The Limbs Lopped Off

We add things in to our lives one at a time -- small things.
Baking bread every other day.
A front porch and a fence that lets the kids run
while we drink coffee together.
Buying the organic flour from the bulk bins at the natural grocery store.
Daddy making pizza from scratch on Fridays.
Batches of scones every Saturday morning.
The making of the yogurt.
The laundry washing and drying and folding and putting away.
The clothesline.
The walks in the woods, and the lunches by the water.
The music we play,
and the friends we pray with.
Watering the houseplants.
Where and how we read our Bibles.
We settle into our grooves,
weeding out the things that don't work for us,
and adjusting each thing that does until it's a good fit.

Several times in our twenty years of marriage,
our life has gotten lost, it feels like.
A baby is born, and the baking ceases.
The dishes go undone,
because we haven't found our new rhythm yet.
The baby cries when it's time for cooking,
and we eat McDonald's, because everyone is hungry.

There's a job loss, and a forced move,
and our pictures are packed away,
and we don't see us on the walls anymore.
Are we still here
if we don't see ourselves smiling together anymore on the walls?

Just as we finish painting the oppressive walls
we were too tired to paint at first,
and we take the pictures out of their boxes,
and remember ourselves in the smiling frames,
and breathe again in the salt air,
holding hands on the beach,
and seeing the kids smile and run,
a call comes that we know must be answered,
and we pack up the music again.
We don't hear the songs of our life for awhile.

We miss ourselves.
The rhythm of the bread and the music and the yogurt and granola.
The way we work and the way we play.
The breathing and the writing and the smiling family photos.
The knitting of our days, one by one, into fabric.

Sometimes it's years before the pictures go back up,
and I take them out to look at them, and to hang them up,
and the children in the picture aren't with me anymore.
My babies with their curls are men and women now.
Almost, anyway.
And their siblings haven't seen their infant perfection,
because the pictures weren't on the walls
for the first few years of their lives.
And we lived in other places that they don't know.
And we were another family that they never met.
And I struggle not to cry
because other people stay in the same places always,
never putting their pictures and their music and their baking in a box.
It seems like they have always been untrimmed and unpruned,
and I grieve the limbs we had lopped off.

So many new grocery stores to learn,
and friendships to build,
and green places to find,
and we had to find them without our pictures on the walls.