Why the Horse?

Seemed that it was time for Old Swimmer to get free and buoyant in words.  As I age, it gets more difficult to drag the human frame around.  It occurs to me that it may be a way to prepare us for weightlessness!

Our last summer in Pennsylvania ended with a complete move of household with only two week’s notice!  I was not ready to leave our historic old farmhouse in the folds of the verdant Valley Forge area.  I liked our generous porch overlooking the little creek with the weeping willow, and looking on one side at the cows blinking happily in their hilly pasture and on the other side at the whispering corn fields between us and our distant neighbor.

I remember the endless garage sale — seeing someone take our couch with all the kitty and doggie smells embedded in it and put it in their truck.  I remember fixing screens damaged by our escapist Beagle.

I avoided seeing the people I would miss the most.  My two weeks were spent with a definite pout, but it was a very sweaty pout.

The weather was ungodly hot and humid– the kind that takes one’s breath away.  Our house was not air conditioned,  but had a cool basement with a minor stream running through one side of it.  All the diapers washed in that basement!  And the litter of doggies that held forth down there when they became too active for the upper floors!   Someone bought the broken chairs in that damp basement, I remember.

It was terribly hot.  We were just swimming in perspiration and not very cheerfully doing the many hard chores of moving a family of five to a state as far away from Pennsylvania as I could imagine.  We were moving to the west coast!

The car wouldn’t pull the trailer we had rented.  We had to trade it in and take out a loan we couldn’t afford to buy a big truck.  We knew the dog would get carsick so we had to get tranquilizers from the vet.

The plan was for the truck, the dog, and my husband to drive across the hot and torrid land while the children and I took a detour into New England to say goodbye to a whole bunch of family that meant a lot to us.  If it had not been for the notion that Cape Cod, MA would be a very fitting dessert for eating all this difficult moving pot of gruel, I think I might have run away from home!!!

Oddly enough, running away from home got to be more and more inviting, until, by the day we all left, I was very very very glad to leave the dear old house and all my favorite nooks and crannies and hills and valleys and dear dear friends.  Just to get out of there– the blistering, smothering heat and the profound tiredness that weighed on us and on each other as we declined into real chronic grumpiness.

That change…the change from wanting never to leave to wanting to leave more than anything…is what precipitates this blog’s invention.  It feels as if the heaviness of this world is getting more by increments,  not only in my body, but in the greater mass of the earth.  I’m getting tired and sometimes grumpy.

What a help it is to have a notion backed by a reputable Word that there is a place ahead that will make an enormous difference.  Can it be that our discomforts are to make us lonely for the next place?  It is, after all, a place we have not been before.

The hype about heaven is pretty good sounding.  There is no reason to believe that it’s exaggerated, since I do know the author rather well, and nothing else I’ve learned from that source has turned out to be false.

Leaning back on a mysterious support is the best kind of rest when you find it renders you weightless.  The freedom of swimming in the salty waters of Cape Cod’s Nantucket Sound are a bit of a preview of the kind of bliss I expect in maybe twenty or so years.  Likely it will get uncomfortable,  tiresome,  hot and sweaty here, especially as the time comes near.  It’s a good thing, really, that we are prepared in this way to go to that unknown place that’s in our future.

I’ve chosen the swimming horse silhouette as my banner for this blog– it is a really free looking horse, isn’t it?  What must it be to be a big horse of hundreds of pounds?  How wonderful it must be for those feet to be relieved of that weight for a time!

Old Swimmer