Blessings in Disguise

October. It’s almost done. I know this because Halloween candy is in our home… miniature Mounds and Dark Chocolate Kit-Kats. I should not partake… but when the candy hits the bowl tomorrow night… well… let’s just say I will know how Galadriel felt when Frodo offered her the One Ring.

I like this time of year. I think most folks do. So much fun and such great memories. Sometimes I think I live for fall.

November. It's just around the next bend. A time of year for giving thanks… and counting one’s blessings. Did you know that not all blessings start out as blessings? Let me tell you about one of mine that was, for the longest time, anything but a blessing to me.

In the early 1960s, a year or two after my grandfather (on my mother’s side) passed away, my father and his best friend wanted to purchase the Adirondack farm that my grandparents owned for most of their lives. My grandmother needed to sell it and retire. But it didn’t work out for my father and his friend; their hopes of owning a farm were dashed by events over which they had no control.

The farm was not far from where our family lived. It lay on the other side of two large fields, its two-story farmhouse easily seen in the distance from our backyard. It was an 1800s farmhouse adorned with large green storm shutters, a silver tin roof, and a tree-flanked covered porch that spanned the front of the house. The trees were huge and billowing, adding an air of strength and longevity to the already rustic home. Behind it were the customary red barns, sheds, and fence-lined fields one would expect to find.

I bring all this up because of a dream I had a few nights back… a dream about the farm. The dream took me down a “what if” path. In it, my father and his friend purchased the farm and, together, did precisely what they planned to do. My life was completely different. I grew up a farm kid. In real life, I was raised in the shadow of the Adirondacks, but I did not grow up there. I grew up in Virginia Beach, moving away from the ADK in early summer 1968. In my dream, I was happy that I grew up an Adirondacker, and I was grateful to have grown up with my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins nearby.

Yet, the dream seemed a bit unsettling, empty somehow, and unfulfilling.

The most poignant part of the dream occurred just before I woke up. I was the age I am now, standing on the front porch of the farmhouse, gazing across the fields to the house my father built for us in 1959 on land my grandfather had given him. It was an early November morning, and all was still. The sky was grey and heavy. All sound was hushed. There was no snow on the ground nor any in the air, but I knew my world was leaning gently against a coming snowfall.

After waking, I lay for a while in the dark, thinking about all I had just seen and also about how I felt, in particular, the empty feeling I was left with. The dream had an imperfection. A casual observer, if our dreams were allowed them, would not have noticed... but I did.

In my dream, I stood alone on the porch.

I listened to Laura’s soft breathing beside me… and closed my eyes. I traveled down a side road of the “what if” path and looked in on a T-shirt shop at the Virginia Beach oceanfront. It was May 1975, and a seventeen-year-old girl had just walked in. She was starting a summer job there that day. On this “what if” path, my eighteen-year-old self is not there to look up from his work and see her for the very first time. He is not there to fall head over heels in love with her over the summer. He is not there… and he never would be.

I don’t talk about it much, but when I moved away from my hometown in upstate New York, I was angry… and sad… for a long time. I didn’t like my new surroundings. I didn’t like where I went to school. I didn’t like the other kids. I didn’t like Virginia Beach. For the longest time, all I wanted was to go home.

I lay there and thought about that… and the dream… and the side road.

Then, I reached out and touched the shoulder of a soul more gentle than a hundred Adirondack mornings… one more beautiful than a thousand Adirondack snowfalls… and the empty feeling departed… and all that was unfulfilled became fulfilled again.

Sometimes, blessings begin as blessings in disguise.

As a child, Laura loved Florida. It is there that she was born. She loves it still. I was born far to the north, in the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. I moved south. She moved north. And we met in the month of May… along a side road… not far from my father’s unrealized dream of owning a farm.

—

Thanks for reading and listening…. I know my posts are much too long sometimes… thanks for overlooking that. Enjoy the holidays. Enjoy the upcoming year. Enjoy life and your loved ones. Enjoy yourself. You deserve it.

And Happy Birthday to the love of my life.