Foundations

In a lot of ways, people remind me of houses.  They have mostly the same things, walls and windows and floors and such.  Some are fancy, some are plain.  Big.  Small.  Tall.  None of that matters.  What matters is how long the walls stand, or how straight they are, or if the doors sag or the roof caves in before its time.  It hardly seems fair, but the most important part of a house is the part you can’t see—the part that’s hidden beneath all the stuff that doesn’t last.  Before the first nail is nailed, before the first rock is set, the future of that house is decided. 

That’s how come I think houses are like people.

I was grown and married before I gave much thought to the fact there were things about me that I couldn’t change.  By the time I figured it out it was too late: the soul of my being was set in the stony canyon ridges, its roots twisted deep as any juniper stump.  I hadn’t asked for these things anymore than I’d asked for the blue of my eyes or the shape of my nose or the color of my hair.  Just like that, someone else laid the foundation, and it was all over and done before I learned to speak a word.  It wasn’t fair.  Wasn’t right.  But still and all, I had to believe that God had allowed it; I had to believe He had a hand in all the things that built my soul the way it was, for the simple reason that if he didn’t, he wasn’t much of a God. 

I was thinking on this the other day while I was gathering cattle off the East Point.  I think better when I’m sitting on a horse, don’t know why that is, maybe because looking out between a pair of ears is like a compass, it makes things come clear.  I was trailing an old one-eyed Hereford cow that knew the country better than even me, and that was saying something since I’d run these hills every day of my life. 

Anyway, my horse kicked an old can and I perked right up since cans were a sure sign we were coming up on a dwelling.  Skeletons of soddies and old rock houses littered these canyons like ghosts in a graveyard, showing themselves plain as pie when the sun was slanted just so, and then spiriting away as soon as the shadows shifted.   

I was curious, so I left off on the Hereford for a while and started tracking the house instead.  Jiblets of broken glass, a rusty can, a shiny piece of metal hidden beneath the scrub oak.  Sure enough, we rode through a clearing and down a little draw and there it was: three walls, a window and half a roof was all that was left of it.  It had been a one room soddy: a homesteader shack no more than twelve by twelve foot with about a low roof made of cedar vigas laced with latillas and covered in sod.  It was different, though, in that it had fancy paned windows and most homesteaders didn’t have any kind of fancy left by the time they made it this far west. 

I rode up to the window where the glass had once been and looked inside. Through the empty pane, I could see clean through to the other wall and out, beyond the clearing, to where a line of junipers rimmed the canyon.  I could see the inside of the house and the outside at the same time. 

I shifted and peered through the other side.

It occurred to me while I was standing there looking though the thick, bubbly glass at how the whole thing changed, how the lines of the doorway swerved drunk-like, how the horizon seemed so much farther away and blurry; that some people were like that house.  They had good walls and a good roof.  Worked hard, sweated hard, and had something to show for it.  In a day when other people were doing without, these folk always had food on the table and shoes on their feet.  Some people aren’t sick once in their whole life.  Never got hurt.  Never even had a headache.  They go to their graves with all their hair and all their teeth and a mind was sharp as a blade of sawgrass. 

But in the end, none of that matters a whit if the foundation was wrong to start with.  As hard as they work, they can’t keep all four walls together. 

In that way, I’m like that house. And that makes me angry.  And that is the part of my mixed up foundation that I carry in my soul. 

This idea came to me clear.  I think it was because just that same morning, when I stopped in town to get supplies, I ran into a man in the General Store and you know, standing there talking to a stranger, I figured something out: I didn’t know my own self.  I only knew part of me, and that probably the worst part there was to know.  But this man, he knew me different.  Different, because he was standing outside, looking in through a fancy glass window—a thick bubbly pane of glass that blocked out the bad and let him see something in me that I’d never seen.  Something good.

Don’t get me wrong.  The biggest part of me still thinks my walls are crooked.  But now there was another part of me—a soft, sprouting part—that was jealous that someone else knew be better, and that part treasured in my heart the hope that maybe I was wrong: maybe there was something—even if it was tiny, God, even just a whisper—of good in the seed that had been planted in my mother’s womb. 

Unfortunately, I learned, as I got older, that whether there was good in me or not wasn’t the thing that I should be pondering.  I should be worrying on the trouble I already knew was there.  Shoulda kept my eye on that, so when the day came for it to bear fruit, I would be ready for it. Be prepared. 

But I didn’t and I wasn’t.  It sprouted up when I was least expecting it and, so help me God, it surprised no one so much as it did me.  It split my world clean in half.  There was before it happened.  And then there was after.  And there was nothing else. Just an emptiness big as the sky.