>From Jan, [email protected] Rocking with Serenity (from the Sunday Afternoon Rocking series) A storm ripped through my yard over a year ago, complete with resounding thunder and streaks of angry violent lightening that split the sky, complete fierce streaks of rain that pounded down unrelenting and dark clouds that promised destruction. When it was over, the maple I had nursed from a mere sprout into a fine tall tree had split and leaned threateningly to one side. We tried to save it, tried to cut away the damaged parts, and let the rest on the opposite side flourish. But my son's wedding was planned in my yard, and with so many people about, it simply seemed too precarious a chance to take. I agreed to allow it to be cut, something I find difficult to ever do. My grown son was crushed. He could remember the day the little fragile maple tree first sprung up in a flower bed, too close to the house, and how it was salvaged by being moved to its own place in the yard. He asked that we leave the trunk. I argued that a bare trunk of a tree in the yard would not be pretty, but he pleaded and promised later to carve it into something pretty if I would only leave it. And so I did. Throughout the wedding, all the rest of the summer, it sat there…a bare ugly stump. Autumn came and all around other maple trees flourished their reds and their golds, and still it sat…a bare ugly stump. In winter it was sometimes graced with a garment of sparkling snow, but for the most part it remained what it had become. And then spring came. And one day I looked for the bare ugly stump and did not find it. I gasped at what I did see. The stump looked more like a bush! LIFE was in it! Sprouting all about from the sides of its bark were tiny fresh green shoots bearing the beginnings of leaves! Hundreds of them. I pointed it out to my husband and he said, "Do you want me to get rid of that stump this year? It can never really be a tree now." And I shook my head adamantly. "No," I replied. "Anything that wants to live so badly has spirit in it…let it live, let it be what it can be." And I was amazed that the tree I thought was surely dead, the tree that for all practical intents and purposes had given up life to storm and chain saw, was not dead. Unable to sprout and grow from limbs and trunk rising into the air, it had simply reached into the soil with its probing roots, reached and prodded until finally it found the sustenance and nourishment to sprout again, to send tiny green shoots out to grace our yard again. It was a reminder. And a promise. And a lesson. The winds of life came fierce this year, and the last of a family was gone. Only four of them were left, that family that began in 1910, and none with living children. I was the daughter of their brother gone many years before, and so the four sisters were especially precious to me…and me to them. And I traveled constantly to be with them, and we spoke on the phone virtually every day. As my children had flown the nest, my goal in life seemed to be to nurture those roots, care for them in their last days, give back something of what they had given so long to me, and draw from them as many memories as I could to sustain the rest of my own life. But within two years they were gone, and the last of them in February of this year. I was not expecting it to happen so soon or so quickly. I should have been but I was not. I felt a fierce storm had passed. And though I have lived long enough to be well acquainted with inevitable good-byes, to lay it all to rest with those I know are simply "on loan" to us, I found this time more than difficult. Perhaps it was because I so identified with this family, and had for all of my life. Perhaps it was because there were so few of us, and therefore the ties were infinitely more precious. Perhaps it was because it was literally the end of a family line, or perhaps it was because it was almost literally the end of my connection with the homeland that my family had inhabited for nearly two hundred years. Perhaps it was because they had become so much the center of my need to nurture and give. I do not know. But I admit to wondering sometimes what my life was really to be about now. That is sad, I know, for I have a loving family left, mother, and children and husband. But I confess this crossed my mind. And the winter moved on, and I felt I had left some important and vibrant part of me back in the cold storms of February. I am not sure I really noticed spring this year, and if I did it was with some semblance of guilt that I could not point out the flowers to my aunts or speak to them about the coming spring, and make promises of their returning health that I could not keep. And so spring came, and summer began. I smiled and laughed and moved through the days, but my heart was not in it. And then came July…and my first grandchild, my son's child. Serenity. My son, realizing what the death of my aunts had been to me, and knowing how deeply I regretted that our line had come to an abrupt end, with all of them gone now and me the last to bear the surname, gave Serenity that surname as a middle name. I was grateful and touched. Perhaps the surname would live on then, not as a surname, but as a name to be passed on, and the stories of a family with it. I nestled the small body against my own and rocked, grateful to finally be alone with this little being, to remember the days of my own children's births. Memories flooded, and I remembered something curious my father had said at the birth of my son, his first grandchild. "I started all this!," he bragged proudly. I remember laughing, and thinking, "Typical grandpa. Yeah, dad, and you had a bit of help." So I was amused at my own thought as I held this tiny creature with her creamy skin and perfect features. "I started all this…if it had not been for…" and suddenly a bit of awe overtook me. I lay that baby down in my lap and gazed at her face, searching for family resemblances, seeing one of my own children in that creamy complexion and those fat chubby cheeks. I was relieved not to see any sign of the "family monument", the nose that gives us away as a certain family line. I checked her hands and sure enough there were the long slender fingers of my father's family, and there was the dark hair of my mother's. Of course, I admitted, it could also be of her own mother's family. I checked the tiny toes, relieved to see those must have come from another side of the house. I laughed at my own attempts to peg this tiny being into neat little family pigeon holes, and remembered doing this as a mother, and now I was a grandmother doing this all over again. And the thoughts kept coming. All the time thinking, thinking a hundred myriad thoughts. All the things new grandparents must feel and think flooded my mind and my heart. I realized I was literally holding in my hands a child that was here because of all the people I loved, and all the people her mother's family had loved, all somehow now in one package. I realized I was holding in my hands the culmination of all of our roots, our ancestry. Mentally I traced back all of the grandparents on my side of the house for as far as I could remember, and realized that because each of those couples had come together in all of those generations…we now had Serenity. Mentally I traced all of the grandparents I knew of on her mother's side of the house, and realized again that because they were…she was…Serenity. And though it seems so perfectly logical, for a moment the awesome realization struck me as the wondrous thing it really is. Our roots were alive and well…and she was the fresh young budding sprout springing from those roots. The stump of the tree that sat there dormant all winter was only waiting a bit for spring, for summer. Our family only appeared to have ended, our family line's name had changed, yes. And I the last to bear the line's ancestral name, but the tree was not really gone. Unable to sprout and grow from limbs and trunk rising into the air, it had simply reached into the soil with its probing roots, reached and prodded until finally it found the sustenance and nourishment to sprout again, to send tiny budding shoots out to grace our family again. It was a reminder. And a promise. And a lesson. I settled back in the rocker with Serenity. And then the other typical thoughts of grandparents flooded me. I thought of all the things I could do with this little being I could not do with my own. In another stage of life now, I had the time and the financial means I did not have when I was struggling to bring up a family. I was nearing retirement. I could bake cookies any day! I could sit and build block castles and play dress-up at any time of day…or night! I could take spur of the moment field trips, and I could nap until noon in order to have a slumber party at night! I could… and so I became a grandmother. I sat and rocked, as I do most every day now, with Serenity laying against my heart, and serenity warming the inside of it. I rock now…with Serenity. Copyright ©2002JanPhilpot ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (Note: Afternoon Rocking messages are meant to be passed on, meant to be shared...simply share as written without alterations...and in entirety. Thanks, jan) Sunday Afternoon Rocking columns are distributed weekly on the list Sunday Rocking. This is not a "reply to" list, and normally only one message per week will come across it, that being the column. 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