Mom’s Sacred Journey

“And there is so much to see always, things too big to take in all at once, things so small as hardly to be noticed…but it is no accident when they open our hearts as well as our eyes.” (Buechner, The Sacred Journey)  

“…Home was not a place to me when I was a child.  It was people.” So wrote Frederick Buechner in his little book, “The Sacred Journey.” Death can never put an end to our relationships with those giants of our childhood—our real home.

“Memory is more than looking back to a time that is no longer,” Buechner says,

“it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still.” These people we loved and who loved us.  These people who taught us so much.  They seem to be with us still and continue to touch us.

My mother insisted, before her death, that I should have her journals.  Why?  I do not know.  Did she really want me to read them?  I couldn’t read them five years ago when they first came into my possession.  I put her journals in a box and hid them away in a closet.  Every once in a while I would think about them being there.  Every once in a while I thought about reading them, but then felt myself an intruder, a trespasser encroaching upon the sacred.

Mom was fifty-eight years old when she began her chronicling in 1977—forty-three years ago.  Dad was living then. Yesterday, I know not why, I pulled the box of journals from the closet and began to glance through the year 1977.  Simple phrases introduce each day’s entry:  “Nice, icy, snow, rain, cloudy, cold, warm, humid, hot, windy…”  Why the weather report each day? Mom was aware that the weather affects everything:  how we dress, whether we will stay inside or venture outside.   Weather affects our daily choices.  It isn’t very important for me to know that on February 7, 1977 it was “still snowing and the wind is blowing hard; snow drifts up to 7 feet high…Stores, schools, banks, airports are closed,” but it certainly reminds me of how the weather plays an important role in my daily activities.

Mom wrote faithfully nearly every day for over thirty-seven years.  Each entry is a brief commentary on her daily activities: “Went to church….Played Scrabble… Cleaned the kitchen…Picked strawberries…Canned tomatoes…Shelled peas…Dad (my father) worked all day.”  She wrote as she spoke without embellishment or erudite rhetoric.  And yet, how profoundly she illustrated life, both her own and mine.