Making Room for the Piano

When your kids are in third grade and you’re in the midst of a construction project and you discover that the foundation of your mudroom needs to be replaced and that while you’re at it adding a second floor room wouldn’t cost too much more – when all that happens, building an upstairs playroom sounds like a good idea.

At least it sounded like a good idea to my husband Scott and me in the summer of 2003.

A playroom would build a breakwater to keep the relentless surge of kid junk from spilling into the other rooms. We could get a bumper pool table. Scott could finally have a place for the 1980s pinball machine he’d been hankering to buy from Mike Knudsen. We could set up our old dartboard. At last we’d have a place to hang the entertaining campaign posters we stole from lawns across the Micronesian island of Saipan when we were teachers there in our youth.

And it was a good idea. Vast Lego and Playmobil cities spread out and could be left for days at a time without ever puncturing the tender parental foot at midnight. Pinball machines came and went. Posters and memorabilia from vacations were added to the walls. But slowly – especially in recent years as our twin sons have entered high school and are more apt to request iTunes gift cards instead of Nerf guns – it has become a place to dump stuff no one knows what to do with: old computer monitors and obsolete gadgets, clothes meant for the rummage sale that never quite made it, a castoff electronic putting green from Granddad that nobody really wanted but couldn’t not accept.

All four of us are guilty of covert dumping, especially Colin, who is responsible for the layer of cream cheese adhered to the surface of the bumper pool table from a bagel he laid down one afternoon in the late 20-oughts. While we’ve been living with growing playroom chaos for several years, today something happened that caused me to take the matter in hand: Scott finally consented to procuring for Colin a real piano.

It’s a problem when your child starts playing the piano at the late age of 15 and it becomes apparent after the first two months that he really knows what he’s about. Recriminations of “Why didn’t you start me with lessons when I was small?” have often cut deep to the maternal heart this last year. Colin’s dissatisfaction with our ancient digital Yamaha Clavinova became apparent about six months ago. “The action,” he said, “it sucks. I can’t play Debussy with that thing. I need a real piano!”

“Well, I can’t play Debussy, either,” I replied. “And your dad doesn’t believe in real pianos in Maine. He’s certain they don’t stay in tune in this climate, so don’t hold your breath, kid,” I warned.

Perhaps it was when Granddad, over for dinner recently, gave Scott a certain look that said, “I supported your interests when you were young,” that made him relent. All I know is that last Friday I returned from a work trip to Miami and suddenly there, on the kitchen table, was a copy of Maine’s quirky classified ad magazine, “Uncle Henry’s” with an entry circled: “Chickering baby grand. $500. Call after 5. Kennebunkport.”

In many ways 2003 feels like last week. Our boys were a perfectly sweet nine years old, and I was writing pieces about the election of Gene Robinson. Now they’re almost 17 and thinking about colleges and +Gene just announced his retirement. How do these things happen?

I don’t feel a day older. But here’s the thing: Scott and I work at the same places. We live in the same house. We eat the same food and read the same magazines and wear (sad to say) many of the same clothes. Lots of things have happened around us since 2003 but a remarkable number have stayed the same. Except boys: they grew an alarming number of inches and shoe sizes and turned from funny, smart, adorable little boys into funnier, smarter, handsome young men.

So amidst the work of clearing out all of the plastic bins and bookshelves and tubs of junk in the playroom, I had trouble accepting that no one wanted the mongo T-Rex that had been such a prized possession. Everyone but I was indifferent to the Mr. Potatohead that had served as a space capsule for intrepid Playmobil pirates on so many adventures to the planet of Zumbar.

I started a pile on top of the pool table for things I couldn’t throw away: one of the little black super-soft stuffed puppies I bought for the boys the day after my father died. We’d been out buying chocolate to take back to the nursing staff at the hospital and, when the children pleaded, I couldn’t say no.

“Hey, Martin,” I hollered. “C’mere.” After a moment my wise wrestler-poet leaned on the doorway to the playroom. “What do I do with some of this? I can’t chuck it.”

“Aw,” he said, fingering first a beanie baby hedgehog that his Kindergarten teacher had given him and then a much beloved Star Wars X-Wing Starfighter.

“Make a nostalgia pile and we’ll go through it later,” he said, leaving me sitting on the floor surrounded by the vestigial tokens of our precious family life. But, well-adjusted person that he is, Martin left with nary a trace of nostalgia in his deep voice. He’s ready for the next thing.


In the Diocese of Maine – and in many places across the Episcopal Church and indeed, we’ve heard in recent months, in other denominations – we are embarking on a strange journey and asking ourselves many questions about how to transform the Church to meet the needs of a changing world. Our diocese is one year into a study process that is compelling us to look at both our mission strategies and our mission priorities. The coming year will reveal an emerging set of both. And, I gotta say, I’m curious about what they’ll look like and how they’ll be received.

It all started in October 2009 when Bishop Steve Lane offered a convention address that stunned members of our diocese with its combination of forthright truth-telling and the firm reassurance that together, with God, we will walk through whatever comes next.

Click here to hear the address.

In his sermon last month at our 2010 diocesan convention, Bishop Lane had this to say:

“The process of adaptive change is many things: a journey from one paradigm to another, a journey through a new and risky landscape, a journey often without a clear destination - but most of all it is a spiritual journey, a journey from habitual ways of being and doing to a closer, more trusting and self-conscious relationship with God. The journey we're on will require a change of heart and a new spirit in every congregation. It will require all of us to be flexible and to take risks…

“The ways we serve God, the shape of our communities, the nature of our buildings, the relationship between clergy and people - all these may change. But our call to announce the good news of God's merciful presence with us never changes and never ends.”

Our church is a lot like my family’s playroom. It’s hard to believe that time has passed and the same practices that have given us such pleasure and comfort over time are no longer relevant or in demand by the people around us: the people we’re called by Jesus to serve. Our nostalgia pile heaps to overflowing. And, yet, as my boss maintains – ever confident in the love of God that holds us altogether and all together - we don’t quite yet know what will take the place of all the things that we must give up.





Seven years ago, if you had told Scott and me that we would be buying a piano for the playroom so Colin could play Chopin and Mompou with such dazzling skill and passion, we would have said you were crazy. “This kid has fine motor skills below the 5th percentile,” we would have sighed. “Piano lessons would be a frustrating, futile effort for us all.”

But it turns out all the people who took a gander at him were right. “This kid has many strengths. He will compensate. He will turn out great!”

We couldn’t have imagined a piano in our playroom, but Colin had other plans.

Perhaps if we, as a people of God, let go of some of the things we can’t imagine our corporate life without, then possibilities we can’t imagine will emerge is the space left behind. The hard truth is that there’s not enough room for everything.

Right now, as I listen to the lovely sound of Beethoven coming from the grossly inadequate Yamaha in the living room, I can just hear the sweet strains of what might be possible.

Winner of a 2011 Polly Bond Award for devotional writing.

A Reading from the Big Book

Tuesday afternoon I take a taxi from a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, to the airport and suddenly, after being surrounded by thousands of Episcopalians for eight days, I am back in the world. Standing behind me in the security line is an otherwise conventional-looking young woman with tattooed arms, shoulder to wrist. Behind her a loud talker is going over the details of a loan closing. A disproportionate number of people with Ohio State stamped somewhere on their person mill around our slow-moving line.

While waiting at the gate, I talk with a group of teenagers, boys and girls, who tell me that they are on their way to Ft. Franklin in North Carolina for basic training. They’re so polite and earnest, so baby-faced and excited that my throat closes up when their flight is called. I can’t help picturing them dead.

Amazingly no one stops to inquire if I have heard how Resolution A161 is faring on the floor of the House of Deputies or who has blogged what about whom.

I am glad to be out of the bubble of the Episcopal Church’s 75th General Convention, where my role had been to do a soft segment for the nightly news program and to cover the convention for the Diocese of Maine. It hadn’t been a great week for reasons that mostly rest with me. One evening I had meant to send a hyperbolic email to a buddy with whom I have exchanged a good deal of gossip and woe over the years. It’s our way. But then, in those wee hours, mistakenly and sloppily, I sent it to about 100 colleagues most of whom I would inevitably bump into by nine the following morning. Most were sympathetic and offered a hug or arm pat of the “but for the grace of God go we all” variety, some were gracious enough to pretend it didn’t happen, but I know others were hurt by an act that strained the bonds of our affection. And that I deeply regret.

Here’s another downer: A number of people, most of whom I don’t know well or at all, said to me variously but essentially: “I don’t care what other people say, I think you’re great.”

Gee, um, thanks.

So I decide to suck up the airline change fees and return home a day early. My work is either finished or can be done from Maine. At some point on the way home, somewhere between Columbus and Philadelphia, I decide to quit being an Episcopalian. In the Philadelphia airport, while waiting for my flight to Portland, I call my friend David in Miami to break the news. He’s seminary-trained and cares about these things, and he doesn’t believe a word of it.

On the plane I open my book, John le Carre’s The Constant Gardener, to discover a photo that I stashed in as a bookmark in my hurry to pack the previous week. It’s a photo of the Rev. Janet McAuley, whom, to me and many others, stood tall as someone who knew what was important and had no problem telling you. Her ministry objective was “love affair with God, each other, and all creation.” I’ve kept her photo tucked into my bureau mirror since her death in January 2005 where, each morning, I look at it and its neighbor, a faded, knock-off icon I bought from a silent monk at the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev.

Within a few pages I read this sentence: “’Better to be inside the system and fighting it,’ her father – an iconoclast in other ways – would say, ‘than outside the system, howling at it.’”

Good God, God, I think, can’t you leave me alone for one goddamn minute.

I arrive in Portland to discover that the retribution for my defection is to prevent my suitcase from making the trip. As a significantly myopic person, that is especially inconvenient news because I had packed my only pair of glasses. I will rise in the morning blind until I bumble into a new pair of contacts.

At midnight I enter the house to discover that the dishes are mostly done and there are no real household disasters. I mosey around, read the court reports in last week’s local newspaper for names I recognize, peruse my sons’ newly arrived report cards and flip through the rest of the mail. I try to refrain from turning on the computer to check the evening’s news from Columbus but fail.

Later, as I gently pull back the covers, Scott rolls on his side, his head on his arm. He says, sleepily but sweetly and rather surprisedly, “Hoozlow, it’s you.”

I wake to an empty bed and a familiar muted version of NPR’s Morning Edition seeping under the bathroom door. My sons are still asleep. It is bright and warm and I reach for my glasses to check the digital thermometer by the window, the one that Marty gave Scott for Christmas. No glasses. Ah, yes. No suitcase. No toothbrush.

After awhile Marty crawls into bed with me. We talk and joke and catch up on our week apart. He offers the scoop on everything. Colin brushed his teeth twice. I nod at this. Colin comes in and deigns to be kissed and fussed over for a few minutes before getting ready for a day at Pemaquid Beach with a friend.

“How about hiking Maiden’s Cliff?” I ask Marty when we are alone after breakfast. He’s flopped on the sunporch couch, playing handheld solitaire and listening to a Harry Potter book on tape for the 23rd time. He’s hiked this two mile climb with his summer camp a number of times and has been pestering me to do it with him.

“Sure,” he says, all 12 year-old nonchalance but I know he’s thrilled. He wants to show me something he cares about, just the two of us. It’s a luxury rarely afforded a twin.

We drive to Camden and park at the trailhead. I carry the backpack as I’ve always done because I’ve always been the strongest. He whips up the trail ahead of me, talking a mile a minute over his shoulder about past forays to the top. This is my first hike of the year and immediately I feel weak and old. I haven’t been eating or sleeping well for the past week and it shows. Marty waits for me next to a big rock, tapping his Teva on the dry leaves of the path. “I’m coming, man,” I say, trying not to betray my hard breathing.

Another quarter mile up the trail he turns around and calls, “Hey, Katz. Don’t chuck the supplies.” He’s referring to Bill Bryson’s out of shape hiking partner, Stephen Katz, from A Walk in the Woods. Katz was known to throw heavy water bottles and tins of Spam into the woods to lighten his load as they walked the Appalachian Trail. We like Katz. Marty smirks and bounds on ahead of me. I call to him to wait up then tell him to carry the backpack if he’s so energetic.

The woods are quiet and there’s a lovely stream trickling down a ravine beside the trail. This is nothing like the Columbus Convention Center. Without the pack I’m happier or perhaps I’m catching my stride. We climb in quiet with Marty leading the way. “We’re almost at the top. Don’t look over the edge and spoil the view until we reach the summit,” he commands.

“Is that what your camp counselors tell you?”

“No, but that’s what I’ll tell campers when I’m a counselor,” he says, turning back to me. “Otherwise you ruin the effect.”

The summit is grand. We’re high above Lake Megunticook and beyond is Camden Harbor with open ocean peeking between the hills. It’s a glorious day but suddenly it occurs to me how red-faced and hot and sweaty I am. I open my bottle and squirt it along my brow and rub my face with the cool water. Salt drips into my mouth. I lift my hand behind my head and squeeze hard to send a stream of water along the back of my neck. It pours down between my shirt and sticky skin. I feel well and happy and refreshed. Martin is closer to the edge than I would ordinarily care to see him, but I see that this is the summer I can trust my fine, long-haired boy.

He shows me the cross and the monument dedicated to young Elenora French, who, while on a Maying trek with other maidens in 1864, tumbled to her death while trying to catch her wind-blown hat.

“Bummer,” Marty says, after allowing me time to read the stone marker.

“Yeah, really,” I say. Then something draws my gaze upward to a hawk gracefully circling the higher reaches of a neighboring peak.

On the way down, Marty leads by 50 feet and we walk along without talking. I think of how much better I feel now that I’m here in these airy woods, the blue sky above my head.

I think of how Philip Newell, in his small treasure about Celtic Christianity Listening for the Heartbeat of God, cites the ninth-century theologian, John Scotus Eriugena. He writes, “he taught us that we can look to creation just as we look to the Scriptures to receive the living Word of God.” Eriugena called Scripture the “little book” and creation the “big book,” which by reading we can divine the grace of God that surrounds us.

I think of how good the water felt splashing on my hot face and pouring down my back and the sweet taste of sweat on my lips. I think of how hungry I am. I think of this winsome, changing boy walking before me, still bearing my burdensome pack. I think of how near-sighted I am and how grateful I should be for this enormous, world-sized book laid out before us all, its type as tall as trees.

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2006 All rights reserved.

Beating Snake and Other Things That Matter - December 2005

A boy named Liam, now a tenth grader, was a member of our car pool until he finished eighth grade. He’s a very likable boy and I would like him except for the fact that he holds the high score for Snake on my aging Nokia cell phone.

Here’s the sad, sad truth: I have been trying to beat his record for three years. I regularly sit in my car waiting for Colin to come out of his riding lesson and try to beat Liam’s record. I’ve lain on a bed in various New York City hotel rooms – with nothing else in the world I’m required to do except show up in the lobby for dinner an hour hence – and tried to beat his record. No such luck. I closest I can get is about 275 to his awe-inspiring 656. (I recall that Nat, now a freshman at Bowdoin and also an erstwhile member of our car pool, held the record of 900-something but that was on his mom’s phone, thank God, and therefore outside my sphere of responsibility.)

Snake is a simple cell phone game whereby you press the north-south-east-west buttons (i.e. 2, 8, 6, 4) on the phone’s keypad to direct a little dot to eat another dot on the screen. For each dot you eat, the eating dot grows longer. If you hit one of the four “walls” of the screen or the eating dot’s “tail,” you die. Game over, man, to quote Bill Paxton, the whiny Marine from Aliens.

Here’s a second sad, sad Snake-related truth: Liam got his lousy 656 points in 12 minutes. Twelve minutes is about the time it takes to drive from the school to Liam’s house, where he would often say as we pulled into his driveway, “Darn! I died.”

“What’d you get?” a younger child would ask from the back.

“Oh, 577,” he’d say blithely.

How is this possible? Give me 12 hours, highly improved eye/hand coordination and considerably more ability to focus than I currently possess, and I might approach the 500 mark. But 656, come on. What are they feeding these children?

On Monday, I am playing Snake in the late afternoon darkness in my car in Topsham, waiting for Colin to come out of the horse barn where he takes riding lessons for occupational therapy. I suspect I am getting a new cell phone for Christmas so there is a creeping urgency to beating Liam’s high score before I part ways with this stupid phone forever.

Here’s another sad, sad truth: I am getting (I think) a new cell phone because this old Nokia won’t die. It is five years old, a veritable dinosaur in cell phone terms, and my sons want to send it to the Smithsonian. It’s black, it doesn’t fold and it doesn’t take photos. I was sitting next to a man on a plane from Chicago about 18 months ago. He saw my phone and said, “I used to have one like that,” then smiled and tilted his head in a way that said, “How quaint. You must be from Maine.”

Though I’ve been proud of my Yankee thrift and practical good sense around my mobile telecommunications needs – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – I finally started dropping hints to Scott that it was time to buy a new phone for me.

“Is it broken?” he asked.

“Its battery operates a little erratically,” I said hopefully.

“Is it broken?”

“Noooo,” I said, “but I hate it. It’s embarrassing at airports.”

Here’s yet another the sad, sad truth: I am embarrassed that I am embarrassed about my cell phone. I don’t want to be the type of person who wants a cool or even somewhat cool phone. I don’t want phones to matter. This is so dumb. This is so American. This is so true.

Living here in Maine, I guess I should just give up. There’s no way I can ever be cool. I can’t hold onto a pair of good sunglasses. I lose good pens. I wear shoes until they wear out. I forget to go to hair appointments.

Several years ago, Scott was the chair of the rector search committee at our church. He asked me to have coffee with a youngish clergy wife from suburban Connecticut who was interested in talking to someone with young children about what it was like to live in our small town. We met at a café by the river. I recall it was a beautiful day. From the café windows you could watch the boats at anchor and see miles downriver toward the Gulf of Maine.

“Where do you shop?” she asked when we got situated. She shifted her artistically arranged scarf in a casual manner.

“Reny’s,” I said immediately, (Reny’s is a Maine-based department store known for good deals), “or Beans.”

She smiled. Obviously I didn’t understand the question so she tilted her head in a certain way. “I mean, where do you shop for yourself?”

“Reny’s, “ I said immediately, smiling back, “or Beans.”

Her husband soon withdrew his name from the search process.

Back in the dark car in Topsham, I have a good game of Snake going. I think I might be approaching Liam’s record but there is no way to know until I die. Colin opens the passenger door and gets in.

“Don’t bug me,” I say, without taking my eyes from the little monochrome screen. “I’m playing Snake.”

He leans over to see the length of my tail. “Whoa!” he says and sits back in respectful quiet.

After a minute or so, I blow it and my score of 252 flashes before me. “Man!” I wail.

“What’d you get?”

“252.”

“That’s pretty good, Mom.”

For a mom, I know he’s thinking.

“Thank you, son,” I say. “How was your lesson?”

“Caroline said that maybe next week will be better. It was hard to pay attention to what I was doing.” Big sigh.

I start the car and head toward home. A little way down the road, a hopeful voice beside me says, “Can we?”

Here’s one last sad, sad truth: On most Mondays, after his riding lesson but before dinner, I buy my son an ice cream with crunch bar and kit kat mix-ins at the Cold Stone Creamery in Brunswick. Not only am I an uncool phone owner and an inept Snake player, I am also a bad mother.

As he comes out with his ice cream, I see that he is smiling. The previous week he was a little short on cash and was very pleased when the person who waited on him sported him the difference. Today it is his intent to repay his debt.

“What happened?” I ask as he climbs in.

“I told him I only wanted eight cents back in change and to keep the rest; he was really surprised. He was also very competent. He could juggle the scoops.”

“Are you happy?” I ask as I start the car, realizing at last that the outcome of this question is the deepest, rock bottom concern of my life.

“Very,” he says, digging in. I can tell by looking at his face in the glow of the lights in that the dingy strip mall parking lot that what he says is true.

“Then that’s all that really matters.”

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

Cleaning Colin's Room - 2004

The past few weeks have marked for me one of those periods in all grown-ups’ lives that descend every two or three, or if you’re lucky, four years. It might be the critical illness or dying days of a loved one, a blow-up at work, the breakup of a marriage, or another crisis that eats up the waking and sleepless moments of all your days and twists your guts and causes you to yell at your children with insufficient cause. Then, almost always – because we humans can’t go on like that forever – the stress and anguish tend to unwind to a manageable level and normal life, though perhaps irrevocably altered, moves on.

That’s where I am on Friday. It is time to move on. Because I strive to work only the 30 hours a week for which I’m paid, I try to take Fridays off. I rarely, if ever, do. But last Friday after doing some email and phone calls, I vow to take the rest of the day off and do some work around the house before 2:30 p.m. when horseback riding and soccer practice will eat up the rest of the day. Our house has been under construction since June 16, 2003, 461 days but who’s counting? We are coming to the end. One last push of touch-up painting, a few pieces of trim, linoleum in one room and carpet in the other, then we’re done. Our son Colin’s room, more than any other, has suffered on-going construction debris infiltration despite the blanket we put up between his room and the new gameroom. Sawdust and sheetrock dust have found safe haven amid the other dust and crumbs. Frankly, it’s gross but because Colin is not the most fastidious ten-year-old on the planet, I haven’t minded too much. I don’t have to sleep there.

But there’s this: Colin has started to sneeze a lot, especially in the mornings and evenings, and guilt is beginning to rear its pointy horns over the horizon of my mind. This isn’t a matter of sweeping dust under the bed so that the room looks presentable, I need to clean it all up…purge it from my home…make my child well. Taking a page from the book of the papa in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," I arm myself with a roll of paper towels and a jumbo-size bottle of Windex. I set to it and am appalled by the dust bunnies and larger woodland animals that I find under the bed along with a dozen beany babies and innumerable legos. "God, where did this kid get so many legos," I think to myself.

It’s hot and sweaty work and I change into a sleeveless top. I am on my knees in here, nose to nose with dust bunnies and little tiny bits of tortilla chips that he knows I know he sneaks up here regularly. I am Windexing everything in sight.

I clean his bedside table, a sweet little drop-leaf affair that I recall from my earliest days as being in my cousin Chris’s bedroom in the 1960s. I open the drawer to check for the remnant of a purple Beatles lick-on stamp that I remember being toward the back. Chris is now 52 and somehow Colin ended up with her childhood bedside table. I can’t explain how that happened, but families are like that.

I move to the windowsill to his dusty collection of horses and dead sea creatures, things he scavenged from my family’s barn when we moved the contents of my Aunt Deedee’s house there after she died. "Deedee’s junk is my treasure!" I remember this Kindergartner saying as he held up a package of long-forgotten daisy refrigerator magnets as I combed through the boxes for anything that still smelled like her house and reminded me of all the hundreds of days I had spent with her until I went away to school.

On the upper windowsill I come across the kind of cheesy "two wild stallions fighting" statue that you see advertised in Parade magazine. "For a limited time only from Franklin Mint…" But this one is different. It was sent to my Uncle in 1977 by a man whose life he had saved in the waning days of World War II. Uncle Ray pulled him out of the line of fire and was badly wounded himself. The man had been trying to find my uncle for more than 20 years, but the package finally arrived two weeks after his death. He sent the horse statue as a gift because he remembered Ray rode and trained horses. Now Colin rides. I give it a good shot of Windex and set it back in place.

I move to his desk by the door where a heavy layer of sawdust covers all. Colin is our collector. Not a dryer load goes in that doesn’t have some rock or seashell sounding the alarm as it tumbles from a pocket. On his desk are his fossils and minerals and do-dads, the value of which only he knows but probably has forgotten. There is a scarab beetle paperweight from our visit to last year’s Egyptian exhibit at the Museum of Science. There are several rocks and mussel shells of marginal collectable value. I Windex them all, the common and the precious alike. Without warning, as I wipe the dust from the desk into a trash bag, I feel a measure of the venom and hurt of the past few weeks flow out of me. What is it about handling and cleaning the treasures of my beloved and complicated son that tempers my troubles...troubles that have nothing to do with him? What is it about being on my hands and knees cleaning the dark neglected place behind the back of the boys’ computer desk that causes me to choke up? I sneeze violently and blow my nose. "It must be the dust," I think to myself.

I am feeling better now but that’s still the best answer I can manage.

Copyright © 2004 All rights reserved.

Cemetery Etiquette* - 2003

With hayfields on two sides, the windswept poplars that line the circular drive of Townsend Cemetery lean permanently north. Our family plot is tucked in the far back corner where the woods begin. Many times a year when I was growing up, I would go with Deedee, my father's older sister, to tend the graves of my Swiss grandparents and a Swiss cousin who surprised everyone by hanging himself from a beam in the haymow just before Christmas 1964.

In the center of the cemetery an ornate wooden fountain provided water for the flowers, and watering cans hung from the lilac bushes for everyone to use. It was a happy place for me to be with Deedee, who, with no children of her own, regarded me as her special friend. She taught me cemetery etiquette: walk around the graves, never run, never shout, be respectful. And she made me promise to tend her grave when she died because she knew no one else in the family, despite good intentions, would ever get around to it.

I began to keep my promise four years ago. Deedee had died, suddenly and alone on the braided rug at the top of her stairs, the previous September. It nearly broke my heart. The following June my young sons and I returned to our little village in the farm country of upstate New York. The boys and I drove over to the cemetery to assess the situation. "Don't run. Don't step on the graves. Keep your voices down." The words spilled out of my mouth unbidden. I walked them over to the cinnamon granite marker of my father's best friend, Brad Farr, whose B-24 was shot down in 1944 in the South Pacific. His tour of duty was over, but he took one last mission for a friend. As a child I discovered the cache of V-Mails my father kept in a Bible on a bookshelf in the den and read them over and over.

My plan was to plant lots of perennials and bulbs around the individual stones and the big family marker. Minimize the annuals that need water and care -- this was a decisive once-a-year gardening offensive. I set the boys to work throwing sticks over the bank and began to rake.

Early this summer, my sons and I make our annual pilgrimage to Townsend Cemetery. They are older now and know the drill. Hauling water from the fountain, now a practical, ugly concrete affair, is their favorite job. They especially like to water Brad Farr's flowers and any surrounding graves that seem neglected. They scour the place to find the graves of children and say to one another, "Oh look, here's a sad one. Three months."

Me, I've got my own issues. My low-maintenance perennial plan isn't working. Every year I seem to do the same hours of work: weeding, planting, pulling out the same annoying mums that keep coming up. I muse to myself that, because I live far away in Maine, I never get to see the continuum of daffodils and tulips in the spring or the late summer perennials in bloom. I get only a snapshot of late June with its promising buds and fledgling annuals. It's a garden of faith, and I'm in it for the long-haul.

Later in the day, leaving my boys happily playing cards with my mother, I slip back to the cemetery to spend a little time with the folks. Over the years the number of stones has grown from three to eight. The latest resident is my father who died of cancer three years ago. It's quiet and peaceful, and I allow myself a few wistful thoughts. But, truth be told, you put these eight relatives in a room together and it's anything but quiet: an odd mix of hilarious stories and bitter recriminations. The departure of my father, an inscrutable personality who managed to be both impossible and adoring, has left those of us remaining in a calm eddy that we can't quite work our way out of. It's wonderfully still, but sometimes it gets lonely.

What I think, as I clip some neglected long grass around my grandfather's stone, is that my family is a little bit like the Christian Church. For better or worse here they are, together, on the last day. My need of family draws me close on a regular rhythm just as my need of spiritual sustenance draws me to Christ's table again and again. Maybe that's why my cemetery garden needs so much care. Maybe the dead draw me back because they like to have me around. Maybe that's why our church is so complicated. Maybe being the Body of Christ in one another's midst is an impossible and adoring task. Maybe it's difficult because if it were easy we wouldn't need God so much. And maybe God enjoys our company.

I scrub the lichen and bird poop off my grandfather's stone with a wire brush."Christian Stukey - 1877 - 1956." I never knew him, but I know his stories and his foibles and his affections. I remain connected to him through something deep and complicated that I can't exactly name. Maybe belonging matters, even if it's to a bunch of nutty, depressive Swiss immigrants. Maybe it's the promise of peace and clear-sightedness that comes at the end and the generations that move on and on, before us and behind us, that draw us close and hold us.

I suspect that my sons are some of the last children in America to be taught cemetery etiquette. But it's good advice for people of faith: This is a holy place. Don't shout. Don't run. And always remember that we are bound together by sacrifice and unfathomable love.

* Winner of the 2004 Polly Bond Award of Excellence for Devotional Column by Episcopal Communicators

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