The Shape of a Life

This picture draws me in. Like I am in the canoe gliding through turquoise water. I see the woman sitting in the bow. The way she holds the paddle and turns her head. 

What is she thinking?

Is she picturing her life when the honeymoon is over? Does she wonder how she’ll  feel when she leaves Idaho for the Great Lakes? Does she still feel sad her mom never met her new husband? 

Did she know the years ahead would not be graphed as a single rising line. Did she expect, like most of us, her life would ascend without dips or stops or fallbacks? 

She couldn’t foresee she would move across the country from her family cattle ranch. Never to return for anything longer than a visit. 

She couldn’t know she would bury her baby daughter soon after her little girl learned to walk. 

Or she and her husband would work to pay for the family home they built not once, but twice. 

She couldn’t expect to watch her teenage grandson endure months of surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation. 

Or that she’d lose her husband little by little as he succumbed to Parkinson’s disease. Then, after all, she would go first. 

And still. 

She couldn’t imagine the surge of emotion each time one of her six children was placed in her arms for the first time. 

She couldn’t picture the students she would inspire 2,000 miles from the ranch. 

Or that she’d fall in love 20 times over as she welcomed each grandbaby into the world, 

Or that her great-granddaughter would carry her name. 

She couldn’t envision the people she nurtured who would produce their own beautiful fruit and remember her touch. 

The woman is my mom. As seen through my dad’s camera lens. On her honeymoon in the Canadian Rockies. She began a life that was anything but linear. 

Instead it was a 3-dimensional shape drawn with precision and scribbled in a rush, erased, crossed through and rewritten. A shape sewn with threads she gathered and threads she received, over and under and through.

A life characterized by transitions she navigated like the canoe — hold, pull, reset. Transitions she learned to accept and work through. Transitions she allowed to change her because she trusted God. 

A life made beautiful by the person and the people it created.