Katie's mother, and talking about boys, and creating a haunted house together on Grandma's front porch. I remember visiting her in California, and spending the entire day in her bedroom listening to David Cassidy's "I Think I Love You" over and over again, falling in puppy love while Larri sat in her schoolroom watching the clock and wishing her day was over. And I wonder anew how so much time could have passed so quickly, and so much space could have grown where there had once been a closeness.

"Yes, Katie ... I'm part of the family."

At that, she gives a happy little cheer and puts those slender arms around me. I'm accepted.

A few minutes later, when Larri comes downstairs and joins us in the living room, Katie brings her up-to-speed.

"Mom, I love your new cousin."

when life was easy

Tera was cleaning her room not long ago and came downstairs with a bag full of recycling stuff. I almost had her take the bag out and distribute it herself, but at the last minute, I took a peek. And there, tucked behind an empty juice can and a rumpled piece of cardboard, I found my treasures: 21 Kismet score sheets.

Kismet is a step up from Yahtzee, in case you don't know. The dice in Kismet are colored, which adds a whole other dimension to the game. And these 21 score sheets represent an untallied, but high number of hours of my childhood spent trying to out-throw my grandmother, and others.

Tera didn't know. To her, it was just a pile of paper that needed to go. But to me, it was a link to an easier time.

I carried them to the couch much the way you would carry a Faberge egg, or a tripped grenade, or anything else you didn't much care to drop. With the pile and my tea, I set to remembering.

The first name I saw, written on the top right side of the first sheet, was Mickey. And there she was again, sitting at her kitchen table rolling the dice, and giggling with ungrandmotherly delight at all the sixes that have settled between us.

"Another Kismet, Grandma?" I imagine myself saying. "How many do you need?"

The brought-to-life woman gives me a steady look. "I believe I have two more in me."

I scoff and she laughs again.

Looking down at the sheet in my hands, I see her beautiful 2s, with the curl at the top of each, and her precise 7s--the slant of which I could never get right, despite all my practice. I remember days when "Old Arthur," as she called her rheumatoid arthritis, got the better of her hands, and she'd have to grip the pen between tight, grimaced fingers. Even then, her numbers looked elegant and queenly.

Her name is on the top right of several sheets--Max on a day she felt feisty, Maxine H. on another more formal afternoon. Interspersed are other names I haven't seen in awhile--Rose, my grandmother's sister--and the Great Aunt I remember visiting in her house with the tilted floor and few groceries. Grandma and I would bring in bags of food--always with extra, nonessential delights for Aunt Rose's three boys--and after a good, long visit, Grandma would kiss her sister and slip her a $20 bill. Aunt Rose has been gone a long time now, but her name lingers on one Kismet sheet.

My cousins are there--Lisa and Robin, and my sisters--Megan, Tarri and Nancy. No doubt, some of those names hit their sheets as we crammed together on a balmy summer evening in the travel trailer we liked to pretend was our home. We'd bring chips and onion dip out with us, and grease up the dice.

Our husbands are there--but clearly before they were our husbands. Dave W. reads one, back when the W belonged to him alone, and not to us. Dave R. reads another, when he was just my sister's boyfriend.

And then there are the silly names--the ones which freeze our then-moods for all time. Sassy I see, in my own handwriting--and Lulu, Wildflower, Animal, and Stud Muffin in others. If I'm not mistaken, Animal was Grandpa. Should have been, anyway. He got such a kick out of beating us, he once sat me purposefully in front of the sliding glass door while we played Old Maid, just so he could see my cards in the reflection in the window and not grab the spinster out of my hand. I can still hear his laughter when finally, after exaggerating his peeks for my benefit, I turned and figured out his strategy.

I love all the names, all the people, represented on those thin, 4 by 6 sheets of paper. I skim them once again, remembering faces, and comments, and the sounds of laughter ... and a time when life was much, much simpler than it is now.

But then I go back to Mickey, and sit awhile with my friend ... and the person I'm most missing today.

cowboy courtin'

I was seven that summer morning between first and second grade when I had my first taste of wooing. Danny was a quiet classmate, someone I'd smiled at once or twice and shared my reading book with on a half-dozen occasions when he couldn't find his own. Sometimes that's all the encouragement it takes. Sometimes, that's enough to make a boy rise early and don all his cowboy gear ... and go a'courtin.

“Mornin’, Ma’am,” he’d drawled in his fake John Wayne voice when my mother answered the door. “I’ve come to call on Shannon.”

Fortunately, I’d been sitting out on the front porch watching a pincher bug cross the walkway at my feet, and I heard and saw Danny making his high-noon advance from well down Cedar street. Long before I could make out the silver spurs attached to his red boots, I heard them jangling. I’d had to squint my eyes and peer hard at first, but then my suspicions had been confirmed. His hat was cocked at a jaunty angle; its red and white striped strings pulled hard against his hairless chin. The sun glinted brashly off his cereal-box sheriff’s badge, making me feel as if the Law were coming after me. The swagger did me in.

My heart galloped right to the bottom of my saltwater sandals. I left the pincher bug, skedaddled straight upstairs and into my bedroom and hid myself under the covers before my suitor could reach the house. As my bedroom was just above the front porch and the window ajar, I could hear the goings-on clearly. When my mother came upstairs to tell me I had a gentleman caller waiting at the door, I informed her in a shaky voice that I had the flu.

She rebuffed him kindly. My illness fled almost immediately, but to this day I can still feel that calf-with-a-branding-iron-coming-at-you lurch in my stomach if I dwell on the Danny incident too long.

I've no idea why I feared that cowboy so. I only remember feeling like that manchild-on-a-mission might just toss me in a feed sack, hoist me over his shoulder, and cart me off to the ranch. Maybe all he wanted was to show off his new spurs, but in my heart of hearts, I felt like a bunny who'd been spotted by a hawk.

I didn't see Danny again after that. My mother remarried not long after and we moved to Oklahoma before the start of the new school year. I have no idea what happened to him or where he is now. But I do hope, in the end, that Danny found a girl who appreciated spurs and badges and red-striped chin straps. I hope she took one look at that struttin' cowboy, and ran herself out to meet him.

That's just what I did, when the right one came along.

a life in review

There's a whole lot reflecting going on in the blogosphere this week. The majority of people are assessing and good-byeing 2005. I briefly entertained the idea of jumping on that bandwagon and giving you my year in review. But then I thought, Why stop there?

So here, in a nutshell, is a life in review.

I knew He was there before I knew what to call Him. In deep pockets of memory, I hold visions that are hard to put to words; fleeting moments when I first heard those whispers, first understood that Something I couldn't see or place knew me, and was calling my name.

Normal didn't live in my home, or even stop to visit. I existed--for the most part--in a whirlwind of drunken outbursts and stormy encounters. I switched homes and states and fathers, observed the late sixties and early seventies, said good bye to Father Two and a home in the South, scowled when my mother traded in Father Three for a motorcycle, love beads and go-go boots, and kept reaching for the owner of that nameless voice. A street girl my mother befriended moved into my bedroom and brought me my first glimpse of God. Through her witness, I met Him on Thanksgiving night, the year I turned twelve, just as the clock reached midnight.

We attended a church that wasn't much interested in things of God. I joined a carnal youth group, where flesh was enthroned and Jesus was allowed nothing more than a brief reference or two once a year at the annual youth retreat. My flickering faith barely survived those malnourished years.

I entered high school, and though everything on the outside looked pristine--I played tennis, joined the debate team, honor society, and girls club--to a knowing eye, I was just another sheep so starved you could count my ribs. No God-life flowed through me. His hand was ever-extended to take mine, but I was too busy looking for love with skin on it to bother accepting that divine invitation.

At graduation, I stood at a podium and addressed my class of 400+, then threw my hat to the sky with the rest of my peers and asked God to give me my privacy while I turned and ran head-on into rebellion. He said no. While I was busy sinning, I'd catch glimpses of Him from a distance, watching me, waiting. The sight never failed to unsettle me.

It wasn't until I turned twenty--after enduring two years of stark ugliness--that I gave up and reached, finally, for that outstretched hand. And when I did, I discovered that everything I'd ever looked for in skin-covered form had been waiting for me in His touch. I began to walk. I began to understand God's heart in the pages of a book that had been there all along, waiting for my eyes. I began to fall in love with the Savior who had watched me so patiently and never stopped whispering, even when I'd been desperate to ignore the sound.

We didn't walk into the sunset. That part is yet to come. Instead, I made mistake after mistake. I willfully sinned. I can't even count the number of dreadful mistakes I've made since I placed my hand in His. And yet ... He has never once made me pay. Whenever I come to Him with my head down and my heart heavy, He lifts my chin with a tender touch and reminds me of the length of His love. He has never denied forgiveness. He has never once demanded a pound of flesh for my infractions. Though I could easily rival Paul as the "chief of sinners"--and I mean that down to my toes--I've never received any other response from God but kindness. Despite my lengthy list of faults, He has poured repeated blessings on me, covered my flaws and errors and blatant sins, opened the door of Grace wide and beckoned me--time after time and again--to come inside and warm myself. When I have least deserved it, He's held me close and calmed my heart and bandaged all my self-inflicted wounds. And all that without a single angry or disappointed word. It seems His rebuke, His disgust, His wrath was all spent on Jesus.

So there you have my life in review. I am a sinner saved by grace--loved, held, protected, encouraged, nurtured. I have failed God a hundred thousand times this year, and the year before, and the years before that. But He's never failed me once. Not once.

Here's to a new year. May God have His place of honor in our lives; may He be glorified in all we do.

choices

In my defense, I have to say that I really never stood a chance.

I was five, and my mother called me into the living room, where Grandma was waiting in a recliner. "Hello, Shanny," she said. I screamed--and covered my eyes with my hands. For my grandmother had taken four or five of those chocolate, star-bursty medallions and situated them over her teeth ... so that it looked, from where I stood, as if her mouth were nothing but a yawning cavern of brownness.

My scream elicited an eruption of laughter from her. As I stood on my trembly legs, uncovered my eyes and watched her lick the covering off her teeth, I realized I had a choice: I could be angry, or I could enjoy the moment with her. I didn't dawdle making that choice.

"I'll get you someday, Grandma," I said, grinning.

I did get her. Several times. Over the years, it was my joy and my delight to make my grandmother shriek. "Don't ride that horse bareback. He might buck you off," she'd say. So I'd ride the horse bareback, and yell at her through the window to make sure she saw. When one did buck me off, breaking my arm, I withstood her "I told you so's." In an odd, hard-to-believe way, it had been completely worth it.

The last time I pulled a shriek-inducing scream from my grandmother, I was staying at the house she and Grandpa had shared, trying to help her out from under a stifling fog of grief. When the shock of his too-early, too-sudden death drifted away, we were left together in a clutch of stark sadness. She couldn't believe he had left her; I couldn't believe I'd lost them both. For despite her bodily presence, Grandma's self was frozen in grief. I could get her to answer my questions, but not with any semblance of Mickey there. She wasn't Mickey any more. She wasn't anybody at all--just a woman waiting to die.

Dave understood when I told him I needed to stay with her awhile. He came to the farm every day to see us both, but when night rolled around, he'd kiss me good bye, hug my grandmother, and drive back to our house in the suburbs. Grandma and I would wash our faces, don flannel nightgowns, and retire to her room. Grandpa still lingered there, in a way that brought a new rush of tears whenever my heart caught the echo of one of his songs, or a whiff of his scent would untangle itself from the cedar closet and swirl around me in greeting.

One night, when the somberness pressed the oxygen from the room, I pulled a rubber pig snout from my purse when Grandma wasn't looking, and slipped it over my head. I'd bought it earlier that day--for no reason except that I had to have it. I adjusted the snout over my nose, waited until she had settled in on her side of the bed, and turned slowly.

"Good night, Grandma," I said.

"Good ni ... " she began, before a scream overtook her. In the second her shriek filled the room, I imagine she wrestled with a choice. She could get angry, or she could enjoy the moment with me.

We laughed until we cried, Mickey and me.

courage

His name was Lou, but everyone on our listserver called him LocoLou. And he was all right with that ... liked it, in fact.

I never met him, never spoke with him by phone, never saw a picture. But I can see and hear Lou in my mind nonetheless. His voice is low and gravelly. He shaves only when he can't stand his reflection. He owns a single jacket: scuffed black leather with stories attached to each mark. He favors jeans, boots and white T-shirts, barely cooked steak, and women who don't mind an occasional ride on the back of his Harley. And the heart beating under those T-shirts--despite his efforts to prove otherwise--is baby soft, tenderized by the God he met after Vietnam while in a trauma-induced state of craziness.

Lou's not crazy now. In fact, he's quite lucid. We members of the Calvary Chapel Fellowship listserver looked forward to his grizzly posts, because his words never failed to provoke thought and discussion. Sometimes they stirred memory.

For no particular reason at all, Lou wrote a post one day in which he described a trench he'd called home one long morning in Vietnam. The words he spilled onto the screen proved he could recall even now every pebble, groove and divet of that open-air coffin. He put himself there again for our benefit and filled our ears with the sounds of battle, the sounds of a nineteen-year old's heart pounding against his chest. We tasted his fear as he hunkered there trying to force his body into submission so he could obey orders, so he could pull himself out of that hole, stand tall, and advance on the enemy.

"I didn't know I had courage until I found myself flying down the face of that hill," Lou wrote. "And to this day, I can still hear the blood pulsing in my ears as I charged, just as if it were still Christmas day, 1966."

As I read Lou's words, I stood with him in that trench, pulled myself out with my own shaky arms, fortified my fear-wobbled legs and moved to take that first step down the hill. But when he wrote the date, I left him there in Vietnam. Because when I read that date, I knew I had my own hill to return to.

I was five that same Christmas day, and I'd just maneuvered my brand-new bicycle out the back door of our house and around the side gate toward the front yard. New bikes need to be seen, especially by neighbor girls who have been hah-hahing you for months with their own sparkly transportation. The only glitch to my showing-off plan came when I ran out of level front-yard grass. The last ten feet or so of our yard was a hill that led down to the street. There was no moving around that obstacle. I had two choices: I could walk my bike down the slope, or I could ride.

I've revisited that "hill" as an adult. I've driven slow circles past my old house on many occasions, trying to capture a wisp of those long ago days and the family who lived there. And I'm almost embarrassed to call that slight front-yard incline a hill. But measurement taken by adult eyes differs greatly from that of a child's eyes. To my five-year old way of thinking, that slight incline was Mount Challenge.

I almost walked the bike down. Almost. But I sensed that a defining moment had presented itself. I could ride off down the street a little girl, or I could ride off down the street a big girl. And no one but me would know the difference.

I like to think Lou and I conquered our hills at exactly the same moment on that December day. I like to believe that my leg swung up and over my bike seat at the same moment Lou swung his leg up and over the edge of his trench. I like to believe our hearts pounded in tandem and we rode the wind together as we flew past fear.

Here's to courage--and the wars it wins. Here's to our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And here's to all of you standing on the precipice of your own personal hilltop, gathering strength to charge. Whatever mountain you face today, don't give up. Fight the urge to retreat, for victory is closer than you think.

You'll find it just on the other side of the hill.

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow." ~ Mary Anne Rademacher-Hershey

pieces

My proper but mischievous grandmother had one firm rule about cussing: If you must do it, do it in the barn. I believe now that her unspoken message was "animal behavior belongs with the animals," but we didn't hear that subtext back then. We just thought it a tantilizing and dangerous invitation. Of us seven girls, I only remember one who regularly took Grandma up on that offer. "Dang it," the girl-whose-name-I'm-not- telling-you would whisper, when she just couldn't take the pressure of being seven anymore. Sometimes I overheard her. Sometimes I didn't have to. She'd come moseying out of the barn with that satisfied look on her face, and I'd know the old building had stripped her of all her troubles.

I spent the majority of my growing-up summers living on my grandparents' farm. And I wasn't alone. Whether my grandparents extended the invitation to bless us or to bless our parents didn't much matter. We seven cousins packed our bags the first day of summer vacation, hit the farm running, and didn't look back until September started making noise.

When the sun broke through our dreams and drove us from our beds, we girls would gulp down breakfast, yank on our cowboy boots, and head for the barn. We ventured out now and then, of course--to chase cows, climb trees, ride ponies, and beg Grandma for a cup of sugar for dipping rhubarb stalks--but our home base was Grandpa's barn. To this day, whenever I walk into a barn (and I do, every chance that presents itself), all I have to do is close my eyes and draw in a big breath, and I'm instantly short again. The perpetual dust inside is drifting through a sunbeam like miniature snowflakes, I'm surrounded by the heavenly tang of manure, and I can feel and hear the stomp of cow feet or horse feet or girl feet slapping the concrete floor.

Our favorite thing to do in the barn was to climb up to the hay loft and make mazes with the bales. It took all fourteen of our skinny little no-muscle arms to lift and stack those bales, but unity of purpose kept us grunting and puffing. We'd take a whole morning to create the perfect hay maze, then spend the rest of the day hiding around corners and trying to scare one another.

Grandpa let us sweep the broken bales and loose hay out the window. When enough had accumulated in a heap below that second floor window, we'd jump. The worse part of growing up was saying good bye to that rush. There's little in the adult world that offers the same freedom as leaping from a second floor window. For just a moment there, you and your sixty-five pounds don't belong to earth.

One summer day, while preparing for a jump, my middle sister Megan took off her spanking-new, bright green tennis shoes and set them off to one side of the window. If her goal was to spare her new shoes an afternoon of dirt, she failed. After repeatedly jumping in the hay, running over the grass and across the dirt path and up the grimy stairs to repeat her performance, the feet she planned to plunge back into those new shoes were beyond filthy. But she never got the chance to dirty her footwear. One shoe went missing. Though we looked high and low and everywhere in between, though we moved hay bales and checked corners and took a pitch fork to the pile outside, we never found that second green tennis shoe. No one ever found that shoe. I like to think a family of klepto-crazed field mice lined up while we were giggling in the pile of hay below and dragged that green shoe down a secret hole. In my best imaginings, it became a mice family heirloom ... and the story, a legend.

A piece of my sister lingered in that barn, long after she outgrew hay jumping and pony rides. And that's just how it goes when you've sojourned in a place. Whether we plan to or not, we leave pieces of ourselves wherever we travel. Those little markers, little breadcrumbs, show we've been this way.

I hope you're conscious of the pieces you're leaving behind today. Someday, someone will hold up that breadcrumb and tell the story of you. Make sure it's a good one.

my point ... and i do have one

I thought it might be funny, when I was about five, to lock myself in the bathroom while having my bath and not answer my mother's insistent knocking and yelling. Who knows why we do these things?

That was, I believe, my first practical joke. Rough, yes--and not terribly well thought out. But we have to start somewhere. I remember lying in that tepid water holding my hand over my mouth so my mother couldn't hear my giggling over her panicked pounding. She stopped after a moment or two, and I heard the back door open and slam. What I couldn't see from the bathroom--and only learned later when my mother recounted the drama for my father--was that she then vaulted herself over the side of the porch railing, grabbed the axe from the woodpile, gave a hearty whack or six at the bush growing against the window, and jammed a ladder under the windowsill.

The window was unlocked, fortunately. After she climbed in and we exchanged polite hellos, she sat her shaky self down on the toilet lid and told me about the little boy who cried wolf. I thought it was a terrific story and asked her to tell me another.

“You’re missing the point, Shannon. That story is about you. If you keep doing this--if you keep telling fibs--people won’t believe you later when you really need help.”

That was my introduction to “the point.” I thought my mother was extremely clever to just plop herself down on the toilet lid (after pounding, vaulting, whacking and climbing, no less) and create that winsome combination of story and point. I admired her ability to tie a seemingly unrelated tale to my mischief. I wanted to do that, too. I wanted to conjure points from thin air.

That desire still lives in me. As a writer, I’m always on a quest to marry the perfect story to the perfect point. Nothing satisfies me more than walking a reader right up to the door of Aha! and watching them walk through. Life is packed with metaphors--random, disconnected ideas that remain detached and unrelated until someone snatches the two and ties them neatly into "the point."

If you write--and many of you do--I hope you make good use of metaphor and simile. But even if you don't write, you live. And a life attuned to metaphor is a life full of wonder. Take a second listen next time something sparks your interest. Why does it? What does it make you think of? How does that relate to your life? Where have you seen that before?

Just for today, be on the lookout. Points, morals, and lessons are everywhere. Find one in your normal happenings and you'll be hooked. You'll be so delighted you'll look for another. Tomorrow you'll look for three.

It's the richest, most interesting way to live. And that's my point.

the gift

"How could I ever prepare for an absence the size of you?"
~ poet unknown

Some losses are, to borrow a phrase from my grandfather, "no bigger than a minute." These small absences are insignificant in the scheme of things, and easy to measure. You work your tongue up into the gap in your mouth and probe the space your tooth once occupied. You plunge your hand into the pocket where your wallet should be. In those "no bigger than a minute" cases, the loss is really no larger than the space it inhabited.

But when the loss is the size and shape of love, it defies measurement.

My mother committed suicide when I was twenty-six. If a detail is needed, it's this: she suffered from manic depression. The whys and hows of her death don't alter the pain we suffered; they don't buffer our hearts or close the book. We've been walking this loss for seventeen years and we've yet to spy the end of it. It's so dense we can't punch our way through, so high we can't see the sun.

I've marked my grief by the milestones I pass. She wasn't there when my doctor told me I was infertile. She wasn't there when I went shopping alone for our soon-to-be-adopted son, and followed a mother and pregnant daughter from rack to rack, eavesdropping on a conversation that should have be mine. Nor was she there the day Zachary was born, or the day he took his first steps, or the day he became a brother to Tera. At each of those milestones, her absence thickened the room and dulled the light.

Every milestone hurt but for some reason the most recent had a disproportional sting. In September of last year, four boxes of books arrived on my front porch. I yanked open the first and pulled out a book--a book with my name on the cover. There's no explaining the thoughts and feelings that rush over you when you hold that first book in your hands, when you realize the task is truly finished. I'm not sure even a writer can put words to that moment. But even while I sat there holding that book, a shadow fell across the moment and stole a piece of my joy. She wasn't there to share this milestone.

I grieved anew for weeks. What would she think? What would she say? I knew of course, and yet I wanted to hear it straight from her. I thought again of the selfishness of her death, and how the ripple of that one moment has yet to strike a shore. My frustration was palpable. I couldn't remedy this lack. I couldn't take a single action that could pry the words I needed from my mother's lips.

Early one Sunday morning, still stinging, I went out to my office (a separate building behind our house) to search my files. I was teaching the 3-4 year olds at church that morning and needed a particular item for our craft. I had a notion that deep in the back of my files, I'd stored--for some unknown reason--an old report from college. For my required special needs course, I'd written a fictional account of my nonexistent, vision-impaired son, Alex. I'd had to create a diary of his daily activities for an imaginary week in our lives. The cover to this report was what I was after on this morning--it was transparent blue plastic, just what I needed for our Sunday school craft.

I smiled when I saw it. How had I remembered that? I flipped the report over and released the tabs, pulled the pages out and tossed them in the garbage. I didn't need the report. I didn't even know why I'd kept it all that time. But I was glad I'd kept the plastic cover.

Later that afternoon I went back out to my office to find a book and noticed the garbage needed emptying--especially with the added pages I'd thrown in that morning. Walking over to pick it up, I glanced down and saw that the report had separated itself into two halves, one flopping forward and one flopping back. And right in the center, tucked down deep, I saw just the edge of a half-sheet of paper. An inexplicable nudge made me reach down into that shadowy spot and pull out the page. Holding it up, I saw familiar, lovely handwriting, and read this:

Shannon,
Dad and I really thought you did a terrific job on your story. You sure write well. Love you much,
Mom

Her words held me like a hug. I cried, and reread her note over and over. And then I found a frame for it, and placed it near my desk where I can see it easily. I can't count the times my eyes have drifted to her words. God brought me a gift--a whisper across the years, a nod of approval, a touch from a hand I long to hold. He brought me what my mother couldn't, on her own.

I will never stop missing her. But I've realized something odd: I know my mother better today than the day we buried her. I suppose that's because I'm a mother myself now, so I understand the pride she felt for us and her gladly-made sacrifices. I recognize, now, those times when she gave her portion to us and lied about not being hungry. I understand the odd combination of love and anger and fear that filled her heart those nights she waited up to hear my key turn in the door. I know the questions she had about the future, and her place in it. I know her better, and if she were alive now, she'd be my friend.

I know my Father better, too.