The Sunday Letter
Last Sunday I wrote to you from the middle of a stretch of summer storms. This week I am writing you from the far side of a long drive home, still shaking the salt out of my ears, because we spent a few days down in the Florida Keys with the whole family.
Marathon. Right in the heart of the Keys, where the water goes every shade of green there is and the Seven Mile Bridge runs off toward Key West like a dare. We had all of them with us, which does not happen as often as I would like anymore. Everybody under one roof, everybody at one table, the whole loud wonderful lot of us.
We spent most of it on the water. That is the thing to do down there, and we did it without apology. Somebody was always jumping off the back of the boat. Somebody was always hollering to look at this. And in the afternoons, the way it happens down there in August, the storms would build up out on the horizon, tall gray towers of them standing way off over the Gulf, close enough to watch and far enough to leave us alone.
One of those afternoons we watched a waterspout come down. A real one, a thin twisting rope of water and cloud reaching from the sky to the sea, off in the distance where it could not touch us. The whole boat went quiet. Then everybody started talking at once, the way people do when they have seen a thing together that none of them will forget. I looked around at all those faces, my people, lit up and pointing at the same patch of sky, and I thought: I would not trade this for anything on earth.
That is the part I keep coming back to now that I am home. Not the fishing, not the water, not even the waterspout. The faces. A few days is not very long. But a few days with everyone you love in one place, laughing at the same thing at the same time, is about as close to full as a heart gets.
When it was time to head back, Misti and I brought the boat home ourselves, the long run up to Southwest Florida with the coast sliding by on one side and the open water on the other. There is a lot of time to think on a ride like that. We did not fill all of it with talking. We just sat with the hum of the motor and the miles going under us, pondering the days we had just had, considering how quick they went, and mostly treasuring the fact that we got to have them at all, and that we got to have them together.
The house is quiet again now. The coolers are washed and stacked in the garage. And I am sitting here grateful, the way you get grateful only after a good thing is already behind you, for every single hour of it.
If your people gathered somewhere this summer, or are about to, I hope you will take a minute with it while you are still in it. These are the days the rest of our lives get built on.
That’s the week. See you next Sunday.
The South, Shared.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
I have been home a couple of days now, and the quiet of the house has me thinking about how fast it all went. We plan a trip like that for months. We talk about it, we count down to it, we pack the car full. And then it is Sunday and it is over, and you would swear the days themselves were made of something that melts.
That is the ache underneath every good gathering, is it not. The knowing, even in the middle of it, that it will end. You are standing on the boat with everyone you love, watching a storm you will never see again build up over the Gulf, and some quiet part of you is already saying: hold on to this.
Scripture does not ask us to pretend the days are not short. It asks us to let their shortness teach us something.
“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:12
Number our days. Not endless days, not guaranteed days. Numbered ones. The verse does not hand us more time. It hands us eyes to see the time we have, and to spend it on what actually matters, which after fifty-some years I can tell you is almost never the thing we worried about and almost always the people in the boat.
I am not naturally good at this. I am a planner. I spend a lot of my life in the next thing, the next week, the drive home before we have even arrived. But there is an older, better instinct, and I saw it on that boat when we all went quiet at the same moment. There is a woman in the Gospels who shows us the way.
“But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” — Luke 2:19
Treasured them up. Held them. Turned them over like something precious, because they were. That is what I want to learn to do with the good days while I am still in them, and not only after the coolers are washed and put away.
So if you are in the middle of a good thing this week, a full house, a crowded table, a face you do not get to see often enough, I hope you will do the one thing I always forget to do. Look up. Take the picture in your mind. The light is on tonight, warm and steady over all of it, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.