Trip to Bountiful

It's 4:38 a.m. on a Tuesday.  I'm up in the early hours, my favorite time for reading, sitting with my coffee and talking all things life over with the Creator of it.  I've decided to read through the Psalms.  I heard David, the author of them, once described as bi polar because of his intense ups and downs.  I prefer to think of him as alive.  Human.  Real.  The kind of man who can look at life and cry when the time is right.  That's my kind of person.

When I swelled big with the pregnancy of my first child, I watched The Trip to Bountiful.  Maybe I was just pregnant.  But this movie. The colors, the sounds of the birds, the cicadas. Here is a woman, come to the end of life, and she longs to go back, just once more, to where she came from so she can just be there.  So she hides her pension check until she can cash it in and buys herself a ticket on a bus back to Bountiful, Texas.  They catch her eventually, her boy and his wife.  But not before she had a chance to sit on the front porch that was her home as a child, and then a young woman.  She and her boy, they sit together for a spell on that porch; the deep sense of legacy, of passing things on washes over me as they drive off.  "Come home" runs deep in our bones.  There is nothing like feeling home; hearing it call.

I saw myself in that young mother, running through the Texas field of flowers, her boy in her footsteps.  From the first time I watched the movie, I sang this song to my unborn child, sang to him with his first gulp of air in the birthing room and he turned his head towards me.  I've sung it to each of my babies. And then, one from Korea was placed in my arms at an airport and I sang the same to him.  In China, my girl heard me sing it to her in a dingy waiting room in a social services office.  I will sing it to my little grandchild, Beatrice, when I meet her for the first time.  I still sing it to myself when my soul longs for what I can't put in words.  I wonder if those who've gone before us are whispering this song to us from heaven.

And this morning, I sip coffee hot, nestled in my big green chair in the "wooden room" in my house.  And I think of the kids at school I will meet this year, whose souls long for a home they can't quite explain yet.  Maybe one day, in a quiet hall somewhere, I will sing it to them.  It will be small gifts I pass out quietly and plant in their hearts, softly, tenderly......come home.