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And now, looking through the tunnel of these many years, I can see what in my youth I could not—that time is a limited and precious gift.
I wish I had not spent my hours worrying over another nickel for the carousel, but instead running barefoot through the fields of yellow bonnets.
Grown-up life has a way of doing that to you—taking up a little more and a little more of your time until you’re never together, and when you are together, you’re exhausted.
‘The man who buys what he does not need will often need what he cannot buy.’”
There is something special about a place that smells
and sounds and feels like your childhood.
Those roses were the finest things I had been given in my life,
that motherhood leaves no time for selfish pleasures. Only time for tending others.
But I did not think of it overmuch. My mind and heart were occupied with the sorrows and joys of motherhood.
I close my eyes and listen to their laughter, and think that the best times of my life, the times that passed by me the most quickly, were the times when the roses grew wild.
Not appreciating the noise until she was surrounded by silence. For the first time in my life, I was very glad just to be where I was.
thinking of Grandma’s story about the roses and about the fact that time is so invisible, you never see it passing.
No matter how much you want to cut your family out of your heart, you can’t. The bond is born when you are born, like an organ in your body. There is no surgery to remove it. When it is diseased, you live with a dull ache telling you that something inside you is not right.
Is it a success when you have all the big things but none of the small ones? Is it as it should be when everybody grows up and moves to opposite coasts and doesn’t care if they ever see one another?
Maybe you should start wanting less. . . . Maybe Grandma Rose was right.
Nothing in my former life had shown that within me I had such a deep and profound ability to love.
Joshua grabbed my shirt, then smiled as if to tell me that all things are possible. .
the Santa House—the crème de la crème of the Christmas Village display. Plans included a dozen freshly cut Christmas trees, decoration of the gazebo, and the election of Mrs. Santa Claus.
I knew my father was right in not going back for the china. It was no longer perfect, no longer whole. It was now fragmented and sharp and, as with all things fragile, could not be made whole again.
Somewhere inside, she was the little girl in the back of a wagon, trying to hold on to something that was heavy, and fragile, and slipping away.
It takes time to turn a heart, and it cannot be done with hard words.
His thoughts were ruled by the work that needed to be done, while mine were ruled by the feelings of my heart.
What we cannot change, we must endure without bitterness. Sometimes we must try to view the actions of those around us with forgiveness. We must realize that they are going on the only road they can see. Sometimes we cannot raise our chins and see eye to eye, so we must bow our heads and have faith in one another.
What we cannot change, we must endure without bitterness. . . .
“God knows you, child. He is mindful of every bird in the air, and every fish in the sea, and every flower that blooms in the field. They are beautiful to Him, just as you are.”
“You must remember that when people are unkind to you and try to make you feel as if you are less than they are. Your Father in heaven made every strand of hair on your head and every ounce of flesh on your bones. You are perfect, and beautiful, and just the way you are intended to be.”
and I thought again about what Dell had said, and about Grandma Rose’s book and how little had changed in her long life. Poverty and ignorance still existed, and cruelty was the house they lived in. It still wasn’t fair that some children had many nickels for the carousel while others had few. It was still true that some were greater while others were less.
“Are you sure she wants to go to church?” I asked. “All children want to know the Lord,” Grandma replied flatly, busying herself with picking lint off her dress. “It is perfectly natural that she would want to learn. Just because her family are heathens does not mean she must be.”
Time gets by so fast. It seems like I was Dell’s age just yesterday, and I thought I’d never be old.” She paused, seeming to lose her train of thought, then let out a long sigh. “I should have done more good.”
“You’ve done a lot for me,” I said
“But God planted this tree here,” he whispered. “It would do no good for it to wither because this soil is too hard and this place too common. God gave it the ability to be fine and full and beautiful, but not the ability to go somewhere else.” Laying my hand in my lap, he dried the tears from my face. “We are like this lilac tree. We cannot change where God has put us. If we are to bloom at all, we must bloom where we have been planted.”
This was the soil into which we had been planted. We had made it bitter, filled it with anger and resentment so that nothing could grow here. But it wasn’t the farm we were destroying—it was ourselves. We were rooted here like Grandma’s lilac bush, tied to this place, this family, one past. The soil was not going to change. If we were to bloom, we would have to change.
that simple for Ben and me—just read a map and suddenly we would know where we were meant to end up and how to get there. But growing up is never that easy, no matter what age you are.
Gathering the family would bring back my mother’s death. And that was when the world had ended for all of us.
In my family, there was nothing but gray area. All the normal guidelines were a blur.
Sometimes life moves so fast, the road splits in an instant, and you only have a heartbeat to decide which way to turn. Right or left . . . fast or slow
Driving the winding road to town, I thought of how it must feel to be unable to do the things you’d done all your life, how frustrating it would be to have to ask for help when you were accustomed to doing for yourself—as if you were a child again, only as a child you know you’ll grow out of your problems. For Grandma, the problems would only grow larger, the list of forbidden activities longer, the need for help greater. She was like a prisoner in a cell with the door slowly being boarded shut. Rage against the dying of the light. Now I understood those words. Grandma was angry with the
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“Ben, you’re awful,” I said, and shook my head at him, wondering if perhaps he understood Grandma Rose better than I did.
Maybe we kept wanting more because all the possessions in our lives were taking us further away from the one thing we started out with—peace.
Ben and I had everything, but not the time to enjoy any of it.
Time passes, I thought, but memories do not.
There was comfort in the fact that some things never change. It was as if the church had been waiting in suspended animation all the time I was away.
Your children are the greatest gift God will give to you, and their souls the heaviest responsibility He will place in your hands. Take time with them, teach them to have faith in God. Be a person in whom they can have faith. When you are old, nothing else you’ve done will have mattered as much.”
Grandma said that sometimes the Lord showed us the suffering of others so that we might be thankful for our own blessings.
“Those horses may not have mattered to us, but they were his heart and soul, and he wasn’t himself without them. Sometimes we forget what things are important to other people. I was never as sorry about anything I did in my life.”
I imagined that I could feel the warm spot on his chest where Joshua had been, where their
hearts had touched, and they had finally fallen in love.
Pride and resentment do not create bread that will rise. Bread, like a good life, can only be created by honest measure, patience, warmth, and time.
suddenly I knew why Grandma was writing to me of patience and forgiveness.
Sometimes we must try to view the actions of those around us with forgiveness. We must realize that they are going on the only road they can see.
