Sunday was a perfect storm, but not that kind of perfect storm.
A perfect storm kind of implies terror and destruction (debris at the very least), but the result of this “storm” was actually…kind of…a little bit…well, perfect.
2 weeks ago, my dad reminded me that today (October 26th) is the anniversary of my mother’s death. A year. A year that has included a surgery, a blood clot, 2 weeks of covid, a new home, an Iron Man podium, wisdom teeth, and so many other things I would love to talk to her about. A year in which I have thought and wondered about her constantly – the joys and struggles I knew about, as well as the lifetime she lived before me. I’ve imagined meeting her when she was a college student at St. Olaf, 40 years before I was a college student at St. Olaf. Who was she? What was she like? Would we have been friends? What was she like when she was my age- 42 and chasing a (slightly) spoiled 3 year old around. So many unanswered questions and un-had conversations. Things I will never know.
Also a week ago Sunday , a memory from 5 years ago popped up in facebook. It was a family picture including both my mom and grandmother. Just 4 months after that picture, my grandmother would pass away at 102. Grandma and mother were so different from one another, but mom was never quite the same after that loss.
A week ago yesterday a large, 28 foot semi trailer appeared in front of our house, in impressive fashion (blocking ½ the street). It was only about 1/8th full, but contained items sent by my father. As fate would have it, he is downsizing from a house to something smaller at just the time we are upsizing from a small apartment to a house, so he sent a few pieces of furniture, nice dishes (we can now have a formal dinner for 8 :)) as well as some items from my childhood that I can no longer claim I don’t have space to store. We unloaded quickly because a big semi blocking half the street is not the best way to make friends with your new neighbors, and most items went directly into the garage. The week went by and on Saturday I finally got around to sorting through the boxes. There were the items I knew were coming, but there was one particular box of items I hadn’t planned for. Included in that box were baby shoes, my baptismal gown, and a some baby clothes. They were items mom had saved that I hadn’t seen since I was small enough to wear them. Most of them contained tags identifying who had made them – many hand-made by my grandmother and my godmother Lois. As I pulled items out, tiny memory after tiny memory emerged – fabric that I remembered, colors and patterns that felt so familiar, the knowledge that those little shoes were chosen for me with so much purpose and so much love.
All of this brings me to Sunday morning, as I picked a spot in a pew at Luther Place and sat. We went back to in-person services just a month ago and this was the first Sunday I attended without a job to do. I wasn’t on usher duty or altar guild duty, just there. I was late (as always), so the sermon was just starting. As I sat quietly listening, it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost two years that I had been truly still. No podcast, no scrolling, no exercising, not doing 10 other things…just stillness. I listened to the words and looked around at others in my church family also being still. I looked at the stained glass windows and the hymnals and the ritual happening around me, ritual and words that both my mother and grandmother loved, and ritual and words that will forever tie me to them even though they are gone.
That’s when, as I sat in the second to the last pew of my
church, 6 feet from anyone, right in the middle of the sermon, everything
converged and the perfect storm arose. I
cried quietly. It was full of grace and full of hope and full of love and mom was absolutely there. It was
perfect. A perfect storm.
Thank you for sharing. ❤️❤️
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