Gifts...

Sitting on my front porch tonight, it is quiet. Cold. Breath can be seen, and it floats for several seconds after it leaves the lungs. And there is snow. Not much, but it is there. Small enough to portend the muddy mess tomorrow's sunshine will create, yet significant enough to be seen as a gift. An out of the ordinary gift for a people who could use it.

From the inside I hear the hum of the television. Olympics. Athletes who have devoted entire lives for these few moments. Moments that I am spending listening to the silence. Melting snow dripping from the rooftops into small puddles on the ground. Houses all around, full of people. Families. Friends. Relationships that are contentious, messy, and necessary.

We spend our lives waiting for this moment, and then it is gone, only to be replaced by new ones.

Today I was reminded of another gift, Ann Miller.

Those who graduated from Baylor knew Mrs. Miller as a revered professor of literature and humanities. She would often break out into poetry at random times and situations. On more than one occasion she was known to spot young students in love and embarrass them by quoting Yeats or one of the Brownings. One former student said about Ann Miller that she was "someone so in love with poetry, with what the written and spoken word can convey, that the language of books was constantly escaping the page-- and through her-- becoming again and again part of the lived language."

I did not graduate from Baylor. It was only in her later years that I knew Mrs. Miller as a customer at Barnes and Noble. What was apparently true of her on campus, was true off as well. It was not uncommon for her to come up to the information desk and ask for a book of poetry by giving the first line of the first poem in the collection, and then the title. Sure enough when I took her to the book, she would ask me to look in it and there it was,the first line exactly as she had recited it. She often bought two copies of a single book and on more than one occasion I would see her giving the book to someone she ran down in the parking lot... complete strangers. I only knew her in fleeting, but I am better for it.

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The snow has stopped
And all is waiting
Hope suspended
But so is despair
In between, liminal
The soul waits
With baited breath...