Memories

Bittersweet is something I’ve had beside my bed for weeks for weeks, an early book by Shauna Niequist. I have always loved Shauna’s words (I wrote about them more here), but Bittersweet is the one I have the most trouble returning to. It’s the hardest one for me to read because it deals with pain.

But as the title suggests, this book looks at the way our pain and our joy mix together to create something better, stronger--a more beautiful song than either could have managed alone. It’s the way the hard things and the lovely things fit into each other and rub against each other and the result is the music of a life.

Bittersweet seems to me to be a pretty good way to look at this last year. When I’d read the book before, I read it more as a collection of little stories, dips into a life of ordinary pain and beauty. When I picked it up again this week, I read it differently. I read it as a story of the way our lives ebb and flow like a river, but in the hard currents, slow bright ripples, and gentle rains, it leads us always toward God.

Shauna writes about the loss of job, miscarriage, moving to a new home, finding the self again. She vulnerably writes about the frustrations and bumps in marriage. She also writes about the sweetness in friendship, in motherhood,  and in finding home within ourselves, and the trust in God that ties the difficult and the joyful things together.

I’ve been looking at old pictures lately, and right now, I’m thinking about my grandfather. My childhood home was on their farm, on a piece of land my parents bought from my grandparents, and I grew up in and out of their house. I rode in the back of the truck over the fields, my long hair whipping in the wind. I followed my grandfather to the barn to feed and sat in lawn chairs in the cool of a summer’s evening with them. I spent countless nights at their house around the round kitchen table, a pile of marshmallows at my side while we played Skip-Bo, Uno, and Rook, and he kept score on a little pad of paper, distracted only when his favorite team was playing basketball or the telephone rang. 

My grandfather was funny, kind, and gregarious. At Christmas, we all used to go shopping, which meant that my parents, sisters, and grandmother would scatter around the mall, while he sat on those couches in the center with one of my sisters and me for company. “My granddaughters,” he would say to whomever got near enough--always so proud of us and ready to talk to anyone and swap stories.

Joe and I sometimes laugh at how much our son is like my grandpa, in his extreme friendliness and interest in the other person. Our son always wants to hear everyone’s stories, he asks good questions, and he doesn’t forget what you tell him. He can’t wait to be around people, to talk and play and joke. He also had more than a slight obsession with tractors and farming for a while, and always begged to visit my grandfather so he could steal his caps and stand on the tractors, pretending to drive.

Now my son is now more into music than tractors, and farming would not make his list of life goals. He’s too young to remember many of the sweet moments he has had with my grandfather, but he still loved to visit. Life is indeed full of the bitter and the sweet, and the two parts fit together to make the whole of life. My grandpa passed away last week. I hope he knew how deeply he was loved. I hope my son remembers the feeling of standing at the wheel of that parked tractor, a too-large cap on his head, a smile wide as the blue sky above him, and those big hands holding him up on either side.