June 8 – “Like A Wooden Flower”

 

 

I did get Chris a gift for our anniversary.  Well, I made her one.  I don't usually do this sort of thing until around Christmas, but I carved her something.  Every time I do I wonder if that one will be the last one I'll be able to do.  Oh, I have my share of cuts and scrapes from the knife, but that has happened from the very first Christmas I started this venture.  The problem lately has been this infernal arthritis.  It leaves my hands sore for days every time I work on a carving.  Very frustrating to have to put it away when it feels so close to being finished.  Of course I never really feel completely satisfied with any of them.  There is always something else I feel I could have done or maybe one more rub with the sandpaper would make it just right.  Anyway, I had an idea in my head that wouldn't go away, and I had one more pieces of soft pine to work with, so I decided to give it a shot.

 

Now Chris loves to work in the yard.  She can get a vision of what some plant will look like three years from now, and plant this scrawny little twig in the ground and be satisfied.  Then three years later it looks amazing, just as she knew it would.  Our yard is in its "three years later" mode.  There are red flowers and blue ones and yellow ones and pink ones and purple ones.  I know all those colors are there because she told me.  They all look blue or red or yellow or green to me.  There are all different shapes of flowers, too.  Some look like cups with little yellow hairs sticking up in the middle.  Others look like the old "she loves me, she loves me not" kind, with petals all in a circle.  Some of them are very tiny, and some of them are really big.  They look so real they almost look fake.  And at any given time they are in some stage or the other of dying.  Great fable about life.  Birth, growth, explosion of potential, slow drooping, and finally death. 

But this year I wanted to say something to Chris about our thirty-seven years together.  I wanted to say that it has been one of those "explosion" after another that I wouldn't trade for anything.  And I wanted it to continue as long as we could open our eyes in one last squint of recognition.  So I made her a wooden flower.  It was not any particular breed or style or whatever they call kinds of flowers.  It was just something that was growing around in my head that needed to get out.  And being made out of wood, it won't droop.  Or wither.  Or fade.  Now there's the symbolism I was searching for.  Forever-ness.  I love you, Chris.  Like a wooden flower.

 

Isaiah 40:8 says, "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever."

 

Father, give us a few more years of forever-ness.  Amen.