Friday, November 27, 2009
The fuss is over and the quiet begins. My favorite part of Thanksgiving weekend! The fireplace is burning, the snow is falling and I’m sitting in my pjs and slippers listening to the quiet. This is that slot of time that is the eye of the storm. Thanksgiving is done and Christmas season can wait until tomorrow. Nothing is pressing; no one is in desperate need of me. I can sit on my couch and just be.
Part of my tradition of the Friday after Thanksgiving is reading a book from cover to cover. I try to select one that is going to put me into the Christmas spirit and yet has a little depth to it. It doesn’t have to be a major work or on the best seller list, just a book to help me enjoy the peace. I selected the book Christmas List by Richard Paul Evans. He is one of my favorite authors. He has a way of telling a story without being wordy. His books tend to have a spiritual moral to them and a sweet romance although usually tragic, that appeals to my romantic leanings. My selection was perfect for this morning’s retreat.
I can feel the calm of the day slipping away as Tom becomes restless in the stillness. He is outside shoveling the walk and I have a feeling in the next few minutes the snow blower will fire up. This cushion of quiet I have been reveling is even now beginning to disperse. Rosie is home and she and her friend Michelle are watching a movie and the phone is beginning to ring. I can feel the pull of the laundry waiting for me, the call of worship music waiting to be organized and the whining of the dog for a walk in the new fallen snow. However, I believe I can squeeze out another twenty minutes or so from the fire in the fireplace and a moment to write my thoughts and vent my feelings before I need to budge from my couch.
I was telling my sister Carol, yesterday that it really does happen! The kids grow up and take most of their stuff with them. All of a sudden getting ready for company isn’t so panic ridden and the house seems less cluttered. She looked at me with doubt in her eyes and I placed a comforting arm around her shoulders while she leaned on me for a moment. It seems like in the last two weeks or so, this phenomenon has finally occurred at our house. The couch stays free of purses, coats, sweatshirts and Old Navy shopping bags, dishes stay in the cupboard and the washer and dryer are empty when I go to put a load of my laundry in them. The weddings were over months ago, but moving the necessary stuff from one abode to another is process. I am sure I will miss all the stuff that used to haunt the common areas of our residence, but for now I am enjoying the overlying neatness.
In less than a month I will be having yet another birthday. I just read a book by Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter Anne called Traveling With Pomegranates. She talked about turning fifty and facing the fact that her physical fertility had come to an end and she faced the realization that her life needed to take on a new type of fertility. As I read I identified with that feeling. She put so well into words what I have been feeling for the last year. Although I didn’t always agree with her methods of coming to grips with the loss of her “young woman hood” and the accepting of “older woman hood” I felt an affinity with her in this. I too stand at the place of leaving my productive years behind and entering the years that I hope creativity can become born in me. I’m praying it will be more than knitting sweaters, making new recipes and finding new ways to take advantage of the silver in my hair. Not that I will stop doing those things, I just long for more than that.
Someone who was a successful composer of worship music once said, “If you want to be creative, get close to the Creator.” That will be my goal for the next year (and every year to come). I am going to ask Him to be creative through me. What will that mean for me? I’m not sure. I hesitate to put into writing what I hope of doing before I am an old woman, I am just superstitious enough to not want to jinx my dreams. But I do know whatever I put my hand to, with the Creator’s blessing, will be enough.
The fire has died, the book is read and it’s time to begin those little tasks that will let neatness continue to reign. My Thanksgiving weekend has been full of blessings.
