"Echoes of Eden" Dayle King Searle

I woke up to a snow covered world this morning. Looking out my window when I got out of bed only confirmed what I already knew I would see. I knew because during the night I heard heavy work boots striding across my wood floors, a door slamming, and a pick-up starting. It was my 22-year-old son who is a snow plow driver. It was 1:30 am, and he had been called into work.

Shortly after my granddaughter Annabelle was born, my son Brock took her with him to pick up his wife Amy’s wedding ring from the jewelers. Amy had begun reacting to the metal in her ring, and the jeweler was putting a coating on it to see if that would help. The jeweler looked at the baby carrier Brock had with him and commented that sometimes when women are pregnant they develop sensitivities they didn’t have before. When Brock got home, he told Amy what the jeweler had said. Amy looked at Brock in disbelief and said, “You do know I didn’t give birth to Annabelle, don’t you?” You see, Annabelle was adopted.

Several years ago the community I was living in held a bond election which required a two-thirds majority of the votes to pass. When the votes were being counted, there was one vote the election  officials could not decipher, and they were unsure whether it should be counted in the total number of votes cast or not. If it wasn’t, the vote received the two-thirds votes required to pass. If it was, the vote didn’t receive the two-thirds, and it failed. That one vote made all the difference. And one more vote in either direction would have made all the difference as well.                 Now here’s the kicker, that day I fully intended to go vote. Honestly, I did. But I really had a lot to do that day, and I got really busy so….

As I was going through files on my computer, I found a list I wrote five years ago for a friend. She was a mother going to college, something I had been through a few years earlier. For one of her classes she was supposed to choose a mentor, who would share their "advice to live by." My friend chose me as her mentor, and this is the advice I wrote for her for travelling down the road of life. Reading it five years later, I found it was pretty good advice for me from my past self.

Between my children and the children of my siblings, our family has had wedding after wedding for the past two years. I, with the help of many wonderful assistants, did the flowers for several of these weddings. For my daughter’s wedding reception a year and a half ago I wanted tall pedestal flower holders, but nothing I could find fit in with the theme we were going for. So I bought wooden candlesticks, glued bowls to the top of them, and created my own. Over the next year and a half those flower pedestals, in slightly different incarnations, appeared as part of the decor at four very different wedding receptions. I thought it would be fun to share pictures showing the theme of each wedding and how the pedestals fit in, so here goes:

When my mother’s father, Chet, was a young man courting my grandmother, Thora, he became very ill, and it was discovered he had contracted polio. This was in the 1920s, decades before the development of the polio vaccine, and a diagnosis of this disease was terrifying. Among its victims who survived, a high percentage were left crippled for life.                 Chet wrote a letter to Thora from his hospital bed, telling her to forget about him and find someone else. According to grandpa, as soon as Thora got the letter, she rushed to the hospital, threw her arms around him, and told him there was no other man for her. They were later married and had three children. Chet supported his family by farming. But his bout with polio did not leave him unscathed. From the time he left the hospital to the end of his life he wore metal braces on his legs and was only able to walk with the help of canes.    ...

Whenever my son Colby visits from college, he walks over to my father-in-law’s house to have breakfast and watch The Price Is Right with grandpa. A few months ago he said to me, “I want to go to The Price Is Right so that Grandpa can see me on TV if I get called down.”                 As a mother it is my natural instinct to want my children to be happy and successful and get pretty much everything they want. Grandpa is getting quite frail, so I knew if what Colby wanted to happen was going to happen, it needed to happen soon. And so I went online to check out the taping schedule for the game show and when my son’s college had spring break. Then last week, when those two things converged, I made my husband get in the car, pick up our son and his cute wife, and drive thirteen hours to Los Angeles for a taping of the show.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. I have never been in a foxhole, but I have stood on the edge of a grave where the body of someone dear is about to be buried. And I have to wonder, are there any atheists at funerals?

     In going through old papers, I came across this essay I wrote years ago. Preston, who in the essay is said to be four-years-old, is now twenty-one. But the phlox plant still grows in my garden. Being the middle of winter, when flower gardens are only memories, it seemed appropriate to share other fond memories as well.