The Plans We’ve Made

“…to face unafraid the plans that we’ve made…”

The calendar image:

Snow, gloves, firewood and fires, colorful trappings, laughing groups of bundled children, family, nature.

All is calm. All is bright.

I had that.

I would walk to my grandmother’s house. While walking was in itself entertaining (with all the fields and animals and trees), I’d find something to kick as I walked - a rock, usually, seeing how long I could keep it on the road. Past Mrs. Smith’s overgrown house, over the creek, past the white brick church, past the Littleton place, past the Dunn’s, past Jaybird’s trailer, past a cousin’s place, past the dirt road that had no name, and finally to my grandmother’s house, the chimney smoke rising just so far into the air before bending, I’d come to the barely fenced-in yard of my grandmother, more scrubby shrubs than fence. Passing through a rickety wire gate (and making sure to replace the wire that held it shut), I’d follow a path that had some grown-over stones for a walkway and some repurposed tires used as planters, with never anything in them much except frogs in the summer, maybe. Hand on the handrail made of iron pipe and glancing down at the rusty iron water trough and aluminium ladle beneath the spicket, I’d enter the house to see my grandmother (on my dad’s side) sitting by the wood stove, screen door slapping behind.

As I try to type this, I realize that it is all too much to remember. The act of remembering causes a pain that then causes a stare, that then causes a departure into rogue territory where arrows of “why” and “if only” whistle past.

Just know that the calendar images come from somewhere, and that somewhere looks a lot - in my heart’s vision - like home.

This season of early darkness should be a teacher. We should learn to pull some of the irons out of the fire. We should learn to be smaller, simpler, and that it is fine not to be busy. That, in fact, we could be healing and recovering from all the intensities of the rest of the year.

I remember living by the wall heaters and the windows. We had the baseboard heater (a long, skinny thing running along the baseboard in the living room) and the common heater with ceramic cylinders wrapped in springy wire. I would live by those in cold weather, the dry, radiating heat like a magnet. It was by these heaters and cold windows that I’d think about my family and my little life. I’d pray. I’d hope. I’d fret. I’d dream.

As a growing youth, I had no plans beyond what I could get into with my cousins. It really was that simple. I could not imagine that I’d go to college or even have a career after college. In fact, because I could not fathom these things, I thought that I would die before any of those things happened.

I did not die.

I drifted through college. Drifted out. Drifted into a job. Drifted out. Repeat. All these years later, I see so much time wasted without vision. I had no leader to follow, to guide consult, and life just kept coming.

Even so,

when I can tolerate reflection, I think of the simple things that I wanted out of life. I can remember standing out back of the house and talking with my best friend Bobby about how much I didn’t want to work in an office or at a cubicle, how I wanted to be out and active. I didn’t want a job that I had to survive during the week just to breathe on the weekend. I wanted to do something with purpose. He agreed.

“…to face unafraid the plans that we’ve made…”

Today, under overcast skies and thirty degree temps, I think back on the fire in the stoves and the smell of wood smoke, the rocks kicked, the little prayers to God for the animals killed on the road, those long stares and earnest conversations and wonder if the efforts I’ve made with landscape painting would please the teenager I once was (he would not be pleased with much else, but he would be astounded that I was married). My friend and I have avoided cubicles. Money has avoided me. From December’s porch, I look onto the muted purple hills and the warm grey trees to see the future and see it as dimly as I ever have. I only know of this day and this week. At other times in life, that might have filled me with uncertainty, and truly, my life - painting efforts and everything else - is filled with uncertainty, but this season should be a teacher, as I said, and so I try to pull back the increasingly impatient tendrils of thought that probe the edges and sample the air. Fewer inputs. Fewer desires. Small and simple.

“…to face unafraid the plans that we’ve made…”

Have you ever thought about that line, the line above?

Let your mind settle on it. Speak it slowly. Read each word. Does it take on any meaning to you? It did for me. While working (at my job, not painting), I heard this line that we’ve all heard a thousand times, but it clasped my mind this time for whatever reason.

We have ideas and dreams that usually vanish when real life comes barreling down. But it does take a kind of courage to hold on to them, to snatch them from the air and plant them in dirt, to not forsake them, to keep them alive, if only in a tiny pot on a backroom windowsill.

This season, think on this.