Who Really Needs to Know?

She comes knocking at 9:07, eight minutes early. She's come for her kid brother, come to pick him up for Uncle Frank's funeral. Farmer Husband's still before the mirror, standing in shaft of sure July morning light, shaving off the growth of five hard days. Levi's got the door.

"Dad's still showering up from the barn, Aunt Marian. I'll go tell him you're here already, kay?"

I can't clearly make out her words, me in the bedroom laying out clothes for a man, but I can hear her laughing words, words like water chuckling over stones.

She's had stones.





Marian's eldest of five, twenty, he sits in the van with his cane. Seven years ago, an all-terrain vehicle accident took and shook the head of a healthy, full of dreams boy and left them a seriously and permanently brain damaged son who will require life-long care. She loves long and deep.

In her purse, Marian carries Tylenol with her, for the vice of pain from the acoustic neuroma, a growing tumor compressing the 5th, 7th, 9th and 10th cranial nerves deep inside her skull. The acoustic neuroma never stops ringing her ears, tingling nerves in her face, pressing hard on her cranium. It was complications from an acoustic neuroma, a hereditary disease, that killed Uncle Frank.

Levi calls in the bedroom door, "Dad ready yet? Aunt Marian's here to go the funeral!"

"Just about, Levi." Farmer Husband does up the last button of his shirt and I straighten his collar, man dressed and put together.

"Mom..." Levi pulls up onto our bed, his own collar rumpled, shirt tail sticking out. "Why does Aunt Marian always talk with a laugh in her voice?"

Oh, son. Yes. To speak words that have taken their joy medicine. It's good for the bones.

"Well, Levi...." I struggle for words, hurt for my own bone elixir, pick up a stray sock from the floor. I speak the words more to me, than to him....

"I think some people just know what they are about."

But he's already slipped off the bed, after his Dad and a long man hug before the good-bye.

Farmer Husband leaves with his sister and two of her sons for Uncle Frank's funeral several hours away, and I stay home with our own four and two daughters, keeping about picking strawberries and rubbing goose aches and stringing out the line with threads scrubbed clean.

The hours slip, water beads down a hose on a July afternoon, and I pray for in-laws gathered in distant city cemetery, clustered in grief and strength.

Sun's low and we're all dirtier, windblown, tummy hungry when I hear Farmer Husband crack open that back door, wash his hands at the mud room sink out of habit, home.

"You good?" I meet him, rub his back, while he dries thick, rough hands in hand towel.

"Yeah... nice to be home." He slips an arm round, pulls me into us.

But it isn't till after dinner, me over a sink, and him getting a glass of water for Little One who always needs a water fount before she drifts, that he pauses and tells me something in passing that I need to cling to. He's halfway out the kitchen with the cup when he turns.

"One of Marian's boys gave her a sign of the fish decal, for the van."

Hands in suds, I half smile, nod. Good sons, hers.

"She put the bumper decal on the dashboard."

"Oh?" I rinse the last pot.

"While she was driving, she took one hand and traced it with a finger...." He gestures, making the invisible visible. Then he pauses, waiting for our eyes to catch, lock...

"And then she said:

I think I am the one who needs to be reminded that I am a Christian more than I need to tell others that I am a Christian.

I lay the pot down on the counter.

"Yeah..." The smile spreads across his face, across her words. "I thought that was quite something too. Isn't that the way to be the best witness of all?"

He turns to bring water to the parched and I stand in an empty kitchen thinking about crosses that I should wear under cotton against skin, and flags I should bring in and drape across our view, and words I need to preach firstly, gently, repeatedly, to myself.

And I whisper it to no one, to me, to him left.

"Some people just know what they're about...."

Because it's themselves they keep reminding.



Lord God, before I witness to others, have I witnessed first to me, chief among sinners? Because maybe the best way to preach to others.... is to preach to myself.

Photo: a cross I need to wear against my own skin, a reminder...

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