All the Birds of This Day

"Just stay for a minute," she said, and Jack sat back in his chair, and watched her, as they all did, because she seemed to be mustering herself.  Then she looked up at him and said, "A person can change.  Everything can change."

Ames took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.  He felt a sort of wonder for this wife of his, in so many ways so unknown to him, and he could be suddenly moved by some glimpse he had never had before of the days of her youth or her loneliness, or of the thoughts of her soul.

Jack said, very gently, "Why, thank you, Mrs. Ames.  That's all I wanted to know."

I read this part of my book on a plane somewhere above the mid-west.  I was heading home.  I turned towards the window and looked down over the clouds and the tip of the plane wing.  I read the passage over a few times and cried a little.  Partly because I was heading home, and I want to change, and be better, and I usually don't know quite how, but I mostly I cried because of the simplicity and beauty and hope in that doctrine,  "A person can change.  Everything can change."

This morning I rode my bike to the bakery,  I spent my last 2 dollars on two raspberry rolls, it seemed the most appropriate sacrifice. I put them in my bag and rode to a friends house. My cheeks were still cold as I sat in the orange kitchen chair looking through the half open window, through the poorly pruned bush, to the street, and the people and the autumned mountains.  I heated up my raspberry pull-apart on a yellow dish,  the colors looked beautiful, the pale, flecked pink and the plastic yellow.  I pulled off a piece of my sticky roll,  it was warm and soft on my cold fingers.  I started to tell my friend about how my grandpa used to bring these rolls to every family function.  How it made him so proud and happy to bring them to us.  How he would drive early in the morning to be sure to get them before they ran out.  As I was saying it, a great rush of unsatisfiable ache to see and talk to my grandpa came over me.  When they died four years ago, I cried at the funerals, and a couple times when I left on my mission soon after, but I have always been able to maintain utmost optimism and positive light on their being gone.  It has been peaceful.  But this morning, I just let that ache fall kindly through me.  And I did, I cried right there at the breakfast table as i kept eating.  It's one of those things you would never expect to happen when you wake up that morning,  missing someone like that, in the best of ways.  

I wonder then if what I'd read about changing was true.  I can't even describe how this morning would be a change,  expect that it was okay to cry about missing someone, it was okay to let them remind you they still care.  It's perhaps the most beautiful thing to have someone so deeply embedded through you, that your heart can't help but move, and sing and weep and praise when you are eating a raspberry roll on a clear fall morning and you think of them.  There are beginnings and endings,  but they are braided inextricably together and through one another, and that feeling in the heart and in the mind seems to care little about our human time.