Category: Marriage

Back to Back

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We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.
~Jane Kenyon “The Suitor”

Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea, 1947

Happiness can be an elusive suitor and is altogether undependable.

I too have had glimpses of it throughout my life – a fleeting “this is it.”
Then the clouds roll in and the ecstasy of the realization fades to mist.

I tend to trust the old reliable friends who show up regularly – like “hopeful” and “contented” and “being at peace” – plus moments when the sweetness of each breath brings tears of overwhelming joy.

Instead of pursuing happiness, (always a pursuit rather than a destination), I thrive on knowing I love deeply and am loved.
That knowledge is what gets me through the really tough times when happiness doesn’t always put in an appearance.

Love shows up.
Love has my back when I’m afraid and full of doubt.
Love persists through sadness.
Love doesn’t give up when everything hurts.
Love is sufficient.

Love is enough to bring those happy tears to my eyes…

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails.
1 Corinthians 13: 4-8a

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Where We Could Not Reach

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My father would lift me
to the ceiling in his big hands
and ask, How’s the weather up there?
And it was good, the weather
of being in his hands, his breath
of scotch and cigarettes, his face
smiling from the world below.
O daddy, was the lullaby I sang
back down to him as he stood on earth,
my great, white-shirted father, home
from work, his gold wristwatch
and wedding band gleaming
as he held me above him
for as long as he could,
before his strength failed
down there in the world I find myself
standing in tonight, my little boy
looking down from his flight
below the ceiling, cradled in my hands,
his eyes wide and already staring
into the distance beyond the man
asking him again and again,
How’s the weather up there?
~George Bilgere “Weather”.

It was hard work, dying, harder
than anything he’d ever done.

Whatever brutal, bruising, back-
breaking chore he’d forced himself

to endure—it was nothing
compared to this. And it took

so long. When would the job
be over? Who would call him

home for supper? And it was
hard for us (his children)—

all of our lives we’d heard
my mother telling us to go out,

help your father, but this
was work we could not do.

He was way out beyond us,
in a field we could not reach.
~Joyce Sutphen “My Father, Dying”

Deep in one of our closets is an old film reel of me about 16 months old sitting securely held by my father on his shoulders. I am bursting out with giggles as he repeatedly bends forward, dipping his head and shoulders down. I tip forward, looking like I am about to fall off, and when he stands back up straight, my mouth becomes a large O and I can almost remember the tummy tickle I feel. I want him to do it again and again, taking me to the edge of falling off and then bringing me back from the brink.

My father was a tall man, so being swept up onto his shoulders felt a bit like I was touching heaven.

It was as he lay dying 30 years ago this summer that I realized again how tall he was — his feet kept hitting the foot panel of the hospital bed my mother had requested for their home. We cushioned his feet with padding so he wouldn’t get abrasions even though he would never stand on them again, no longer towering over us.

His helplessness in dying was startling – this man who could build anything and accomplish whatever he set his mind to was unable to subdue his cancer. Our father, who was so self-sufficient he rarely asked for help, did not know how to ask for help now.

So we did what we could when we could tell he was uncomfortable, which wasn’t often. He didn’t say much, even though there was much we could have been saying. We didn’t reminisce. We didn’t laugh and joke together. We just were there, taking shifts catching naps on the couch so we could be available if he called out, which he never did.

This man:
who had grown up dirt poor,
fought hard with his alcoholic father
left abruptly to go to college – the first in his family –
then called to war for three years in the South Pacific.

This man:
who had raised a family on a small farm while he was a teacher,
then a supervisor, then a desk worker.

This man:
who left our family to marry another woman
but returned after a decade to ask forgiveness.

This man:
who died in a house he had built completely himself,
without assistance, from the ground up.

He didn’t need our help – he who had held tightly to us and brought us back from the brink when we went too far – he had been on the brink himself and was rescued, coming back humbled.

No question the weather is fine for him up there. I have no doubt.

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You May Not Realize…

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Without realizing it, we fill
important places in each others’ lives.
It’s that way with the guy at the corner grocery,
the mechanic at the local garage,
the family doctor, teachers, neighbors, coworkers.

Good people who are always “there,”
who can be relied upon in
small, important ways.
People who teach us,
bless us, encourage us, support us,
uplift us in the dailiness of life.

We never tell them.
I don’t know why, but we don’t.

And, of course, we fill that role ourselves.
There are those who depend on us, watch us,
learn from us, take from us.
And we never know.

You may never have proof of your importance,
but you are more important than you think.
There are always those who couldn’t do without you.
The rub is that you don’t always know who.
~Robert Fulghum from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

If there is one thing living through the pandemic taught me, it’s noticing the people in my life who may have not been as obvious to me before. I hadn’t realized how many folks truly are front-line serving others day-in and day-out.

It’s not only health care workers, grocery store clerks and school teachers but the list of essential workers is large, including law enforcement, plumbers and electricians, child care workers, water, sanitation and sewer maintenance, pastors, postal clerks, technicians who fix our cars and appliances and the farmers who tend the crops and livestock we need to live, as well as scores of others.

We are remarkably interdependent and need each other.

I realized how oblivious I had been before not taking the time to acknowledge the daily services I received from so many varied people. In fact, it has become more urgent for me to tell my family members and friends – some thousands of miles away from me – how much they mean to me.

Now, in non-pandemic times, I try to tell others – the grocery cashier, the medical assistant, the office receptionist – as simply and clearly as I can, whenever possible, that I appreciate what they have done and what they continue to do, how they make life better for us all.

I also need to continue to nurture relationships with family and friends crucial to my own well-being. I need them all.

I need you all.

And it is important to me that you know.

Well over a thousand of you receive these daily Barnstorming emails and posts – a handful of you communicate with me regularly.
I treasure those messages, thank you!

We all need encouragement that we are making a positive difference in others’ lives and you all make a difference to me.

You can always reach me by commenting on posts or emailing me privately at emilypgibson@gmail.com or giving anonymous feedback at https://barnstorming.blog/barnstormingreviews/

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When All Is Said…

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A butterfly dancing in the sunlight,
A bird singing to his mate,
The whispering pines,
The restless sea,
The gigantic mountains,
A stately tree,
The rain upon the roof,
The sun at early dawn,
A boy with rod and hook,
The babble of a shady brook,
A woman with her smiling babe,
A man whose eyes are kind and wise,
Youth that is eager and unafraid—
When all is said, I do love best
A little home where love abides,
And where there’s kindness, peace, and rest.
~Scottie McKenzie Frasier “The Things I Love”

When all is said and done,
I love best the people
who bring kindness, peace and rest
to the little house
we call home.

It is enough
and everything.

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Those Quiet Eyes…

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Who loves the rain    
    And loves his home, 
And looks on life with quiet eyes,  
     Him will I follow through the storm;    
     And at his hearth-fire keep me warm;
Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise,    
     Who loves the rain, 
     And loves his home, 
And looks on life with quiet eyes.
~Frances Shaw, “Who loves the rain” from Look To the Rainbow of Grace

Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
~Wendell Berry from “There is no going back”

What a wonder I was
when I was young, as I learn
by the stern privilege
of being old: how regardlessly
I stepped the rough pathways
of the hillside woods,
treaded hardly thinking
the tumbled stairways
of the steep streams, and worked
unaching hard days
thoughtful only of the work,
the passing light, the heat, the cool
water I gladly drank.
~Wendell Berry “VII” 2015 from Another Day

Love is a universe beyond
The daylight spending zone:
As one we more abound
Than two alone.
~Wendell Berry “VIII” 2015 from Another Day


Thinking out loud on this day you were born,
I thank God each day
for bringing you to earth
so we could meet,
raise three amazing children,
now six wonderful grandchildren,
and walk this journey together
with pulse and breath and dreams.

The boy you were
became the man you are:
so blessed by God,
so needed by your family, church and community.

You give yourself away every day with such grace.

It was your quiet brown eyes I trusted first
and just knew
I’d follow you anywhere
and I have.

In this journey together,
we inhabit each other,
however long may be the road we travel;
you have become the air I breathe,
refreshing, renewing, restoring~~
you are that necessary to me,
and that beloved.

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While the World Tilts Toward Sleep

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The cat calls for her dinner.
On the porch I bend and pour
brown soy stars into her bowl,
stroke her dark fur.
It’s not quite night.
Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.
Above my neighbor’s roof, a transparent
moon, a pink rag of cloud.
Inside my house are those who love me.
My daughter dusts biscuit dough.
And there’s a man who will lift my hair
in his hands, brush it
until it throws sparks.
Everything is just as I’ve left it.
Dinner simmers on the stove.
Glass bowls wait to be filled
with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley
on the cutting board.
I want to smell this rich soup, the air
around me going dark, as stars press
their simple shapes into the sky.
I want to stay on the back porch
while the world tilts
toward sleep, until what I love
misses me, and calls me in.
~Dorianne Laux “On the Back Porch” from Awake

They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
~Wendell Berry “They Sit Together on the Porch” from A Timbered Choir

If just for a moment,
when the world feels like it is tilting so far
I just might fall off,
there is a need to pause
to look at where I’ve been
and get my feet back under me.

The porch is a good place to start:
a bridge to observe “out there”
without completely leaving the safety of “in here.”

I am outside looking squarely at uncertainty
yet still hear and smell and taste
the love that dwells just inside these walls.

What do any of us want more
than to be missed if we were to step away
or be taken from this life?

Our voice, our words, our heart, our touch
never to be replaced,
its absence a hole impossible to fill?

When we are called back inside to the Love
that made us who we are,
may we leave behind the outside world
more beautiful because we were part of it.

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Renewed Pulse

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The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.
Louise Bogan “Night” from The Blue Estuaries

 I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay “Ebb”

My mother was 58 when my father left her for a younger woman. 

For months, she withered,
her heart broken, her pulse erratic,
crying until there were no more tears left.

She began drying inward from her edges
despite the ebbing and flowing
of her heartbeat.

It took ten years,
but he came back like an overdue high tide.  

She was sure her love had died
but that tepid pool refilled
with water cool to the touch,
yet overflowing.

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You Think You Know…

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Wind and the sound of wind—
across the bay a chainsaw revs
and stalls. I’ve come here to write,

but instead I’ve been thinking
about my father, who, in his last year,
after his surgery, told my mother

he wasn’t sorry—that he’d cried
when the other woman left him,
that his time with her

had made him happier than anything
he’d ever done. And my mother,
who cooked and cleaned for him

all those years, cared for him
after his heart attack, could not
understand why he liked the other

woman more than her,
but he did. And she told me
that after he died she never went

to visit his grave—not once.
You think you know them,
these creatures robed

in your parents’ skins. Well,
you don’t. Any more than you know
what the pines want from the wind,

if the lake’s content with this pale
smear of sunset, if the loon calls
for its mate, or for another.
~Jon Loomis “At the Lake House” from The Mansion of Happiness

I thought I knew my parents as well as I knew myself,
certain that their love for each other
was the foundation of our family.

When it fell apart, I came apart too.

It was as if I no longer knew myself,
since I came from them.

It took a decade of tears
for them to find their way back
to become family again.

Even so, the scar remained,
although glued and smoothed,
a love that once seemed so solid, so forever.

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Feeling Them Resting There

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The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still.
I went over to the graveyard beside the church
and found them under the old cedars…
I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there,
but I did…

I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated
with presences and absences,
presences of absences,
the living and the dead.
The world as it is
would always be a reminder
of the world that was,
and of the world that is to come.
~Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow

In great deeds, something abides. 
On great fields, something stays. 
Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; 
but spirits linger, 
to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. 

And reverent men and women from afar, 
and generations that know us not and that we know not of, 
heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, 
to ponder and dream; and lo!
the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, 
and the power of the vision pass into their souls. 

This is the great reward of service. 
To live, far out and on, in the life of others;
this is the mystery of the Christ,
–to give life’s best for such high sake
that it shall be found again unto life eternal.
~Major-General Joshua Chamberlain, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania 1889

A box of over 700 letters, exchanged between my parents from late 1941 to mid-1945, sat unopened for six decades.

I started reading. I felt them resting in those inked words.

My parents barely knew each other before marrying quickly on Christmas Eve 1942 – the haste due to the uncertain future for a newly trained Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. They only had a few weeks together before she returned home to her rural teaching position and he readied himself to be shipped out for the island battles to come.

They had no idea they would not see each other for another 30+ months or even see each other again at all. They had no idea their marriage would fall apart 35 years later and they would reunite a decade after the divorce for five more years together before Dad died of cancer at age 73.

A presence of absence: the letters do contain the long-gone but still-familiar voices of my parents, but they are the words and worries of youngsters of 20 and 21, barely prepared for the horrors to come from war and interminable waiting. When he was fighting battles on Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian, no letters or news would be received for a month or more, otherwise they tried to write each other daily, though with minimal news to share due to military censorship. They speak mostly of their desire for a normal life together rather than a routine centered on mailbox, pen and paper and waiting – lots and lots of waiting.

I’m not sure what I hoped to find in these letters. Perhaps I hoped for flowery romantic whisperings and the poetry of longing and loneliness. Instead I am reading plain spoken words from two people who somehow made it through those awful years to make my sister and brother and myself possible.

Our inheritance is contained in this musty box of words bereft of poetry. But decades later my heart is moved by these letters – I carefully refold them back into their envelopes and replace them gently back in order. A six cent airmail stamp – in fact hundreds and hundreds of them – was a worthwhile investment in the future, not only for themselves and their family to come, but for generations of U.S. citizens who tend to take their freedom for granted.

Thank you, Dad and Mom, for the early years together you gave up to make today possible for us and the generations to follow.

I hear the mountain birds
The sound of rivers singing
A song I’ve often heard
It flows through me now
So clear and so loud
I stand where I am
And forever I’m dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home

It’s carried in the air
The breeze of early morning
I see the land so fair
My heart opens wide
There’s sadness inside
I stand where I am
And forever I’m dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home

This is no foreign sky
I see no foreign light
But far away am I
From some peaceful land
I’m longing to stand
A hand in my hand
…forever I’m dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home
~Lori Barth and Philippe Rombi “I’m Dreaming of Home”

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Where You Go, I Will Go: Keeping On In Spite of Everything

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There is nothing which so certifies the genuineness of a man’s faith as his patience and his patient endurance, his keeping on steadily in spite of everything.
~Martyn Lloyd-Jones from Spiritual Depression – Its Causes and Cure

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free.
But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh;
rather, serve one another humbly in love.
Galatians 5:13-14

Staying married, therefore, is not mainly about staying in love.
It is about keeping covenant.
“Till death do us part” or
“As long as we both shall live”
is a sacred covenant promise –
the same kind Jesus made with His bride when He died for her.
~John Piper from This Momentary Marriage: A Parable of Permanence

photo by Josh Scholten

My husband and I attended a wedding in an outdoor park years ago where the officiating pastor asked the couple to vow to each other to stay together “as long as we both shall will.”

I remember thinking that was the most useless vow I’d ever heard because it was no vow at all. It was a poetic and tempting string of words, like a strand of colored lights buried in the snow, pretty but pointless in purpose.

There was no promise to keep covenant with one another despite everything that can happen in life.

There was no commitment to see things through, to be steadfast in the face of trouble, to not wander from the path set before us simply because we have the freedom and desire to do so.

Keeping covenant is particularly significant when a couple ages, and memory and body fade and fail. A spouse continues to love and support as they vowed to do when they married, by keeping faith through this toughest battle of all by serving needs with strength and endurance.

As we enter Holy Week this coming weekend, we are reminded about keeping covenant–with each other, with the body of Christ, with God Himself. The complication is that we have been created with the freedom to choose not to do so or only do so as long we shall “will.”

How genuine is our commitment? It is so fragile compared to God’s commitment to us.

His Son on the cross was God’s most tangible keeping of covenant with His children. He came to us, stayed with us, died for us, and remains committed to saving us as we await His return.

We are kept whole, through our greatest earthly battles and in our dying, by His love.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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