I feel as if a colorful rainbow stretches across the sky above my home and a reflection of it lies below in my garden flowers. All of this brightness and color describes the one place on the earth where my family and I have lived for 50 years. My husband drew me across hill and dale to see the world, but we always came back home. Sometimes the sky grew dark and the rains and hurricanes blew away color for many days and weeks but finally the rainbow came, and finally the color came back in the garden.
And now all the clatter of car pools, school buses, telephones, children chasing and dancing, has turned into silence.
My husband is no longer here to take me to American Bar meetings with a plane full of lawyers. I would not want to go anyway; it is tiring now. I spend my attention vicariously enjoying my children’s holidays and plane trips. There is so much going on between three families, six grandchildren and two great grandchildren that I hardly have time to enjoy it all.
One grandson teaches Latin in a high school in Virginia. He has to cook his own meals. I worry that he doesn’t cook all the different kinds of food he needs; but I shouldn’t worry. He seems to be on top of his situation. He recently found 2 boys cheating on a Latin test–copying each other’s papers. He called them to his office and gave them one more chance with the explanation that the next time they would go straight to the principal.
Another grandson wrote me that he is making a living in St. Louis, writing trivia questions and writing about stories and book reviews as his vocation.
I have another grandson, a lawyer, who spends his Saturdays building a Habitat home for a poor person. He loves to build, so this is the way he enjoys his day off.
I have another grandson who has a hard time doing his high school lessons so that he has to have a tutor. But on the other hand, he is a whiz at fixing computers. The school calls him to come work in the summer and work on their computers.
Life holds surprises. These 4 grandsons are doing exactly what they want to–somewhat unconventional and unusual, but they have the courage to hold to their own desires instead of doing what their peers are doing.