Why I don’t have a bucket list

Admittedly, to get guilt tripped into a camping trip exposes character weakness on my part. When someone bounds up to you, excited as a kitten encountering his first ball of yarn, and says they have the best idea for a geology fieldtrip, spanning 3 days (“ooh, ooh, no let’s turn it into 4!”), 400 miles, and something like 8 piles of rocks, any person with their wits about them would laugh and say, “Y’all have fun now, I’ll be over here, sleeping in my own bed.”

People who camp on purpose, non-ironically, are an utter mystery to me. The more I learn about camping, the more outrageous and certifiable it seems! Did you know that KOA (one of the largest campground empires in the United States and yes, there is such a thing as a campground empire) stands for Kampgrounds of America?? How are we not promoting illiteracy and the overall degradation of our dignity by paying these people to borrow their dirt so we can sleep on it? Did you further know that after you have paid to sleep on dirt out in “nature,” you still are required to either buy or pack in your own wood for building campfires? In the (wait for it…) woods?

Yet for the longest time during the diabolical planning of this trip, whose chief stated end was to go and stare at rocks, I could not bring myself to say “no, absolutely not, life is too short.” Which leads me to the character flaw, and my grandmother.

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In the same week that this trip was scheduled to take place, I received word that my grandmother, my dad’s 94-year-old mother, had suffered a severe stroke. As I write this, I await further word on her condition; things didn’t look good last night. So I have been contemplating my grandmother, someone I have always found to be remarkable and not, perhaps, for the usual reasons.

My grandmother was the quintessential farmwife. She raised four children, kept a lovely home, and was known for feeding people well. In many ways, I didn’t truly get to know her until I got married at age 20 and we both discovered that I shared her love of beautiful dishes, and of tables set to appeal to the senses. It was something she was teased about a bit over the years, her large collections of glassware, full sets of tableware, antique bowls and coffee service, but it has captivated me since childhood. She gave me my first everyday serving bowls when my oldest was a toddler – the same ones she used when her kids were little, and then proceeded to gift me antique glassware for my birthday for the next nearly 20 years. The year the glassware stopped was the same year she stopped calling on my birthday; that was, perhaps, the first time a birthday ever made me feel my age.

I was blessed with 2 beautiful, intelligent farming grandmothers growing up; my mom’s mom went to the Lord a couple of years ago, and I like to think there are flavors of each of these women’s influences in my own farmwife homemaking.

My maternal grandmother was known for ingenuity with the food at hand, with using her abundant garden to set visually peaceful tables, with the sort of minimalism that employs only that which is meaningful.

My paternal grandmother was known for overflowing tables (why serve one kind of meat when you could serve three?), and for leftovers that could feed an army, created with simple recipes that everyone loved, served with what I find to be an uncommon blend of elegance and utility. She had no shame in making her mashed potatoes from a box, and paper napkins were a blessing. No one ever left her table hungry. I asked her once to teach me how she cooked various meats, how her meals always taste so good. She shrugged and said, “just a little salt and pepper?” As a person tempted by gourmet magazines, it was an important lesson for me.

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And this, obviously, leads me to the ill-fated camping trip (not obvious, you say? We should spend more time together).

The thing that guilted me into agreeing to this grand adventure of curiosity and literally leaving no stone unturned was the feeling that good mothers, or for that matter, that really interesting people, are the sort who long to travel the world, to always be experiencing new things. They are the ones who cannot simply read about a volcano, they have to climb it! At sunrise! And then go glissading down it, trying all the while to avoid hidden frozen lakes (you think I am making this up. Friend, I couldn’t make this stuff up. I refer you to your friendly neighborhood internet browser to prove the point)! How could I be worth anything at all if my bucket list was not perpetually on the verge of overflow? What does the truth – that I don’t even have a bucket list– say about me, about my value as a mother, as a wife, as a Christian?

My grandmother has run well. She has lived an extraordinary life, and why? Because her life has been marked by extraordinary faithfulness to the task at hand. She has steadily built the portion of the kingdom wall God put in front of her. The pitfall I fell into was to believe that true faithfulness had to look different than embracing the life God has given me – it had to look both more “normal” and more exciting. I gave room to the lie that setting a gracious table was inferior to seeing something new, to having an adventure outside my own home. I am kicking myself as I write this… how could I have been so daft as to think that kicking rocks was more full of glory than grilling fresh corn on the cob, that sleeping on dirt had more inherent value than putting clean sheets on my family’s beds? Sitting here in the morning light, having removed myself from the geology fieldtrip, the truth of what it means to live well shines brightly before me. Only what’s done for Christ will last.