Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look by Emily T. Wierenga

Author:Emily T. Wierenga [Wierenga, Emily T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441246301
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-24T07:00:00+00:00

20

A House

Canada: Blyth, Ontario

July 2007

In the years of living this life of faith, I have never known God’s care to fail.

Brother Andrew

I am in the garden, weeding, when I hear God say he has a house for Trent and me.

We had planned to move in with our friends, Nicholas and Stasha, whom we’d visited on our honeymoon, who had also taught English in Korea just south of us in the city of Pusan. We were going to buy a place together in Toronto and do communal living and grow a big garden together and chop vegetables at the same counter. Stasha and I planned all of this one day in Korea while the boys played cards, just as quickly as we’d become friends on the flight home, years earlier.

But then I had seen Mum dying on the webcam and I’d come home.

And I know now that I can’t leave her. My youngest sister, Meredith, is six hours away in Ottawa at Carleton University, and my brother and his wife and kids live there too, while Allison is in Australia at Hillsong International Leadership College. Dad has no one else.

I hate when people feel sorry for Mum. “You’re so good to her,” they say to me, watching me take her to the bathroom in the middle of church and feed her at potlucks. And they are well-meaning but all I say is, “She’s my mum.”

She gave birth to me.

She homeschooled me, sewed me outfits, cut my hair, and taught me my manners. And more than anything she tried to show me she loved me through the way she cooked.

Growing up, we ate Saturday Stew. It was a conglomeration of all of the week’s leftovers in one pot, because for a few years Dad’s annual salary was $12,000 and my parents hated waste. So if we didn’t finish our supper, it would go into the pot and we dreaded Saturdays. Liver and onions mixed with spaghetti mixed with meatloaf.

Mum didn’t want us to take our meals—the blessing of having food, and the love with which it was prepared—for granted. She made love, in the kitchen. She baked homemade bread and homemade granola. She made every meal from scratch and because I was homeschooled until grade five, she did “cultural” meals once a month in which she cooked a meal from the country we were studying. I still remember the African peanut-butter stew, the chunks of beef in the peanut sauce over rice.

My mum didn’t know how to tell me she loved me in words. She wasn’t a big hugger and compliments didn’t come naturally. But she put oregano in the spaghetti sauce. She broiled tomatoes and cheese on top of the creamy macaroni, and she crunched up potato chips in the tuna casserole. She made homemade chocolate zucchini cake because she wanted us to be healthy, and every swirl of the spoon, every donning of the apron, every evening standing over the stove was a posture of love.

Even Saturday Stew.

Because Mum cared,

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