Weaving The Dream

So here I am with my husband at our oldest son’s, Stephen, home in northern Virginia.  He and our daughter-in-law, Mindy, just moved into this house last month and the living room is filled with unpacked boxes.

Yesterday, Bob helped Stephen install three new water-efficient toilets.  Over the years, Bob has shown his sons how to fix, mend, repair and replace what can’t be repaired.  Bob learned much of that from his father.

While Bob and Stephen took care of the toilets, I put on garden gloves, grabbed a rake and a pair of pruners and went outside to make an initial dent in the thick carpet of leaves that lay on all their flower beds and to trim back some of the shrubs.

Glad to be outside in the balmy (40 degree) weather in relative quiet, stretching and working my muscles, I piled up leaves and clipped back magnolia bushes and other shrubs.  As I worked, I was strongly aware not only of the passing of seasons but of the passing down of traditions and skills.

When Stephen was only five, Bob and I moved him and his two brothers to our 1840’s Greek Revival farmhouse in the foothills of the Catskills. Over the next few years, every time my mom and dad came to visit, Dad came prepared to help with the yard work—digging, weeding, planting, mulching.  Many times he brought divisions of his carefully grown daylilies for us to plant. 

Being my father’s daughter, I did for Stephen and Mindy, as my dad has done for Bob and I, raking leaves and pruning back deadwood.

Yesterday, I made sweet rolls for Thanksgiving breakfast, having taken up the tradition from my mother.  This morning, my son and I worked together at the sink to first clean and then prepare the turkey for roasting.  And I remember my mother standing in the kitchen of my childhood home, cleaning the turkey and suddenly lifting it by its wings to pretending this naked turkey was talking and squawking. My siblings and I laughed at her silliness.

While today’s turkey roasted, Mindy and I stood together preparing pies and I showed her how to crimp the crust the way my mother showed me.

Yesterday and today, I am overwhelmed by such a strong sense of the passing of seasons and the ongoing cycle of the generations.

Not everyone gets a chance to experience this.  Not everyone wants to. 

But I do.  So Bob and I are especially grateful this Thanksgiving for the opportunity to do for our son and daughter-in-law what our parents have done for my husband and I—pass on life skills and family traditions, and work to create a sense of home and an appreciation for the legacies and lineage that are our roots.

Even as I clipped the deadwood from an old magnolia at the corner of their house, I also noted the buds of new growth just waiting for Spring’s warmth to blossom forth.

And someday, as they fill this home with the new growth of the next generation, Stephen and Mindy will do for their child what Bob and I now do for them—and give thanks in the doing.