Reading Between the Lines: Writing from the Heart

I grew up loving stories as far back as I remember. I loved listening to the older people tell their stories. I enjoyed their expressions while they talked, as well as the varied expressions of the listeners. Sometimes I learned more about the storyteller from the latter’s expressions than from the teller’s words. I was a child when I learned to read between the lines and to listen with my heart.

In third grade, I wrote my first story. It was a class assignment. I was nervous about reading it to the class. I was shy and didn’t like being the center of attention. It was a story of an unlikely friendship between a cat and a mouse. They have adventures together traveling on a magic carpet. The best part of their story isn’t the places they go or even their method of travel. The best adventure is their friendship.

My class clapped after I read it. I was so embarrassed. I was so quietly happy, too.

In this blog I’m sharing some of the stories I’ve written since the third grade. I’m sharing some of my thoughts as well as my devotional writing. Once in a very great while, I may even share a little of my poetry. I pray that they will be a blessing to the readers.  

-Kathy

Housekeeper

She was an older lady with hair dime-metal grey. Maybe it was once red with a little gold or maybe brown. Whatever it may have been when she was young and brimming over with life’s many possibilities, on the day I met her it was grey.

It doesn’t matter. I just want to tell her story accurately. Of course, sometimes what you don’t say in a story says more than all the words wrapped up together and topped with a red bow.

In the book Fahrenheit 451 books are outlawed. Firemen actually start fires. They burn books. There’s an underground movement. Each person memorizes the contents of one book. They recite their book to others. As they advance in age, they teach it to someone younger. That person becomes David Copperfield, or Ulysses, or The Catcher in the Rye. In that same vein, I want to tell her story. I don’t have it memorized, but I think I can still tell it. After all, I was there when it happened.

Her name doesn’t matter because everyone thought of her as Housekeeper.  She kept other people’s houses sparkling clean. They never thanked her, but they did appreciate the results of her hard work – spotless houses in perfect order, smelling clean. Her employers acted like their houses became clean by magic.

Housekeeper didn’t believe in magic. She believed in old fashioned hard work. As a youngster, she was in charge of her brothers and sisters. They lived in a run-down house. She wanted it to be a home filled with love, but since that wasn’t possible, she made it a house filled with clean smells. Cleaning became her talent, her friend, her mission. And somewhere in between the laundry and the scrubbing and the window washing and the dusting, the brothers and sisters grew up and left Housekeeper alone with her aging parents.

One day in between the bathroom scrubbing and the shaking out of rugs, they left, too.

After the funeral, Housekeeper kept on cleaning until the small amount of money from her parents’ estate ran out. She sold the house and found other houses to keep. That was about 20 years before I met her. What happened in those 20 years I don’t know. I suspect Housekeeper kept house and kept to herself, but kept no secrets because she received none. She had no secrets to give – her life was a clean slate. It can’t get dirty if no one writes on it.

Housekeeper might have lived out the rest of her life that way were it not for one event. It was around this time of the year. August has a way of promising fall but delivering summer. It was unbearably humid made even worse by smarmy promises that cooler weather was just around the corner.

Housekeeper knew about corners. She had cleaned in them, around them, under them and beside them. The day I met her, she missed one and stepped out into the street. “I was dreaming about having a day off and not even cleaning up after myself. That’s when the car hit me. Do you think God is mad at me?”

I looked for a smile, but she was serious. “No, God isn’t mad at you. God loves you. He loves you with an amazing love.”

“Really?” She asked. Then she laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“I grew up hearing an old Irish blessing. ‘May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. And the rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand.’”

“Yeah?”

“As a little girl I always wondered, if God holds you in the hollow of His hand, is there an echo?” She pauses, then she says with enthusiasm, “Guess what? There is!”

“What?””I hear the most beautiful music. And….”

“What?”

“He says He has a special place just for me and it’s always sparkling clean!”

That was the first and last time I met her. But I have a feeling we’ll meet again one day.

©Kathy Yoder