The Kissing Hand (Kindergarten and the Scent of God)

 

It was the first day of kindergarten.  My oldest son and I walked toward the low brick building holding hands and he reached over with his right hand to pull on my wrist, pressing his small hand deeper into the crevasse between my thumb and index finger. Pressing, pulling, he buried his hand in mine as I asked, “What are you doing?”

“It feels like it’s slipping out,” he explained.

Then I held on tighter, adding, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to let it go.”

Inside, he sat on a large alphabet rug with his classmates, his long legs folded under as his teacher read Audrey Penn's, The Kissing Hand. I sat at his desk in a tiny chair that pushed my knees to my chin and braced myself against tears as I listened to the story of a Mama Raccoon and her son parting for school.

The story is based on a scene the author witnessed, where a mother raccoon placed its nose on its baby’s paw and the baby pressed the paw to its own face, as a way of remembering its mother’s scent. In Penn’sbook, the mother raccoon kisses her son’s paw, telling him,

           . . . whenever you feel lonely, and need a little loving from home, just
          press your hand to your cheek and think, 'Mommy loves you, Mommy
          loves you.'  And that very kiss will jump to your face and fill you with
          toasty warm thoughts.

Later, the young raccoon, Chester, repeats the ritual for his mother,

          "Give me your hand," he told her.  Chester took his mother's hand into
          his own and unfolded her large, familiar fingers into a fan.  Next he
          leaned forward and kissed the center of her hand.  "Now you have a
          kissing hand too," he told her. 

We moved to another part of the room and I crouched beside my son who sat now in a chair just his size in front of a large piece of paper. He sponged cool green tempera paint onto my outstretched hand and I pressed it firm onto the page. Then I coated his with yellow and he too pressed his hand down, leaving an imprint on each side of the page; one large hand with long green fingers and a smaller one, yellow as the sun.

Sitting in that room that felt so empty and far from home, I wondered how God’s love would be made present there.  Then I realized it would be, in part, through my son, who carries the love of God that his father and I have massaged into his limbs, his bones, his heart; that he is the scent of God’s presence to his classmates and that I am the scent of God’s presence to him.

And I thought of the One who the prophet Isaiah says, has engraved us on the palms of his hands.

God who, like a mother, carries his children with him breathing deep the scent of his people even as he whispers, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” 

*   *   *

Click on the video below to listen to Audrey Penn reading The Kissing Hand.   

(This post is linked with Playdates With God).

Red Bird, Black Bug

 

(this is what I'm listening to as I type, though we live nowhere near a field)

 

*   *   *



At our old house, the cardinals swooped and soared through the back yard, pausing on a tree or fence before flying through the air again like a flaming arrow flung.  Here, at the apartment where we are living in-between, and only a few blocks from where home used to be, there are no cardinals.

There are slugs, though, which is something we never had at the old house - big hearty ones measuring in excess of five or six inches.  They slip silently along the side-walk and I narrowly miss stomping on a big fella in the early morning rush for school. 

No cardinals here, just slugs.  And crickets. 

The whole place is filled with their drone when I step sleepily down the stairs in the early, dark morning.  They pulse relentlessly, these black, singing bugs.  Some days it feels like their song is holding us all aloft and, unlike the Cardinal, that bright messenger winging through my days, the lowly crickets tune is constant and in this I find some small measure of comfort; we are carried along moment by moment by the cricket's song. 

*   *   *

 



Over the past year, I've written a lot about cardinals and birds, if you'd like to read more, try This Nest, These Birds or A Prayer for Winter.

This post it linked with Five Minute Friday for the prompt 'Red.' Click over to read other posts. And, yes, this did take me a little more than five minutes . . .

 

The Smoker

He was middle-aged,

with a shock of honey-blond hair,

dressed in a suit and tie.

Crossing the street in front of me,
he stood on the far corner,
smoking a cigarette,
waiting to cross again.

Raising the thin tube to his lips,

he took a drag, tilting his head
as if to follow that breath to the end.
Then he held it for a few seconds or more
and let it go.

“That’s how I want to live,” I thought.

Breathing deep,
holding on for a moment,
then letting go.

This post is linked with dVerse Poets Pub.

Learning to Float, pt. 2

(This story was originally posted last summer as part of a longer essay, click HERE to read part 1.)

 

I’m headed to the biggest grocery store in town on the day before the fourth of July. This is only the second time I’ve ever gone shopping alone with all four kids and I know it’s a fool’s errand, doomed from the start.

My heart sinks a little at the sight of the full parking lot.  The sun beats down mercilessly on the blacktop as I anxiously calculate the time that remains before the twins are due for another nap. 

As I turn off the engine, my oldest shouts with urgency from the back of the van, “I have to go to the bathroom!” 

Of course. 

I unload the stroller and position the older two on either side.  The double stroller is like a pontoon and the kids and I float along like rafts tied-on as we ride the tide toward the automatic doors.  I grab a cart and assign roles.  One will push the stroller and one the cart, as I carry the list and pull things from the shelves.   

I see a friend with whom I’ve been meaning to connect, but time is pressing on me – time before the babies break down, time until the older two break down, time until I break down – so I brush her off.  Now a second friend is trying to chit-chat as we turn and head for the restroom.  I refuse to enter the bathroom with the older two, a passive-aggressive expression of my frustration at the inconvenience of this pit-stop. 

I’m tense and irritable at the crowd and the scene we make. The aisles, like the parking lot, are packed with shoppers loitering, choosing slowly, chatting and generally in. the. way.  

I’m trying so hard, fighting, resisting.

In the pause of our bathroom break I can feel it, the invitation to surrender. 

What am I so afraid of?  What do I seriously think can go so wrong that this trip must be a battlefield, an attack against which I’m perpetually braced? 

The question sinks from my head to my heart until I can glimpse an alternate view, until I can taste the prospect of adventure and fun and possibility, until I relax and start to float. 

And so we float through the store, our boats bumping the aisles and strangers’ carts and each other. 

We laugh at Levi who pulls boxes off the shelves with fixed determination when the stroller wanders near the aisle's edge.  We absorb the smiles of strangers as my kids squabble over who gets to help with what and I stand like an air traffic controller waving people past us and directing kids, my tiny fleet of beautiful, floating boats.  

*   *   *

What is life if not one long lesson in the art of letting go, of learning to float in the sea of grace and mercy that lies below and within and all around us everyday, every moment an opportunity to surrender.


This post is linked with Playdates with God.

Twin Pictures of Faith

He crosses the sandy shore, walking his slow, sturdy toddler walk and carrying a small, plastic teaspoon filled with sand.  Shirtless, still wearing his pajama shorts, he focuses with a force of determination that causes his hand to shake.  Depositing the sand on a pile of his own making, he crosses the sand again to refill his spoon.

"Mountain," I say in my sing-song Mommy voice, "You're building a mountain."

Looking up to where I stand, knee deep in the icy cold water, he squints into the sun and smiles.

"Mout-een, mout-een," he confirms, before returning, spoon in hand, to the impossible task before him. 

He is moving a mountain, spoonful by spoonful.

*   *   *

His twin brother, the tumbler, light-footed little Levi, who just days before nearly drowned in a foot of water, comes splashing, tripping out to me.  His eyes are half-shut, blinded by the light, but he runs, carelessly toward my outstretched hands.

Locking his hands in my own, I lift him off his feet and drag his body, belly-up, through the water, making wide, splashing circles around me, spinning him like a washing machine on rinse cycle. 

I worry that I will hurt his arms, that water will splash on his face, but he is giddy with delight, enraptured with the pleasure of the moment as he whirls through it.

"Moe!  Moe!" he cries when I attempt to right him on the sandy floor, he cannot get enough of this moment's joy. 

*   *   *

My boys made a tableau that day at the lake, two pictures of faith - the slow and steady faith of the Widow's Mite and the head-long falling faith of one carried by arms of Love.  Two boys, two pictures, so different, but not so very far apart, laid out before me as I stood between them, knee deep in the icy cold water.


This post is linked with Playdates with God and Jennifer Dukes Lee.

What We Took From Eden

I imagined it would be like preparing a body for burial, one last loving touch to each wall, each floor before saying goodbye.  I was grateful my daughter, seven, came with me.  This house holds her earliest memories, the ones that hover, wordless, in the recesses of her mind. 

She cleaned windows, reaching higher than I'd known she could, and begged endlessly to mop.  She climbed onto the counter and drank water right out of the faucet, because we didn't have any cups.

In the end, we opened the back door one last time and filled a small box with the ripest things we could find in the garden, mostly tomatoes.  I took my familiar position, sitting on the concrete steps and watched as she walked this last time through her very own Eden, that small patch of grass and weeds and boxed in vegetables that she helped to plant and pull every year. 

I told her it was time to go and she lingered, looking, leaning, "Let me get just one more," she said, longing to take something more with her than that box of luscious fruit, already full to bursting. 

*   *   *

That night I made spaghetti sauce, fresh and light, every ingredient pulled from the dirt of our own lives.  Dirty garlic bulbs and tiny red onions, hardly worth the time to peel, green pepper and, of course, the tomatoes. 

It was a small harvest, but it was enough; it was the best sauce I ever made. 

(This post is for Five Minute Friday on the prompt, "Last."  Click over to read more five minute posts!)

Living is Believing

‘Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live.  Emerson, Beauty

She was bent at the waist, plucking at the ground near the swings, hunting and pecking like a chicken and I thought for a minute that maybe she’d lost something.  When we reached the swings, she straightened and turned.

“I’m not crazy,” she said, “I just like weeding.”

Then she turned and bent again and continued pulling the weeds that grew scattered across the wide expanse of mulch, moving from patch to patch like a frog crossing a pond on lily pads. 

She was white-haired and thin and as I watched, did not appear to be overly crazy.

I lifted the boys onto swings and rotated from one to the other, pushing on their soft, solid backs while my older two swung like monkeys, maneuvering the swings in every way possible save for the way they’re intended. 

“When you grow up as one of ten,” she said, “weeding all the time, it’s hard to stop.” 

“Well, it’s satisfying,” I replied.  Then, though she didn’t hear me, “I miss my garden.”

*   *   *

“I’ll be so relieved when we have a contract on a house,” I said one evening as we cleaned the kitchen, “so I can live in the future instead of having to live here and now.”

Since selling our house, we are living in-between in a place that is not lovely.  The walls are bare and white, the windows hung with three dollar blinds and I don’t want to spend a dime or an ounce of energy on improvements here that could be used on a “real home” when we move. 

“I feel like I’m in a cage,” I say, when my husband gets home and I pace from room to room.  Turning to the windows for an escape, I’m disappointed to find the neighbor’s old siding, the deli sign across the street that blinks continually , “O – P – E – N.”

*   *   *

I watched her hands, wrinkled and tan, as she drew closer.  She held a small metal tool that loosened each weed, then pulled them out root and all. 

She didn’t seem to mind that it wasn’t her garden, her mulch or, even, her weeds.

She kept right on clearing the area, one by one, like the man in that story of the star fish dying on the shore, tossing the weeds aside, handful after small handful.

It seemed futile, it was futile – the Crabgrass, the Plantain and Mallow, all sure to re-grow, to spread again.

Watching her bending, gathering, I thought of Elijah’s widow gathering sticks outside the city wall.  The old woman clutching the dry branches, gathering what she needed to return home and build a fire and bake one last meal from a few bits of oil and flour.  To the observer, her actions would appear futile, but she was a gatherer, a baker, a mother, so she lived while she still could and her living became belief.  The oil continued to flow, the flour was enough.    

I thought of the boy with two loaves and the fish, his hands small and shaking as he offered the meager meal, extending on skinny arms the too small, not enough.  To the observer, his actions were futile, but he was a giver, provider, so he lived who he was and his living became belief.  The bread and the fish split into a million pieces like light refracted through the prism of Christ's touch and it was enough.

*   *   *

I am going to have to start living here, I tell myself. 

If I stop living and keep pacing, I may well stop seeing.  And if I stop seeing, for example, the branches of the gentle oak tree that wave softly to me when I lift the blinds and glance in their direction, then it will be because I’ve stopped believing.

I’m going to have to deal with the boxes in the back room and hang hooks on the wall for the backpacks and coats that will come and go this whole winter long.  I’m going to have to find a place for things, to tend my plants, to nurture bits of beauty and light and to write it out when I can, because it’s who I am and then, maybe, my living will also, please oh please, become belief.