Before bed and again before first cups of coffee, we played across the paper cards with them: the little people taking turns calling. How at 3 can he read his audience and build excitement for the possibility that he will call the animal they have learned only in story? So much eagerness, as they grow their way up the yardstick, for possibility.
I look around their home and see story creating possibility four (generations) across: the signed football handed down; a very old English oak wardrobe; a Goebel Co Boy, lovely matriarch’s way of introducing whimsy to the hearts of men in the family; the beautiful red-and-white toile duvet and shams rescued from family hands that were moving them on to some estate house somewhere; the intricate stitched landscapes of Christmas framing hundreds of hours of intricate and loving labor.
There is the winsome call, spilling over walls and bookshelves and on tabletops, of things that mattered decades ago and continue to matter now: love of golf, love of home, love of mountains, love of learning, love of books, hearts of faith. I wonder, with our lives, what stories J. and I are telling about what matters.
On the other side of the woods, miles away, hearts move to collect blue & white chinoiserie, gather friends and family around the table, fish in good streams and plant in good dirt. Stories are retold on the perfect cast and on rose heads and other things that push their way up from the ground. And a little boy, in sleepy sleepover minutes, asks for stories about his great-grandfather growing up. They must be real stories of Ronnie, he insists, not make-believe; otherwise, they will not count.