Grace Abounding

There's one picture--I can't find it--that features a little section of our backyard garden where a lot of detritus floated for a while until finding some current out to sea, in this case the flood waters of the Floyd River, as they receded. That stuff in the picture is gone. 

There's a bunch of things floating around, but one of them is the inside title page of a book of stories by Raymond Carver, who for a time in the eighties and nineties, stood atop the contemporary literary world with a style of bare-boned realism that seemed new at the time. Carver did a summer's worth of teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where I was a student. I read him religiously, and for reasons beyond my ken, he and his work bore down on my life like no other writer. His work was an inspiration. Some early stories of mine are an attempt to be Raymond Carver.

He signed a book of his, Cathedral, to me and said some sweet words about whatever fiction I'd handed in to him. It was Carver I spotted from the front window of the house, Carver in a couple feet of water with a bunch of other water-logged books whose loss right then, in comparison to Cathedral, seemed incidental,

Just a word about Cathedral. In it, in his own inimitably minimalist way, Carver had--to my sense at least--begun to rebuild a life torn apart by abuse and dischord. The proof was in the fiction. So not only was that volume of Carver stories mine, signed by the master personally, and sweetly, to me, it was also a path by which I could feel the drift of Carver's own life moving toward something I most certainly felt, back then, to be "religious." For me, so much was in that particular collection.

And more. Of all the books in the Schaap library, my son had long ago determined that one day he most surely wanted that copy of Cathedral. All of that is what lay down there beneath me in a mess of ruined books and who knows what else in the windfall of a flash flood and left again almost all that quickly.

That's a bad story, one of the worst, personally--I mean, there were other great losses, too numerous to mention even if all around us--Canton to Spencer and Cherokee, southwest to Hawarden and Akron--there are people whose losses are total, who are nakedly homeless, people who wander into social service outlets and tell the volunteers who are trying to help, that they need, well, everything because they have, well, nothing. Hundreds. Our loss--we can move back into the first floor of our house before we need to be out of the college apartment Dordt has given us, and others--our losses may seem paltry, hardly worth mentioning, But last week, in a flood that no one saw coming I lost my own personal copy of Cathedral, and I'm not at all ready to say that the loss of a book is anything less than horror.

Enough sadness. Let me tell you about Grace. It's abundant and free, and it's magical in its power. 

But there's a story. For years, Barbara has taken her grandchildren out to the strawberry fields east of here, just west of Sanborn. We sit (I resigned from sitting three years ago) in the rows assigned until we've picked two or three or four flats of wonderful strawberries. Her grandchildren have always loved the romp, in part because their grandma's wallet falls scandalously--no, delightfully--open; not only does she pay for the abundance they've picked, that gaping wallet gets them the treats the business sell--strawberry malts, strawberry pie, strawberry ice cream, and whatever other strawberry concoctions the berry business creates that year. Whether I picked along side the bunch or just drove them out there, I always grab a half-dozen strawberry donuts.

For whatever reason, I didn't go this year, but when Barbara returned, lo and behold there was a half dozen strawberry donuts--for me. I shan't eat a half dozen in one sitting, so the package went into the freezer and were then, well, totally forgotten, amid the bedlam of the flood and all the madness.

Yesterday, I opened the freezer and found them. 

Salvation, grace, I can't help but think, isn't particularly hard to talk about, but it's almost impossible to define in large scale.  Surely all of Rock Valley right now looks upon the cloud of witnesses and caregivers descended on that community as grace itself. People cry publicly, when amid the catastrophe all around someone sounds the good tidings of sweet and abiding hope.

So let me just say that last night, just as we were about to leave our real home for our temporary home, I looked in the freezer of our real home's upper floor (and the power company have been heroes!) and found a package of pink donuts both of us had forgotten we had--strawberry donuts from before the flood (that phrase always sounds biblical), strawberry donuts that themselves kindle memories of many good years in those strawberry fields. 

I'm sure theologians can and will give far more pointed and comprehensive definitions of grace, but i want you to know that just coming on those strawberry donuts last night, at the end of the Sabbath, was nothing less than glorious. a moment of sheer grace.

So, if you're wondering about me--Barbara has her own assembly of moments--I'm doing just fine and so is she. It's frickin' hard to go back there day after day and realize that the life we were living isn't going to continue or return. Cathedral, and its precious signature, is just plain gone. I can't give it to David. 

But if you want to know about the Schaaps, then understand this: it's a grand mess, but there are these precious moments when grace from on high comes streaming--dare I say "flooding"?-- into our lives by frozen strawberry donuts. There's always grace.