Vachon Imagined

It’s graduation season, and we’ve been busy attending various graduation parties. So many people. If I’m honest, I would prefer not to attend. I don’t enjoy large crowds or being expected to make conversation with people I don’t know. If a person were an introvert, that would be me. But I rise to the occasion. I make the effort, probably by faking it until I make it.

Graduations are interesting ceremonies. They are large, public declarations that something important has happened. We gather in crowds, clap for accomplishments, take photographs, and mark the passage from one chapter to another. We make a great deal of these moments, and rightly so.

But not all ceremonies are large.

Some happen quietly, in kitchens and gardens, in habits inherited from people long gone. Some are witnessed by hundreds; others by no one at all. Yet the size of a ceremony has very little to do with its meaning.

Tomorrow is my son’s orchestra concert—his first year playing the viola, woot woot—and my mother and bonus dad have come up to see him perform. As we sit talking, the conversation turns to my grandmother, now gone, who had an extraordinary impact on my life in all the right ways.

She was a deeply religious woman who believed Jesus Christ was the only path to peace. And she wasn’t entirely wrong.

Though I’m sure there were times she watched her granddaughter venture into places and ideas she never imagined. A Southern woman rooted in her faith and community, she likely looked at some of my choices and thought, Oh no, she’s on her way to hell.

But I wasn’t.

I wasn’t lost, and I wasn’t really searching either.

I was experiencing.

Maybe I didn’t know that at the time. Standing in unfamiliar places, waiting for a squad leader who never showed, surrounded by a language I didn’t speak, I learned how vulnerable a person can feel when everything familiar is stripped away. I learned how heavy it can be to carry the need to prove yourself. I learned things that could never have been taught to me in a church pew or a classroom.

And yet, sitting here today, talking with my mother about gardening—a pastime I do not yet share—I find myself returning to my grandmother.

We talk about her love of tilling the earth, growing food, and waiting patiently for things to emerge in their own time. Looking back, I realize that while my grandmother and I may have walked different paths, we were not heading toward different destinations.

She found meaning through faith.

I found meaning through experience.

She trusted God.

I learned to trust life.

Different roads, perhaps. But not different truths.

As I look at my own little ceremonies, the rituals that keep her alive in memory, I’m reminded that I never really traveled that far from her. The distance was never as great as it appeared.

And I hope, wherever she is, that she’s looking at me—if such things are possible—and smiling when she sees that I still fill a bowl in the sink with warm, sudsy water before I begin the dishes, just so it’s ready.

No audience.

No applause.

No photographs.

Just a bowl of soapy water.

A small ceremony.

A small remembering.

Perhaps that’s what ceremonies are for. Not simply to mark an occasion, but to connect us—to those who came before us, to those who will come after us, and to the parts of ourselves that might otherwise be forgotten. The grand ceremonies do this in public. The small ones do it in private. Both remind us that we belong to something larger than ourselves.

Even when no one else is present, we are not alone.

My grandmother is there.

My mother is there.

The countless lives that made mine possible are there.

My lineage.

My way here.

My way home.