As I sat down this Saturday morning to begin my new writing
assignment, I kept gravitating back to BOOKED.
Now don't go sending me emails fretting, I very much have ample time to meet my
deadline....so just this once, just for today, I revisited and allowed myself
some time to ruminate on the words, all over~
One of the passages I kept coming back to related a present
that ma mere's husband had given to her one Christmas, and her explanation of
why it remains to this date as one of her favorite and best gifts ever received:
it was a wheelbarrow.
Yes. A wheelbarrow.
My first thought was one of surprise when I read this...yet
when she explains the why behind her love of this present, it makes
sense....and brings everything home. Dr. Prior shares that:
"What I loved so much about the wheelbarrow (besides
its sheer utility) is that it was something that required a certain amount of
knowing me, knowing my daily life and needs, knowing the pleasure that I take
in caring for the horses and chickens each day, in order to see its
fittingness.....The wheelbarrow was a gift because it was perfect for me."
As I read that, my mind transports back in time to when I
lived on her farm with her and that husband she is speaking so warmly of. It is
nighttime, and I am inside reading for my class. All is quiet out here in the
country, save for the crickets chirping. And then I catch it....a slight,
snippet of sound. It is laughter. No, it is....a giggle....escaping from the lips of my brilliant, no-bones-about-it, top-notch Professor. Pretty as you please, peeking its way across the night sky
from the back porch, the audible presence of joy joined me at my desk. The
source of that simple, small delight was ma mere...rocking on the back porch with
her husband (a porch that this husband had built with his own hands, mind you).
I realized then and there that THIS
is what I wanted...even though I wasn't quite sure what I meant, or didn't yet
(maybe still don't) have the exact words to capture what I was having the
blessing of witnessing unaware.
Perhaps Dr Prior can say it best in her own words:
"We had been married many years by this morning. I had
come to see that lasting love is less like a dinner with candlelight and red
roses and more like a wheelbarrow given on Christmas morning."
This holiday season, as I think of giving gifts....I want
the people I love and cherish to feel it. To know that the investment in
getting to know them....the time it took...was worth it. That they are worth everything~
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