The Way Makers by Laura J. Oliver

You don’t have to die to glimpse paradise. One of my two older sisters owns a horse farm nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we gather there every few months. Because my sister who owns the farm, is a gifted perfectionist, these lush woods and golden pastures are exquisite in design, natural beauty, and upkeep. While others might have constructed a pool, she has created a lake; trucked in sand for a small beach. Built a screened gazebo over the water and a loggia in the grass. 

Ringed by purple mountains’ majesty, the lake is within sight of the house on the hill and the green barn on the rise, where two horses are shaded during sweltering summer days but let out into the cool of the fields at night. How could heaven eclipse this Eden?

We gather in appreciation of having siblings, having sisters. We gather because our parents are gone, our children are grown, and our days together are slipping away like water through cupped palms.

We gather to share stories of the way-makers—the experiences and people in our lives who helped us each become who we are. We gather to explore what remains and to theorize on what is to come. 

And although we don’t gather because our mother would like it, we know that she would. I understand that. When I am gone, I hope my children find each other in a meaningful way. I hope that together they can laugh at the memories of what we got right and forgive us for what we got wrong.

My sisters and I consider lunch at a vineyard or a trip to Costco, but we have really come just to talk. The talking is a legacy of our mother, who claimed more than once that we were the best thing she ever did—and I suspect she is around somewhere, listening in, surveying her handiwork.

Alone on the upper-level screened-in porch, where iridescent hummingbirds dart around the feeder like bees, my oldest sister asks me what I am currently hoping for. Longing for. A high- octane question that I want to get right. The answer can’t be “lunch.” Or an exploratory “Umm, Sauvignon Blanc?” 

It needs to be an answer worthy of our mother, the therapist and poet, who was bigger on introspection than on laughter. Bigger on beauty than practicality. We have inherited the same spiritual curiosity but manifested it differently.

So, I tell my sister one of my heart’s longings, which has to do with my own three offspring, followed quickly by one I’m more comfortable sharing—the professional response: I want to be as successful as Anne Lamott. Our books were sold side by side in every Barnes & Noble in the country for 8 years: Bird by Bird and The Story Within. She sold a million copies. 

So. That has not happened. 

Yet! 

I am obviously the funny sister.

I don’t get a chance to ask my sister the same question because someone else joins us on the porch. 

On Sunday of our weekend, my sisters go to church together, and I head home. They are both very active members of their local churches and practice organized religion on a daily basis. There are definitely some mom-questions floating around this topic, in part, because I have discovered that gratitude feeds in me what worship seems to nurture in others. 

So, while I am deeply moved by the music and the message of an unconditional love that can’t be earned, I have gently distilled from dogma a spiritual practice with no name or denomination.

I guess you’d say it is a spiritual practice without a narrative to explain it, no instruction manual to study, no messages to decode, no origin story, except perhaps, the birth of the universe itself. Now that’s an origin story for you. 

World without end, amen, amen. 

Religion is one way we carry longing. There are others.

For me, God is a homing beacon, and I am sometimes homesick for a place I can imagine but not remember. I read that the French don’t say, “I miss you.” They say, “You are missing in me.” Sometimes it is like that. 

On our last night, we eat dinner at the lake and wait for a blue moon to rise. We have a playlist and the dogs, a Golden and a Rhodesian Ridgeback, lie as close as possible. The May air is cool. We sit by a fire. Bullfrogs bellow occasionally from the reeds. Venus and Jupiter jewel the sky.

Present but out of sight, there are foxes, deer, beavers, and bears. Barn swallows and bluebirds. 

And whatever it is we each long for.