Lifting stones
Yesterday, it looked like Mom would be going home today; not home to her house, but at least home to the rehab center in her town. Today, that seems unlikely. Her platelet and white cell counts have improved, but not enough, and she is still in pain. As I was speaking with her, an aide arrived to take her down to x-ray. She is getting discouraged.
This was a great big surgery, and no one (except perhaps she herself) expected her to be lindy-hopping by today. She has a long history of being a quick healer, and it seems to her that the streak has broken. This time, she is in for a long trudge toward pain-free mobility, and it's going down hard. But my mom is a very stubborn woman. We battled over every inch of the territory of my teenage years; I did not then see this hard-headedness as an endearing quality, and she was not too thrilled by the generous amount of same that I inherited. If I look further back, though, I see, in memory's eye, The Wall.
When I was in first grade, and through the first half of second grade, my family lived in Shrub Oak, NY, in what was then a fairly new subdivision. The clump of split-level ranches was spread out over a hillside, and the streets bore names like Strawberry Road, and Briarhill Street. We lived toward the end of a dead end road, in a house perched up on a hill. There were highbush blueberries growing in the back yard, and one Christmas Eve I watched Santa and his reindeer land on the rooftop of the house across the street (that's my story and I do not recant). Our steep driveway had a little bit of a curve to it, and because it carved its way up to the house, there was a steep embankment as well. Mom thought a dry stone wall (meaning one constructed without mortar) would be good there, and she decided to build one, a wall that would start with just a course or two of stone at the top, and would become, by the time it ended at the bottom of the drive, a really tall stone wall. So she did it. Stone over stone. These were not evenly-cut stones. They were field stones; the craft of the endeavor was to put up a wall that would not fall down, the art of it lay in fitting the rocks together like a beautiful jigsaw puzzle. She did it, and she did it, for the most part, by herself, over the course of a summer. Dad was working, like all dads did, and she was not one to wait for the weekends. Her fingers were crunched repeatedly, her nails chipped and broke, I am pretty sure a couple of rocks landed on her feet, and she certainly got sunburned, but she did not stop until it was finished. She had a vision in her mind, and she did not stop until we all could see that vision manifested in stones. It looked great. It looked permanent.
Of course, for the peripatetic Massé family, nothing was ever permanent, and we moved to another house in another town in another state, eighteen months being our average stay in any one house. We may have driven by a time or two after the move, to see what the new folks did with the place, but I don't know if the wall is still there now. I've just looked at a satellite photo of that street. It's difficult to determine, from above, what is a hill and what is not, and which house we lived in then. But I do see one or two houses with curved driveways, and one of them looks like there might maybe be a stone wall there. Hard to tell. But I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of stubborn went into those layers of stones.
I am counting on that stubbornness to help her through the next few months, and on our prayers, and the skill of the nurses and doctors, and most of all - you want to talk about stubborn? - on the relentless love and healing power of God.
Photo by Rob Styles