Sukey Lou and me...chores and choices

We stand facing the camera, my arms snuggled round her neck. My short brown hair is pulled to one side and held by a barrette. I am wearing my old plaid shirt and shorts, after school play clothes. Her sweet Jersey face with her beautiful brown eyes look straight at the old Kodak box camera and she, like me, is smiling. She had been orphaned at birth and given to me to raise. Twice a day I mixed powdered milk in the feeding bucket. Before school and after school I called her up to the fence by our house so she could suck her meals down, tail switching in pleasure. Afterwards I would brush her using my hairbrush. Mama saw me do this and bought me another one since she thought I shouldn’t be sharing a brush with my calf. Her name was Sukey (Sookey Lou) and she was my constant companion in my eleventh year. Tame as a dog, she followed me down the dirt road to the mailbox to get the mail or took walks with me in the field. Often we took naps together. She slept and I propped up against her reading in the sun until I fell asleep.
My life choices were simple in those days. A limited wardrobe... five school outfits to be taken off as soon as I got home, two Sunday dresses, one pair Sunday shoes, one pair school shoes (always ugly brown lace up oxfords) and one pair of old farm shoes... made choosing what to wear easy. Chores... feeding and watering the chickens, tending Sukey Lou, helping in the garden, starting supper before mama got home from work, homework... filled my time in the afternoons and evenings. No T.V. or phone for distraction or amusement.
This simplicity was full of rich texture and possibilities. Unhampered by the need to make constant decisions about what to do next, I became an expert at creative chores. Feed the chickens? Play with the hen pecked hen to make up for all the others treating her so badly. Scuff my bare feet in the green soft grass in the backyard between the house and the coop. Pick wild flowers for the supper table. Feed Sukey Lou? Sing while I mix the milk and sing to Sukey Lou while she eats. Laugh when she rolls her eyes in joy when I scratch her ears with the hairbrush. Pick beans in the garden? Play with roly poly bugs in the rows... touch them and see them roll up into tight little balls. Go to the barn to get potatoes for supper? Dig for doodlebugs with my toes as I walk over the sand around the barn. Simple? Yes. Limited? No.
This week I listened to authors and pundits discuss the latest round of self help books that focus on decision making, how we make choices, how many choices there are now in our complex culture, the price we pay for these multiplicity of choices, and it made me plumb tired to think about it. From megasized grocery stores with an overwhelming array of foods (and notions) to megasized churches with a supermarket style offering of services and worships, we are surrounded by more choices than we know what to do with. We can live anywhere and keep in touch with the folks back home on our Smart Phones that are smarter than we are, or e-mail them, or keep up on Facebook, or fly home from across the country in a matter of hours not days. Our closets are full of seasonally appropriate choices of clothing and if you are a shoe hound like mama and me, you have many shoe options not just three. We wear our souls out deciding all the time. This or that? Here or there?
A friend of mine broke her leg in three places requiring surgery and a long period of recovery. Boredom set in because she was very limited in her activity as she healed. She tells me that an unexpected gift was given to her and her husband during this time, the gift of limitation and the use of the word “No”. No, I can’t come because I can’t put weight on my leg. No, I can’t...Suddenly the busyness of their lives came to a screeching halt as she had to sit, wait and heal. No way to hurry that along. And in the sudden stillness was the rich possibility of silence, quiet listening, making the most out of a limited state of being.
Today I will narrow my choices as a way to move towards stillness of mind and body. Cleaning out my closet, I will send clothes to Goodwill. Cooking supper I will only prepare three items from my pantry or freezer. I will listen more than I will speak. God said “Be still and know that I am God”. Not go save the world and know me, but be still and know me. I will choose to know God more completely by narrowing my field of vision and controlling my options so that I might see God first and all else after. Thanks be to God for freedom from having to be superhuman, on top of everything and everybody, in charge of my life and yours, being the whole cheese, taking advantage of all the opportunities that come my way. I can just be still and know...