Whispers of Truth

As a teen, I remember more than anything wanting desperately to just belong. In some ways, being in band met that need as we were all thrown together so much. In other ways, I tried to meet that need by being a part of a softball team. Sometimes those two groups collided and didn’t gee and haw, and then I felt trapped between them, wanting the people I liked to just get along. Sometimes it was the desire for a group of friends or a single friend to accept me as I was and to love me as I loved them, as it seemed I never cleanly fit into either category of friends. I was somehow both and neither. Sometimes my desire to belong was directed at finding one person who would love me forever. As an adult who had been given that one person, I still longed for close friends to share the journey with, especially when raising small children and at home alone so far from extended family while Greg worked so many long hours to provide for us.  Belonging has always been important to me, yet my u...

I walked the pastures and fields of my youth this week and found myself lost amidst the changes of thirty-plus years. The fields still call to me (although two-thirds no longer belong to my family), gently rolling hills full of solid black cows instead of the familiar brown ones with white faces from my childhood, tall trees I remember as much smaller in height and girth, and a pond surprisingly the same. The corn crib, barn, and chicken house starkly missing from the  landscape like amputated limbs that still feel present in spirit, phantoms my memories.  The Formation of Grooves The grooves are there, soul deep, worn paths that take me back to distant days spent in youthful pastimes (like mud pie making and Zebco fishing and puppy chasing and playing in the blanket tents my grandmother built), to gangly teenage years spent with friends (tending my brother after a dog bite, family fish fries with young cousins, playing my flute for the cows), to fleeting college days and ...