Tuesday
In the morning, while the coffee drips and darkens and I pour rich cream into the bottom of a mug, Riley stands on a chair, riffling the contents of a cabinet in search of a flower vase.
Yesterday, she walked in after school with armfuls of Valentine’s Day love–flowers and balloons and chocolates, fresh with giddy gratitude after a surprise lunch visit from her boyfriend Josh.
“What is all this about?” I’d asked, gesturing toward the haul, grinning because I already knew.
She’d giggled, looking at me over glittery hearts and glinting foil, her arms still full of gifts. “Well, what this is about is Josh came and surprised me today for lunch.” She has a certain smile reserved for moments when she feels the abundance of her blessings, one that hints at humility and incredulousness as well as glee, and that’s the smile she wore right then, standing in the kitchen with her cheeks all flushed with joy and her backpack sliding slowly down her shoulders.
But today, it’s just Tuesday. Today, the neighbors down the street have already begun peeling garish heart-shaped stickers from their front windows and red food coloring stains have begun to fade from little-kid lips and we have begun to tuck away our big declarations of love in anticipation of other special occasions. Today, Riley has to get ready to go to school, and I have a home and family to manage, and we both started the day feeling less weighed up with gifts and more weighed down with responsibility.
I can dread a Tuesday, and when Riley had walked in the room this morning, God had already begun to teach me again how to be thankful. What are you thankful for right now?
“So,” Riley had said first thing, turning toward me, holding Josh’s gifts in the air, “for Valentine’s Day, it looks like Josh gave me flowers and balloons and chocolates and a card.” She’d declared it like testimony, an accounting of the evidence of love, like the truth that would set the day straight. She’d told me again what time yesterday Josh had surprised her at school and what time he’d left, and meanwhile, I had wandered in the kitchen in search of coffee, wondering why she needed to repeat the story. I missed the similarity between what she’d done to start her day and what I need to do to start mine, how I sit curled in a chair rehearsing an old story about how God loves me, how I open my journal and write down His gifts.
She lifts yesterday’s bouquet from the table and begins to cut away the cellophane, tenderly touching the stems, and as she drags a chair over to the cabinet to find a vase, I gently remind her that it will soon be time to go to school.
“I don’t know when Josh will surprise me again,” she says with a wavering voice. I look at her back as she searches the cabinet, wondering if the muscles twitching there already ache like mine, if her arms feel a little empty. “I just wish we could always be together.” She probably doesn’t understand the reason why love makes us homesick for forever, why it always feels all wrong for us to be separated. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, Paul wrote. That’s the holy determination that changed the world.
“I know.”
She steps down and takes her vase to the sink, and I reach for the coffee pot. Coffee splashes and water splashes, and I smile a little over how a day can feel so dry in the beginning, how you can buy the lie that you’re still wandering the desert.
“But what are you thankful for right now?” I ask her, because everything I say to her is just an echo of something God has already said to me.
“I don’t know when Josh will surprise me again,” she repeats. Carefully, she settles the flowers in the vase. She blinks, looking down, presses the curling corner of a planner page. Her fingers turn white. Even from where I stand I can see the heavy indentions of her handwriting charting out her days. What a trick it is to believe those marks account for a life. We number our days, and wisdom counts blessings. We do this together.
“Tell me again how he surprised you,” I say, and she does, and I tell her I’m thankful she has Josh, thankful he would think to do that and want to.
“Me too,” she says, turning to finger the card he gave her, to touch the top of that heart-shaped box of chocolate. “So thankful.”
“Tell me what he wrote to you,” I say, and she does, reads it gushing, wiping a stray tear from her cheek with one hand.
“I’m thankful he tells you how he feels about you,” I say, “thankful he loves you that way.”
I smile, realizing that this conversation reminds me of countless others, of my soul sisters and me sipping our coffee, gushing over an even greater love, retelling our stories of God.
“Me too,” Riley says, “so thankful. I am so thankful.”
I lay a hand on her back, right between her shoulder blades in that valley where my own body aches. “And he gives you chocolate,” I say.
She grins. “He does, Mom. He gives me chocolate a lot.”
