This December Life

Late last night we heard a tapping at our back door and there was Anna D., her hair covered with snow, shivering and cold, she’d just got off work at the hospital and was snowbound, needing a place to stay for the night.

We’ve been getting snow now for the past two weeks and Denis has been out shoveling quite a few times, but yesterday afternoon a storm that began with a few flakes and swirling drifts ended with six to nine inches by this morning. People have been hurrying past on their way to work, breath steaming, walking up the middle of the street. I saw a neighbor wade through the snow to his front door with four Canadian geese by the neck – he’d been out hunting! Others are scraping cars and running their snow blowers.

Seems like long ago when on a hot day last summer I saw these little tutus in a pricey store in the Nashville airport and immediately thought, Christmas for granddaughters! They were alarmingly cute, but not for $85. So I sketched them, avoiding the stares of the clerk who was pretty sure I was going to shoplift. This week I made one for Paige and Isobel. I know little girls dream of being the princess or the dancer. They do.

I don’t know if they’ll like them or not, but making them was almost reward enough. There are a lot of things we pretend to do for others, but really, it is for ourselves. When finished, I admired the layers of tulle, the sequins and silk flower petals floating in the folds. I felt some kind of accomplished, like maybe I’d have worn them myself, tapping my three year old brain parts. Soon enough most of us we learn we can’t become anything we want. When I was a girl one day Dad taught me how to take care of a horse that had a very nasty cut on his fetlock. That was when I abandoned dreams of ballet. I soaked and cleaned his leg every day for ten days. The horse adored me as though he knew the pain I caused would heal him, and I thought, not that I wanted to be a veterinarian, but a people doctor who squirted disinfectant on fetid wounds, sewed cuts, removed tumors.

Only later did I learn I’d no capacity or resolve for that sort of education. Am thankful God’s destiny was a different one. How often do we know what our future holds and how we will manage to live it? Over and over again, we experience God’s care in shepherding us through places that hold both sorrow and deep joy.