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When people ask me: “Where are you from?” I find it hard to answer. My home is not so much a place as it is something that grew inside of me, or as James Baldwin would say, my home is “an irrevocable condition,” a condition I acquired in the “way back” of a Rambler station wagon in the time before seatbelts and the interstate highway system, in the time when families were large, children were the cargo, and luggage went on the roof. It was not the houses or the bicycles or the toys that we were leaving behind that spoke to me of home, but rather, it was the landscape that faded into the distance as the miles added up on our journey to somewhere else. Eventually, the years added up alongside the miles, and even after I took the wheel, it was the landscape and the roots of the people it sprouted that let me know when I was home. Necessity not wanderlust led me to spend so much time moving from place to place. My father was a Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force. My early childhood was marked by frequent moves across the country as my father was deployed or re-assigned in the service of his country. By the time we finally landed in suburbia, it was too late—my condition was chronic and could not be undone. I had the stubborn awareness that all places are not the same. Though most of my life has been spent in the city, I know that the city is not my home. Urban living serves practical needs like higher education, employment, and access to state-of-the-art health care, but my home is in small towns and wide open spaces, places that serve my soul: My home is where laundry flaps on a clothesline and cows graze in the pasture. My home is where the air smells of rain, wet dirt, and new grass. My home is where Amish buggies and giant combines slow the few cars trailing behind them. My home is on dusty dirt roads where indigenous people sell their colorful handicrafts from makeshift stands against a backdrop of majestic mountains and prickly cacti. My home is in small villages where people know your name and generations of your family. My home is where people give directions to strangers using fence posts, barns, and disabled tractors as landmarks. My home is where there are old cisterns in the yard and Seckel pears falling from trees that shade the porch. My home is where children swim in the creek, race frogs, pick wild berries, and wear necklaces woven from dandelions. My home is where the sheriff might also be a volunteer fireman and a farmer might drive the ambulance. My home is where a big night out is a trip to the local custard stand—the only establishment for miles around. My home is where the blast of a locomotive’s air horn and the rumble of coal cars say it is time for dinner. My home is where a trip to the city is a big deal but coming home is better. My home is where a person’s reputation is known and it matters, where hard work and resourcefulness are The Designer’s brand. My home is where a man can have a doctorate in chemistry and still farm the land, where he has the know-how to make everything from fudge to a barn and repair anything from a leaky faucet to a truck’s torn upholstery. My home is where business establishments still close on Sundays. My home is where productive labor is a joy and people join hands with God to raise a crop or expand a herd, places where people turn trees into furniture and fruit into jelly. People ask me: “Where are you from?” Where am I from? I dwell in the city but my roots are in the dust of the earth and in the soil of country landscapes; my heart belongs to stalwart and generous neighbors who care for the earth and for each other; and my soul rests in the wisdom of The One who planted a garden in Eden and put there the man and woman he had made.
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I go to bed with frost in the morning forecast. After the brutally hot and humid summer we've had, I am delighted to awaken to a chilly morning. Shivering in my PJs, I look for something to wear. Scanning the options in my bedroom closet, I accept it is time to pull out the fall and winter clothes. I go to my spare bedroom and slide open the closet door. Hanging there is the sum total of my cold weather wardrobe: four sweaters and two sweatshirts. As with my shoes, I will have to employ carbon dating to determine the age of these items. They probably aren’t in style any longer, but then I remind myself neither are old people, social courtesies and democracy. I used to be a working, socializing gal. Surely this can’t be all the clothing I own. I dig into old dresser drawers and scour every closet and shelf only to find it is true. COVID ushered in a style change that defied the seasons and became permanent. COVID came just in time to save me from the Spanx/shapewear movement—another life threatening cause of shortness of breath. Sweat pants, blue jeans, and t-shirts are my all-seasons, all-occasion wardrobe. And speaking of sweat, I am pretty sure sweat is glitter for people. That’s about all the accessorizing and sparkle I have left in me these days. While I sometimes long for adventure or at least a special occasion, looking at my wardrobe, I am relieved by the lack of invitations. My wardrobe is strictly casual, and when I say casual, I mean I could sleep comfortably in anything hanging in my closet. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about the prom this year. A couple of years ago, post-COVID, I did get the idea that I might want to shop, see what’s in style. I hit the strip mall with all the popular women’s clothiers. I walked into the first store and discovered that a t-shirt cost $60.00. I walked out. I found the same thing next door. With no real reason to shop and no small fortune to spend, I abandoned my updating efforts. If people can refuse to return to the office post-COVID, I can refuse to shop. I will work the stuff I have at home thank you very much. And as to “style,” I am not sure what might be in style or if “in style” is even a thing any longer. When I step out in public I can’t really distinguish social class or occasion from the way people dress save for the wealthiest who I spot out for a morning stroll at 10 AM decked out in high-end gym clothes that actually look like the aforementioned shapewear complemented by some expensive jewelry and an equally expensive breed of dog on a leash. Turns out the new work from home movement is a coming out party for underwear and pure bred canines. So disconnected am I from the social scene, I have to ponder what a special occasion might be for me, one that would require special clothing, and then I say a prayer of gratitude that I will never again have to wear pantyhose. While they were a great improvement over nylon stockings and garter belts, they came with their own unpleasant side effects. And really, does anyone even make pantyhose anymore? I don’t see those cute little plastic eggs on display in any store in which I shop. Maybe a leg wax and pedicure are now mandatory. Seems like a lot more time and expense for such a temporary purchase. Yet another reason to stay home and watch other people exercise on YouTube. At my age I suspect I have only two special occasions left in me. I could get arrested, but I’ve seen plenty of mug shots. I am confident I can pull together that look from what I already own. The second special occasion that still awaits me is a trip to the morgue. I am pretty sure my wrinkled old birthday suit will get me past the bouncer. A nation that grew to greatness from the efforts of the tempest-tossed and wretched refuse of teeming shores, that saved the world from fascism, and sent men to the moon by employing vision and powers of the mind is seeking a statesperson. This nation is seeking honorable men and women for leadership positions to restore a great country to decency. The nation is seeking an intelligent, insightful individual with no conflicts of interest who desires to do what is right even in the face of opposition or party loyalties, a person who can lead a revolution of thought and behavior. This person should be able to speak the truth with respect. No prisoners of political correctness or impulsivity should apply. Good candidates will allow their own ideas to be informed by other points of view. We are looking for someone who can acknowledge the truth about the past while leading us into the future. The ideal candidate will be of sound mind. Other important qualities include grace, dignity, restraint, compassion, and empathy. He or she will provide a conscience for capitalism--understanding that economic growth and prosperity do not have to come at the price of greed, deceit, corruption, or poor quality goods and services. We are looking for people with educated minds capable of seeing the big picture and the long term consequences of action. The statesperson should be able to speak in an articulate fashion providing clarity about views and positions without insulting others. Preferred applicants will be those who can get responsible gun owners to the table to discuss how to protect second amendment rights as well as the lives of school children, concert-goers, and church members. A worthy candidate is someone who can acknowledge the seismic changes in the culture that have left too many people feeling confused and angry without any idea about how the world works, how to find a job or get ahead--someone who understands that all the rules about living have been upended and can fill us with hope in this time of uncertainty, someone who can give people a future and a will to live. The right individual will be able to elevate good, working, productive people above celebrity. Applicants should have the strength to call out companies that collude to create epidemics and economic crashes and then benefit again by charging the public for the antidotes. The best candidates are those who live by example, obeying the laws of the land and rules of civility. We are not looking for great men and women. We are looking for good ones. We are seeking someone who can transform public opinion about government service and make it an honorable aspiration once again. Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country. Apply in person. I set out on the walking path as usual this morning. At the end of the path there is a large commercial property. Most days I pick up a few extra miles by circling the lot twice before reversing for home. Lately, I have encountered a maintenance worker there on my first pass around the lot. The maintenance worker is an older gentleman. His build is so slight that his baseball cap alone seems to overwhelm his small frame. He pushes a cart full of brooms and shovels, sprays and rags while pulling a vacuum cleaner behind him. This busy man is not much taller than the cart he maneuvers around this giant property. Most days I greet him with a smile and a simple hello. Some days I compliment him on the way he keeps the property looking so lovely. This morning as I came around a bend in the sidewalk I saw the maintenance worker taking a break at a picnic table inside a small pavilion. He turned to me and said, “There’s my little lady.” I laughed and said, “I think God intended for us to meet. I’m Lilli.” Smiling broadly, he extended his hand to me, “Jesse.” The encounter was pleasant and brief, but as I walked on I could not ignore the strength that came from his hand. Had we stood side-by-side, no one would have doubted that I was the sturdier one of this pair, and yet the strength there in his hand… And that feeling of strength remained upon my palm and at the base of my thumb for much of the day. Ironically, the right hand I offered to Jesse is a hand weakened from radiation following breast cancer treatment. It started with a fibrosis in my shoulder and the nerve pain inched its way down my arm into my hand. I first noticed the pain and the weakness as I struggled to lift a small pot of boiling water from the stove. But here, after this brief encounter, I felt a renewed if not unusual strength in my right hand. I know that it has become cliché to say that people and things are not always what they seem or that looks can be deceiving, but the strength in Jesse’s hand was a needed reminder for me. We make big judgments about people based on a glance, but most people have unseen strengths earned through hardship, work, and even the ordinary demands of daily living. I study my weakened hand and feel Jesse’s strength upon it, a strength that was given freely and generously in response to nothing more than a smile and a kind word or two, and I wonder: can it really be that easy? Share your strength with someone today. I am beginning to suspect that good hygiene has been my downfall, my kryptonite, the real reason I did not live an accomplished life outside my own four walls. It took retirement to shine the spotlight on what should have been obvious much earlier: I am a powerhouse in my pajamas but once I stop to take a shower and get dressed, I’m like Samson with a fresh haircut--my superpowers fall into the waste bin, gone in a snip. I can leap tall buildings (or at least a high mattress) with a single bound when I awaken in the morning. I fire up the computer and turn on the day. I make my bed. I straighten up my entire apartment and put away the dishes. I water the plants. I check the refrigerator for aged leftovers and wrap up the remains for the trash. I wipe down the bathroom sink and empty the trash can. I replace the toilet paper roll and put out a clean hand towel. I clean out my purse and check my change for valuable coins. I do my squats, lunges, pushups, wall squats, planks, and sit-to-stand exercises. I say my prayers. I pay my online bills and write cards to far away friends. I sort the laundry with actual care, checking the pockets for rogue Kleenex and gum wrappers carried home from use during my morning walks. I contemplate what else I can do with the day. And then it’s 8:30 AM, and I eat breakfast. I am completely comfortable and relaxed in my PJs. No tight waistband. No irritating fabric. No shoes Nothing to tug at me or to irritate my flesh or my nerves. No looking in the mirror to put the focus on how I look instead of what I can do. I am so happy in my pajamas that I am sure that if I actually encountered someone that I would be the kindest version of myself which gets me to thinking of soldiers sleeping all night in trenches waking in their combat fatigues ready for battle. Could my PJs be my compassion fatigues? Am I too old to save the world? I think back to my childhood when my younger sister was a preschooler. My mother would say “brush your hair” to which my sister would reply “Why? I’m not going anywhere.” Preschoolers have this down. No wonder they kick and scream when forced to dress. We lose something with age, but I am getting it back! The beauty of retirement is that I can spend all day in my PJs. I can answer the door at three o’clock in the afternoon dressed in my pajamas, sporting bedhead and morning breath and people will just shrug and say, “Old people.” With the general state of our couture, maybe we can get away with wearing our compassion fatigues in public. Comfortable old people changing the world! There is one minor but important exception: if you sleep in the nude, you might what to call that outfit your passion fatigues and do your work from home. Earlier this week I stepped out of my door onto the walking path. The sky was clear and brilliant blue in every direction save for a faint smudge that was the sleeping moon, God’s thumbprint on a new day. As I walked, somewhere in Utah the police stepped into a crime scene searching for evidence, a fingerprint perhaps. A young man, a boy really, had turned assassin. Where could he be? Why did he do it? Somewhere else, a grief stricken family stepped out onto the tarmac to receive the body of their son, husband, and father. He had left his handprint on their hearts. They will be devastated for a long time to come. Little was known about the shooter that morning. The victim was well known. Many people disagreed strongly with the victim’s rhetoric. Right or wrong in his point of view, killing him was wrong, and it did not make him a saint, but it did make him a martyr, silencing the opposition, elevating his words and beliefs, giving them even more attention and power. People who had never heard of him will now remember him forever. No one will remember the shooter’s name. He will be just another lost boy with a gun. I walked on thinking of all of them, all of us. We are all part of the same family. Every mother and father can imagine the grief of both sets of parents, both families. A mother myself, I ponder the question, “what is happening to our sons?” Why are they especially vulnerable to the hate proliferating in our society through our politics, social media, and video games? Why, increasingly, do polls show young men believe in violence as a solution to life’s problems? As an aging adult, I am exhausted by the hate and cruelty of some of our politicians and by the unchecked social media that generates continuous, unrelenting outrage to sell advertising. Perhaps a young person still gaining control of his impulses and the powers of his mind is unable to manage it, to shove it down, to find another outlet. In the growing isolation in which we live, the anger, outrage, and hatred grow unchecked inside him. Maybe the pain of being invisible just makes him want to be seen, to be remembered… I walked along that morning contemplating what has happened to our humanity. Fifty years ago a self-esteem movement began to gain momentum. Perhaps thinking of oneself has gone too far. We now live in an age of narcissism. Long past loving our neighbors as ourselves, we elected a man for president who once boasted that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue in New York and get away with it, a man convicted of sexual assault and fraud, a man who has upended the entire world with his cruelty. Is this the new role model for young men? Alone on the path, I thought of the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story in which robbers strip, beat, and leave a Jewish man for dead alongside a road. A Jewish priest and a Levite cross the street to avoid the victim, to pass him by, but another traveler, a Samaritan is “moved with compassion” and stops to help even though Jews and Samaritans were known to be antagonistic toward one another. Perhaps the Jewish priest and the Levite who passed by the suffering victim thought only about themselves, their fears, their reputations: “What’s in it for me? What are the risks to me if I stop? What will people in my social circle think of me?” But the Samaritan was capable of thinking first about the victim: “What will happen to him if I don’t stop?” Perhaps, implicit in that thought was the Samaritan’s belief that his own soul would be irreparably damaged if he failed to attend to his neighbor’s needs. The Samaritan boldly left his fingerprints at the scene of the crime because he did not need to hide. I returned home exhausted by the awareness that the hateful rhetoric would likely escalate in the days ahead, that any attempt at conversation would be deemed evidence of being “far right” or “radical left.” As I stepped inside my home, I glanced back at the thumbprint on the sky and silently promised the One who had left it there that I will stop for a stranger in need regardless of his politics. Compassion is the high road and the only road out of this mess. Days before she died, my cousin Marcia and I sat around her sister’s dining room table. The meal long finished, we chatted into the evening about old times. Perhaps it is the way karma works, but somehow the conversation came around to what people might say about each of us after we died. We both smiled at the thought that her brother born with cerebral palsy and a speech impediment would be the one who would draw the biggest crowd to his funeral, the one about whom there would be so much to say, a testimony to George’s beautiful nature and the unwavering devotion of his parents and siblings. I spoke with Marcia again the morning of her scheduled medical procedure, a procedure intended to clear a blocked artery. She felt a little “off” she told me, blaming the new medicine the doctor had prescribed prior to the surgery, but I had already heard it in her voice, and I felt it too. Something was off and it hovered. Marcia spent most of the day in surgery after a major blood vessel exploded during the procedure. She was delivered to intensive care in an unconscious state. She never spoke to us again. She died in the night after hospital visitation rules had sent us all home. Turns out Marcia drew a big crowd to her funeral. There was much to be said about her life, her significant accomplishments, and her beautiful nature. Yesterday in the mail I received a copy of the 2009 literary journal, Alimentum, containing Marcia’s first nonfiction essay, The Proof is in the Pudding, in which she described cooking and baking to keep busy after the death of her beloved father. She noted that she did not share the faith of those who offered condolences. She searched for God and proof of everlasting life in the mixture that would become dough for pies. She wrote: “Transfiguration. It is a miracle. I have witnessed a miracle. And what other comfort people derive from faith, I pour into my pie shell and begin to believe again that in the end we are transformed and we go on. I hold the proof here in my floured hands.” They come back to us these people we have loved. Today, I hold the proof in my hands: Alimentum, Issue Eight, Summer, 2009, pages seven through nine. |
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January 2026
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