Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (30 page)

Meanwhile, in between base hits and pop-ups and home runs, I got to catch up with some folks I hadn’t seen in a few months. We talked about life, we talked about the Lord, we talked about the poor guy playing left field for the other team because, bless his heart, it was probably not his favorite afternoon.

After a couple of hours, the game ended. We won by about forty-two runs (this number might be a slight exaggeration), and after we said our good-byes, I called David, who was just finishing up at work, to see if he wanted to meet us for a hamburger. He did indeed. The boys and I hiked back up the small mountain (okay, it’s just a really steep hill, but I do not consider myself an explorer) to my car, stopping to visit with Alex’s favorite substitute teacher, and after we were buckled into our seats and heading out of the parking lot, I realized there was a big ole lump in the back of my throat. The presence of Alex and his friend was the only thing that kept the ugly cry at bay.

The threat of tears was no mystery. I knew exactly why I was so emotional.

I grew up so immersed in community that I didn’t even realize I had it. College was the same. But in my early twenties, I lost that feeling of being deeply connected to other people, and to me at least, it seemed like I didn’t fit in anywhere. My Jackson friends helped me rediscover that sense
of belonging, and while Baton Rouge (and marriage) required some adjustment, the Lord provided a sweet church, great neighbors, and phenomenal students to pull me through.

But then Birmingham. Oh, Birmingham. Life got so much sweeter after we found you, and part of me is so tempted to think that you might be the very best place of all.

So that baseball game, as silly as it may sound, was such a reminder of how the Lord went before us when He called us here. Really, He’s outdone Himself. It’s been fourteen years, and our roots are deep. Fourteen years, and our hearts are at home. Fourteen years, and ordinary, simple, everyday life is all the more beautiful because of the people God has placed in our path.

It might sound strange, but for more reasons than I could possibly count, Birmingham has been my very favorite lesson.

Over the last forty-some-odd years, I’ve lived in ranch houses and dorm rooms and apartments. I’ve lived in a sorority house, post-war cottages, and the unfinished back room of a Craftsman bungalow. I’ve removed all manner of hideous wallpaper, I’ve experienced the depths of paint-color regret, and I’ve planted
 
—and subsequently killed
 
—more mums than I can count. I’ve added stripes to my walls (my late nineties decorative sensibilities might be best dubbed
carnival chic
), I’ve reupholstered seat cushions, and I’ve been known to tie a Christmas tree to a nail on the wall if I couldn’t get it to stand up just the way I liked it. It’s been mighty big fun to decorate and repurpose and personalize.

But when push comes to shove, I’ll take substance over style all day long. I’ll take deep conversations around my cluttered kitchen table, heartfelt prayers on our tattered living-room sofa, and precious friends who know they’re welcome even if they walk in the front door and think the laundry has most certainly revolted and maybe even exploded.

Because while it’s taken, you know,
my whole life
to wrap my brain around this idea, what I’m finally figuring out is that when we’re really and truly at home
 
—with our faith, our family, our friends, our callings, and ourselves
 
—there’s a transformation that has little to do with the style
of our house or the numbers on the mailbox. It’s a change that turns us outward, that opens our arms, that compels us to extend a hand to people who are standing at a crossroads in their own lives and trying to figure out which way to go.

And speaking of that.

My path to peace hasn’t been the most predictable. It’s less than two hundred miles from Myrtlewood to Birmingham, but the route the Lord mapped out for me wasn’t quite as direct as moving from point A to point B. I left Myrtlewood, moved to Starkville, then to Atlanta, back to Starkville, then to Myrtlewood, to Jackson, and finally to Baton Rouge before I ever made it to Birmingham. That route is more than 1,400 miles, which means that, from a purely human perspective, it’s about 1,200 miles away from making good sense. If I’d sat down with a road atlas and a pen when I was seventeen years old and getting ready to leave for college, I would have never picked such an out-of-the-way, seemingly nonsensical path.

But God knew better. He knows better. He’s been so sweet to lead me exactly where I needed to be
 
—and in every single place, I’ve seen more of His goodness, more of His love, and more of His character. He has shown me all those things through His Word, certainly, and through the people I’ve met at different points along the road.

So while David and I really do believe that God wants us in Birmingham right now
 
—and while it really does feel like this is our place
 
—I’m also mindful that it might not be our last stop. And that’s okay. I only have to look back over the course of my life to know that if the Lord has another destination in mind for our little family, we can trust Him. He won’t lead us somewhere new and then abandon us; after all, just look at what Moses said to Joshua: “It is the
L
ORD
who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 31:8).

Maybe things would have gone more smoothly for Moses and the Israelites if they’d had access to the Google. Maybe they would have made it to Canaan in record time if they’d only had an app to help them navigate the wilderness. But they actually had something even better, and so do we:
a sovereign, steady Compass. The Lord guides us along every step of our journey.

His timing is perfect.

He doesn’t waste a bit of our wandering.

And His faithfulness teaches a truth we can take with us no matter where we go:

     
’Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far

     
And Grace will lead me home.

T
O
B
ILL
J
ENSEN:
You are calm, wise, and honest, so basically you’re the perfect agent. Thank you for your constant encouragement and sage advice.

To Stephanie Rische: I still haven’t figured out how you crawl in my head when you edit, but I’ve decided that you must be secretly Southern. I am so grateful for you. Thanks for taking my words and making them better.

To Carol Traver: Somehow you manage to take the most stressful process I have ever experienced and make it feel like a relaxing board game. By a fire. With exotic coffees. Thanks for being patient and taking care of all the details that totally stress me out. You are a gem.

To the Tyndale marketing and sales teams: Thanks to y’all, people can actually find my books in places other than the trunk of my car. I am forever indebted to you for your creativity and hard work.

To Lisa Jackson: There are few things that make me happier than a long e-mail from you. Your insight is invaluable, as is your feedback. You’ve taught me so much, and I can never thank you enough.

To the sweetest blog readers in all the land: Hey, remember when I quit blogging for about three months so I could finish this book? Y’all were so
sweet about that. Your e-mails and tweets and comments and prayers kept me going, and even as I type this, I’m super happy that we now have tons of time to discuss TV and bacon and mascara again. Y’all are the best.

To my writer friends: Thanks for being a safe place to vent/cry/celebrate/doubt/discuss Bravo/analyze cover options/laugh/quit/start over again. Y’all are a gift.

To Jean: You are such a blessing to our family (and to so many other people too). The Hudsons are crazy about you.

To the Baptist and Anglican Council of Mamas: Now it is time for queso.

To Mary Jo, Anne, and Leslie: I can never repay you for all your prayers, but I do hope I get to fry you some chicken real soon.

To Ree: Who is kinder, more generous, and more encouraging than you are? Nobody, that’s who.

To my forever friends: I don’t even know what to say except that y’all are the best friends a girl could ever want. Thanks for letting me share some of our stories.

To Paul IV, Gillian, and Graham: I’m so happy to be able to introduce your daddy to the people who read this book. He would be so incredibly proud of each one of you.

To Melanie: Oh, my friend. I would have never finished this book without you, especially when I hit that point when I no longer had PLENTY OF TIME. I think our good friend the apostle Paul says it best: “I have never stopped thanking God for you.” I will forever contend that you’re the best gift the Internet ever gave me.

To Rose: You are the world’s best writing cheerleader. Thanks for praying, for checking on my progress, and for sharing 13-B more times than I can count. You take care of your people so selflessly and so well.

To Mama, Daddy, Martha, and the rest of my family: You have been patient and supportive all my life, but never more than this last year. And now that this book is finished, we are going to take A LOT of trips. I love y’all.

To Alex: You’re my favorite person in the whole world. Being your mama is the best part of every single day. Your daddy and I are so proud of you. Go get ’em, #44.

To David: You have championed all this writing stuff without condition or hesitation, and you will never know what a gift that has been to me. You read every word of this book before anyone else, and I have to say that you’ve become a mighty fine editor, Mr. Hudson. There’s no earthly opinion I value more. I love you.

And finally, to Jesus: “Here I raise my Ebenezer;/Hither by Thy help I’m come;/And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,/Safely to arrive at home.”

W
ITH AN URGE
to document the hilarity of family life, Sophie Hudson began writing her blog in 2005. She’s just as shocked as she can be that people are still reading. Sophie hopes that through her stories, women find encouragement and hope in the everyday, joy-filled moments of life. In addition to her blog,
BooMama.net
, Sophie is the author of
A Little Salty to Cut the Sweet
and also serves as co-emcee for LifeWay’s annual dotMOM event. Sophie is a wife, mama, daughter, sister, and friend. She adores her family and loves to laugh. She also loves the DVR, Mississippi State sports, unsweetened ice tea, pedicures, and Jesus, whom she loves most of all. Sophie makes her home in Birmingham, Alabama.

Connect with her in the following places:

Blog:
BooMama.net

Facebook:
www.facebook.com/SophieHudsonBooMama

Twitter:
@boomama

S
O,
I
HAVE A THEORY.

It’s not a theory about science or religion or politics. Oh, heavens, no. That would be a complete departure from the very fiber of my personality.

But I do have a theory about memory. More specifically, I have a theory about how we remember people.

Are you ready?

Prepare to be underwhelmed, my friends.

My theory is that we typically have one dominant “fallback” memory that becomes our go-to mental image when we think about somebody.

Now that I’ve typed that out, by the way, I’m thinking that maybe it’s not so much a
theory
as a loose, unverifiable observation.

But let’s just run with it. Because whenever I think about Papaw Sims, for example, I picture him leaning over his deep
freeze and asking if I’d rather have chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry ice cream. Whenever I think about Uncle Joe, I picture him dozing in his recliner with a stack of paperwork on his lap—and a ten-key adding machine within arm’s reach. And whenever I think about Mamaw Davis, my maternal grandmother, I picture her looking over her shoulder and grinning while she’s standing at the stove. Maybe even scooping a little Crisco out of the can.

The mental picture of Mamaw standing at the stove is one of the most enduring images of my childhood, mainly because she stood at that stove so faithfully. She cooked three hot meals a day, seven days a week. There was never anything made from a box, either—no powdery macaroni and cheese or Hamburger Helper. Oh, no, ma’am. There was hot cornbread, beef stroganoff over rice, pot roast with carrots and potatoes, fried chicken, creamed potatoes, fresh peas, fried squash, fried okra (I have to pause for a moment whenever I mention Mamaw’s fried okra and give it the reverence and honor that it is due), egg custard pie, pound cake—I could go on and on.

We didn’t have all that food at one time, mind you, or else we’d have alternated trips to Mamaw’s table with trips to the cardiac care unit, but there was always something delicious and homemade on that stove. Mamaw didn’t think she was doing anything special—she was just taking care of her family the best way she knew how—but I think her children and grandchildren can all testify to the fact that those meals she cooked ministered to us like a good Sunday sermon. And she didn’t have to say a single word.

For at least one week a summer—sometimes more—my mama and my daddy, along with my aunt Choxie, who is Mama’s sister, and Chox’s husband, my uncle Joe, would ship my cousin Paige and me off to Mamaw and Papaw Davis’s pretty
white farmhouse in Moss Rose, Mississippi—about thirty minutes from my hometown of Myrtlewood. Since Paige would have been born in the early 1900s if she’d had any say in the matter, she thrived on Mamaw and Papaw’s farm. She was perfectly content to pick blackberries, walk through the chicken coops, amble about in the pastures, and count cows. I, on the other hand, was a total scaredy-cat, wary of tall grass that made me itch and bumblebees that refused to be swatted away.

I had issues when I was indoors, too. When Paige and I would go to bed at night, exhausted from our day’s adventures, I’d usually make it ten or fifteen minutes before I’d sprint down the hall and crawl into bed with Mamaw and Papaw. Every floorboard creak sounded to me like imminent danger, so I settled into sleep much more easily underneath the cool hum of the AC window unit in my grandparents’ room. No way could the boogeyman get me in there. Not on Papaw’s watch. He was broad shouldered, barrel chested, and utterly devoted to his family—a security blanket in human form.

Papaw had some health problems when I was ten, and not too long afterward he and Mamaw decided to downsize and find a smaller house with a lot less land. Somebody later told my mama that Papaw was thinking ahead—he was worried something would happen to him and Mamaw would be stuck with the responsibilities of the farm. On top of that, he didn’t want her to be living in a relatively remote area all by herself. So they sold the farmhouse (and the farm) and moved to a blond brick house that was just catty-corner from Moss Rose’s Methodist church.

Papaw added a den to the back of the new-to-them house so there would be a nice big gathering place for the family, and when we had our first Sunday lunch there a month or so after they moved in, Mamaw stood at her new stove and carried out
the ministry of the homemade chicken pie just like she’d always done. Paige and I missed the backyard of the old house and the pipe swing with the eight-foot chain that hung from the branches of an old oak tree, but there was a barn to explore and plenty of room to roam. That was all we needed.

The following winter Mama and Chox hosted a tea at Mamaw and Papaw’s house to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Mama and Choxie’s brother, Bill, who lived three hours away, was there too, and in my opinion Bill’s presence always elevated a family gathering a couple of notches. He drove a sports car, reminded me of Burt Reynolds, and delivered one-liners better than anybody else I knew. If that weren’t enough, Mama and Chox let Paige and me serve the punch, and we were certain such a grown-up responsibility meant we’d hit the big time. Papaw wore his nicest suit, and Mamaw wore a pretty dress that she’d made for the occasion, along with a corsage that Sister had bought for her at a florist’s shop in Myrtlewood. They made an adorable couple.

Papaw’s personality came alive in a big group of folks, so he was in his element that afternoon. Mamaw, on the other hand, was much more introverted and soft spoken. Every once in a while Papaw would put his hand on her back and whisper, “You doing okay, Lucy?”

She’d grin and say, “I’m fine, John.”

But even at eleven years old I knew it was hard for her to be the center of attention. Her sweet, servant spirit shone just fine without the aid of any limelight, and part of me wondered if she wasn’t going to sneak out of her own anniversary party so she could get in the kitchen and make everybody some chicken and dumplings. She hung in there with the socializing, though, and she stood by Papaw’s side until the front door closed and Mama
and Chox practically raced to see who could be the first one to take off her high-heeled shoes.

What none of us knew at the time, though, was how much Mamaw was struggling with her health. Then again, not even
she
knew how sick she was. Having been plagued by a general feeling of weakness as well as liver problems during the past several years, she initially thought that she was dealing with more of the same. Over the next few months, however, she and Papaw traveled to Myrtlewood almost weekly for doctor’s visits, and early that fall—about eight months after their fiftieth anniversary—Papaw told the family that the doctor had confirmed their worst fear: cancer. Other than helping Mamaw manage her pain and keeping her as comfortable as possible, there wasn’t much the doctors could do.

Mamaw was admitted to the hospital in Myrtlewood right before Thanksgiving, and for the next two weeks Mama, Chox, and Papaw rarely left her side. Mama would pick up Paige and me from school—we were fourteen and twelve at that point—and we’d do our homework in the waiting room down the hall from Mamaw’s room while we drank Cokes and ate Dolly Madison fruit pies from the vending machine. Mama or Chox would take us downstairs to the hospital cafeteria for supper, and we’d eventually go home whenever they felt Mamaw was settled for the night. It broke their hearts to see her in pain, and they took their role as her advocates very seriously. It wasn’t quite like Shirley MacLaine at the nurses’ station in
Terms of Endearment
—Mama and Chox were far too polite to make a scene—but in their own Southern ways, they didn’t mess around.

By mid-December the weather had turned windy and cold, and Mamaw showed no signs of getting better. One Tuesday night Papaw needed to drive back to Moss Rose to get a change
of clothes and a few other things, and since Mama and Chox didn’t want him to stay at the house by himself, they suggested that he take Paige and me with him. We had school the next day, but they were far more worried about Papaw than about our missing an hour of social studies. So off we went.

The ride to Moss Rose in Papaw’s Oldsmobile 88 was a quiet one, and by the time we arrived at Mamaw and Papaw’s house, we were all pretty worn out. It was the first time I’d walked through their back door without immediately seeing Mamaw standing at the stove, and while we didn’t stop and take time to vocalize our feelings or anything like that, I think it’s safe to say that we all felt her absence.

Paige and I brushed our teeth in silence that night, standing in the guest bath that always smelled like a combination of rubbing alcohol and Mercurochrome. We walked down the hall to tell Papaw good-night and found him lying on top of the bedspread, staring at the ceiling with his arms crossed over his chest. Paige and I sat down beside him, not really knowing what to say. Papaw spoke up first and uttered six words that have stayed with me for more than thirty years.

“She was mighty sweet, wasn’t she?”

It struck me as strange that he used the past tense, but Paige and I certainly didn’t correct him. We tried our best to comfort him as his shoulders began to shake and the tears started to fall. And while I don’t have any idea what time it was when Paige and I finally fell asleep, I do know that Papaw’s quiet sobs were the last sound either of us heard.

Early the next morning, around five o’clock, there was a knock on the door. Mama, Daddy, Chox, and Joe had come to tell us what Papaw’s heart had told him the night before.

Up to that point in my life—and I was every bit of twelve
years old—I’d been all about ballet lessons, my snazzy new Merlin game,
American Top 40
, and Nancy Drew mysteries. So for me, Mamaw’s death was my first glimpse into what family life looks like in the midst of sadness and grief and heartache. I couldn’t have put words to it at the time, I don’t think, but somehow I could sense that there was beauty in all that brokenness, that there were little patches of light that permeated the darkness. Yes, there was sorrow and pain—but there was also love and comfort and laughter and joy. There was a confidence that something bigger was at work, an assurance of “an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Corinthians 4:17,
NIV
).

So while Mamaw’s death certainly isn’t my happiest memory, I can honestly say that it will forever be one that I treasure. Because that memory, by God’s grace, continues to teach me.

And even now, more than three decades later, I hold that memory in my heart real tight.

And I watch.

And I listen.