Haze

Three silent sisters sit in a semicircle on folding chairs in a nearly empty house—
save a few dozen boxes
and clumps of scattered things. These are the last vestiges of our parents’ seventy-seven-year marriage, and of our family life together.

Box by box,
picture by picture,
document by document,
we set ourselves to the inescapable work of bringing it to an end.

One sister breaks the silence,
reading aloud a letter she wrote to Mom as a child.
Her innocence—pure love, the longing to please—
shines through every earnest word and line.

Laughter rises suddenly,
echoing through emptied rooms, as we pause to lift the pervasive pressure of uncertainty and change that has suddenly uprooted our status quo.

And still we press on through the multiplying fragments of a shared half century—
report cards, awards, silly notes, love letters,
death certificates, service records, insurance cards,
gold medals, dance mementos, embarrassing photographs, Christmas gifts, and Mother’s Day cards.

Our childhood wounds are covered now with that expensive concealer we all learned to buy. The world doesn’t see—doesn’t even ask.

But we three know each other too well.

That old bluish indigo still seeps through no matter how carefully we blend the tones.

We carry the scars gracefully, mostly. Still, something rises uninvited—like biting into a ripe, sweet peach and finding the hidden bruise. It is not polite to spit it out. So we learn to swallow the bitter.

A still, unspoken tension gathers as we measure our life together in small decisions—
keep this,
throw that away,
keep this,
throw that away.

Pain sits with us, a familiar companion. But so does the distant hope of fresh start.

We choose, together,
to hold fast to what was good. We dry our tears. Our hearts have set our faces against the strong winds of irrevocable change, against the dead-end street of forever loss.

I fight the urge to run. Instead, I turn toward the window, longing for the warmth of sunlight.

I have never seen the flowering trees in Mom and Dad’s yard so heavy with bloom. White petals cover the ground like fresh, unblemished snow—
pristine—
yet the air carries winter still.
Late March winds sweep through, driving scores of early flowering petals to the ground.

It is spring.

The house stands empty now, and three sisters kiss and depart on separate paths.

In the west,
an afternoon haze settles
over the Rocky Mountains.

Without thinking,
I pluck a blossom as I leave,
pressing it later
between the pages of my Bible.

The haze clung thick that day—blurring the horizon, veiling the mountains,
and everything that lay beyond—as we said goodbye.

Bonnie Saul Wilks

“You called out to me in your time of trouble and I rescued you. I came down from the realm of the secret place of thunder, where mysteries hide. I came down to save you. I tested your hearts at the place where there was no water to drink, the place of your bitter argument with me.” Psalm 81:7 TPT