The Third Floor

I'm writing this shortly after a visit to Baptist Hospital South to see my sister, who had surgery to repair a broken femur this afternoon. She's going to be just fine.

The orthopedic ward is on the 3rd floor. You go up by elevator, you exit them and go through the doors to your right, and at the end of a little hallway -- at the first "intersection" just next to a private sitting room where boxes of tissue rest on every available surface -- you take a right....

No. That's not it.

If you take a right you will wind up at the doors of the MICU. You walked that way so many times for so many days that muscle memory just came into play, and although you realize you meant to take a left at that intersection, your feet keep walking toward those closed automatic doors, your hands begin to reach for the disinfectant pump containers mounted on the walls, and it is only when you allow yourself to face the fact that her room now holds some other mother, maybe, some other person whose family you had a hard time making eye contact with when you got off the elevator and saw all the MICU families hovering there waiting for their own limited visiting hours because they looked like wounded animals just like you and yours did when you sat there, waiting...   well it's then that you remember to turn around and head the other way.

The way that leads to the room where your sister is, where she will spend a few days recuperating, and taking some measure of rehab, and leaving from there to go home not much the worse for wear ultimately. The way that reminds you with each step that life is going on, that for every heartbreaking story those hallways could tell, including your own, stories of healing, and joy, and medical miracles great and small are being told there, too.  Right now. And your sister will be one of them, and this time, a woman you love deeply will come home from that 3rd floor.

And you are grateful to have felt, and moved through, another little landmine.

Shhhh.....

It's been a bit since I shared a landmine. Do not take that to mean that I've ceased to run across them; the busyness of the last few weeks has meant less time to feel the weight of them, to allow myself to fall fully into the gift they inevitably bring, and certainly, to write about them when they happen.

But here I am on a quiet Sunday morning. We will be getting our granddaughter in a little bit for the day, something we've not had an opportunity to do for too long, and we've an afternoon of just soaking her up planned. We aren't even heading to church today -- she has a mild viral infection to which we don't wish to expose other people's children.

So, I'm here at my computer. I opened Spotify, that wonderful, eclectic music sharing site, and typed in the keyword "strings," and just let it find music for me as I continued to work away at the computer here on the things I've not been able to find time for during the rest of an overscheduled week.

I was hardly listening to any of it, at least up to the moment I heard the opening strains of Barber's "Adagio for Strings, Opus 11."  Surely this is one of the loveliest, most evocative pieces of music ever written.

And in my heart, I heard Mama say -- as she always did, when something particularly lovely fell on her ear and we weren't paying due attention -- SHHHHH -- listen to this!  Her face would light up, and she would close her eyes or just get this dreamy look on her face, and nothing would annoy her more than for you not to listen with her just as intently.

Since Mama died, a hundred things have caused me to think "Mama would love this," and then have felt tremendous emptiness because there really isn't anyone else in my life with whom sharing those things would mean anything. This morning, though, it was almost as if she wanted to share something with me.


So, when the first strains of this magnificent piece fell on my ear, I listened to the urging that is so impressed on my psyche that it found a voice I could hear. I stopped everything I was doing, closed my eyes, shhhh'ed, and listened.  The gift of stopping, just for a few moments, and then allowing myself to weep just for missing her, and to weep for the beauty of that -- and for the beauty of the music -- was another precious landmine.