This is life

I’m in a coffee shop, writing a homily for Colin and Anne’s wedding. On an incredibly perfect fall morning.

I talked to my Mom on the way over here about her day yesterday: seeing clients, going to a funeral for a family friend who died much too young, one of my cousins winning state semi-finals for soccer after that funeral. “This is life, ” she said.

So, here I am (on vacation, but I love Colin and Anne so I’m happy to spend a few hours doing “work”), thinking about that funeral that I missed yesterday, strugglin with a bad cough, watching a couple of National Guardsmen head off to their day (making me think of a friend at war in Afghanistan), enjoying the neighborhood where we are being hosted by Erik’s cousins, wondering if maybe in 5 or 6 years we’d move to Minnesota, thinking I should have had a glass or two fewer of the really good wine last night, glad to have had time with old friends from college, happy that Zora is so pleasant a child that she can stay out late for dinner and behave so well, delighted that she gets a night with grandma Viv tonight during the reception and Erik and I get a date, wondering when we’ll be able to take a trip again, thinking about my sisters who live on two continents right now, my parents about to set off on an adventure vacation in Asia, trying not to check websites about the election, and generally procrasitnating on this homily because all I can really think of is “This is life…” Too much going on, jumbled emotions, feeling pulled this way and that. Oddly, at peace in the middle of it all.

I’ll write something that has to do with their passages, but I wish I could just tell them: this is life. You don’t know where things will go or what will happen, and some mornings you’ll be pulled in every direction at once. But somehow, we just live with that and keep going to weddings and soccer games, writing homilies (well, in my case–they’re doctors, so…), wiping kids snotty noses, drinking some wine, and enjoying the sky when it’s blue.