Coming and then going

Today I'm going to begin a journey with my readers, a journey into the past, my past, everyone's past in some ways, as well as look ahead to the coming again of our Lord, Jesus. I'm going to muse about this journey we take together for the season of Advent, which in itself is a self-contained look back and a wistfully wonderful look ahead. Advent means coming, speaking of our Lord's first, then second coming. But there's no doubt that for me it's about reflection, coming and then going.

Five years ago last Friday, the 25th of November, I bent over, slipped through a barbed-wire fence and walked through pasture-land to the edge of a hill. The drop wasn't a large one, but the hill led to a huge, flat pasture split like a vein in an old arm by a creek. It wasn't painting-pure, postcard scenery, but I loved that look and had for years. There were times when, life being what it's always been, I almost crawled back there to take a few minutes to push reset, to reboot my being. When I walked back there the morning of the 25th, in 2006, I walked back there for the last time.

See, my mother was ill. Deathly ill it turned out. She had lung cancer. We sold her six acres, gave bits and pieces of her "stuff" to the kids and packed up the rest ourselves. The computer with which I'm doing this pondering sits on a desk that came from her house, a desk given to me when I was in high school eons ago. She had moved to an assisted living home just a month before we divided the property, and we sold her house, "our" house in record time.

We cooked and ate Thanksgiving dinner that year, a slimmed down meal at that, and proceeded to pack up life, or what had been all our lives, the rest of Thursday as we prepared for a Friday departure. U-haul was our friend.

So there I was on Friday, looking at the place where I killed my only squirrel (and regretted it to that day), the place where I went swimming in the creek with Lynn Pratt, the place where we called cows (before their "eat more chicken" phase), the place where we walked on pine straw and imagined space invaders, walked on grass with eyes wide and alert for copperheads or moccasins, the place where we grew emotionally and even physically over years of play. I looked at the land as mist lazily rose from it, covering the postcard with a surreal, even somber dusting on that cool morning. I tried, successfully it seems, to freeze it in my memory as if I had many mega pixels to work with in my tired, old brain.

Then I, we, walked and then drove away. I haven't been back. I don't think I really can, though my cousin I'm now told had purchased my mother's house as well as all the land.

My mother passed away about a month later, Dec. 23, 2006, and our lives certainly changed. No more driving to her house for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. No more dead-sleep naps, as my grandson Gavin described a cat's drowsy moments last week, on her couch after loads of heavy "dressing" and often dry turkey. No more moments with her. Holidays sometimes make me cringe, having lost my childhood home around Thanksgiving and my mother around Christmas. It is what it is.

And certainly no more gazing, peacefully, securely, wonderfully at that land crossed by a barbed-wire fence, dissected by tall oak and pine soldiers, and a creek that has become overgrown by bushes and tragically dried to to point that no one in his or her right mind would ever consider wading in it. Heck, snakes must have packed their tiny bags and slithered away rather than call Ponta Creek their home any more. We've all aged and weathered and moved.

Five years come and gone.
Five years.

Advent is a time of reflection, of staring at pasts good and bad and remembering. It's what I used to use the hill and the valley for. God promised, through the boy-king David's writings, that he would walk with us through those valleys.

Now?

Driving the grand kid boys home on Thanksgiving, I began a rousing rendition of "Over the hills and through the woods, to grandmother's house we go."  Four-year-old Gavin said, "I hate that song."

Everything changes, my friends. Everything. We come and then we go. We arrive and we depart. We are born, then we die. We are togther, then quickly apart. We are. We aren't.