Strawberries

We've been clearing out our strawberry patch. The poor berry plants are nearly strangled by grass invading their cozy, little bed. I've been digging the near-sod up and then gently separating the twisted grass roots from the remaining strawberry plants. It's fairly delicate surgery for some of the berries. Their roots are nearly rotten - brown, dried, dying - choked.  The grass has invaded and is trying to choke the life out of those roots.

It's my Grandma's birthday today. We called the nursing home where she lives and got ourselves transferred back to her special care unit. The nurse put her on the portable phone that gets shared when residents get phone calls. The girls got the cue and sang their little hearts out. Grandma perked up a bit when I told her it was me and repeated my name with a hint of happy emotion in her voice. A hint. Emotion is one of those areas, I think, that has been attacked by disease. She asked where I was and just said nothing when I told her I was at home in town here. I could tell that it didn't make sense that I was somewhere other than my farm home. I'm a little girl again, the girl she remembers from so many years ago. Laura and I are "the little girls" and will probably remain that now. 

The strawberry roots reminded me of her mind, how the grass wrapped around those roots just like dementia has wrapped around her mind, her memories. It sounds sinister, and, in my mind, it is. I'm convinced that Satan loves it. He laughs at our tears, smiles with glee at her confusion and struggles. Not because of anything my Grandma did or did not do - no sin of hers - but just our fallen humanity. I think about my Grandma's life; it has not been easy. From watching an infant sister die, to losing a younger brother years later, beginning marriage in a grainery, and then losing the home she and Grandpa thought they had finally built to retire in to a failure of a governmental project, very little of her life was easy. I'm humbled to know Laura and I have been bright spots in there. All of her children have been - caring for others, though not always perfectly, I suppose, has been her life.

Each year these weeks are solemn ones for me, in my mind anyway.  In the weeks between Mothers' Day weekend and the anniversary of Hope's birth and death, I'm struck this year by all the problems I cannot fix. Sometimes the sadness of it is overwhelming; I sit rocking my sleeping, teething son, wondering, wondering, wondering about all that I cannot fix.

Alzheimers. Dementia. Cancer. Veins in a baby's heart. Parkinson's. 

So much that none of us can completely, really, totally fix.

And so, and Mike reminds me, we cling to the One who has fixed it all.  Who, regardless of the outcomes down here of diseases and disasters, has fixed us a place free of all of this - f.o.r.e.v.e.r.  The One who, as Satan salivates over our pain, walks with us through all of it, holding our hands, holding us up, walking straight through death with us as the best friend we could ever imagine. The One who gently untangles all those choking, nasty grass roots from around our tender, bruised selves, dusts us off, and replants us where we really belong, in the spot He's been preparing for us from the beginning.