Beech Tree News Network

Christmas 2013 is now Christmas past and I feel like I do every year at this time, like a crumb on the map of the world.  Not a pin point that someone has stuck a push pin into to mark a spot, but more like a miniscule piece of a Christmas cookie that has fallen from the hand of someone who is viewing the map.
    There were highlights during this season—my granddaughter’s red “Chrisam” tree, my daughter’s visit from Louisiana, dinner with my two Alabama nephews (that hasn’t happened in ages), Christmas day with my stepmom and my brothers and sisters and their families.
    I love the Christmas season, but there is also an underlying sadness that accompanies it for me.  I suspect there is a subconscious part of me that travels back to my first Christmas without my mom and my grandma, a remembering of their absence.  It is a scene of four young girls, hiding with a stepmother we barely knew in a Louisville apartment, while a custody hearing to determine our fate took place three counties away.
    We were given Santa Claus puzzles to take our minds off things—things we would have no say in.  The younger two of us (I am one) were unruly, over-active, bored.  We quickly lost interest in the Santa Claus puzzles and made too much noise.  The sound of a broom handle thudding against the ceiling below us and a booming voice yelling, “Cut that noise out up there!” interrupted our little girl noise.
    It was shocking, the sound of a voice below me, a stranger’s voice, calling me out, telling me I had disturbed his peace and I had no right to do so.  It would become a theme throughout my young life—always disturbing somebody else’s peace.  As an adult, I would find myself saying over and over, “All I want is peace, if I could just have peace.”
    My granddaughter is like I was then—unruly, loud, easily bored.  There are times when I want to bang on the ceiling with my own broom handle, but I know better.  It would become a game for her.  In my mind’s eye, I can see her, atop the kitchen table, with her small, red-handled broom in her hand, banging on the kitchen ceiling, yelling, “Cut that noise out up there!”
    She is at her father’s for the weekend.  I’ve had quiet.  I learned long ago, however, that quiet isn’t always accompanied by peace.  Quiet sometimes makes room for those small, disquieting voices that whisper things like, “It will never work; it won’t get better; why bother.”  I find myself longing for the noise that will bring me peace—the battles over what shoes she will wear outside and what she will eat for lunch; the arguments over the toys scattered about the living room with their lost or broken pieces; the small conflicts that ultimately bring me peace, the peace of knowing I matter in someone’s life besides my own.
    I hear people talk about having peace and quiet as if the two co-exist, hand-in-hand.  I wonder what that’s like.  Maybe, someday I’ll know.