Chicago
December 2006
WHILE WE WAITED on her mother, Marla sat on the sofa in the foyer of my office and finished telling me about her conversation with Mr. Josh. “Why does he have all those colors on him?” She pointed back to the picture.
“Because that’s the way I like to think about him.”
“He looks like he got caught in a rainbow.”
I chuckled. “Perhaps he did.”
“But it’s dark all around him. How can you have a rainbow in the dark?”
“Marla, you ask the best questions.”
The clanging bell indicated someone had opened the front door. Marla turned to see. “It’s Mama.” She jumped up and ran toward the door. “Bye, Dr. Kate. See you next year. Oh, and merry Christmas.”
She was halfway out the door to meet her mother when I managed a “Merry Christmas to you too, Marla.” I watched Marla hug her mother. Silhouetted against the late December afternoon sky dotted with Christmas lights, they walked hand in hand across the street to their car.
I turned to the quilt hanging on the wall behind me and ran my fingers over the silk thread outlining the redbird. Then I glanced at the Christmas photo hanging next to the quilt—my first photograph, the one I took on that first Christmas morning after Mama went to heaven. I pondered that day for a few more moments before locking the door and turning out the front lights. I’d be in Cedar Falls this time tomorrow afternoon, joining my family for Christmas again.
Eighteen years had passed since that first Christmas portrait. Life changed when Mama died, and sometimes, I wondered how things might have been if she were still with us. She left too soon, but she left us with so much.
Granny Grace loved every day at her farm, continued singing in the choir, chased more guineas, and passed out orders to all the family until age eighty-four. She went to sleep one April evening and woke up in her heavenly mansion, built with only God knows how many blueberry pies and Japanese fruitcakes and other acts of kindness.
Aunt Susannah Hope and Uncle Don still live in the white Victorian with the wrap-around porch and picket fence. Somehow my aunt’s attacks of breathlessness went away after she had two children. Uncle Don still runs his accounting business when he isn’t painting windowsills or following up on Aunt Susannah Hope’s honey-do list. Hank, their first, is a college freshman studying architecture, and Gracie is still in high school. Gracie has Mama’s red hair.
Uncle Luke and Aunt Lisa married, and he set up his family practice in Cedar Falls. They bought Granny’s farm and added practically another house onto that log cabin. And now their three children fish in the pond where Uncle Luke proposed to Aunt Lisa.
Chesler. He is in school to be a veterinarian. He spent the last three summers working on a dude ranch in Colorado and singing tenor with a cowboy quartet for nightly entertainment at the chuckwagon dinners. Daddy said Chesler was going to be a singing cowboy vet.
And Daddy. Well, Daddy became Uncle Luke’s physician’s assistant, and he is still taking care of people. Evie, Pastor Simmons’s sister, moved to Cedar Falls shortly after the Christmas we met her and set up her studio and gallery there. It was small but successful. Two years later Daddy married Evie. I was the twelve-year-old maid of honor at their wedding and Chesler sang. Evie taught me so much about cameras and how to see things, really see things, and she made Daddy happy again. I still take trips with them a couple times a year. Daddy follows us to all kinds of exotic places and carries our camera equipment. Evie and I are collaborating on a book, a coffee table collection of happy faces from around the world. Mama would be proud.
Laramie and I are still friends. Although we don’t get to see each other as much as we’d like, we chat often. She and her parents moved back East to be with her grandparents when Laramie was fifteen, so we didn’t graduate together, but she’s done well. She’s married, lives in Richmond, Virginia, and is the buyer of women’s fashions for a large department store chain. She will meet me in Cedar Falls in June for the wedding.
And me? Well, little Kate now hangs out her shingle as Dr. Katherine Joy Harding, a licensed counselor and art therapist in Chicago. I still have the first camera I got for Christmas the year Mama went to heaven, and I am working on the next book of my life. Daddy, Chesler, and Uncle Luke are relieved that I’ll become Mrs. Henry Beckenworth this summer. Henry’s a social worker I met at a conference two years ago, and one day we’d like to go back to Appalachia, near my family, and do our work there. I wear his grandmother’s engagement ring on my finger, a family heirloom and my newest treasure.
I still value the old treasures though, like my box of Christmas ornaments, and the note Mama wrote to her fifth-grade boyfriend, which is now stuck with chewing gum to the bottom of my office desk drawer, and the pink satin bag with the lock of Mama’s hair and the mysterious Haven of Hope matchbook. I try to do the things Mama taught me—to be kind to others, kind enough to make them smile. I try to be good to myself and aware of the wonders that others miss.
Most of my practice involves grieving children, and it seems that Mr. Josh, the mysterious one who comes when children need him most, is still moving around just like he told me he does. I find myself looking for him, and I think I might have caught a couple glimpses of him since that Christmas of my tenth year, but the children who come to me often tell me of their conversations with him. He doesn’t always tell them his name, perhaps because they don’t ask. Oh, he dresses differently, and most children don’t see him the way I painted him in a rainbow of colors, but his caring eyes and his gentle words are still the same. He shows up at parks, in hospitals, in churches, and all kinds of surprising places. One of these days I’ll have my camera ready.
And Mama? Like Mr. Josh said, I hear her in my voice sometimes, and I see a bit of her when I look in the mirror. She still feels near, and there always seems to be a redbird close by.
