Within the fold

This July 6 marked twenty-four years without my firstborn daughter, Rebecca Jane. The date perennially recalls a knock on the bedroom door where my husband and I slept as houseguests in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“Iris, Mel…it’s Pauline,” my friend said timidly.

I sat up in bed. Mel and I looked to one another, horrified. “Come in, please,” I said.

In obvious distress, Pauline leaned against the doorjamb. “It’s Becky.”

She spoke the tragic news with compassion and mercy. Hopes and dreams for our daughter’s recovery from substance abuse collapsed word by word. For Becky’s death also included the life of her unborn child.

This July 6, Saturday, I awoke in my home alone. “Our home” perished with my husband of fifty-four years this past January 30. Therefore, I could not read to him again my brief entries for this July 6 in our five-year diary from 2015-2019.

I read the entry for 2017: “Quiet day with Mel remembering Becky. Will go to cemetery, harvest lavender. Patty (a sister) called this morning to wish us peace and joy.”

The 2018 entry offers encouragement. “Another year without Becky and her child. They wait in Glory. They wait with our Savior, Light and Life of all that is good, pure, holy. I will visit her grave today. Take a bundle of lavender.”

This July 6, I did not carry a bundle of lavender to my father’s, Becky’s, and Mel’s gravesite. Rather, I mucked, scrubbed, and hosed down the hen house, for Six, my sick hen, died late the day before. The henhouse needed disinfecting and fresh straw.

Some serious TLC.

Most heartbreaking, I’d found Six by the screen door separating the storage side where I’d quarantined her from the roosting/laying side of the hen house. As if to be close as possible to her sisters, Six had nudged her beak into the crack between the screen door and doorjamb.

One of five daughters, I empathized with Six, and wept while I buried her. She laid eggs for three and half years with her sisters, and earned my affection. I grieved when she became ill several months ago, and rejoiced when she recovered.

Yet, Six’s sisters repeatedly pecked her when I returned her to their flock. She lived her last months in safety, separated by the screen door.

This July 6, I left the hen house to dry inside and joined the Dryden Methodist Church congregation for a picnic hosted by friends Anne and Stan at their home. Although I preferred the solitude of my home and companionship of my hens and cats, I needed fellowship with my kind.

As hens do, believers in Jesus Christ understand we need to gather together, and a picnic of pot-luck dishes holds a holy power over hungry humans.

For, dear Reader, we’ve also learned this from God’s Word and experience: there’s no pecking order in the Body of Christ. We’re all broken people living in a fallen world.

Our refuge and healing is within the fold.

Contact Iris at irisfarmletters@gmail.com