The summer Becca was four

"But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart." — Luke 2:19

There was a summer when Becca was four and Hannah was not yet born and the house was a different house than it is now.

Not a different house. The same house. The same kitchen, the same table, the same window over the sink where the morning light comes in. But the house was louder then. The house was full of a kind of noise that I did not know I would miss until it was gone. A four-year-old's voice carries through every room. It fills the hallways. It gets into the walls and stays there, and twenty years later, when the house is quiet, you can almost hear it if you stand still long enough.

Becca was four and she was afraid of the vacuum cleaner. I do not know why. She was not afraid of the dog or the dark or the storm that took the power out for two days the summer before. She was afraid of the vacuum cleaner, and every Tuesday when I vacuumed the living room she stood in the kitchen doorway with her hands over her ears and watched me push it back and forth and she did not leave. She could have gone outside. She could have gone to her room. She stood in the doorway and watched because she was the kind of child who faced the thing that scared her by standing in the room where it was happening.

I did not know this was remarkable at the time. I thought all children were like this. I thought the standing-in-the-doorway was ordinary. I know now that it was not ordinary. It was Becca. It was the first draft of the woman she would become, the one who stays in the room, the one who does not leave when the noise is too much.

Earl was working. He was always working that summer. The cattle and the hay and the feed-and-seed and whatever else needed doing before the light ran out. He came home tired and he sat in his chair and Becca climbed into his lap and told him about her day and he listened the way Earl listened, which was without talking, which was the best way.

I was thirty-two years old. I was teaching third grade and raising two small children and running a house and I was tired in a way I did not know was temporary. I thought the tiredness was who I was. I thought this is what it is and it will always be this way and I did not know that in ten years the house would have three children in it and in twenty years it would have none and in forty-nine years I would be sitting at this same table remembering the summer Becca was four and the vacuum cleaner was the scariest thing in the world.

She is forty-nine this Saturday. I will call her in the morning and she will answer because Becca always answers. And I will not tell her about the vacuum cleaner because she does not remember it and the remembering is mine to carry. The way all of the remembering is mine now. The house is quiet. The noise is in the walls where I put it, and it is safe there, and I am grateful for every room it filled.

Lord, I did not know how fast it would go. Thank you for letting me stand in the middle of it.