Mixed Feelings

            Over the past several weeks, my daughter Anna has been moving some of her long accumulated and much hoarded hope chest to her new home. She is soon to be married and creating a home of her own. Just as she has filled my home with her bargains of pots and pans to other necessities for a good wife to change a house into a home, she has filled my heart to nearly bursting over the years. My other children still have loving places in my heart, but Anna has lived with me for a longer period of time. Occasionally, the friction of two differing opinions has frayed those cords of love, but it has never severed them.

            Yesterday, we began to move mountains. The Bible says, if you have the faith as a grain of a mustard seed, you can move mountains.  Well, that happened. Decorations, foodstuffs, and other supplies were taken to our church where the wedding and reception is to be held. Two trips of my car and her SUV has nearly emptied my house of stacked bins, stored boxes, silk flower arrangements, and bags of all sorts. I can walk in my living room without following a maze. The living room has been a workshop and storage area for months. I can now see the top of the dining room table, but it somehow makes the house seem empty. I had gotten used to the clutter.

            For the longest time, she was sure that she would be without a mate; an unloved spinster, until she met a wonderful young man who loves her fiercely. When she was in the UN-wedding bell blues, I was snooping through a local antique mall. I wasn’t looking for anything special, when I saw a tatted lace cap. It was crocheted and shaped almost like a ladies nightcap with tatted chains of off-white patterns across the top. For some reason, I was drawn to look at it. The tag said that it was a wedding cap from the early 1900’s. I bought it for Anna. It was if God directed me to it to help lift her from the funk feeling of being unmarried. I can’t say that the cap gave her the faith to continue, but the belief that she was still loved allowed her collect and build a mountain of things for her home.

            Not too far in the future, those feelings of being loved and wed will be fulfilled. I will gain a son and he will gain a loving wife. A new family will be created with the hope for a new generation and for more grandchildren.