Weather Report: Forgetting Your Address

On Mother's Day morning early, I get up in this place where we live, soak in the tub, corner windows open to cool May breezes blowing over hot waters, and listen to the mourning doves high in the spruce trees, singing the dawn.

I can hear a child tip toe breakfast to our bed, cutlery clattering.

But who expected the Smallest One to knock on bathroom door, already chewing one half of bagel, wanting to know: "Can I eat that other bagel they left on your bed, the one on that pretty tray?"

Oh, that one.

And I nod and laugh and say sure and Love Child eats my Mother's Day love.

I get bleary-eyed when they give me their cards, scrawled words carefully rhyming, and vibrant indigo paintings of profuse blooms, and handkerchief embroidered in daughter's precise stitches, Edwardian scrolling of "MOM" in powder blue, pale green, soft pink.

I get bleary-eyed because Saturday morning I had whirled in from a tea at the church and fumed about their paints and brushes and splatterings all over multiple tables and the thread everywhere and all these scissors and crayons and papers and floor scattered with snippets and couldn't anyone please show honor and pick up after themselves?

Holding their creations, their hearts, I grieve my heart-cracking words. They hug me long, anyways, and I don't want to let go, hoping this warm pressing together heals fissures I don't know how to suture.

And after we've gone laundry diving for matching socks before church, and in spinning flurry leave the house with half-empty porridge bowls on the table and the ironing board still up, and are standing at the back of the sanctuary, ten minutes late, the usherer says he's got seating for four, half of us, in the front row and I wince, but that is what you get for not matching your socks.

The usherer hands me the bulletin before we stroll in before the whole congregation and I scan down to find my name slotted in to serve in the earlier service's nursery, the service that was in progress right about when we were wildly looking for a black knee sock, me loudly berating myself for flagrant and willful laundry neglect.

I cringe and wish the floor would open and swallow up the irresponsible.

It's never a good thing when the head of the nursery is a no-show. So when the pastor invites the congregation to stand and offer gratitude applause for this gathering of mothers, I shake my head and audibly mutter, "None for me, thanks," mother undeserving.

But a husband smiles, winks assurance, applauds appreciation, and a boy wraps an arm around shoulder, and I fill lungs with the air of this place, the embrace of here.

And I try again to hold on to this knowing that slips through my gaping cracks, try to remember again this thing I keep forgetting, thing too extravagant for me.

That Grace is where we live.




Lord, in my own daily bungling I get lost. Direct me Home: Grace Land.



Photo: Our Smallest One walking home...