A Daughter Remembers

It isn’t often that I get to hear the stories of our lives told from our children’s point of view, but after I posted the last blog, my daughter Suzanne texted me this 2006 excerpt from her journal.  As a mother this week before Mother’s Day, I share her memory with you with her permission.

Dad drives the cheerleaders in Homecoming parade.

Journal Entry--2006
Out on a back road in Orestes, there is an artesian well—you hear it before you see it. My dad used to pile all of us into the old Chevy convertible, and after we got our ice cream cones at Dor-tees, we would go for a drive out around the winding roads, past the landfill and Martin Paving, past fields oof cattle and corn until Dad would turn down the music of Willie Nelson long enough to say, “Listen.”  He would pull up along the side of the road and turn off the engine. 

Photo by Angela Kellogg

Over the sounds of birds and cicadas you could hear the gurgling of the well spring coming up from somewhere deep in the ground.  It was magical for me as a kid, straining to hear the sound of the water, knowing that even while I slept or ate dinner or worked math problems, the spring was always bubbling up and out of the ground, day in and day out.  Once my dad stopped the car, got out, and took me by the hand to see it, even though it stood on someone’s private property.  It was amazing, truly.  I had never seen water so clear or felt anything so cold.  My dad bent me over to take a drink so I wouldn’t get my clothes wet.  The water was as chilled and sweet and untainted as an April rain.

In February of this past year, our family made the difficult decision to move out of Madison County to Nashville, Tennessee, where my husband could be a more “hands on” manager in a music company with which he had been involved for some time.  Our children who are both serious musicians had expressed intertest in getting more involved in a music community and began to desire the move as well.  Toward the end of May, the week before we packed the moving truck and headed south, my dad pulled around our driveway in the old Chevy convertible and told the boys and me to get in.  We drove down the familiar streets of Alexandria—the bakery, the Lighthouse Café, Broyles Furniture—curved around Washington Street, drove out past Martin Paving and what used to be the Madison County Landfill (“the only mountain in the county”, we used to joke), past the cornfields just beginning to emerge into decent-sized plants, until dad came to the road where the artesian well gurgled up out of the ground.  He turned off the car engine and said, “Listen.” We could hear it, the joyful sound of clear, cool water.  

We got out of the car.  It had been years since I’d been to the artesian well, so I was surprised to see that the owners of the property had laid a little stone path which curved around to a podium with a guest book people could sign.  There was beautiful landscaping—hostas, zinnias, daffodils—blooming around the well.  Statues of angels and wildlife stood in their cement stillness as if to pay homage to the flowing water.  Beyond the spring down another winding path stood a miniature chapel with a tiny steeple set up for those who wished to meditate and reflect.  The boys, sensing the sacredness of the place, remained silent.  

Photo by Angela Kellogg

They made their way to the spring which had been connected in recent years to a galvanized pipe so that people could drink from it.   They bent down one and a time to drink from the well.  I watched their faces as each one smiled, tasting for the first time the cold sweetness which I had come to know so well.  “This is good,” whispered Jesse to me as he took another sip.

As we got into the car to leave, an old rusty Oldsmobile pulled up behind us.  A heavy-set woman with her hair pulled back in a bandana was driving the car.  The back seat was full of children with dirty faces and faded tee-shirts.  The littlest boy had on only a diaper.  A girl about fourteen got out of the passenger seat.  She wore tattered cut-off shorts and a halter top that said “Baby”.  Her eyes were lined heavily with eyeliner and mascara, and she smelled of stale cigarette smoke.  She only glanced our way briefly, then headed toward the well, an empty gallon milk jug in her hand.  We got into our car and drove away.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

A week later we left Madison County for our new home in Tennessee.  We packed the back of both of our SUVs full of suitcases, dogs, and movies for the trip.  As I was getting ready to close the trunk, I spotted a gallon milk jug.  “What’s this?” I asked.

Jesse glanced behind him and replied rather matter-of-factly, “It’s water...from the well.”  He began fidgeting with his seat belt, then added, “I thought it would be good to take some with us.”

I shut the hatch, “Yeah, it would be.  It would be good,” I said as I got in the car.  We drove the back way out of Madison County, country roads lined with corn plants and soy beans, Frankton Elementary School, Rickers, Hutchinson’s Orchard, Florida Station Church of God, the granary....

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

America on Purpose

These are the times that call us to live our lives on purpose as individuals; and if we believe in the right to make our own choices as individuals, the times also demand that we live on purpose as citizens of our local and national communities.  In this year’s election process it is imperative that we as citizens seriously explore our nation’s purpose and our personal role in it.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

This is our nation’s 244th birthday.  How young we are! And the jury is still out, as Abraham Lincoln said, as to whether “this nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure”.  The Republic that has sustained our country is still testing and probably will always be testing whether such a democracy can endure, because, as many of our forefathers wrote, this kind of experiment depends on the moral character of its people.  There can never be enough laws enacted or enforcers trained to make a country good.

As we celebrate what we tend to take for granted—our more firmly established nation and its government of the people, by the people, and for the people--we must be aware that freedom is always a fragile thing, balanced on the generous and voluntary agreement of all the free to abandon personal inclinations to selfishness and care for the well-being of others.  In so doing we must trust the audacious expectation that others will be caretakers of our basic rights in return.  Making the putting of others and the common good ahead of self-interests is a biblical principle.  The question is, have we come to value freedom enough that we dare on regular days to risk that freedom to live in this reciprocity, alert to any internal (inside our own hearts) or exterior efforts to threaten it.

The future of freedom as we know and love it depends on our personal and persistent living out in practical ways our commitment to this ideal.  It calls us to tell our children the story of how freedom was won as well as discussing our best and worst efforts at living it out in the past, and challenging them to love better and take seriously their responsibility to chisel out their generation’s call to this precious and unique vision. 

Photo by Angela Kellogg

My favorite verse of “America the Beautiful” is this:

Oh, beautiful for patriot dreams
That see beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears.

There must always be visionaries who, when in even moments of our most disappointing behavior, can see and hold us to a better purpose.  When our cities are smoking with disillusioning failure, someone has to still see the potential of precious stone sparkling in the sun.  When the wails of despair are rising to the ears of heaven, and tears of the disheartened are flowing, someone has to still believe that there is model to which we can aspire of a city “undimmed by human tears.”

That dream city will not come about by human perfection.  It will only be an outgrowth of grace, the awareness that in our worst moments, “God shed his grace on me.” That amazing mercy gives us the right to hope, and demands that we be gracious and merciful to each other in spite of glaring imperfections.

In the next few days many of us will celebrate our free country by roasting hot dogs and wearing our patriotic tee shirts; the community band will play “The Star Spangled Banner”.  We will listen to our children’s children sing along, but they will not know unless we tell them that this national anthem is about a wounded and embattled remnant of soldiers, straining to see through the fog and gun smoke whether the tattered remains of the American flag could still be seen flying from the mast of a riddled ship in the harbor.  It did!  And still flies nearly two and a half centuries later over battlefields and harbors and battered cities where men and women have given their lives and blood so that the rest of us could go on taking care of each other’s right to be.

But there is a deeper, more important foundation for this freedom we protect and enjoy.  It is the deep belief that God created every living person with an eternal soul and therefore with infinite and eternal value.  It is that eternal value that gives each person essential rights. Our founders believed that these rights were not ours to give, but were “endowed by the Creator” as a gift from God.  The right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is only ours to protect and honor.

In spite of our shortcomings and failures, we can celebrate progress made. Our nation has learned and grown in the trust in its people to do the right thing; when that trust is strained almost to the breaking point, those who follow the Master of love must not abandon that trust but renew our commitment to it.

The belief in basic human value has driven us to fight for justice, not only here, but in places where human rights have been grossly violated.  This belief has caused us to use our power to defend the weak and the downtrodden and to preserve the rights of those with whom we disagree.  We yet have a long way to go, but we have made progress, and must always work to do so.

In the end, if we lose our belief in God and the eternity of the soul, if we degrade and disregard the sanctity of life itself, not just commercially viable life, but all life, and cease to protect the powerless, we ourselves and our nation will be swallowed up in greed and overtaken from within, disintegrating into an anarchy where only the ones with the biggest weapons survive.  We will go the way of ruthless dictatorships of the world, each eventually betrayed and mutinied by an uprising of the disenfranchised.

So in kindness, decency, patience and gentle grace, let freedom ring.  May we believe in the value of all and use our powers only and always to protect the weak, the powerless, and those who have yet to enjoy the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  May we never abandon our own personal responsibility to live out our commitment to these ideals by scraping onto the plate of institutions and government the total load of pursuing “liberty and justice for all”.  And may God bless not only America, but all peoples who choose right over evil.

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below:

Good Things Just Take Time

photo by Meg Ballard

As kids prepare to go back to school, we realize that the jeans that fit fine in May are halfway to their knees, and the tennis shoes are so worn and stained that they certainly won’t do for the first day of classes.  The marks on the wall we made last August to record their height is two inches shorter than the one made this morning.

The voices are changing, too.  The sound of that sweet child calling from his upstairs bedroom sounds strangely like a man; and the little girl that loved to wear her pink and lavender dress is bounding in to breakfast in brand new tattered and frayed jeans and an oversized tee shirt tied in a knot just above her navel, allowing a peak at her bare belly.

When did this happen?  When did we go from holding a cuddly infant to dropping a child at kindergarten?  And where went the time between kissing a second grader good night to hosting a pizza party for 14 teen-agers?  How amazing, too, that we survived the turbulent years adolescence to enjoy these coming-back-home moments with responsible adults with kids of their own, parenting with wisdom that sometimes puts to shame my own bungling attempts at being wise and engaged.

I’m sitting on the porch today sensing hints of the season changing from summer to fall.  The zinnias are tall and in full bloom of outrageous colors.  I saw the first chrysanthemums at Welche’s Nursery this week, and the leaves of the giant maple beside the driveway gate are showing edges tinged in scarlet.  That tree was just a sapling when we first poured the cement for the driveway. In fact, when we built this house and were still teaching English fifty-three years ago, we could still see my parents’ back deck across the creek.  Now there is a forest of pines, maples, sycamores, oaks, and willows between us and what we now call the Creek House.

I readily confess that patience is not a natural virtue for me.  But over the years of serving God, I have come to know that good things just take time.  Tall, lush trees, an English garden, a good rich marriage, deep friendships, and responsible adult kids just take time, whether I’m patient or not. “And who of you by worrying,” asked Jesus “can add a single hour to your life?” But I am learning to sigh fewer sighs of exasperation because things aren’t moving as quickly as my limited perspective would like.

I am learning to trust the process and to “pull the camera back,” to see the bigger picture and not be so focused on the details of today. I am learning to pick my battles and save my “nos” for the big stuff.  I am coming to realize that the promise to “work all things together for our good” means “good” from an eternal perspective; I am also learning that pain is often the shovel God uses to dig a wider, deeper capacity for holding what is eternal in the here and now.

And my impatient nature is finally relaxing in the trust that “good things just take time.”

To share this post with others on Facebook, click below: