When she stands in the garden, hauls the pumpkin up in both arms, she laughs and says it’s like she’s the one grown all round and full.

“Haven’t I grown so big?” She’s a riot. Summer and light and this reaping, it makes us tipsy happy.

She giggles and the pumpkin rounding out her belly, it jiggles, and I grin.

A mother’s smile is the child’s sun — what can grow without the warmth of grace?

Heaving up over the the vines and the tendrils and the weeds, she keeps saying it aloud, ” One step. One Step. Getting there. One Step more.
”
And there she is in an October light deepening,  her growing right to
the edge of the garden, moving steady, one step at a time. And when she
looks up and tells me she really is getting there, there it really is
—

Family is a field to grow in. Where children grow up and parents grow patient.

Where
mothers grow in maturity and fathers grow in forgiveness, where sons
grow in self-control and daughters in discernment and this is what He
means — For us to stretch and dig down and reach out and for family to
grow us full in the faith.

Aren’t we all growing here
together and how can she be six already? Why is it lately that when she
turns, that I can see it again, that long ago baby face, the way her
eyes would look right up?

These steps with the small, these are
the giant leaps not to be lost.  Saving the world, it begins with the salvation of one child.

There’s only a harvest in the kingdom when someone attends to the the smallness of a seed.

I watch her.

How she rounds with the reaping, how she gets her pumpkin to the walk.

“And now let’s just roll it. Straight to the stairs.”

She throws herself all into it, pushes that pumpkin.

And her feet slap the walk, this crazy applause — her just rolling with it.

Her with eyes on the stairs…

All these steps but ladders leading straight up…

“…but God made you grow.


It’s not the one who plants or the one who waters who is at the center of this process but God
,

who makes things grow.

You happen to be God’s field in which we are working.

~ 1 Cor. 3:5 MSG

When
it’s time, I know, I can tell in my bones, the ways the knees ache, those joints with a clock of their own, and I drag my fingers through
the hair, back from the temples, and I survey the room of the sprawled
out legs, the stacks of books, the balls of yarn, the half deck of Rook
scattered, and I smile and chime the hour quiet.

“I think it’s time for bed, folks.”

They cheer wild. Race for their beds. They know when it’s time too.

Time for the day’s best hour, the children’s hour, the moon out the window and night studded up with the stars.

I
pick up and I return and I lead a few lost things back to their homes
and they call from their rooms, the darkened sleep wombs. “Are you
coming to tell us a story of when you were little?”

I say yes, but how could I have known that tonight it would be a child who’d tug the curtain, tear down the veil?

Yes, I am coming. I am coming for the prayers, for the page turning of the printed stories and yes, the stories of your roots,
of the time before you were born, when you were still a future star and
that place in the night sky was black, still waiting for you. (Do all
children love to slide their hands down their roots again, again,
remembering whence they’ve come? “Tell us that story again when…” )

I read. The wee chair in the hallway creaks. I turn pages. I bookmark. And they squirm happy under quilts, anticipating. “Now tell us a story when you were a kid like us.”
(And I smile and I think this is really it: a child’s deep longing to
know that they are known, that the old were once young, once saw the
world large, that for that one evening hour, a story bridge spans the wide river of decades and for a spell, we are one, children together.)

So
every night I grope mad around the memory vault, feeling my way along
time, hoping to find one I’ve lost, a memory I haven’t yet told, and
wishing I had kept better record but who would have thought that 365
nights of the year, year after year, our children would story beg from
my days before them and I never stop fearing that they’ll be
disappointed at the blandness of the recollections and I never stop
being surprised at how children heartily embrace our feeble efforts at creativity. What audience is as grateful as a child?

Creativity
is the first tongue of the children and when the aged ones try to speak
it, even haltingly, we are all natives of happiness and of the Garden
and of our Creator Father.

“A long, long time ago,
when I was about your age….” I don’t even know what the next words will
be and I hold them high in the shadowed room, waiting, like a key
suspended before the lock of the memory safe, and I so pray that the key
fits and I’ll find something… and there it is.

“I drew pictures
of pigs and curly-cue flowers and palaces and princesses with blue ball
point pens that left inky-sticky gob marks behind and my mama hung on
them fridge with lettered magnets and that was the first thing I ever
hoped to be.” I remember the smell of the paper and the white expanse of
possibilities and I can see even now the rows of flowers with the row
of pigs, their tails curling up like blooming vines behind them, and I
laugh now the thought and I’m almost too embarrassed to say it.

“The first thing I ever dreamed of being was an artist.”

“That’s what everyone first dreams.”

I stop short. I hold the top edge of the quilt in hand, ready for the tucking, but I’m struck.

Levi rolls over and I can see his silhouette clear, his lanky frame backlit from light in the hallway.

These
are words of the farming son, the dig in the dirt, don’t hand me a
pencil, I just want to go work with Dad son, the I know Jesus said we
have to work heartedly on to the Lord but I don’t think Jesus ever had
to do Latin son, the practical boy who tells us point blank, “If I can’t be a farmer, I ain’t going to be nothing.”

I am struck and I can only repeat.

“Everyone first dreams this? To be an artist?” I ask those whose first dreams still shine.

“Yeah….
Of course ” Levi lies down on the pillow, stares at the ceiling. I
hadn’t known. Do we all first dream of being artists — because that is
who our true selves really are?

“And with colors. Lots of bright
colors.” Malakai pipes up, his toothy grin peeking out behind sheets. I
remember his drawing this morning of bold sails flapping in wind and the
wings of parrots flapping over the waves and I remember the colors.

“And they dream of showing their art?” I’m rooted to this spot, me finding my roots.

“Well…
no. Well, you do at first. Until you show your art to someone and they
don’t like it. Then you don’t want to show it anymore. Then you start thinking about other stuff to do.”

Ah, yes. I’m unstuck. Child’s told the bedtime stories, all our stories, and I pull the cover up under chins and I smooth.

Every person is made by love and we are love and we can’t stop making. Love makes. God is Word because He must express and we are made in His image, His poiemas and we must express. I run my finger through little boy hair and I can feel his smile in the dark. This child.

There are no two identical persons on the whole of the planet. Anything created that expresses the essence of a person is wholly and entirely original. And whenever I look at a creative work, I am looking at the impossible created. Because before those hands created it, it was impossible to have ever have been created before!

Life becomes art when we attend to it
and I trace a little boy cheek by the light of the moon. And Child,
know this, I will resuscitate the artist within, Child who’s inherited
Father’s creativity. I will not put lips to the dreams and try to
breathe life into them. But I will lay the ear down to the dream and I will listen deep. For all art and artists revive when the dreams are truly heard.

I know it and you speak it Child: All
our lives we all need to create because creativity is the life breath
of our Creator Father and if we don’t create we breathe stale air and we
wither dry.

Levi cups into Kai and both boys turn
towards me and the night white of the window and I lay my hands on both
their shoulders and I squeeze and this skin and bone part of them I
know that this is the wasting away part and the creative making part
deep within these frames is the lasting part, for all creating is out of
love and love is the forever eternal expanding through time rippling
ring.

I pray. And they close their eyes. And on the way out of
their room, I pick up a lost crayon, a lego piece, a piece of paper with
a a story begun and I don’t return them to their places.

Under a
winter moon in a still house, I lay them out on the counter for tomorrow
and all the artists and makers and inventors and dreamers and
co-creators who will rise under the sun.

“The Bible tells us that we are God’s masterpieces (poiema in Greek); not only creatures, but His creations, His poems (Eph 2:10). We are living epistles (2 Cor 3:3).

And so, our lives are meant to be listened to, because it is God who is speaking into and out of and through the symphony of the years, and the masterpiece of a lifetime.” ~Michael Card

​Dormant geniuses lie sleeping down the hall.

They eat across from us at the breakfast table, sit next to us in mini-vans taxiing to soccer fields, even look back at us from our bathroom mirrors. What if genius is the normative intent of what God’ bestows?

And our own lack of faithful stewardship results in malnourished gifts?

László and Klara Polgár, parents of three daughters, understood exactly that. Homeschoolers in Hungary who were harassed by armed police to enroll their daughters in public school, Klara and László believed that any child could be nurtured to flourish, and exceedingly so. It was simply a matter of faithfulness.

The Polgar’s were.

Faithful hours of considered study and practice were invested in the Polgar home. By 2000, these home educated daughters were at least tri-lingual (one daughter could speak seven languages), each had achieved top-10 ranking in the world of female chess players, and their youngest daughter, Judit, shattered the previous record for the youngest person, male or female, to earn the title of chess Grandmaster. She was 15 years old. While Susan would later be the number one female chess player in the world, Judit would be the first woman to be rank in the top ten chess players worldwide.

How did the Polgar’s raise three geniuses?

It wasn’t a function of I.Q. or genetics. (László concedes he was a mediocre chess player at best, being regularly beaten by his oldest when she was five years old; Klara didn’t even know the rules when their daughters began playing. Current research clearly indicates that the top achievers are rarely high-IQ geniuses or former child prodigies.) It was simply the same way Mozart, Benjamin Franklin, Tiger Woods found their way: by faithful , wholehearted stewardship.

By diligent, attentive nurtuing of the gifts God hands out liberally to far more than a select few. It’s dangerously tempting to think that geniuses are exceptional products of blazing, divine intervention.

Because then we don’t have to closely examine how we are stewarding the gifts He’s given us.

Are geniuses really only better stewards then the rest of us? 

Recent research suggests that rather unnerving possibility.

​

1. Geniuses are stewards who Faithfully Practice

Geniuses make it look effortless only because they’ve faithfully practiced. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, posits that “extended deliberate practice” is the ultimate key to successful use of a gift. “Nothing shows that innate factors are a necessary prerequisite for expert-level mastery in most fields,” he says. Ericsson’s interviews with 78 German pianists and violinists discovered that by age 20, the best musicians had spent an estimated 10,000 hours practicing, twice the average 5,000 hours the less accomplished group practiced.

Genius is a long faithfulness.

So fingers stretch across ivories here, shoulders hunch over Latin, brows knit in mathematical quandary. Just two hours a day of concentrated practice over a decade stacks up to 7,000 hours of faithful stewarding.

What would happen if every Christian used the 4 hours daily spent in front of the television a day (more than 126 hours a month!) or the near hour a day the average American surfs the internet and spent two of those hours developing their skill in a particular domain (woodworking, quantum physics, photography) and one hour more on the spiritual disciplines that lead into a deeper relationship with God, (prayer, memorization, Bible meditation, fasting) – only repurposing three hours a day from the five we spend on passive entertainment — and in one decade, our entire culture – and the world at large – would be entirely revolutionized. How are we being faithful stewards of our 10,000 hours?

Why not tenderly unfurl a gift?


2. Geniuses are stewards who Faithfully Pioneer

The flesh tugs towards the path of least resistance. Even if we practice, we’re tempted to keep practicing what we already know. But geniuses steward the gift by faithfully pioneering into unknown territory. Committed stewards continually forge ahead by asking: what weaknesses need strengthening? what skills need extending?

Faithful stewards fight the flesh and mind’s inclination to sloppily automate a skill, by careful analyzing the parts of the whole skill and altering their practice accordingly, which forces the brain’s internalization of an improved pattern of execution. Like Benjamin Franklin who would rewrite his favorite articles from memory, then closely compare it with the actual, we too stretch minds and skills with challenge of new ground. 
How can I gently stretch a gift? 

3. Geniuses are stewards who Faithfully Pursue

Geniuses steward the gift by, practice, pioneering and finally, pursuing a mentor. A coach or teacher is necessary to flourish a gift, to grow it into pioneer territory. And pursuing a supportive environment is paramount for fostering a gift. Parents can be mentors. Parents can be the positive environment. When Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, praised children for “how” they did a task—for undergoing the process successfully — most children wanted to take on increasingly challenging tasks. The children wanted to pioneer. Generally, such encouraged children’s performances improved, and when it didn’t, they still deemed the experience enjoyable. 
How might we pursue a mentor and *be* a strengthening, affirming for others stewarding a gift?

Children slip out of beds, and another day dawns with its hours. I’m not so sure anyone here will ever be deemed “a genius”, or if that is really even a worthy goal, but stewardship clearly is. And it’s clear that God’s far more generous in placing truly great gifts into our hands than we’ve ever realized.

It’s our hands that need be faithful with the talents.

I reach out and squeeze the young hand next to mine.

Sky’s flushing red from today’s long race and children lie in beds and I sit on worn chair in the hallway. It’s my nightly post, seat at day’s finish line.

From chair there under light, I open pages and read into line of doorways, into those bedrooms with children tucked under quilts, children waiting (or not) for sleep to slip under covers too.

I’ve found our bookmark in Little House in the Prairie, opened to where we’d left off last night.

“No, Mama! Don’t read us a story!” Child voice calls from a pillow. “Plllleease don’t read us a story. Tell us a story!Tell us a story about you.”

I smile and it strikes me again: children need us to do more than read story. They want us to tell story too – our personal ones.

The Bible is our Grand Story, drama stacked on drama. And after each meal, the eating of physical bread, our family reads from Scripture, feasts on spiritual bread.

After I’ve collected plates, young hands pass out our “gathering Words,” a set of 8 Bibles of the same version, and our voices read verses in unison. Storytelling around the table. The words of the God-stories linger in our mouths, and we say them aloud to each other, just as Scripture was first lived for the early church: stories spoken aloud in the gathering.

Together, we read The Story.

But what of the other story children need to nourish souls, minds? Won’t we have to tell our own stories too, how our lives, today, and God intersect?

This living in story is Epic Parenting, and it’s the way of Jesus: “The followers came to Jesus and asked, “Why do you use stories to teach the people?” (Matt. 13:10)

Jesus didn’t lead by lecturing. He didn’t sermonize, pontificate, moralize or summarize. He knew well what as a parent I too often forget: Lecturing grinds away at faith.

Simply, Jesus told stories and let the stories alone speak. Because a story’s beauty and potency is twofold, doubly powerful.

1. First, a story gives children a practical prototype.

In seeing, hearing, visualizing how Biblical truth reacts when it hits the air of this earth, our fallen flesh, story offers a life simulator like no other. Children see God’s principles test driven. The ethereal becomes concrete; not only does story breathe three-dimensional life into doctrine, but the story- prototype now offers a way for children to imitate.

2. Secondly, the story-prototype powerfully prompts.

Any fact or principle that enters into our brains wrapped in emotion is more likely to be remembered.Thus, while the emotions of a story deeply move, they actually offer the greatest hope of remembering truth and being changed by it. The prompt offered by the story’s prototype ultimatelyinspires children to live in new ways.

Epic Parenting, parenting out of story, both in the pages of Scripture and the warp of our lives, is potent stuff. Not only because it’s a faith prototype and a prompt to live the faith, but it is peripateo, the way faith’s robes are passed from one generation to the next.

3. Thirdly, parenting out of story is the essence of peripateo faith.

Deuteronomy 6: 6-7 urges, “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children, talk about them when you sit at home and walk along the road.”

Practical and participatory, telling God’s story, both in Scripture and in our lives, is peripateo, the Greek word forwalking – teaching through story as a natural outflow of our talking and sitting and walking with our children.

Epic parenting is storytelling around our togetherness – about what God wrote during this morning’s errands, during our vacation last year, from our own childhoods. No curriculum, classes or other paraphernalia necessary. Just a willingness to listen to our lives and tell the whole of God’s epic — parchment and personal.

God says our lives, tarnished and tainted as the characters that traipse through Scripture, are nothing short of living epistles (2 Cor. 3:3); our lives, lines He reads as His very own poetry. (Poiema in the Greek of Eph. 2:10).

Is it any wonder then that our children want us to tell the stories God writes on our days?

In fading light, I lay the storybook of Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie down on my lap. And children prop up on pillows, ready for a true, real-time epic and slowly words come … “Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, just about your age….

Because we love to tell the story.

Lord, make my leading like the way You led: not lecturing but Storying. Because Story is the way to the heart.

What story can I tell today?

​

​“I think I am going a touch crazy.”

The words catch in my throat somewhere in the midst of scratching casserole remains from the corners of a 9 by 13 pan and monitoring piano practices. 

Maybe another day I could have found something to feebly chuckle about through the choking words? 

But today stinging tears of exhaustion and hopelessness blur my vision. From my vantage point at the kitchen sink, it all looks despairingly familiar, a millionth showing of a frame jammed on replay. 

And at this point in the scene, I’m thinking the script calls for me to sink my head down onto the countertop and have a good cry…or just give up and run away.

A few steps from the sink, Levi pounces on the back of growling Kai, the roar and rumble of their wrestle sending wedgits scattering amidst the legos, blocks and tractors. Shalom’s crying in the doorway over a lost doll…

And at the kitchen table, Caleb howls with laughter over his sketched caricature of Joshua, who now fumes retaliation, both negligent of the grammar diagramming lessons at hand. 

Hope accompanies the entire scene with an appropriate score: gratingly wrong notes of “Morning Has Broken.”

“It’s me who is just about broken, somewhere deep inside,” I scoop up wailing Shalom and stumble through the legos to the quiet of our bedroom. 

“If only I could touch Christ,” the words spill out, “He’d gently smooth out my mothering mess…”

Touch Christ

Closing my eyes to the whirl in this house, my mind’s eye can make out the staggering woman tripping, scuffing her knees, the wee pebbles burning along the scrape. I wince: I know the pain of falling. 

Then that woman, she raises a hand, trembling, to make a final lunge for his hem and hope: “If I only touch his garment, I will be made well” (Matt. 9:21).

When I am going a touch crazy, can I remember to close my eyes, and stretch out a quavering hand? Relinquishing my slipping grip on a chaotic day, I lunge to touch Christ’s hem, the hem of Him who can restore and renew. “And Jesus perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” (Mark 5:30). 

To touch Christ is to touch the power of hope, the power of wholeness, the power of healing.

Touch Cross

He to whose hem I cling leads me to the Cross He asks me to embrace. 

In the vortex of a day spinning out of control, He takes my hand from His hem and calls me to carry a cross. 

I can hardly stand under the heavy weight of it all, to disciple a half dozen little sinners in the path of Jesus by example…and yet I hear Him whisper to my heart, “For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin” (Heb. 12:3-4).

To walk this way of the Cross is to take up the way of mercy and grace. As He pours mercy mingled down upon this head leaning against the foot of the cross, so now He calls me to similarly extend grace in this home to wrestling, teasing boys and their weary mother. 

When I am going a touch crazy, I must remember to press lips to this Cross, and inhale: receive Christ’s mercy… then exhale: give Christ’s grace. Mercy, grace, mercy, grace.

Touching the cross resuscitates me, changing how I breathe, how I live… how I mother.

Touch Cave

In the crushing milieu of today, I relish the quiet of our bedroom, just for a moment, this still grotto of calm tucked away. When I’m going a touch crazy, I need to find a cave, enter into the still, and let new life stir.

Whether I close my eyes for a moment, or slip into an empty room, I can touch the stillness of the resurrection cave and let the powers of new life heal these wounds, revive me, restore to wholeness. “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20).

Finding the quiet of Christ’s cave wherever I am  — is to resurrect from my death in trespasses and sin and to let the life of Christ, pregnant with new, life-giving ways, fill me, grow in me, produce fruit in me.

Touch Children

Touching Christ, the Cross and the Cave leads me back to the center, where I can smile with Him, “Let the little children come.”

Pulling Shalom close, I bury my face in her soft curls. “Let’s go touch all the little children.”

I gently lay my hand on the older boys’ shoulders while helping with grammar, softly brush Hope’s hair as she ascends and descends her scales, touch the younger boys with smiles and applause as they stack wedgits.

Touching Christ, the Cross and the Cave lets me touch children with the Gospel hope of renewal: “Then the one who looked like a man touched me again, and I felt my strength returning” (Dan. 10:18 NLT).

As I touch the children, I too feel this strength…hope…returning.

Touch Cana

I lustily sing in time with Hope’s tinkling of the ivories.

As Kai tackles me from behind, I turn with my own fury of tickles, dissolving into a sprawl of laughter, Hope and Levi piling in on our fun. It feels good to laugh, releasing the tight grip of control to touch the joy and celebration of Cana, imbibing deeply of the feast of now.

Jesus has come, touching the water of our days and turning it into the sweet wine of delight. As we laugh and touch Cana, Jesus works a miracle in this home, transforming our hopelessness and thirst into a glimpse of the Great joyous Feast to come. Touching Cana makes us laugh with the wonder of it all, this life together, Christ at the center.

Somewhere in the midst of scratching casserole remains from the corners of a 9 by 13 pan and monitoring piano practices, I had gone a touch crazy, lost my way, lost touch with the hallowed call to motherhood.

In the press of it all, I had forgotten how these intense mothering days are a daily spiritual retreat, Him calling me to come touch that which will direct towards Home.

Touching Christ, the Cross, and the cave had drawn me back to touch children with the delightful touch of Cana.

The scene was the same, but I could hear a new score playing. 

Morning had Broken and I’d been restored.

Touching the things of Christ has a way of doing that.

I am by the stove cutting warm loaves of dark bread.

My mother is at the window, sewing new and vintage fabric pieces together.

I listen to the hum of the machine, thread lacing down, through, up, through, listening to her.

“Now you try. Just slowly. Take your time and really focus.”

Her crown of white hovers over a little one’s shoulder.

​

“Like this, Gram?”

​

I turn to see a little girl’s furrowed brow lit by the machine’s glowing light.

They are stitching up blankets for the PCU at the local hospital. The needle stitches crisp new cottons to a backing of reclaimed, familiar flannels.

Hope’s eyes are fixed on that quarter inch seam allowance, the curving arcs of the material.

​

“Yes, that’s it, Hope. Now if you’ll stop a moment…”

The machine drones to a halt. Butter melts into the steaming warm slices. I ladle garden vegetable soup into a circle of waiting bowls.

“If you’ll look closely, do you see how it puckers here, when you push the material through?” Mama leans in.

“Don’t rush, or push the fabric along. If you push the material through, you’ll end up with wrinkled, disappointing handiwork. You just guide…”

“Gently?” Hope offers.

“Yes!” Mama lights. “That’s it precisely: no pushing…or you’ll wrinkle everything. Just guide gently.”

——————————–​​

​

My ladle hangs midair.

Empty bowl waits in one hand.

I might have ears to hear.

Sunlight streams in. The needle again begins to purr. I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and finger write those words  on my mind:

“Just guide gently.”

Push and it will all pucker.

How many perfectly good days have I wrinkled because I pushed, arms heavy with an agenda?

How many happy faces have I wrinkled into distress with pushing words: “Hurry up!”

I don’t even want to consider how many bare, beating hearts I have crinkled and crumpled with my pushing for more. Pushed and puckered.

I come to, fill the waiting soup bowl, and whisper it again, etching it deeper, “just guide gently.”

​

——————————–​

​

The Spirit nudges: “This is what I meant the other morning. You underlined it, remember?”

I find black ink marking the words:

​

“Therefore, although in Christ, I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do, yet I appeal to you on the basis of love.”

– Philemon 1:8-9

​

I could be bold and order you.

Push, push, push.

​

​

Yet I appeal to you on the basis of love.

Just gently guiding. Gently serving. Gently leading by caring, encouraging, edifying.

​

——————————–​

​

Wasn’t it Mama who also pulled me up on her lap as a four-year-old and told me the fable of the sun and the wind, arguing over which of the two was the stronger? I can still feel her leaning close:

“The Wind began to blow cold blasts, but the man only drew his cloak tighter about him to keep out the cold. Then the Sun took his turn, and under the sun’s rays, the man then threw the coat off!”

She turned me to look me in the eye: “Remember that, girl of mine: gentleness can do what force always fails to do.”

I could be bold and order you…yet I appeal to you on the basis of love.

​

——————————–​

​

To release a child to be all that he or she was meant to be requires the sun, requires guiding gently with loving words of encouragement. Recent research confirms:

A study of twenty-two grade eight students found that those who were lit with positive feelings generated significant more creative and problem-solving ability than the group of students in which “a neutral mood was induced.”

Appeal on the basis of love, with a light touch of guidance and the warm igniting of encouragement, and watch hearts and minds creatively, joyously thrive. Gentle guiding reaps far more than pushing.

​

——————————–​

​

Bowls served and dinner bell waiting to be rung, I survey the trail of rainy day pursuits: strewn legos, a blizzard of paper snippets, scraps of material flung about for good measure.

Take a deep breath, O Heart. Push and the day—no, more than the day— delicate hearts, will pucker.

What if I were to just guide gently?

“What a day we’ve had, best beloveds!” Books are set aside, scissors left, and masterpieces presented.

“Such color! What a design! You made that by yourself?” Hearts embroidered with edifying words.

“Let’s clean this all up together?” A love appeal.

My hands, their hands, we sort, organize, gather.  I run my hand across the clean counter.

My mother smiles, her showing me how to just guide gently — this pucker-free pattern for hearts.

​

——————————–​

​