Telling Your Story
Got a nice card yesterday from a distant cousin. Distant both geographically and genealogically. He wrote a nice letter about how much my mom meant to him, and how she used her time on earth as her super-power.
I tend to think of "super-power" as something magical in the movies, like reading someone's mind, time travel, or maybe being a Gunsmoke's Matt Dillon who could always draw first on the bad guy. I never thought about Mom having a "super-power.
It looks like she did.
Hers was giving her time and using time well. She spent hours upon hours crocheting afghans and baby blankets and handkerchiefs and kitchen towels. Most of them were given away. Each of her sister's grandchildren got a hand-crocheted baby blanket to welcome their first child, since her sister had passed before she became a great-grandmother and did not have the opportunity to make them herself.
She also gave away endless bags of caramel corn, especially at Christmastime. Her famous caramel corn came up in her memorial service yesterday. Another cousin—a regular recipient of the famous Christmas caramel corn—said that she could immediately smell it upon hearing the word and congratulated us for having the scent piped in at just the right time in the service! Words can evoke some interesting scent-sations.
Her time. It made a big mark on a lot of lives.
We are all given the same super-power of time. Some people have less of the super-power to use than others, but we all have some.
How we use that super-power is up to us. Of course, we all have to earn a living, take care of home and family. We have the details of life to handle like paying the bills, mowing the lawn, paperwork, laundry, banking, shopping, errands, and the like. At some point, we run out of those demands or find that they aren't quite as important as we once thought.
It doesn't matter how you use that special time super-power you are given. Teach Sunday school, be a 4-H volunteer, bring meals to people, crochet baby blankets for first time parents with no grandparent to provide the heirloom, share vegetables from the garden, share your woodworking projects, visit nursing homes, write letters, take a kid hunting or fishing—whatever.
You are already doing something with your spare time. (Hopefully that time isn't spent glued to the news, because that doesn't deliver a whole lot of hope and is sort of a super-power waste.)
Are you sharing the result of your time super-power? Here is a gentle reminder to keep sharing yourself with the world. Little things—even caramel corn and afghans—leave big impressions about life, sharing love, and the pursuit of happiness.
Bev Berens is a freelance writer and FFA parent from Holland, Mich. She can be contacted at uphillfarm494@yahoo.com.