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A quote: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” ~~ Proverbs 13:12
I’ll start with a story …
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He promised, of course. “Don’t worry, mom. We’ll visit. I’ll call every week.”
And of course, I believed. We were so proud of him. We went to all the parent-teacher conferences, showed up at his soccer games.
I displayed his latest drawings on the refrigerator, scrapbooked the Student of the Month certificates and ribbons for Science Fair projects.
He loved helping his dad with yard work and fussed only a little with clearing off the table after dinner.
And when he brought her home on Thanksgiving in his junior year at college, we were thrilled. She was funny and warm and couldn’t be helpful enough with dinner. We laughed over a sink of suds and I told stories as we put things away.
The wedding two years later wasn’t what we expected. That it was grand beyond our modest expectations wasn’t the thing. Her parents were polite, but distant. I’d catch looks thrown my way. Oh, they adored our son, but …
He worked for them and they settled in the city. Phone calls slipped, visits were often cancelled “Mom, I’m sorry. My job is so hectic lately …” We made sure to travel to them when our grandson was born. But we were put up in a hotel and had to call first before dropping by.
Today I find myself trembling. My husband comes up behind me, arms hold me tight. “this time,” he whispers, “this time.”
A car pulls into the driveway.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe stock standard license.
Cameron says: My father was considered a difficult man by many, including me and my siblings. Grief was something that you never showed openly no matter what. So when my wife and child died, I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I came over and he simply said “Work with me tomorrow.”
The house was down by the beach but it had fallen on hard times. It only had the most basic of work done over the years. We got to work. Not just fixing; completely restoring it. Within a few months, the inside was better than new. And then dad called in his favorite landscaper and we dealt with the outside. Weeds that had been there long enough to claim squatters’ rights were removed, native flowers took root and the bird bath was sterilized and filled up.
When it was all done, I had to admit that the place looked great. And then my dad pressed a key into my hand. He pointed at the house and said “You had to come here to restore the house and your heart,” he said quietly. “Now move in and rebuild your life.”
It was the therapy I needed. And the house is great.
When I was little, my folks used to take me to visit Grandma and Grandpa on the old family farm. I can still see the little white house on that country road, the white picket fence around a front yard full of flowerbeds. Behind it was a back yard with a vegetable garden and a henhouse. Grandma would take me out with her to help collect eggs and take care of the garden.
About the time I started school, the visits stopped. Later I found out that Grandpa had a stroke and had to go to a nursing home, and Grandma moved into an apartment in town to be closer to him. Uncle Greg started farming the land, but he and Aunt Nancy had a house of their own, so they rented out the house.
I’d often dreamed of going back, but knew that even if the house were still standing, it would be someone else’s home and they wouldn’t appreciate me showing up and wanting to poke around for old time’s sake. So I’d remember it as I went about my life, but I was never quite happy with the jobs I took, the work that never seemed to fit.
Now that First Contact with the Kitties has changed everything, I’m going to take them up on their offer and head out to homestead on one of their frontier worlds. I have enough pictures of the old home place that I think I can make a reasonable reconstruction of it, even with the Kitties’ pop-out modules. Of course this farm won’t be quite the same, because we’re not just going to have a little henhouse for some eggs and the occasional stewing chicken. When you consider that the Kitties and several other member species in their Empire are obligate carnivores, it’s not surprising that we’re going to be setting up a full commercial chicken operation — and the contracts with the Quartermaster-General’s office is going to help pay off the loans for our startup equipment.
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