By the end of the summer the trees on the bluff by our house will be gone. Not all of them, just the ones at the edge, at the very top, where the ground has started to slip away beneath, and the balance has begun to shift in favor of the fall, and not the ground beneath, and the next big rain could pull them down, dragging too much of our backyards with them. The neighbors tell of the flood of '92, and how they woke up early that Saturday morning and watched their trees slide down the hill. Most likely the end of summer is only thinking wishfully, and instead the first warm weekend will bring the chain saws out.

My mother used to say that my father would sooner lose an arm as lose a tree. When I was five the interstate came through our farm, cutting fields into odd pieces stranded on either side, cutting through the crick and the ravine, through the trees. The Black Walnut trees. The stand I imagine my father had walked from the time he tagged along with his older brothers. You know them, doing that. Like you know your hands. You know the pattern of roots sinking into the ground, which ones are good for leaning against, the smell of their leaves, the path worn between them, how far you need to stretch your head back to see the tops of them, so far your mouth hangs open just a little bit. Who would imagine something like that could ever go away?

And the men from the highway sat at our kitchen table, day after day, until it was done. Funny that I can't remember my father saying a word in all those meetings. I only remember an enormous silence, a stillness that froze his face, and his arms by his sides, and made me stop at the doorway, unable to break through the thickness of it to reach him. That summer the dust from the construction blew in from the east and settled on the tables and windows and the wash hanging on the clothesline.

The next summer we tried, once or twice, to walk through the culvert they built for the crick to run through, but it was long, and wet, not anything like walking under the trees, and my father had to carry me through the deepest part of the water. So we unlearned the boundaries of the woods we had known, and learned new ones. Some time after the last of the big equipment was gone and the first of the cars came, my father climbed the fence and planted trees, enough that years later, driving through, someone looking out the window might wonder what was different about that section of the road. It was only the dog that couldn't stop protecting the boundaries of his territory, slipping through the gaps in the fences on his nightly rounds, until he was hit by a car, and the thing that had been simply ugly became an unimaginable, eternal wound.

Like trees walking, the things we cannot imagine losing march out of our lives. Which is better, learning new trees, or haunting the old ones? And when we make the wrong choice, doesn't our Father carry us anyway? How tenderly my father must have lifted his dog from the side of the road and brought him home.

My father thought of small things. He thought of grains of oats. Every year, some time before it was fully spring, he kept a handful of oats wrapped in a wet paper towel in a glass jar, on top of the china cabinet in the dining room. Maybe it was a nice warm place to keep them. And I would watch him, after lunch, reach for that jar and unroll the paper towel and see. He showed me the sprouts growing their way into the folds of the towel, soon to fill up the jar, like pale green promises of a summer of fullness.

Who knows why I thought of playing in the back of the truck parked in the big shed across from the barn, on that summer evening? There had been so many times when my sister and I, too short to see over the side, had boosted ourselves over the open tailgate. So I reached up and pulled the latch.

The oats were part of what we fed the cows. Not taking as much time and worry as the alfalfa, or so it seemed, but there they were, filling the bed of the truck. And I pushed back as hard as I could. But two trails of them dropped to the cement in little piles, leaking out of the not-quite-closed gaps on either side of the tailgate.

I could have run away, and let them spill on the cement floor, the floor that smelled of cold and grease, even in the summer evening. It would have been after supper when my father and the hired hands were busy in the barn with the evening milking, the whine of the milking machines and the radio insulating them from everything outside. And there I was alone, the only one to hold back the mistake I had made. And I held on. Stuck between, not strong enough to push it back and crush the few unlucky grains caught between the tailgate and the side of the truck bed. Stuck with guilt. Stuck in a place too big for me.

So I held on, bracing my weight against the tailgate, first with one foot then another, pushing against the heaviness of my arms, until there was no thought of anything else and my life had become the truck, and the oats that must be saved, and the smell of cement and grease, and the faint sound of the milking machines in the barn across the yard. Until the milking was done, and my father came to push the tailgate closed.

All it took was one quick shove and it was done. And never mind the few grains crushed in the effort, or the piles that could be scooped from the floor. My father had come to make it right. But the guilt still hung in the damp air, even as the blood crept back through the veins of my fingers. And the bigness of what I had done stayed on me, and a chafing thought grew in my mind that my father had not done it right, had taken too long, hadn't seen how hard I had tried. And the thought of it made me run from the shed to the house at the opposite end of the yard.

Think small. Think of the too big places our Father has rescued us from, and the way we chafe at His hand, like He hasn't done it right, like He doesn't understand or care, like He owes us. And think of how it makes us run away.

I have a taste for certain ancient foods. Foods I grew up with. Foods handed down, too ancient for any of my friends to have seen them on their tables. Too old, even, to be written down, the routine of them burned into our muscles, the pattern of our footsteps from refrigerator to stove and back again. Foods we call home for at six o'clock when we aren't quite sure how much of the next ingredient to add. Concoctions that would feed a farmer's family with a loaf of bread, two eggs, a few strips of bacon and just one cup of milk. Or would spread a pound of hamburger onto sixteen hamburger buns.

They have names like Owl's Nests and Russian Fluff, and a taste of ancient farm kitchens, wood stoves, and grandmas in yellowed photographs. Egg Butter. We'd carefully spread a thin coat of this golden sauce to the edges of our toast, because that was the way our parents did it for us before we were old enough to spread our own. And at the end of the meal we were full. Not wanting, not to be pitied, not afraid.

Even today I bite my tongue as my husband spreads what I think is too much on his slices of toast. Is it possible that the batch I make for the three of us once fed us all?

Who knows if my mother served those meals because she had to, or because it was just what we ate on a Sunday night or Tuesday morning breakfast when she had forgotten to take anything else out of the freezer? I don't.

And my son won't know the taste of scarcity in those ancient foods. Just the taste of fullness and the certainty, as real as the crunch of toast, and the scent of bacon, and the determination of 161 years of grandmas at the stove, that it will be enough.

Last names didn't apply to grandparents. It's not like there were a lot of them left by the time my son came along, the youngest of a youngest of a youngest, with only two complete sets among us. Not like my friends' children who had their Nana's and Papa's and Grandma Helen's and Grandpa Burt's. We didn't need that kind of code to tell them apart, we thought.

But my son thought differently, and even though there were only two of them, they became the Black-Haired Grandma and the White-Haired Grandma, and I could almost feel my husband's mother cringe at the description of her light hair. But she smiled through it. Like she smiled through the six months or so when we each went by the name of a ninja turtle, and the White-Haired Grandma was temporarily Donatello. How happy she was to populate his imagination. How often she wished out loud that she could get down on the floor and play like she had with her children and grandchildren. My son would be her last.

The White-Haired Grandma. Where else would he ever find that kind of love? And when she died, the summer after second grade, the memory of it grew out of him like he grew out of action figures and imaginary names.

Is a loss as great if we don't know it? Or greater? My son has played hundreds of soccer games without his grandma on the sidelines, birthdays and Christmases have come and gone, and there is no one who stops by our house just to see his latest toy. And he is happy.

While my heart aches for an empty space around his life that was once filled with love, like God must ache for us who forget Him.

I never forget a car. I don't know why. What random event from my childhood burned that ability into my brain? I may forget a name, I will likely forget a face until I've seen it three or four times, but once I know what you drive, I will always know it. And when you buy your next car, I will know that one too, like I know the car you had before it, and the one before that.

Maybe it was my brother's car that started it. I can still feel the cool cement of the garage floor on my bare feet, and smell the old grease and aquamarine paint. A '57 Chevy. It looked fast, even there in the dark garage. It took him time to fix and polish. It took him places where teenagers went, places I couldn't go yet, places where girls dressed in gloves and high-heeled shoes that clicked on smooth floors rode with him in the front seat. It took his hopes and dreams.

Or my sister's first car, that used green Rambler. We laughed at the custom name plate glued to the dash. Who would think of having their name printed on their car? I took my sister away to her own apartment in a different city, a place where she cooked her own meals, and made her own friends, and didn't even call much when the washer broke, or the car got stuck in the snow, or she needed a good recipe for chocolate cake.

I have a car. It makes me smile. I park it far away from other cars to keep it safe. It takes me fast through curves and on-ramps, fast enough to make me feel sorry for the other drivers in the cars that can't keep up. It doesn't take me where I most want to go, like past frustrations, or through fear, or into that place in the soul of my teenage son where he looks out at the world, the place I knew inside and out when he was three.

I never forget a car. They put their promises on us, sometimes, shiny and new, pledging us beauty and speed and sophistication we couldn't possibly have apart from them. What promises do we put on them? Do we promise to grow up as beautiful and smart and successful as the expectations of us?

Do we print our names on our cars and take them with us? Do we take them as fast as we can, not looking back at failures, or stopping for fear, straight into what we really wanted from our lives—our souls?

Someone asked me what was the most important day of my life. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. Was it the day I married my husband, or the day I met him, or the day weeks before that when I finally told myself I was ready to give my heart away? Was it the day my son was born, or every day since then when he wakes up and smiles at me, or the morning when he's no longer here, and I finally realize how good that part of my life had been.

Each memory becomes an endless chain of pictures, like pearls strung from the limbs of trees in the yard that I can't reach the end of. How do we know what day is important and which one is not, especially while we're in them, and maybe never? Until finally the only day I could think of is not a single day, but a kind of day, the kind of day I'd lived enough times that the memory of it comes back in one complete picture.

It was the day when a load of peas would come from the field, mostly the scraps of vines, too small to send to the canning factory in town. We fed them to the cows. Except some of those days my father would find a vine intact, and pull it from the truck for us, a treasure of fresh pods, waiting to be split and the peas eaten.

We sat on the lawn on a big terry beach towel that my mother had sewn, my sister and me, the pile of vines between us, our pixie haircuts wet from the pool. We sat, like lilies of the field, and picked through the vines for the best pods, until the breeze had dried our matching cotton sun suits, pulled from a box sent by some distant relative we had never met with daughters who wore clothes of unimaginable finery, and the sun had warmed the goosebumps from our arms enough to go back into the water. We marveled at our fortune.

It is the picture of everything I need. How could anything be more important, that memory of warmth and food and clothing, that plenty for which we did not worry, or expect? What greater moment than the one lived in the open hand of God?

How do we learn to give?

We give because we saw it, experienced it. Because it was the quiet, right thing to do, like the box on the top shelf of our parents' closet that we climb and peek into when our parents are away, and because it's hidden, we know it's important.

It comes back to us. Like the sweet smell of scalded milk and melting butter brings back the memory of homemade bread and the sight of loaf pans lined up under dish towels on the kitchen table. At least once a week, sometimes on Saturdays, I would watch my mother pour the hot milk over the butter and stir the flour in the green Tupperware bread bowl, the kind of bowl I still make bread in. Waiting for the loaves to come out of the oven, she would scold us if we cut into one too soon, too hot for even Grandma De Master's perfect bread knife to cut it cleanly, without mashing it into a sticky mess.

We ate that bread every day, and when one loaf was gone, a new one would come up from the freezer in the basement, stored in a bag leftover from some rare store-bought loaf, washed out and hung to dry over the bathtub.

My friends ate sandwiches made of Wonderbread. And I knew, when I saw them take those sandwiches from their lunch bags, so thin, so white, a flattened line of purple jelly or processed cheese holding the sides together, that I was better than them, because my mother made our bread. We were more sensible, more thrifty, didn't waste our money on that stuff that smashed itself into a gluey mess. And probably they were thinking the same thing. We're better than she is, that girl who has to eat bread saved in rinsed-out bread bags hanging from a clip in the bathtub.

What separates us from them, we who wash the bread bags of our selves so they can be used again, in places where we might not be cool, and we might not get paid, and it might cost us the invitation to the sleepover at the popular kids' house? What makes us different? And each one probably looking with disdain at the other, thinking, "I'm so much better than they are. I'm doing it right." And maybe a bit of envy.

They were men, that day, our boys who ran, and fought, and flew through the air like we had never seen them do before. And I remember thinking to myself, "Remember what this looks like. Remember how beautiful he is, my son, as he runs, and how fluidly they move together, each boy knowing his position, his place on the field, like a perfect wave that curls and crashes, then recedes and comes back again, always knowing exactly what form it should take. Remember this now."

But the thing that seemed most clear about that game was the pattern of the blades of grass at my feet, and how hard it was to find a place for my water bottle to stand up straight on the sloped, uneven ground. Maybe because the ground was easier to look at in those moments when the game hung on a split-second decision, a reaction, a moment's lapse of concentration.

Or maybe because they were too much to look at, those men-boys who played for us. How could we look at them without seeing all of them, the ones whose shorts hung below the tops of their shin guards, the ones trying to take control of limbs too long and skinny for their bodies, the ones with tow heads and missing teeth smiles, as if see-through skin contained each of the ages they had ever been and each of the games they had ever played. A gift of clear that makes them bearable and unbearable to watch.

Is this how God sees us, with clear Jesus skin? Us, but filtered through the image of His beloved son? How much dirt and shame and loathing does that clear skin filter out? Enough that we can look down at our hands, our feet and see what could be, now that they bear that unbearable likeness?

We are the gift of clear in those places where there never seems to be enough hands and feet to do the work. If only we would see ourselves clear. What could we do with hands and feet and bodies so light they bear the touch of God? Or maybe the dirt is easier to look at.

There was a patch of carpet in the house where I grew up, just beyond the doorway leading from the kitchen to the dining room, where my father would lie down to take a nap, sometimes, after lunch. Not long, just 20 minutes or so. Long enough to absorb the warmth of the sun that seemed to fall on that particular spot at that particular time of day, before going back outside where the steam from the cows' noses reflected the mid-winter sunlight as they crowded around the feed in the barnyard. Years later, my mother would still fuss about the dirt on his overalls, and I noticed that sometime along the way she had put a throw rug down over that spot.

The sunlight seemed to grow out of that carpet, harvest gold, with a vaguely sculpted floral pattern, that scratched for the first few seconds, then softened as I settled into its warmth. I would lie there sometimes, in the afternoon, when the patch of sun had moved farther toward the other wall of the dining room, when I had nothing else to do, or my sister was busy reading and didn't want to play, or I was waiting for my turn at the piano.

Doing nothing was easy then, lying on the carpet listening to the choir on the radio singing, "Holy, Holy, Holy," or the recording of My Fair Lady, borrowed from the library for the umpteenth time. With my bare feet up on the rungs of my mother's metal typewriter stand, I would wonder what it was that I would do when I got to heaven, that one thing that I could do better than anyone else, the thing that God really needed me to do. I knew from Sunday School and listening to my older sisters that heaven was a place where we did things for God. I could play the piano, but so could every other little girl in that Dutch town. How many piano players would God need, after all?

I thought I've known, a few times in the years since, what God wanted me to do. The one thing I could do better than anyone else, that thing that would make Him need me.

What is that thing? Is it talent, or work, or money? Are you richer, faster, better, smarter, taller than anyone else? Surely God needs you to do that for Him.

And over and over, the thing that I thought I could do for God, because He needed it, was gone, and I was left with nothing to do but lie on His carpet. Over and over we cling to what we think we need to be worthy, and over and over He says to us, "Aren't I enough?" Until the answer is, "Yes."

Golf outings - what we do to lure those otherwise too busy or too distracted, to our cause. Even if they don't have time to pay attention to their own grass, perhaps they will play for a few hours on our grass, and do something good too.

This is the time of year when anything seems possible. Homeless people don't freeze to death overnight, food pantries stock their shelves with fresh tomatoes, and no one worries if there will be Christmas for their children, yet.

The summer stretches out in front of us like that perfect game we know from behind the first tee. And then we actually play that game, and the grains of too many sand traps stick in the creases of our elbows and scratch our forehead as we wipe off the sweat and smearing sunscreen.

It turns out our season of hope is not a game, isn't found on the golf course. True hope grows between the cracks of concrete in this season, in this city, where grit blowing off the sidewalk sticks to our arms. Hope is a truck, and a hot dog, and a rap song, and neighbors dancing in the evening, together, where only fear had played for too many years. Hope is the S.H.A.L.O.M. that lives on a street for a night, in the city, because a few people, who have long forgotten about their own grass, have chosen to sow life.