 Reflecting on Terror |
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THIS IS the favorite time of the year for many of us. Autumn has a “homey” theme somehow.
Homemade becomes the byword amongst women, and the need to create prevails. With men it may bring on the psychological whispers of an era long past when their main occupation was providing food, warmth and protection. The ladies still have some hands-on options to fulfill the deeper urges of gathering and storing. Visions of jams and pickles, pumpkin pie, knitted scarves and jewel-colored quilts waltz through feminine minds. Big pots of homemade soup appear on the back of the stove and the stores have a run on electric bread makers.
Even with all the improvements technology can provide for us, it seems that at least a part of our love for autumn hearkens back to a time when it wasn’t quite so easy to prepare a family for the coming winter.
Those were times when people were truly busy “making” their living. Yet checker games were played with sons and daughters. The classics were read and listened to with fervor. Friends came over for an evening of simply talking. Imagine that.
There was a lot of singing around pianos that sat in 80 per cent of American parlors. Most everyone knew the words to hundreds of songs, and nearly every family had a musician or two.
Long, well-written letters crisscrossed the world with affection and interest. These weren’t notes of facts and figures, but scaled-down works of the heart talking, so dear to the recipients that many were tied in satin ribbons and read over and over. It took time to compose those missives, and time was just as precious then as it is now… precious enough to spend any extra portions on those we cared about the most.
I have a theory that fall is the favorite season for so many people because a big part of us would like to LIVE the autumns of our grandparents, or even our great-grandparents--mainly because we haven’t researched what that involved. The harvest alone would hospitalize most modern couples of today. Then canning, preserving, drying, butchering and smoking would finish them off. We think we’re busy now…?
“Busy” is the most overused word in the English language today. It’s everybody’s excuse for…everything: “Sorry, I’m just too busy.”
If we aren’t careful we will become too “busy” to hold conversations of any substance, to pat a cheek, to say a prayer, to keep in touch with an old friend, or look--really LOOK--into the eyes of a little one. Each moment comes but once. We can’t go scurrying after them and gather them up again if the mood happens to strike us later.
There is too high a number of us who are over-occupied with justifiable “busy-ness.”
Some years ago I dropped an oral thermometer on the floor. It broke in two and the mercury inside began its oily, quicksilver race to find every crack in the wooden floor. The harder I tried to pick it up in a spoon, the faster it slipped away…splitting up, multiplying a hundred times until it simply disappeared in places too small for me to reach.
Once the thermometer was severely damaged there was no way to save the meaningful part of the apparatus. Recently, I’ve seen a parallel between this idea and an aspect of life…the whole point to this column.
September 11th, most Americans had spent some time weeping. Tears flowed from sea to shining sea and we all had questions.
Who? Why?
And then the more personal cries from ordinary people who lost chunks of their hearts between a quick morning leave-taking and a never-to-be “Hello!”
From some slight experience I know the endless keening sent toward Heaven, all the regrets, all the “If only’s.” Did I take the time to tell her/him how much they were loved? Why didn’t I give him one more kiss? Why did I make excuses last night when she wanted to talk? Why didn’t we take that get-a-way cruise we always talked about? Why didn’t we spend more time just being together…no TV, football games or sitcoms?
Some of the complaints against our selves are natural and usually invalid, but I was hit between the eyes with some very real shortcomings of my own.
Just how “too busy” had I been over the last couple of years? How many times had I made excuses for missing gatherings because of personal projects? Or, put selfish interests before friends' birthdays, showers, graduations, weddings…and, yes, even funerals? I didn’t like the answer.
Had I lost too much mercury from my thermometer? Was it too late to get another and wrap it in the protective cotton of backed-up, carried-through good intentions?
We hear it over and over, “Our country will never be the same,” and I know that’s true. Every day I am learning to live in this new place. The back of my mind is never completely clear of niggling apprehensions, and yet, I believe we can turn the results of this disaster toward the light and a better way of spending the life we have.
“Love thy neighbor.”
It’s easy to say the word, “love,” but without some actions it doesn’t add much to anybody’s heart. Give the most valuable commodity we seem to have these days…time…and caress a soul.
© 2001 by Audrey Yeager.
The illustration is © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
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