I’m burying my story in the dirt right now. Hands in the soil and knees sinking in the mud I’m digging deep with this shovel to cover over a legacy.
You have to plant the thing for it to bloom.
We traveled to Tennessee, straight through to the end of it where the flat edges meet the river and ground is white with cotton fields. We sat there in my grandmother’s garden and the flowers were family, carried from one plot of the land to the next, from my great-great grandmother on.
We dug up our story by the roots and drove it some eight hours south in the back of a white Toyota.
I gave my daughter a toddler-sized shovel, miniature things are always so cute, and she beams as she moves the crumbling dirt from one bucket to the other, carefully brushing it off the leaves, and we have a garden growing.
When the cold comes it looks far less impressive, leaves wilting and colors fading.
“Don’t be afraid when it all looks dead in the winter,” my grandmother said as she dug up another cutting with my great-grandmother’s knife. “It will all come back to life. In the winter it is just spreading it’s seeds.”
Which is good to know because right now it is all only sort of pretty in the morning, sparkling under a silver layer of frost, when I’m still squinting because I don’t know where my three year old put my glasses.
But in the spring we will watch as it all pushes through the dirt, growing up and blossoming and bearing the beauty of my history.
In the spring I will be surrounded by my story, by my great-grandmother’s roses and in the summer, the sunflowers.
Some people tell their story through a lens and others knit it in to sweaters and scarves. Whether you brush it bright across a canvas or arrange it on your mantel, it’s your story and it matters.
My grandmother, she puts hers in the ground and tends it and it multiplies.
Me, I write my story down, pen to paper in this little gold polka-dot notebook that I’ve carried some version of since I read my first Baby-Sitter’s Club book two decades ago. It’s early mornings and stolen moments but it is a portion of what I love most.
And I want my daughter to see me digging deep into the things that I most love. Him and her and God and my people and holding a pen.
Motherhood is not an easy season in which to chase down your passion but what you love is your story and when tended in grace, like a garden it is fruitful.
How will you tell it?
P.S. I’m writing more today over at We Are That Family about saying yes to your passion, because motherhood sometimes finds us losing ourselves in this part of our story and we are all the better for finding our yes.
