There Will Always Be

I am certain every street in the neighborhood was visited by every child dressed in every costume imaginable.

I am certain every piece of candy was counted, sorted, and traded in first round drafts until, comatose, each child was ushered off to bed.

I am certain I’m glad the Autumn curtain fell as it did with the snows, the friendliness and the overall good company of so many fine people. And as we move through the home picking up (already) more candy wrappers than I’m pleased to find (though I would have been doing the same thing were I as young and invincible), I’m grateful for the coming dormancy of winter.

I think of our table and of the altar it really is in every home…

…around it there have been meals without number, most of them wonderful…some not so much. Some slow and languid, others rushed and fragmented, to put it mildly.

…there have been the most memorable conversations and, unfortunately, conversations edged with a prim politeness toward one another because the tension in the air got in the way of a heart’s better courtesies. There has been much laughter and not a few tears. There has been a terrific bubbling fount of Mom! Dad! Guess What! and no shortage of I Said Leave Your Brother Alone.

A lot has happened around that table. And I’m looking forward to the upcoming months of relative hibernation as the colder weather closes in and the fire in the hearth affords more chess games than the backyard affords any chance of the warmer weather’s game-playing.

In this house there is always something to clean up.

There is always someone to feed.

There is always laundry to be done.

There is always, daily, world without end, myriad ways to step into life…or, better said, myriad places to invite Life into the goings on.

There will be hurt.

There will be healing.

There will be plenty.

And want.

But there will always be, thank God, friends to connect with unexpectedly…

…like in hallways at cocktail parties, where five minutes of catching up give us what we need to get to the next place because we remember, again, that everyone is pretty much in the same season, working double-time to navigate the best and the not-so-best.

Here’s hoping that, as we enter our relative dormancies, our reflections and pauses come to fruition in real words said that bind up and bind together, real actions that make real differences; that tables are surrounded with life and living and joys and sorrows and every inward and outward texture that makes up the fabric in which we live and walk and run-too-fast, tear down and mend back up once again.