Resurrection Thoughts
How appropriate to be having thoughts of resurrection around this time of year. Even though Passover hasn’t ended yet, the matzo is finished in the house and we are taking an Easter break – which means painted eggs and chocolate bunnies. I was ease dropping – a thing that I am want to do – and heard a guy said, “It’s not about how hard you fall, it’s how you get up.” Oh, yes, I thought, eggs-actly.
Don’t tell me where you came from, tell me where you’re going.
Yesterday, we were driving away from Tin’s friends house and he said to me, “I want a house like that.” Asked what he meant, he meant he wanted to live in a big house again. He said he missed the LaLa. I told him that I missed the LaLa too but we couldn’t afford it anymore. He asked how come his friend lived in that house and I said, because his father has a successful business and was able to afford it.
When I was young, I remember living on Louisiana Avenue Parkway, and having this huge room where all six kids slept. We had a bunk bed, a trundle bed, and something else – I can’t remember but I remember there was a hamster too. There was a long hallway and we had a buffer – what’s that you say – it’s a machine to wax the floors and the buffer has two circling clothes that buff the wood till it shines. So weird, you never hear of buffers any more. It was a chore that every one of us hated.
I also remember hugging the space heater in that apartment. Just like Tin is doing in that photo here at the Red House – we had a couple of bone chilling days and both of us were hugging the space heaters.
A friend and I were talking yesterday, she and her husband and two kids have lived in an 850 sf home for a few years and now they are more than doubling their square footage with an addition. She said they were thinking that after the addition is done they would no longer be in those cramped quarters, which is good, but also not good in the sense that they have been in each other’s business for years now, which has been a wonderful thing as a family.
It made me think of Deacon John who showed me a photograph of his tiny shotgun house where he and his 12 siblings were raised – he was born in the kitchen. How is that possible I thought when I was looking at the tiny house, the tiny porch? With love, he said. With love.
Tin and I are a wall apart now, I can almost hear him breathing when he sleeps. This is so different from where he was in the LaLa, which always seemed miles away. I like sleeping near him – it makes me feel he is safe. I never really liked him so far away in the LaLa, too close to the back door, too far from my bed.
Yesterday, we walked right out the door to Fortier Park – two blocks away – the boys said, “Oh it’s so long to walk.” And I laughed. In the park, I found a lime green adirondak chair and sat in the sun while the boys played all around the park – putting sticks in the fountain, “No sticks in the fountain!” – throwing all the plastic chess pieces on the ground, “Pick those up!” – and here and there and everywhere. I was peaceful, sitting in the sun, bare headed, soaking up the rays. They were running and every now and again, I’d have to fire off a warning, but for the most part I could close my eyes or watch the butterflies floating passed my line of sight.
Pink azaleas had taken over one patch of the park, a sculptural birdhouse was beside a bench, a ceramic totem pole grew out of some bushes, a fountain here and a fountain there, a Virgin Mary statue nested in an eave created for her, and there I was, I had risen. Amen.