More, Please
The farmers are picking corn here in the Midwest. I drove along I-70 today, past corn fields ready for the harvest, and I thought about my father. It’s impossible for me to see dry cornstalks in the fields without thinking of him on Election Day in November, 1956, when he tried to unclog the shucking box of his picker without first shutting down the power take-off. The spinning snapping rollers caught one of his hands between them. He tried to free that hand with his other one, and the rollers caught it, too. I find myself thinking of that moment when he could have made the smart choice to shut down that PTO, that moment when his life and mine could have turned out very differently, that moment when grace was still possible.
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A year ago today, a blood clot traveled to my brain, and for a while, I lost my vision, my speech, and the use of my right arm and leg. All is well now. No impairments outside of a penchant for corny jokes, which one friend jokingly says must be a result of the stroke. Not true. As another friend points out, I’ve always been corny.
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Like my father, I know how life can divide into before and after.
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I spotted a food truck recently called “Egg Rolls and More.” It was doing quite the business. Someone had made a hand-written sign on a piece of notebook paper and taped it to the glass behind which the workers worked. It said, “No More Egg Rolls.” For some reason, that really amused me. I guess all they were serving was the “More.”
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More, please.
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More life, more love, more time, more everything.
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Lose something, or someone, dear to you, or come close, and you’ll never stop wanting.
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Harvest what’s yours for the picking. Don’t delay. Nothing about the future is guaranteed. Live in the moment. Celebrate the love that surrounds you. My friends, you bless me every day.
