Vachon Imagined

She was raised in a home many people would have passed by in search of something greater. Greener pastures just beyond the horizon, where those laughing in a hurry, rushing toward the sun, would never have seen what was there. They would never have experienced it.

But I did.

I got to experience her in more ways than one.

I was the little girl who looked up to her. She was my strength when I didn’t have any. My minister, who prayed for me when I didn’t even know what prayer meant. I didn’t even know who she was.

An angel, really, who had fallen out of grace many times in her own struggle to understand how God could be a man when men had treated her so poorly—overlooked her, chastised her, beaten her. Her own father, his father, or so I’m told.

A mother barely able to keep clothes on her children, so she made them herself. She poured her soul into the ground, hoping for a harvest, hoping for rain.

I walked those fields as a child. I uncovered their secrets as I tugged at my great-grandmother’s dress, begging for just one more bite of her cucumber—the one she made, the one that tasted like hers. A gift that would be given to my grandmother, and then to her daughter, my mother.

It traveled through the generations like a telephone pole we look up at and wonder about: How does that work? How does that symphony move through time, air, and space and bring words to the other end? How does something unseen carry something so precious?

The analyst with her papers and the researcher with her academics could never answer the question.

Not until she sat with her memory of two women who, much like me, wanted more.

Maybe not riches, though that would have helped.

No.

They wanted love.

Gentleness. Kindness. Goodness. Self-control.

They wanted these things from men who could not give them because they, too, had lived a hard-knock life—a life that stressed their minds and hardened their souls.

Good men, some might say.

They went to church. They tithed. They gave to the needy.

My grandmother was the first in line to give—whatever she had, whatever she could.

But still, she wanted love.

She wanted affection. Attention. A sacred moment held inside a sacred man who knew how to make room, who knew how to provide shelter.

I don’t know that she ever got to experience that.

In fact, I’m quite certain she never did.

So she created her own sanctuary.

She created it through reading her Bible, memorizing scripture, and devoting herself to her God.

Not his God.

Hers.

Just hers.

The God she found in the quiet places of her own heart. The God who gave her the strength to bear children, the strength to raise them, and the presence to love them.

She loved them through her cooking, through dishes only she could make, dishes only she could bring to life. She loved them through the vegetables she tended to day after day, vegetables we would later enjoy in the garden of her making—the joy of her labor.

There was laughter in that garden.

Laughing in the sun. Laughing with one another.

And that was the sanctuary she had been building all along.

Not a place untouched by suffering, but a place where suffering could not have the final word.

We held each other in a different kind of sun, a different kind of rain. We gave one another something that could not be measured, something no man could take away.

Love.

The kind of love that purifies the soul through each other.

The kind that gives us each other so that we can experience it fully.

I don’t know that she ever received the love she had wanted from the men in her life.

But I know what she gave us.

She gave us a home.

A home that is my home.

And now, it is your home too.

She is your home too.

That is the power of the spirit.

That is the power of movement.

It touches us. It carries us. It travels through the generations, through the blood, through memory, through the things we thought were too small to matter.

And somehow, it always returns us to the garden we make—not always the garden we believed we deserved, but the one we learned how to cultivate from the hands that came before us.

She planted something in me.

And now I am planting it in you.