“Happiness is a house with many doors—“

So said the card.

He’d bought it because our house has many doors.

The words caught my heart because they could mean so many things–(and maybe because I’d just read, a  few hours before, this post about open doors)…

Inside the card his own scribble said, “I know this day does not represent one of your favorite times—there have been bad connotations in the past—but…”

But…

 

We’d just finished dinner when I saw, peripheral, out the window of one of those doors, a passing blurr of white, and heard, I thought, a slowing.

“Did someone just turn in the drive?” I asked, as he walked to the middle front door, to fetch the mail, come late. I thought I’d heard the gravel crunch.

 

No sign of anyone, and he kept on walking.

“I guess someone’s just turning around,” I murmured…

I settled myself again at table, and the doorbell rang. But which one? “Ding-dong,” meant back door, didn’t it? And the front one just goes “Ding-,” unfinished (I thought, but I do get this mixed up).

Was he being cute at the front door, or had someone come up the drive to the back? I glanced out the front, seeing no one, and hearing the bell go “Ding-dong” again, I headed through the  kitchen door, out through the mudroom door, to the back door… and saw no one!

Swinging it open anyway, I now saw the Fed-Ex truck, driver back inside—and the box leaning against the milk can.

“1-800 Flowers.com…”

Waving smiles at the Fed-Ex guy, I gathered up the package like a baby.

We reached the kitchen both at once, he with the mail, I with the box, which I naturally started tugging at, most eagerly.

He’d done it again, our once prodigal boy grown man, matured now and gentled by life’s rough edges: another Mother’s Day jolt.

He doesn’t do such things half-way. This year there’s candy, too. And a longer note—of love.

I remember doors that slammed. A teen who ran away. A bedroom door I closed and didn’t open for over a year, couldn’t bear the cleaning needed beyond it till then. Then all the years of not knowing, and a doorbell that never rang to announce return.

But…

one day a phone rang…

Does your heart wrench on Mother’s Day? For you I pray what my card said this year:

“the blessing of faith,

the gift of hope,

and the miracle of love…”

The door you’re looking through might not be the right one. Or the time, though dragged out in many Mother’s Day tears by now, is not yet the right time.

There’s always that little word, “but” — which, with one word added, fills  with impossible possibilities:

“But…

But God…”

 

Don’t quit praying—

Or opening doors.

 *****

Linked to Sunday Stillness