Happy Holidays!

Jeanie

Growing up, my family attended the First Presbyterian Church in New Bern, N.C.  On Sunday I would be dressed in a hand-me-down from one of my sisters who may have received it from one of our cousins, which meant by the time it made to me it would be faded and worn.  But I couldn’t have cared less about the dress because what excited me was that this was the one day of the week that I could wear my patent leather, flip-strap Mary Jane shoes.  I was born with feet issues and every day of the week I had to wear heavy oxfords with arch supports.  My brother said that I looked like I was wearing Frankenstein shoes.  I begged my mother to let me wear the Mary Jane’s with the straps flipped to the back so that my shoes would look like fancy, grown-up slip-on’s, but she always said no because they would “eat up my socks”.

After everyone was dressed and hair was combed, we piled into the Rambler and headed downtown to church.  On the first day of my Kindergarten Sunday School class, my mother escorted me to a classroom in the basement.  The room had tiny chairs placed into a half-circle and the teacher, Mrs. Huggins, welcomed me to her class.  As I watched the last bit of my mother’s hem round the corner, my mild anxiety dissolved at the site of animal cracker boxes and juice.  Other children’s little hands were passed from their mothers to Mrs. Huggins and we settled into our seats for our Bible story and lesson.

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I don’t remember the details of the lesson but I do remember the picture that Mrs. Huggins showed us.  She held up a print of a child in a field looking up.  Peeking down out of the clouds was a man with long white hair and a white beard and a kindly smile.  I got excited thinking that our lesson was going to be about Santa Claus!  Mrs. Huggins said this was God who was our father in heaven.  She said that he loved all his children very much and if we were good then when we died we would live with him forever in heaven.

I remember being confused about God being my father as my father worked at Eddie Webb’s Shoe Store on Middle Street and he didn’t look anything like the man in the clouds.  And besides that, I didn’t plan on dying any time soon.  After the lesson we pulled our chairs up to little tables, took crayons out of a cigar box and colored pictures of angels who also lived in heaven with God our Father.

After we got home we ate Sunday brunch prepared by my father, the one that worked at the shoe store.  He didn’t go to church.  My mother said that his Sunday morning church was reading the newspaper without all of us bothering him.  My mother and I then went out to work in our garden.  We had a big vegetable garden and my mother knew all about growing food.  She showed me which plants were the weeds and how to pull them out so that the roots didn’t break off.

Still thinking about heaven, I looked up into the sky and asked my mother where exactly heaven was.  She stopped for a moment in the middle of the squash vines, looked around the garden and said, “Right here.”

Jeanie and Waterfall

I liked the idea of heaven being in our garden where we weren’t dead and everything smelled so good.  And since I believed that my mother knew everything about everything, gardens became my idea of heaven and they still are.

After all the preaching and teachings I have heard in my life in regards to the 3 story Universe of heaven, Earth and hell, I wonder how things might have been different if we all had been taught that heaven was right in our backyards?  How would we have cared for Earth if we knew that God lived in the squash patch and the only white-haired man in the sky was Santa Claus?