Kate Romney

       If someone asked me today why I believe in God, I would tell them it is because once, when I was age nine or ten, I awoke, bundled in my sleeping bag next to my mother, to the music of rain staccato on the tent. Because I could hear her breath warming the air next to me like a harmony, though I don’t remember its sound.  
       Because early one morning while my dad was serving the teenage boys in our church at Scout camp, the sound of my mother’s thumping, bumping filled the house when she had risen and rolled camp pads and stuffed sleeping bags and paired together the tiny socks of five children and one baby and then driven us all through those old silent woods by herself. Because her hands had carefully smoothed the tinfoil and salted the salt and peppered the pepper so later the sound of popping ground beef with potatoes and carrots could sizzle through the air, cut across the smoke of the campfire, onto our tongues. Because her tired voice had reached beyond the clatter of aluminum tent bars toward us, thudding against dusty ground through the swaying green, echoing towards the lake where we piled rocks and built other worlds in the missing spaces between trees.
       Because the smell of trees poured through the open windows of the car like a prayer before I knew what it meant to say one and really mean it and all the lakes mirrored an infinite heaven and the stones were real and hard beneath my feet when we arrived and I could feel something brushing along my skin and spine dripping down from the pines overhead. Because she brought us to this new world, a world she had made and she had made us, and we never questioned whether there was love or whether we were safe. Because we dreamed of one day being her, of having a world made all our own, but were afraid of any world without her in it.  
       Because her world was one where she could build both teepee and log cabin fires, knew how to pee in the woods without having to sit down, could jump nimbly over any stream, stake a tent firm even in wild wind, knew how to identify snakeweed along the edges of the wood in case we were lost or starving, brought jellybeans on every hike to energize us, never missed a night brushing her teeth in the campground spigot by the wavering light of a flashlight and washed her face with baby wipes before she could feel like a human in the mornings and knew what it felt like to lie beneath the stars in silence and when the best time would be to start tickle fights and would carry her own pack even when her back ached from her teenage car accident and read maps better than anyone and insisted we learn to hike slow enough to perceive some sort of hidden beauty.  
       Because when she got it in her mind that we were going to go somewhere, going to experience something, we could feel her excitement light up the whole house and would hear the tattle and tack of her computer key research late into the night and then we would taste peanut butter and jelly in our lunches for weeks, months as she scrimped and saved and budgeted and bargained because my dad was in medical school, then residency and money was tight, and she would dance around the house painting pictures of people and history and art, the whole world spread wide before us and the trees and the lakes and the dirt in an infinite rainbow of colors, the smell of wind and how the land felt when it was thirsty and how it felt when it rained, and we would begin to grin and be gleeful until we were tired and her dreams always became our dreams and her beauties filled us up gleaming, brimming, bursting as we camped and drove and slept outside and swam in lakes cold enough to chill your blood and when we cried and complained our father always reminded us that we were to respect our mother because she was a mother of God and loved us and she was something wonderful and whole and don’t you talk to her that way young lady, young man, you go right up to her and say you’re sorry, look at all this around you, this life she has spun from air into something heftier than gold.  
       Because she had been camping since she was a child and showed a man who became my father what the joy of waking up beneath some gentle, unroofed sky could taste like and accepted his ring with the feel of grass beneath her shoes, and the baby cried all night that night ten years later in that tent and she still woke up the next morning and drove us to town in a downpour to buy donuts and cards. Because we sat in that still warmness beneath the green canvas in a nest of nylon and down while outside the earth swallowed the world and grew slick with mud. Because she had loved the world and wanted it, and told me once that she kept a careful list of the places she ached for and kept the money in a fund. But instead of taking herself to the Great Wall, to Machu Picchu, across oceans and over seas, she loaded us up into the minivan and packed fruit snacks and handed us games over her shoulder into the backseat and showed us the mountains, the lakes, the sky. Still, the children kept growing and the windows needed to be replaced, the car kept breaking down, there were weddings to pay for and college tuition, the youngest needed new pants, she had seen that sweater and thought how much I’d wanted one like it, and would I like to take home some milk or some yogurt, did I want to come with them to my brother’s bike race she’d pay for my hotel. The years passed and she has not gone to so many of those longed-for places.  
       But I have gone out into that wonderful world, out into hordes of humans and through museums and stood before art, walked the spice markets of Turkey, stood before the David, tasted tapas, and stood still watching the heaving breath of cows in the Alps. I have gone out into that wonderful world and been out where she has never been, and there have been times, many times when I have seen her in it. Because she made my world and me in it, she created my whole world, every breath and sleep, and showed me Him and made me listen. Because I heard God there: the world was everywhere whispering.