Moment of Clarity

Photo by Hansueli Krapf

In many ways, this has NOT been a good day.  Blogging memes and hearing from all of you has kept my spirits up today, but just a few minutes ago, as I was getting Brigid the Supertoddler ready for bed, she got choked on a drink of water, and the panic was instantaneous.  Normally, if something like this happens, she gets over it, she fusses for a minute just because she wants to know I care, and of course, I do care, so I ask her if she's okay and baby her for a minute and then she's happy as a clam again.  This was the first time in her young life that she had a fit of choking that actually scared HER.  When the baby gets scared, all the Mom alarms and hormones go off in me at once and shriek, "SAVE THE BABY!!!"  It's moments like that when my mother's death nine months ago feels like the wound from which I will never recover.  I wanted to call her, once Brigid had calmed down and was safely tucked up in bed, so she could help me come down from that adrenaline rush.  Since I can't, I wanted to cry instead.

Because you see, this isn't the only thing I'm facing right now.  The REAL terror is the impending financial doom that I'm facing, that is going to hit my life Friday, October 28, if large sums of money don't rain down on me from Heaven, and I'm really not holding my breath on that.  There's absolutely nothing I can do about this--it is the train wreck you see coming and can only stand and watch, except my vantage point is that of standing on the track.

And so, in the midst of it all, I am going to stop.  It is cold here where I live--it didn't break 60 degrees all day, as far as I know, and that's pretty chilly for October--and being the very strange person I've always been, I just LOVE cold weather.  The rest of the world feels like it comes back to life as Spring starts to, well, spring, and greenery and new life begin to peek through the brown.  What I mostly see in that is the impending heat of Summer.  I feel life and health course through my veins once again when there begins to be a true nip in the air, that little bite at the tail end of a gust of wind that whispers, "Snow!" in my ear as it passes by.  Nothing changes that; nothing perturbs it.  At some point, every single year, if you live in the right latitudes, that moment will come.  And this year, it came today.  And I want to stop in the midst of the panic and the turmoil and thank God for this day.  Anne of Green Gables said it best, and even she was quoting Robert Browning: "God's in his heaven/All's right with the world." 

"As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22, NRSV).  And neither will my moment of perfect chill, perfect peace, perfect contentment.