Places

It was rumoring autumn in New England last week when we visited Pete’s parents. The Japanese maple in his old back yard was tinting more red than usual, and one evening while we were there, we could smell wood smoke on the cooling breeze. We slept with open windows, woke to memories, started scheming how we might move back north for the fall and winter. I tried to picture him as a baby, a little boy, a teenager growing up in the same place all his life.

I never quite know how to go home after we visit the many places where I grew up. I know that I’m growing up here in Charleston too, and I know when I leave, I will be homesick for the history, the architecture, the waves brushing the shore, the hint of passion and pirate all over here. There’s something here that draws me out, something safe in the old places that gives me rest. How do I choose, and what is home anyway?

Someone asked me if there is one thing I can drop in order to live my life to the fullest. My health issues – I’d drop them, I think. I don’t want to quit anything else. But that can’t be dropped, and when I start the treatment again after feeling better for a few days off, and my kids write on walls we’ve just cleaned and I want to sit down and cry…

Pete asks me if I’m still here.

I fall toward despair, wonder why I bother living at all, and then, annoyed with myself, look out the window at the wind in the trees and the wild rumors of life in this place, and I hear my own rational voice in my head giving me the what-for about how much I do want to live and good grief, how ridiculous can you be, letting the Lyme defeat you? I know why God has me in Charleston. It’s a rebellious beautiful city, built up from the sea, living on a dare.

Yes, I’m here.

I don’t like this place, the one where I exist and certain things refuse to change. I live outside of it as much as I can, but some days I can’t, and this is where I am and this is what I am, but this is not who I am and it never will be. I will not let it define me.

I ask God what I should be thankful for, and I know it is not this, not this place, not this limitation, but this: that He is good. It’s His Person, not His actions regarding my life or how He runs the world. Good is just Him, who He is, and somehow that means everything will be okay, like the happy ending we all know has to come sometime, no matter what we go through getting there. We all know it down deep, this sense that the bad will be defeated.

I’m too tired to think beyond this, and this is my home for this moment, His goodness.