It happens every time I take Daniel to preschool. We take the sidewalk, the door is in sight, and he says, “I’m gonna take the short cut.”
It’s actually the long cut, but I don’t need to correct him. We have plenty of time and he loves it.
Today he asked me to walk it with him. “If you do, I’ll show you something cool. Something important.”
“Sure,” I said. “You’ve made me curious!” But I knew what it was.
It was this:
The statue of the little boy with the loaves and the fishes.
“Nope,” Daniel laughed. “Silly Lala. That’s not it.”
Here’s what he showed me.
No, it’s not the bench.
It’s the mud.
“Look.” He tiptoed through it. “There’s all sorts of important stuff in this mud.” After we examined it, he showed me how to scuff my shoes through the wet grass. “It comes off clean!” Then he showed me some berries that the rain knocked off the bushes for the birds “for free,” as well as some beat-up flower blossoms (peonies.) “They’re just about dead.” He touched one with his finger. The petals dropped to the ground. “Cool.”
It was cool.
After I walked him to his class, I left to do my Meals on Wheels route. Some days I have to rush from client to client, but today I had plenty of time. Like Daniel, I took the long cut.
I’m glad I did. There was a lot of important stuff along the way to examine and witness and treasure.
Like Mrs. Smith*, who has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Her neighbor’s dogs bark their heads off at me, which is fine. She can’t always hear the doorbell, but she can hear those dogs! As they kept yapping, I asked her how she was doing, and she said that she fell in the backyard last week. “But my daughter, she’s got cameras everywhere, so she saw me tumble into the grass and called 911. The doctor couldn’t find anything wrong. I guess I’m just weak. Thank you, honey, for the food,” she said as the dogs waited at the foot of the porch.
“Looks like they want to go home with me,” I said.
“Either that or they just want to eat you.”
She’s funny.
Mr. White* is a treasure too. I’d been worried because he’d been missing from my delivery list for nearly two months. I’d drive by his house and wonder what had happened. Had he gone into a nursing home? Had he died? His yard had always bothered me. It had clearly once been something he was proud of, but now everything was falling apart. A statue of a child was missing its head, the porch glider was broken, its embroidered pillow gray with mildew.
A new home health aide answered the door. As I handed her his meals, she asked me about my Mother’s Day. I told her it was nice and asked about hers. “Oh yes, it was wonderful,” she said. “My child’s been with the Lord a good while, but I have spiritual children that remember me and call. It’s nice not to be forgotten.” She called into the living room. “Mr. White, you have a visitor!” He was hard to understand, but his eyes brightened and he managed to say that he’d been in the hospital with anemia and was feeling better. On my way out I noticed a piano by the door. How had I never noticed the piano? There was a framed photo of him and his wife on the music stand. Had she embroidered the pillow? Had she placed the statue?
Janet* loves to talk and laugh so much that I can hardly get a word in, not that I mind. At every visit, she fills me in on the news about her neighbors. “I’m not one to gossip,” she always says, “I’m just telling you what other people told me.” 🙂 Today she talked about how much she loves to sit on the porch and watch the kids play across the street. “See that trampoline there? Sometimes the parents get on and jump with them! Oh they’re good parents, you can tell that. Even if one of them got arrested.” She told me all about her latest doctor’s appointments and how the police came down the street “WITH A SWAT TEAM so I went inside.” Then she told me about her bouts with the blues, how she misses her husband and her daughter that passed. “I find myself crying and crying. But the doctor says it’s good to get it out.”
I agree. It was good to get it out, all of it, from everyone on my route who felt like sharing– the laughter mixed with brokenness, the search for hope, the fear. It might have felt like a mess–like mud, even–but those moments held important stuff to examine and witness and treasure.
It felt holy to me. Definitely worth the long cut.
* Names were changed to protect their privacy.
”
