The Season of Winter
The most difficult time in life, I’ve read, is raising children (track meets, parties, overnights, homework, grades, tests, friend fights) while balancing time to care for aging parents.
Looking back, I have regret.
Looking forward, I am apprehensive.
The awareness of human frailty quickens, as does anxiety over change and concern of being ignored, overlooked, forgotten.
(Larry David: Dad, where’s Mom? Dad: Oh, she died last week.
Larry: What? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Dad: Well, you’re busy.)
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One year on the first day of the school year before my students arrived as I entered the high school, I looked up at the miraculous blue blue sky and wondered how many more first days I would have.
Little did I know that day would be my last “first day.” *******************
In the 19th century, Thomas Cole painted a series of four paintings he called The Voyage of Life.
The first painting—Childhood—is a magnificent landscape: an infant is on a boat drifting down a river, presumably toward birth. An angel—a heavenly being—hovers overhead closely accompanying the child.
Cole’s successive paintings—Youth—grow more complex, as the child, now a man, reaches toward the dream of what his life can or perhaps will be, full of possibilities, perchance success, but away from the angel who initially escorted him.
In painting 3—Manhood— the atmosphere is complicated, darkened and tumultuous as he faces complexities and a river full of twists and turns and frightening waterfalls; he has no immediate vision of the spiritual or his angelic guardian.
In painting four—Old Age— time has bent the man, his hair white as he stands in his beaten and weathered little boat in supplication to the spiritual, now close again as he wearies from the battle.
Though the river and his surroundings are ominously dim, only now can he again see the Angel that accompanies him; his eyes are fixed on Heaven and the divine light that shines distantly in the gloriously brilliant heavens. We can see distant Divine Beings who hover as the man prepares to return whence he came.
Of course, those around us, many of whom are young, have not that urgency, that sense that we will not be here much longer.
Those around us have busy lives and desires: they do not see or feel as we whose time narrows.
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There is a reason God gave us seasons.
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We joyfully remember days of laughter and warmth and the soft skin of a newborn but these are simply memories, the past, not our future, perhaps even occasional intrusions into our children’s lives.
And so we go, listening to voices and sounds the young do not, indeed, cannot hear.
Memories can be ghosts: our grandchildren do not want to acknowledge that once they were little (perhaps even two years ago?) and dependent and innocent, though to us in old age—those days are only a whisper away, the mere turning of a page.
Every now and then, however, it brings great joy to take out pictures of Halloween costumes and baby dolls and the seven year old boy sound asleep in a tiny pup tent on the porch or two sisters pretending to be Incredible Hulk.
Sometimes life feels circular; sometimes, however, it is very, very linear.
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In truth, God has made all things beautiful in their own time and He has indeed planted eternity in the human heart.
Though it may appear so, this universe is not one of chaos, but of events slated to happen.
And even though Winter tugs at the bones and sinews, in old age, there is at last time to drink in the cheerful chatter of neighborhood birds (those Blue Jays are terrible gossips!), to let the fragrance of Spring lilacs swell in each breath and to work in the garden turning dirt, planting, running your fingers through the very substance of Earth.
There is no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.
