The house that I was born in has been bulldozed. There is nothing left but a giant hole in the ground and another hole in the Molenhuis family history. Humour me and let me get a little sentimental here.
My mom, soon to be 80, had been on an errand to return my dad's leftover rifle bullets to the man that owns the general store with a hunting shop out back. She lives in a retirement condo now, since last May when my dad sold the farm to the neighbor who now owns the 2 country blocks that surround our 100 acres. Not too many uses for rifles in town. You're not even allowed to get rid of a raccoon yourself, my dad would say and shake his head at town life. Since she was already in the neighbourhood, my mom decided to take a crop tour around the country roads and just drive by the old farm. When there was too much light peeking through the cedar trees where the house should have been she decided to drive up the 200 m laneway and investigate.
She told me she felt a "kick to the gut" when all that was left of her home of 50 years was a hole in the earth. 50 years of toddlers learning to walk, 6 year olds learning to bike, bandaids sticking on scrapes, teenagers fighting about dishes, coffee times at 10:00 after the pigs were fed, Santas scaring children at 50 Christmases, countless loads of diapers and knitted Dutch socks hung on the clothesline, harvesting crews eating sandwiches, ponyrides at birthday parties, baby ducks warming by the woodstove, cats sitting on mom's lap (she doesn't like cats much), freezers filled with enough garden vegetables to last all winter, and endless more things that no one can count that make up a farm family's daily life. She knew it was coming and yet, when they moved last year, she cleaned the oven and scoured the tub and left the house clean for the backhoes.
This was the day before Mother's day and while tears she'll never admit to streamed down her cheeks she told the hole, with defiance, "If you're going to take my house, I'll take your tulips!" And she picked every tulip she could find that grew from the bulbs that she herself had planted and gave half to my sister and half to herself for Mother's day.
I knew too, that the new owner was going to tear down our humble house and build a new fancier one. The thing had septic problems and plumbing issues, and the basement flooded with some regularity. And yet when I heard the news, for the rest of that day and the next, it felt as if my dad had died all over again. So many links to my childhood and my kids' heritage have vanished off the face of the earth in the last few months. Things you assumed would be there as long as you needed them. I'm a fairly prosaic person, I don't speak in poetry, but for some reason throughout those days the line "Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may" found it's way from some dark corner of forgotten things in my brain to the front of my thoughts. I looked it up online and I think it has to do with virgins getting married and starting a new life but I found the sentiment applied to my thoughts quite well.
Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May
(To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time)
By Robert Herrick
(1591 - 1674)
.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles today
To-morrow will be dying.
.
The glorious lamp of Heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run.
And nearer he's to setting.
.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.
That same day, I was driving through town listening to CBC Radio One. The host of a classical music radio show was introducing a piece by Mozart which was all about transitions through phases in life, in his case, the shift from a time of fame and limelight in Vienna to one of more obscurity and uncertainty in a new city. Again. The theme of endings and beginnings and treasuring what has come before. Weird synchronicity?
This poem and this music, both 400 years old, were great comforts and reminders that the things that we treasure in this life do not last. They are precious gifts and ours to enjoy and hold dearly, for a time but then their moment passes. And now I'm in the throws of raising four lives, and I'm brushing their teeth, holding their hands to cross streets, reading them books, yelling about holes in socks, hugging little bodies until they cry because they think their ribs have broken, watching their dirty dishes reproduce on the counter, praying for sick hamsters at bedtime (God, in his infinite wisdom called them home), and the time is going too fast. My youngest is 5 and I'm no longer the mother of babies. It doesn't last. But the Giver lets us squeeze every moment of joy and of trouble from the gift, the present, and the Giver lives on. Farms, houses, and even Opas join the past in our memories and we move on to whatever comes next.
Hopefully this is good, but I find a lot of relief in the knowledge that we're all just passing through. Ecclesiastes has always been a favourite book of mine. It's all utterly meaningless under the sun. Cheery words, eh? I think so. I feel it gives me leave not to take much very seriously, stressy things that may seem important but really don't matter much in the grand scheme. Schooling my kids, then, better be about loving God's people and learning to gather tulips while we may. Yes, quadratic equations and the laws of the conservation of mass and energy have a place within that curriculum. They don't have much value outside of it. So what are the bulbs that I can plant today so I can keep on picking tulips year after year?
