Laughter in the Walls #Mother's Day #Memories #Reflections

Mother's Day, Sunday, May 12, 2019

This morning, Pastor Jack Graham (PowerPoint Ministries) read Bob Benson's inspiring "Laughter in the Walls." The author tells how he designed the home he loves, allowing room for a study, a guest room, and a sewing room. Those rooms are claimed by his five children as they grow. Soon they will be off making their own lives. Yet the house won't be empty. Every nook and cranny holds a multitude of memories, which the author enumerates. He ends by saying that someday, he and his wife will sit quietly by the fire and listen to the laughter hidden in the walls that surround them.

I smiled through tears. Been there. Done that. Decades ago, our family filled our home with love and laughter, tears, and fears, joys and triumphs, hardship and prosperity, sickness and health, and found joy together. Lack of electricity meant holding a kerosene lamp when Dad, Mom, my two brothers, and I gathered around the old upright piano evenings and harmonized our way through tattered, southern-gospel song books. When  not singing, we crowded around the rectangular big table near the old wood heater in the living room and devoured every book we could beg, borrow, or afford. 



Among my best memories are those centered around the round, wooden, dining room table. No eat and run after supper in our family! Each of us shared our day, the good, bad, the problems and perplexities. No happening was too small, no child too little to be included in the sharing time.  If you could talk, you had a turn.


I am happy to say this tradition is alive and well into the third generation. Mom, Dad, and the boys are no longer with us, but the family meals continue, complete with catching up on what each person is doing. 

Not long ago, my niece and her husband gathered all the family members available for yet another bountiful dinner. Nine of us circled the large dining room table. Talk ranged from school doings to a recent vacation overseas, upcoming prom dresses, gardening, stories from "the olden days," a gazillion other things, and what all the family members not present were doing. Laughter and making new memories to blend with all those gone before abounded.

Memories are gifts from God, the means by which we stay connected with those who have gone ahead and are waiting for us to come. Memories keep our friends and loved ones alive in our hearts and minds long after they have departed. Laughter in the walls reminds me of days gone by. Of quiet evenings and frosty mornings. Of walking in the woods, and hide-and-seek around the old home place. Of unexpected visitors at suppertime, running to the root cellar for home-canned food, expanding the old table with another leaf or two. and getting out more plates and utensils. Most of all, the joy of simply being together and blessed.



I have several photo albums filled with treasured pictures taken through the ages. But the greatest treasure of all is the wealth of memories indelibly etched in my heart and mind. I thank God.

Happy Mother's Day,
Colleen