Go Paint the Porch

“Move through life looking for signs and messages,” said Rosanne at a meeting of a group I belong to. What a lovely idea, I thought, and what a wonderful way to move through life. We were entering a terribly contentious election season after enduring the harrowing Covid years of rancor, losses, loneliness, and confusion.

To that meeting, Rosanne had brought a few plaques and positioned them in the center of our circle, so we could see them while talking. “Whisper words of wisdom. Let it be,” one read. I remembered the Beatles song, “Let It Be” which my older son learned to play on the piano. When his music teacher asked him for one of my favorite songs, he noted that one, and then she taught him to play it. He played it beautifully; sometimes I sang it with him. Listening to my sons play music, violin, cello, or piano, while I sat in the soft chair in our music room remains one of my most precious memories. I joked to them that we knew the notes were played just right when the song made your mom cry.

Around the same time of the meeting with the words of wisdom plaque and my friend’s revelation about messages, one of my sons, 19 at the time, came over full of existential, philosophical questions about me, the world, about my life, about what gave me meaning and purpose.

How and when did I know what I wanted to do? How did I know what to study in college? What and how had I learned? What had helped me? Unexpected, it was one of my best days ever. My son asked for lessons I had been trying to teach him his whole life, and at that moment, he wanted to listen. Plenty of past times, I talked, especially during his adolescence while he merely endured and didn’t think I knew very much.

“Let me get out a pen to take notes,” he said this time. I was astounded. 

Was I prepared? What could I say? He wanted me to give him those words of wisdom. What words might they be? That night, I strung some together as best I could. 

Then, I decided then to start looking for signs and messages and the words to go with them, as Rosanne had advised, so I would be more prepared the next time my son came to me, full of questions. I watched. I collected. I made notes. Here’s my fumbling attempt. To my beloved sons. Whispered words of wisdom. Let them be. 

At the Trash and Recycling Center recently in our county, I unloaded the truck by myself. I did this routine chore while feeling some despair, loss, grief, and disappointment in our culture and in communities’ handling of the Covid period, the lockdowns, the impending elections. I coped with a host of normal problems many of us face, including physical pain while recovering from recent cancer surgery. I climbed onto the back of the truck, grateful to be still young and strong enough to do this. I unloaded bags and boxes and threw them in the bin. The attendant, probably in his eighties, saw me unloading a plastic bin of recyclables and carrying it up steep steps. He walked over to help me carry it up. We emptied the bin, and I finished this job.

“Come back to see us,” he said warmly as I left. Often on darkest days, the world has given me kindnesses from strangers and friends, which I know are my most desperate prayers answered, prayers people have prayed for centuries, from sorrows and depths of bones scattered to ash, from houses of poured out waters, described in the Psalms, our deepest laments.

There are good people everywhere, I would tell my sons. Everywhere. I remember them. Pulling up beside me when my tire was flat, on a road trip by myself long ago, on a dark road in Quebec in the rain. More recently, the lady behind the gas station counter in the small town where I taught during lockdowns. She called me “honey,” and reminded me that I could get three bananas for a dollar rather than just one for $1.29. Sweet small graces. In the middle of that strange and terrible time, no one wore a face covering in the small store across the street from the school where I taught, including the cops who often lingered there. I relished normal, brief fellowship.

Notice beauty, I would tell my sons, and you may notice more when living as Rosanne suggested, looking for signs and messages. At the late summer music festival called the Sing Me High Festival near Harrisonburg, Virginia, a music festival held annually at the Mennonite Brethren Heritage Center, families listened to acoustic music, sitting in chairs and on blankets on a gentle slope in the woods. Children played chess, napped, and read books. A woman was cross-stitching, another knitting. The scene reminded me of our dear Quaker camp my sons attended growing up and where I had worked. My older son said it was the best time in his life.

Three guitarists, a trumpet player, and a drummer made up a band of young musicians called Juniper Tree, playing at the festival. They sang a song they had written about finding things and noticing – a four-leaf clover, dinosaur bones, a nickel, sparkling in a wishing well. Was god there in the tender notes? They sang a song about Revelations 20, about the Alpha and the Omega, a new heaven and a new earth. 

At the Virginia State Fair recently, also right before this most contentious political season in our country, when divisions flamed and festered everywhere, while TV stations promoted the discord, a Confederate history group displayed a Confederate flag and distributed literature at their table in the conference center. Their table was situated right across from a table with a large sign, teaching on Islam. Literature was arrayed, and free copies of the Quran were offered. Muslim men at the table gave me a copy.

I chatted with a handsome young man and noticed his beautiful leather shoes. I took and read a couple of their pamphlets while meandering among tables. Muslims don’t believe in original sin, one pamphlet described. Yes, Adam and Eve had sinned, it said, but we don’t carry their sins into the centuries. God is god, “the most compassionate, the most merciful,” the pamphlet read.

I talked with a woman at the Christian Farmers table, complimented her sparkly earrings, took their pamphlet, then talked with a man at the John Birch Society table nearby, who knows a prominent farmer in our area, a mutual friend. I smiled at the guys manning the Gideon’s table. I thought it remarkable that all these disparate people would be tabling peacefully together on this early fall day at the Virginia State Fair. I knew that if one of them needed help carrying his or her boxes or signs back to the car when the event was over, another would gladly help. When I turned off all the networks on TV, blaring their hostilities, I noticed real people more.

At the church my husband, Glenn, and I attended the next Sunday, the acolytes were two boys, about 10 and 14, the same age difference as my two sons. The younger one played with the knot of his robe, the wooden cross around his neck, the older one, stoic, mouthed the words slightly during the liturgy. I noticed how impossibly vulnerable people were, kneeling at the throne of grace. At the Eucharist, I mostly watched the pageantry, stories playing out across the body, the people, kneeling like children. What does the “peace that passeth all understanding” look like, sound like?

To whisper words while noticing signs and wonders, I may tell my sons that the kingdom of god may be now. God’s time may be nothing like what we are able to imagine. I picked the garden at dusk, and hid among the green bean plants, growing from the arch Glenn had made for them. Another day I drove the tractor, following him as he pulled the trailer he had repaired, rebuilt, and painted for hours in the sun in spite of long-ago discouraging voices he told me about, the ones that many of us may hear in our heads at times, those contemptuous voices whose origins we may not even remember – the ones that say that the job is pointless or futile. For the trailer, Glenn also had built side supports when he needed to hold logs he sold from dead trees cut down. 

We had to pick up three culvert pipes, 20 feet long by 30 inches in diameter, that Glenn had been storing in the backfield of a neighbor’s farm. One pipe was to be used for rebuilding a fence over a stream. We were going to sell the other two. He planned to use the tractor to lift the pipes onto the trailer. The side supports he had built would now work to hold the pipes while we got them back to our place. 

Glenn drove his truck, pulling the large trailer. I followed him in the tractor, glad I remembered how to change gears like he had taught me. I was grateful to be unafraid while driving on the highway and then a long country road. The tractor wasn’t running well, however, and I thought I was doing something wrong shifting gears only to discover after we completed the job that the right front tire was almost flat while I was driving it. 

The tractor grapple was not big enough to pick up the pipes without damaging them, so we attached a chain to the grapple and then put the chain around the pipes to lift them onto the trailer. I counted the total pipe ridges, 60, so I could place the chain at about ridge 29 to balance it while he lifted and loaded it. Was god in the culvert pipes too, back in those woods where we did this job with the smell of Virginia Mountain Mint all around?

“Live the questions,” writes Ranier Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, a book that my beloved English teacher recommended to us my freshman year in college, when I was 19. Listen to your heart and instincts. Try things. Make mistakes. Say, “What about this?… Maybe I’ll try it this way…” Try to retain the mind of an 11- or 12-year-old, you as a 6^th grader in your STEM class for gifted students, when you planned and built projects and experiments with friends. Keep the you of your string orchestra class at that age and over the next years, your fingers dancing over the fretless neck of your violin as you learned fast, fearlessly, playfully.

Go ahead and paint the porch, clean the barn, clear the closet, cook the soup, even if you’re depressed and don’t feel like it. You’ll still have all the same problems when you’re finished but the porch will be painted. I describe these habits, not because I have been good at them but because I have learned a lot from the times I did not practice them.

When you follow your heart, stand for what you believe is right, you may have to stand alone for a while, but the right people will find you when you need them. Be a blessing to others. Answers are probably not in advertising slogans. Maybe words of wisdom will arrive in silences or while you’re playing, working, or walking. 

Volunteer when asked sometimes, even if you don’t feel like it at first, because then people will expect you to show up. They will look for you, and that’s good. Join groups to find kindred spirits. Attend. 

Find what brings you joy. Not the quick dopamine hits from computer clicks, drugs, or alcohol, but the longer-lasting, more sustaining feelings. For me, these include songs and singing; good poetry; caring for animals; Frisbee with you; real mail; the smell of juniper berries; picking green beans at dusk; and picture books created by wonderful artists. For you, they will be different. Find them; do more of them.

Ask for help when you need it, and let people help you. Let people pray for you or hold you in the light, as we say in Quaker Meeting. Let their prayers cover you. Believe that they will.