Thoughts About Home by Deborah

Raising a Toast. To a New Light

New growth has appeared in my Winter garden, yet, nothing has changed in the corner of our living room where I bring most of our courtyard's potted plants to rest during the Winter. Nor has anything changed on the deep window sill of our bedroom's east facing window where a single plant spends the Winter hours and nothing has changed on the third floor's window seat which points due north and provides a safe haven for yet another fern. Nothing, nothing, except, perhaps, the light.

I make it a point to water my plants each Friday. How nice it was last week to be surprised by fresh growth, new leaves at the base of one, a brand new shoot on another, a lively furl of green like an elaborate tip of the hat on still another. For it is yet February and cooler temperatures are bound to be in the forecast and, knowing the Ohio Valley, probably another snow storm will appear somewhere down the road to Spring, but this first sign of a shift in the light of Nature always cheers me.

David and I went to the opera last Friday night and arrived home, late, by our standards. It was nearly midnight! While David walked Cooper one last time, I looked for the full moon. The homes on Belgravia Court are very closely built and it is hard to see the moon from our bedroom windows until it is quite high in the sky. As I pulled the drapes closed, I searched the sky and the moon was not there. Instead, I walked to our granddaughter's room which sits at the back of our house, down a short hall from our room. I gazed out her window and noticed the waxy flat leaves of the old Magnolia were bathed in the softest light. I knew of no street lamp which might cast such an even glow.

Then, I climbed the steps to our third floor and there, in the back bedroom, a flood of moonlight cast a beam across my writing desk. I looked up and there was the moon, quite high in the sky above our house, full and bright against the night, framed by the skylight in the ceiling of that room. It was like being reunited with an old friend. Like a child, I waved and said, "Hello, Moon. There you are! I found you!"

Let us raise a toast to the new light of late winter, the fresh promise of new growth, the reassurance that life does indeed go forth from the stillness of winter, that rest provides the energy it takes to continue the celebration, for it will soon be a new season, another day, and we will be surrounded by the surprise of all that we have yet to see.

Home, in every language there's a word for it. It's that space where the moon shines through and illuminates the night.

The Last Conversation

In these days of early darkness and recent cold I am reminded of how much I love the simple moments I share with my lover. He has reminded me that this is how he wants to be listed in my obituary. We became formally engaged 45 years ago this week and as I sit by the fire this evening, I am ever so grateful for all that love has reaped.

While I don't anticipate my obit any time soon, he and I have entered that season of our lives where many we have known and cherished have gone long before we were ready to bid them farewell.

It is never easy to say goodbye to someone you love. Each time, such departure has redefined my notion of courage. I am a woman of faith and I believe in miracles and the mystery of God but it does not mean that loss ever comes easily.

The last conversation I had with my friend, Catherine, was at the corner of Saint James Court and Belgravia. The evening of her unanticipated loss fell, six days later on a Tuesday. As I walked Cooper, I thought of Catherine as I approached the space of our last conversation. I looked up in the gathering dark and above me was an owl, perched quietly in the upper reaches of the tree which marks that spot where we'd last laughed and bade each other goodbye.

I stood there in the cold. There was just enough light to see the silhouette of this large bird. And somehow, I knew Catherine was safe. I just knew.

So I took Cooper home and resumed my walk alone, down Belgravia to Sixth. Upon my return, just as I prepared to turn into the brick path that leads to our garden, the owl flew near and landed in the lower reaches of the gingko that stands before our home. I paused as the bird spread its lovely wings and took the clarity of flight, swooping past me between these narrowly spaced houses in pursuit of what light there was left.

Home, in every language, there is a word for it. In every season, in each moment.

The Memory of It All

It's hot. There is no denying that.  I get up early and take my cup of hot, yes, hot, black coffee to our back porch before the heat of the day arrives. In that space, in that early moment I am still and notice a pair of cardinals who land in the dense foliage of the towering magnolia. In those early moments beyond first light, I can smell the lemony scent of the pure white magnolia blossoms just unfolding in the sweet memory of night.

It's a new day and already traffic on Hill Street is passing. I think of "Big Shirley" who once lived in the apartment building on the alley facing Hill. She worked the early shift at University Hospital as an aide and caught a special bus that hissed to a stop right in front of the place where she lived then. It was a once grand house, long since divided into small rental spaces with no central air. In those days, Shirley lived on the third floor with her dying son. He was a young man in his early twenties and he had leukemia.

I still pray for him although he departed this life years ago. When David and I attended the wake held in a converted trailer on West Broadway which doubled as a funeral parlor, the room went still as we entered. We identified ourselves as neighbors and were quickly welcomed by Shirley who appeared from a side hallway.

We have lived on Belgravia Court for 21 years now. We have watched many neighbors come and go in that space of time. I miss each and every one of them and rejoice in the vitality of their memory and the fresh faces who have stepped forward to take their place.

Earlier today I stepped into the kitchen of a house behind us on Hill Street which David and I renovated nearly 13 years ago. It will soon be on the market and is now vacant. Each night I go back to check on it and change the lights. Among the recent owners was a man whose sister is a genealogist. Before he and his partner sold the house, his sister did a genealogy of the place. It seems that once there was a maid who lived in the sweet coolness of the basement. There was also a passageway connecting this house and its mirror image to the one just east of it so that the children might go from house to house to visit grandparents who lived next door. The mother of them all would be laid out in the front room which faces south, just off the lovely entry hall with its still intact cherry mantle and white gold embossed tile surround.  She would be carried from this house on Hill to the cemetery on Preston where Jews of that and subsequent generations were laid to rest.

It is all still here. One of the very last conversations I had with my late sister was on our back porch. She had come to give me a birthday present. It was the final spring of her life although none of us could have anticipated that. She worked then in Shelbyville for the Center for Women and Children. On her lunch hour she would wander the antique stores on Main Street. She was a great bargain hunter and that May morning brought me a cruet set which she envisioned I might use for starting ivy or other cuttings for my garden.

The night of her death, David and I were notified close to midnight. We walked to our car on the alley near Big Shirley's former home, just down the street from the house I watch over in these days. When we arrived at Suburban, my nephew was wandering the green space outside the emergency room entrance. He quickly escorted me to the room as though my arrival might reverse everything. I spent the rest of the night by her side, holding her hand while David read aloud from the Book of Common Prayer and those who also loved her came and went.

In the early hours, I sit with my coffee and watch the new light play across the canyon of trees which line these closely built homes. It is then I am visited by the nearness of grace which brings hope and the renewal of light.

I will sell the Hill Street House and I hope many others in the coming year for it is these homes that hold our history and all that traces what it means to be neighbors and family.

Home. In every language there's a word for it. If you have a need to buy or sell, please call me because I can help.

Light In the Window

The air is softer. Blossoms have given way to tender green and even though the evening chill would indicate otherwise, spring has arrived with all of her turbulent beauty and grand style.


I once knew a woman who changed her furniture, drapes and rugs with this season. The velvet drapes were replaced by silk; rugs were rolled up and wood floors buffed; chairs and couches with heavy legs carried to the attic. "Light," she would exclaim, "Light! It is time to welcome the new light." And with a wave of her hand even the china she used for tea displayed the fresh breath of spring. Violets sprinkled the tea cups she had inherited from her Irish great grandmother.

Then ashes were swept from the fireboxes and birch logs, cut to fit, were placed unlit in each fireplace. Windows were washed and the whole space of her large old home breathed anew. Even the scent of the place changed.

For the house was never perfect. There were dents in the woodwork, squeaks in the floorboards, nests in the branches that grazed the bedroom window on the back of the second floor, the one with a view of the garden. And her kitchen with its wide wall-hung porcelain sink had pipes behind the skirt of fabric that draped to the floor. There was no dishwasher or even a thought of one. I loved it. I loved everything about it.

There was a trap door just off the back hall that when lowered revealed a secret staircase. On the wainscoting of that hallway hung pictures of family members, long gone but forever cherished. There was a deep window seat along one side of the kitchen and, on the other, a huge fireplace that blazed during the cold days of winter and gave comfort to the beagles who curled up near the hearth and slept until the next intruder of any sort, real or imagined came near and then the whole room would erupt with howls. Everyone, human and animals alike came in by way of the kitchen. The screened door was meant to be opened and the sound of its slamming behind whoever had entered the room always signaled a welcome.

The porch off the kitchen was covered but open. Large slabs of limestone knit together by a close fitting from years ago provided a space to store logs for the winter fires and a boot scraper for the mud on your shoes if you'd gone wandering in the garden after a spring rain. The place had character. It had presence.

The last time I ever saw her, she had been ill. She met me in the kitchen and we threaded our way through the formal rooms of the house and up the front stairs to her bedroom which faced east.  She had something to show me, she said, and so I followed her.  Once in her bedroom, she pointed to the bed where she had spent more time than she cared to say during her recent illness. Then she gestured to the wall at the foot of her bed.  A linear abstract hung just at the right level to be viewed by someone who might be lying down. She said the painting had been her focus during the worst of her confinement.

That spring day she walked with me in her garden where fresh shoots were breaking through cold soil and the leaves on her Apothecary Rosebush were making their debut. I was a young woman in those days and everything felt new to me.  I will be forever grateful to her and others like her who took me into their confidence in my youth and shared the presence of their homes and gardens.

This particular woman would die in her own bed watching as it snowed out the window. I can't imagine a better way to leave this world.

Each spring, I remember her and the others who taught me it is only what we share that lasts; our gardens, our homes, our stories. I am ready to open the windows and let in the light. How about you?

Home, in every language there's a word for it. After all these years, I am still selling. Please call if I can help you or anyone you know who is looking for a fresh start, a new space, a place to call their own.

A Beckoning

Someone has reached out to me across the sea of all life.

He was a preacher whose New Testament I have found among a stack of books left behind by previous generations. It is a blessing to have him draw near with no attempt on my part to summon his spirit.

His voice first reached out to me through a letter he penned to my husband in November of 1947, days after David's birth. He wrote, "As I now sit in my room alone writing this I sincerely hope
to be among those who shall congratulate you and rejoice in your achievements." He told his firstborn grandchild, "Just as we have always thrilled at the accomplishments of your dear parents, we, too, shall be eagerly awaiting each and every step of your advancement to...cheer you on."


He postdated the letter to November 1970 writing, "It is my fullest expectation that you in walking in the footsteps of your worthy Dad will on or about the above date be, like as he has done, graduating from dear old Louisville School of Medicine, which will make it about December 1970."

In December of 1970, David was serving in Viet Nam living in a rat and scorpion infested bunker deep in the side of a mountain which offered breathless views of the lush and deadly valley before him.

His grandfather went on to say, "It shall be the prayer of your devoted family...that you shall have a faith well anchored in things Divine and, too, that your life may be dedicated to Him for any field and any service He may ask of you."

The letter ends with a promise and a wish. "May you have enjoyed good health, good fortune and good grace all along your pathway of life. And since we may not live to share with you the joy of accomplishment and service, we shall be waiting and watching at the port of entry for you and your folks coming home and 'bearing precious sheaves.'"


His name was Overton Howard Callis, known simply as Howard. The New Testament I carry upstairs each night and to breakfast each morning has the imprint of his hand in the soft leather. One can literally feel how he held this testament, how the spine fit  his palm while his thumb and fingers  the front and back of this book which carries the inscription designating it as a gift from his wife, Anna Clarissa Lowry. He called her Tad.

It reads:

                         From Tad
                         To Howard
                         Nov 1940

I am consoled by his presence so vividly evoked by this letter and this holy book, carried into all the battles of life and considered in each moment of joy, for I am now a grandmother.

When our six year old grandson confesses his fear as I sit beside him at bedtime, his fear of zombies, crayon people, meanness and evil,  I trace a cross on his forehead and remind him of his
baptism when Father Ned blessed him with holy water and consecrated him as a child of God by sealing his spirit with the sign of the cross pressed in oil against his forehead. I tell him this is the sign of the promise of God's love and protection.

Then, I pat his back as he drifts into sleep, knowing I have conveyed the goodness so simply offered to me from his great-great grandfather, a soul I never met.

It is indeed the nature of true tenderness to increase and never abate...

Love, like home...in every language there's a word for it.

It was the first snow day of 2016 and our house was filled to overflowing with wet mittens, blue jeans, scarves and hats. A beach towel had been hastily rolled out in the front hall to absorb the melting snow rather than the accustomed grains of sand. The old armoire stood sentinel near the front door which leaked cold air each time it swung wide with sudden bursts of laughter and occasional tears. Our four-year-old granddaughter, Faith, sobbed, "But I can't get my boot off!"

Ten-year-old David tried to help his cousin but she asked for "Amma." That would be me.  He then shucked his boots and wet jeans and picked up his IPad mini from the front hall table where it sat like a belated bill from a feast of some measure. He retreated to the nearest couch, propped himself against the old down pillows and pulled the soft throw against his bare legs.

I built a fire in the living room fireplace, then stood at the front window with Faith to watch a young squirrel feed next to the cardinals. Faith had refused the comfort of dry leggings and preferred to stand, bare legged, with nothing but her long sleeved shirt and underwear to keep her warm. She told me, "I like cold!" She is ever so like her mother, our daughter Kate, who as a child threw off all blankets, even on the coldest nights.

It is not, however, consoling to me when Faith's cough deepens and her lovely face grows crimson with fever. She and I snuggle in my chair by the fireplace and read silly poems by Shel Silverstein. I suggest we might check her temperature with a thermometer that fits in her ear.  She objects mightily and so I text her mother who says to try it under her arm. I know better than to ask. Instead I decide to keep a grandmother's practiced eye.


Our grandson plays Roblox. Pandora is tuned to Baroque music. I try to remain present to the miracle of these children.

The afternoon brings grilled cheese, hot cider and later, finger painting. Faith's cough wanes. She paints in vivid swirls of blue and green, red and yellow. She calls her compositions " Winter Skies." Paint is smeared along her legs, across her face and along her hands. She looks up and requests a bath...in the kitchen sink, a throwback to her babyhood. She barely fits cross-legged in one side. She asks for her bath toys that squirt and then tells me she wants the faucet to run on and on creating a waterfall from one sink to the next. She loves this.

I scoop her long hair into a ponytail and wrap her in a warm towel. She dresses on a chair pulled alongside the kitchen table and then I tuck a blanket around her as she sits in our "company" chair in one corner of the room. I turn the television to KET and she falls asleep while watching Curious George as I clean up after her bath.


In the living room I ask our grandson to turn off his IPad mini and read poetry for a while. He is very sweet although I sense he is humoring me. Then, unwittingly, I hand him my IPad where an article has caught my eye about the discovery of a possible ninth planet.
 
I stoke the fire and check on Faith. When I return, David is still on my IPad and when I ask what he is reading, he looks up from the New York Times app and says, "Stocks, and did you know the price of oil is going down?'

He is ten years old.

I juggle and suggest he consider more poetry. If it were not for Faith's fever and cough, we might have gone sledding or added to the snow fort we had begun earlier on Belgravia.

The light fades. Faith coughs from the kitchen where she still naps. I send my grandson to the third floor to photograph the skylight in the back bedroom which is was so covered with snow earlier that the normally bright room was strangely subdued when Faith and I had climbed up there to check.

Presently it is time to walk the dog, feed the cats (again) and add wood to the banking fire. My children will soon arrive to retrieve their children from my care. Our granddaughter will go to the doctor the next day and get an all clear although her cough will choke her in the night and send her retching into the bathroom in her own home. Her mom will draw a bath at three a.m. and Faith will later tell me that, "It even came out my nose!"


Our grandson will pause for a moment by our (still standing) Christmas tree as he departs and say, " You know, Amma, I think we should let it stay up all year long."

Love, like home...in every language there's a word for it. Call me if you need help finding just the right space for your memories to grow. I'm always available!

Casting Into the Future

Last night the moon, the full round moon, shown in our bedroom window, bathing the sheets with the

softest light.  Such a balm.  I left the drapes open.  I wanted to sleep in the moonlight.

Now it is morning.  A bird chirps over and over again just outside the library window.  A fire hums to itself in the fireplace and the sky has changed each time I’ve glanced up and out the window, the early magentas fading to blue and rising into pale pink all in a moment’s glance. 

Most of the trees on the court have lost their leaves, exposing the elegant carriage of their bare branches.  I’m still waiting for the one fell swoop of the gingko’s leaves.  They are nearly there, nearly that brilliant yellow that precedes the sudden fall.  Gone, it will seem, in one swift moment.

I feel as if I’ve finally come home.  Louisville.  It was first my father’s hometown.  He was raised not far from where I live now.  These streets were the streets of his childhood.  He played tennis in Central Park and football for the old Male High.  The last time he and I walked this area, he told me about each of the families who’d lived in the houses on Floral Terrace and Park between Sixth and Seventh.  The fruit vendor, the Lutheran minister, the L&N engineer, the single ladies.  He showed me where he and his buddies had played football as children in the fading light of fall afternoons.  He pointed out his favorite house, the one on Ormsby, just the Sixth Street side of Ormsby Court.

My father raised us far from the city in a brand new house.  He wanted something better for us.  It was the post war dream of men who’d left home as boys and returned as people hungry for a new beginning.  He never talked about the war with me and it wasn’t until his wake that I heard stories of what he’d endured out there in the South Pacific- 18 years old and far, far from these gracious streets.

I am his daughter and I’ve come home now. A generation later.  One night, shortly after we moved in, I had to park on Sixth Street and walk down the court.  As I struggled with my purse and a plastic bag of groceries, I looked up and walking toward me from the far end of the Court, silhouetted against the ginkgo tree, was a man whose features I couldn’t discern but whose gait and body build were identical to my father’s.

My earliest memory of him was his return from work.  He’d suddenly appear on the sidewalk up the block from where we lived at the time.  My mother would give me permission to run to him and he’d gather me up in his arms and lift me high off the ground.   I thought he was the strongest man in the world.

My father is buried beneath a ginkgo tree.  The Chinese claimed it as a sacred tree, one to be revered.  I can see a ginkgo from my window here in our library.  It’s just after eight now and the sky is clear, the colors of dawn dispersed.

I’ll sleep again tonight in the moonlight and rejoice, in the quiet grace of this house, this place where I so ineffably belong.

     Home is a place where the past reaches for the present and casts us into the future.  Safely. Safely.

 

Changing Light

Already the light has changed. Some days the temperature and the humidity are still high but the light
holds the truth about the time of year we are entering. It is autumn and the leaves have begun to change color, the sidewalks down here on Belgravia Court are sprinkled with small branches snipped by squirrels overhead tending their nests, preparing for the long siege of winter.  Life is moving on.

But summer does not go readily. The flowers we have nursed through dry spells and dense heat are suddenly more verdant than ever. The Persian Shields are so tall they must be staked. The roses are budding out as though it might be spring and the Sweet Woodruf fills the shaded pots with the deepest green of its delicate being. There is a stillness now I hadn't noticed before. The birdcalls are muted. In the park where I walk each morning a stand of daisies and goldenrod draw a small army of humming birds. It is as though, knowing a great change is about to occur all of nature is bracing in the  transition, taking it slowly before the cold rains of November shift the equation irrevocably.

Our summer projects are complete. That leaking skylight a former owner had placed in the ceiling of the third floor back bedroom thirty-five years ago has been replaced. Our eight year old grandson spent the night last weekend and fell asleep gazing at the moonlit sky with its fleeting clouds. He moved his pillows to the foot of the bed so he could look out the skylight.

The trim of the overhang windows, doors and box gutters as well as the fire escape have all been scraped and painted. The old screen frames have been rebuilt and re-screened. I have never spent as much time on the fire escape as I have this summer, checking for places that might need extra attention. The French windows off the library open wide and allow one to step up and onto the deep window sill and out onto the first landing of the fire escape. The first time I did this, I was scolded by our cat, Lydia, who sat patiently on the landing while I scampered up to the roof top. She called out to me, convinced, I am sure, that I'd lost my bearings, out there acting like a squirrel.

The painters told me of brightly colored spiders who'd spread their lovely webs under the eaves. They told me how strong the American Holly that towers over our old house stands against the wind, swaying from one side to another like the living presence it is. They showed me where some animal had tried to chew its way into our third floor eave, leaving a splintered section of wood bare to the elements.

Bob "the builder," as we affectionately refer to the man who holds many of these old houses together, hunted up a piece of old growth timber to replace a rotted window sill that had held a window air conditioner in the days before central air. Our house was built in 1891 and so what repairs are made must be done with what I call "real" materials.

Last summer it was the chimneys that needed tuck pointing and this summer, out on the roof I noticed yet another chimney on the back of the house, one we'd had taken down years ago, the remnants of which needs a bit of tuck pointing on the north side.

The list continues but my attention has turned inward. Maybe that's what winter is for, a time to reflect on what is left to be done.

If your to-do list includes buying or selling a house, please know I can help with both.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy whatever space it is you inhabit.

Home. And the cadence of life.

It is early and still. The old magnolia outside my window shimmers with fresh light. I love this time of day, so like early evening in a way. I think it's interesting how beginnings and endings share so much in common, a certain residue of feeling.

Houses that pass from one set of owners to another are like that. Over and over the boxes of one are packed and carried out the door as the new owners are dressing in another space, waiting, anticipating. My husband's father had a phrase which he repeated on certain occasions, usually in a time of change. It was, "All in good time; all in good time."

People move for all sorts of reasons. They need more space, change jobs, want to downsize, find their one and only dream house, end relationships, start new ones, have babies, get restless, see an opportunity for profit, someone dies. During the past thirty or so years I have helped people buy and sell homes for all those reasons.

I have always loved houses. I never tire of walking into them. There is a certain cadence of life that
infuses the space we make our own, no matter for how long or how briefly. Before I became a real estate agent, I was an ordinary person who fell in love with one house and then another. One might think that I would grow immune to the allure after so many years of stepping into strange spaces, not my own. But I haven't. I guess that's why I still do this for a living.

We once lived in a small town in Georgia where the houses were known by the previous occupants. It took a generation or so to establish yourself. If you bought Miss Pearl Bailey Brown's house on the corner of Everett and Church, it would not be known as yours until a whole generation had died and maybe not even then. I still recall walking through Miss Gina Riley's house over on College Street. She had been gone from this earth for more than ten years but her house had been shuttered and the furniture left undisturbed for all that time until one morning I stepped into the front hall and caught a whiff of someone's long ago perfume. She'd been the town librarian, a single lady who lived a quiet life of routine, her days measured by walks to work, to church, to the store. I never actually knew her but her presence has remained with me, all these years hence because I once stepped into the space she'd called her home.

I am privileged to have this job which grants me access to the lives of so many in times of change. If you or anyone you might know needs a real estate agent to help in buying or selling a home, please let me know. I'd be glad to help.

Light On the New Day

There is no warmer place in our house than the third floor in winter. Our guest room and my office are
up here and, sometimes, it feels like a space suspended in time. The fans from last summer are neatly arranged just inside the office door, standing like little sentinels all in a row. My goal is to put them away before summer's return. In another corner is the giant fern I rescued from the alley on recycling day when neighbors get rid of everything from last week's newspapers to plants that aren't thriving. This one is struggling but the special attention of light, water and a bit of plant food has created tender new shoots, so there is hope. 

Up here the sounds of the court are somehow amplified. I hear the mockingbird singing from our holly tree down below where he gathers the red berries and sings as he nibbles. Quiet conversations also reach my ear from the sidewalk three stories down. It's not quite eavesdropping, just a reminder that there are people out and about on their morning walks with one another or their pets. Often, it is the voice of someone greeting our white cat, Lydia. In Old Louisville one often knows the names of our pets long before they know us by name. "Oh, you're Lydia's people," is not an uncommon refrain.

This room that holds my office has a window box that hugs the curve of the cupola which forms five walls of the space. The ceiling is domed and I love the way the first light of day illuminates the room. There are six windows in all and although our house faces due north, one side has an eastern exposure and so it is filled with morning light.

The floor is painted pine. An earlier owner splashed, a la de Kooning, paint on the floor's tan canvas and so I have chosen not to refinish the floor of this room because it reminds me of John Dillehay and his artistry.  I think of de Kooning's Pink Angels and the colors beneath my feet bear some resemblance, I think, to an early sky with stars and angels in flight. When I had the walls and ceiling freshly painted a year ago, I selected a pale blue with a hint of green because it highlights the floors.

There are many books here, tumbling from shelves, waiting in stacks, some arranged by subject, others by author, still others by nothing in particular except a recent interest. Nearby is a boxed set of Mozart I inherited from a friend who died not quite unexpectedly.  I am in good company up here surrounded as I am by the words of Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov's lectures at Cornell, C. S. Lewis on faith and volumes on houses and their owners, their design, their secrets of goodness, the voices of all those angels any space that has ever been lived in possess.

All that is below on the lower levels of my house represent the rest of me. A kitchen where we cook, a library with a fireplace, books but also a "smart" television that brings us news from the outside. This morning I must descend to make the bed, pack up Christmas, put away the extra leaves in the dining room table and prepare the whole house for winter's short days and long cold nights.  But, this Monday morning, it has felt just right to begin the week with a quiet time up here between the spaces of what pass for real in everyday life. We all know better. It's just so nice to have a place under my roof that provides this brief respite, this music, these overheard greetings from the past and windows that give light on the new day.

A Beckoning

Someone has reached out to me across the sea of all life.

He was a preacher whose New Testament I have found among a stack of books left behind by previous generations. It is a blessing to have him draw near with no attempt on my part to summon his spirit.

His voice first reached out to me through a letter he penned to my husband in November of 1947, days after David's birth. He wrote, "As I now sit in my room alone writing this I sincerely hope to be among those who shall congratulate you and rejoice in your achievements." He told his firstborn grandchild, "Just as we have always thrilled at the accomplishments of your dear parents, we, too, shall be eagerly awaiting each and every step of your advancement to...cheer you on."

He postdated the letter to November 1970 writing, "It is my fullest expectation that you in walking in the footsteps of your worthy Dad will on or about the above date be, like as he has done, graduating from dear old Louisville School of Medicine, which will make it about December 1970."

In December of 1970, David was serving in Viet Nam living in a rat and scorpion infested bunker deep in the side of a mountain which offered breathless views of the lush and deadly valley before him.

His grandfather went on to say, "It shall be the prayer of your devoted family...that you shall have a faith well anchored in things Divine and, too, that your life may be dedicated to Him for any field and any service He may ask of you."

The letter ends with a promise and a wish. "May you have enjoyed good health, good fortune and good grace all along your pathway of life. And since we may not live to share with you the joy of accomplishment and service, we shall be waiting and watching at the port of entry for you and your folks coming home and 'bearing precious sheaves.'"

His name was Overton Howard Callis, known simply as Howard. The New Testament I carry upstairs each night and to breakfast each morning has the imprint of his hand in the soft leather. One can literally feel how he held this testament, how the spine fit  his palm while his thumb and fingers  the front and back of this book which carries the inscription designating it as a gift from his wife, Anna Clarissa Lowry. He called her Tad.

It reads:
                         From Tad
                         To Howard
                         Nov 1940

I am consoled by his presence so vividly evoked by this letter and this holy book, carried into all the battles of life and considered in each moment of joy, for I am now a grandmother.

When our six year old grandson confesses his fear as I sit beside him at bedtime, his fear of zombies, crayon people, meanness and evil,  I trace a cross on his forehead and remind him of his baptism when Father Ned blessed him with holy water and consecrated him as a child of God by sealing his spirit with the sign of the cross pressed in oil against his forehead. I tell him this is the sign of the promise of God's love and protection.

Then, I pat his back as he drifts into sleep, knowing I have conveyed the goodness so simply offered to me from his great-great grandfather, a soul I never met.

It is indeed the nature of true tenderness to increase and never abate...