WHAT WE SEE

Abandoned farm house. (All photos by Marylin Warner)

Dear Mom,

During a trip to Colorado Springs many years ago, you visited my high school English classes.  In one class we were beginning Transcendentalism, and I wrote this quote on the board: “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” ~ Henry David Thoreau 

I displayed pictures of houses—very old, decrepit houses—and told the students to choose one and write for ten minutes about what they saw and what might have happened there.  Sitting in the back of the room, you lifted a little notebook from your purse, closed your eyes and thought for a moment, then took a breath and began to write.

When the students shared what they’d written, the usual responses ranged from eerily sad tales to creepy horror scenes.  Much later you showed me the beginning of the free verse you’d written that day. Eventually it became a full narrative poem, but here’s what you wrote in the early draft:

Gone from the warped and bare front porch

The soft weary voices of evening—

And the steady creak of the porch swing

As weary ones rest from their labors,

Relax from the plow and the washboard.

 

Great are the secrets you hold there,

And the love that was whispered in evening.

But gone are your voices forever,

As the broken glass of the windows,

And the rusted spring at the screen door.

                   From “Lonely House” by Mary E. Shepherd 

I post this for your friends and family, Mom, and especially for your great-grandchildren who would otherwise never know your feelings about farm life in the 1920-30’s, and the beauty you found in simple daily events.  What you wrote is a reminder of your gentle and hopeful spirit.

_____________________________

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”  ~Confucius

“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”  ~C.S. Lewis

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”  ~ Sir John Lubbock, English writer and archaeologist

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RAIN UPON BLINDING DUST

This is not the post I originally planned for this week.

After what happened yesterday at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut, I couldn’t write a holiday post. This is one of those rare times when I am actually grateful that my mother has advanced dementia.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile know that my mother, Mary Elizabeth Shepherd, now 94, was once a kindergarten teacher. She is third from the left in the back row of the 1940s picture above.

All of her life, my mother has protected, loved and nurtured children of all ages. She was a CASA volunteer, a Sunday school teacher, a substitute teacher, a devoted mother and grandmother, and a volunteer tutor for children who needed help. Anyone or any thing that hurts children wounds her deeply. I am grateful she is oblivious of this tragedy; it would break her heart if she understood.

Charles Dickens, author of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, wrote this:  “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”

In conclusion, author C.S. Lewis faced a personal, profound grief and loss during his life.  In his book A GRIEF OBSERVED, he wrote: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” During this time of sorrow and fear, may we join hands and hearts and cry together, our tears raining upon the blinding dust of earth.

Hummel figurine of children singing and playing instruments. (photo by Marylin Warner)

Statue of young readers, Abilene Public Library, Abilene, KS. (photo by Marylin Warner)