Making Memories

June 25, 2024

Beloved:

What a great day!  Ten people for lunch at my house on Saturday for my sister’s birthday.  Some stayed to swim and visit into the afternoon at the neighborhood pool.  I loved cleaning up after and went to bed tired, happy and feeling very loved.  I remember being a child at such gatherings, all my aunts sitting in those aluminum webbed lawn chairs, not a few of them smoking and tapping their ashes into empty IGA pop cans.  My uncles grilled and played horseshoes, and also smoked.  We drank that pop – orange, grape, cherry and root beer – ate hot dogs, potato chips and cupcakes, and pretty much ran barefoot and wild until eventually an adult rounded up us kids to take our picture with the flat skinny pocket cameras all our mothers had.  One time a little cousin was screaming from a bad bee sting and one of the uncles chewed a wad of tobacco which they laid on the welt with a wet paper towel on top.  I was slightly revulsed but in ten minutes the welt was gone and my cousin was back in the pool.

None of these memories took place more than an hour away from where I’m sitting now, in either Lawrence, Monroe, Morgan or Clay County Indiana.  The people who attended were working people, a few military, and less than a handful had attended college.  They drove trucks or worked for companies which supported their families with living wages and good benefits.  My dad worked for the Bloomington Division of Wetterau Foods who sponsored a company picnic for employee families every summer at McCormick’s Creek State Park.  All of which is to say that one of the treasures of my life is being a grandparent at the same gatherings on the same spot of the map where I was one of the grandkids.  Now I sit in the chair, just so my grandgirl will say, “Netnet, come swim with me please. . . .”  And I always do, making the memories she will carry when she watches her own grandkids some summer, 2075 maybe.  I hope she will remember these days as joyfully as I remember mine.  I hope she will also remember being as loved and watched over, so free to be a kid I didn’t even know how loved and free I was.

These days are all we have, beloved, so treasure them.  Keep the joy and release the sorrow as fully as you can.  Believe me when I say I know how difficult it is.  But only the joy will carry us when we get the lonelies, that temporary but oh-so-real feeling that we are all alone in this world, despite the head knowledge that we are surrounded by people who love and care for us.  Sometimes head knowledge just won’t soothe the heart, but deeper joy born of long memory comforts me.  Remembering I have been loved all my life, by people who are still my people though long gone from this world, comforts me through more than words can say, and in turn reminds me that God’s love, though also not of this world, is ever present here and now.  From it I can draw strength for this new day, whatever this new day brings.

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette