Children....what a blessing! When I found out I was expecting the first time, June of `92, I was sick. I had just met my future husband, I worked in a bar, I had a roommate and an apartment...I wasn't ready to be a mother. I realized, though, that my life had to change, immediately. I quit the bar, my grandparents gave Jeff and me a place to live for pretty much nothing, and we set up housekeeping. I went in for my checkup at 14 weeks on a Tuesday and the doctor couldn't find a heartbeat. She set me up to come in to the hospital that Friday for monitoring. I didn't make it that long. Late Wednesday night I was overcome with pain....all night long, and on Thursday morning, our tiny little baby was born...I had miscarried. I told Jeff "You can leave now...there's nothing to hold you here now." He stayed. I was pretty much out of my mind for a while. I was heartbroken. I still carry that heartbreak....tears run down my face as I type this from just the memories. I was changed forever. Time went on...I lost my grandfather two months later. In March, my cousin's baby was born stillborn. In May, I miscarried again. This time I was only about 6 weeks pregnant. All I had done was taken a home pregnancy test---which was positive. I hadn't even been to the doctor yet. And then, one year from our baby's death, I found out I was pregnant for the 3rd time. I was petrified. I went immediately to the doctor and she confirmed it. I will never forget hearing his heartbeat that day. I sobbed. The time came and went for my ultrasound...we had decided not to find out his sex....and in April, our son was born. I cannot tell you the song of joy that overflows in your heart when a child is born if you aren't a parent. There are no words. I am glad I cherished that moment. It would be my last. I was not destined to have more children, and now, after 19 years, I still remember that moment. My son is a good son. He's a good person. So I will graciously accept my one-time chance. I tried,and am still trying, to make the most of it.
Yesterday at the cabin, I reflected on what it must have been to build it. It's huge, by old fashioned cabin standards. David was a young man, with a young bride, Elizabeth. As I was sifting thru the garbage and the junk and the treasures left by the last people to live there (found some things from the 1940's!), I said "Papa Henderson....I don't know if this was what you intended when you built this thing, but I aim to set it straight." There was no response. It was quiet there, in the Hollow. Turkeys gobbling, birds singing, and the wind fluttered thru the broken plastic on the windows, but there was a deeper quiet there. I picked up a rock off the floor. Someone had busted every window in the place at some point. Probably a teenager. Someone with a vehicle, anyway-it's too remote to just be walking along and find. The wind moved thru the room and jingled the clothes hangers in the closet. They sounded like a wind chime. To replace the one someone stole off the front porch. I thought about what it must have been like to have children back then, in the 1800's. No pain relief, no modern medicine...at home, in the bed. What an ordeal! I thought of the children who had been born, the ones born under that very roof. I wondered if any had died there. I wondered where they were buried. I worked and worked, and thought and thought. I worked until my body was shaking. I didn't eat. I was consumed. I had peace there, though. My phone battery kept dying so I had to keep it plugged into the car. I checked it every so often-I had a few texts, but for the most part, it was just me and my thoughts. I sat on the porch and rocked...thinking about the generations of people who had lived there. I thought alot about Elizabeth Lee, who had given birth to all those children, who raised them to do well, and who was buried just up the road a ways...I said "Elizabeth?" very loudly....I don't know what prompted me to do it...and was scared out of my wits to be answered with a huge crash like a rock being thrown on the tin roof right above me. I didn't say her name again.
I finished for the day...33 bags of garbage, an old rug, and a lot of big stuff I couldn't fit in bags...all from one room. A solid day's work, done all by myself. A good day, finally, after being unable to work there for a year. And then I realized that while my surgery last summer removed any chance ever again for me to have children, and while it had kept me away from the cabin for so long, it was okay. I was there now...working to secure my son a place for his own peace...a place he would be able to bring his own children to and tell them the stories of our family. Of what it meant to bring the cabin back to it's glory...my one shot at leaving him something he couldn't get anywhere else, but Bugger Hollow.
