Broken Packages

Jeanne Lou gave me what she and the girls could retrieve from my mom’s crushed car a few days back, but it wasn’t until last night that I actually inventoried what was left of Mom’s abortive over-the-river-and-through-the-woods journey to my house that ended in her wreck coming down the Virginia-facing side of Cheat Mountain.

The Christmas presents, so carefully wrapped, presented with torn paper, crushed boxes, and those blasted containers I can never open without serious self-injury now not so smug.  It all looks like the after-Christmas-morning melee – how did I never see our Christmas morning flotsam for the wreckage it is?

As I survey it all, various me’s emerge:

Clinically-detached me wonders at the science of impact on a cold winter’s day, where so much survived intact, but the plastic bits are all shattered.  What is it about the properties of plastic that metal and rubber and even glass could remain unbroken, but not the plastic?  This is what I think as I survey a small yellow funnel Mom had for adding oil, now in bits – and other plastic things as well.

Theologian me surveys it all and wants to draw some meaningful metaphor out of the things that survived and those that did not – surely some important insight about our own brokenness is called for, what with the tattered paper and cracks so visible.

But it is daughter me who prevails as I solemnly open each gift bearing my own name, as always bemused by some gifts and touched by others – observing how Mom’s skin is now as delicate as wrapping paper – and just as torn by the indignities of being hurled about a moving missile of a car on the skids in the snow mountains of West Virginia. . . how her broken bones must look like the shattered bits of the new steam iron she was bringing me, still in its box. . . and as I sit alone in Mom’s house in the darkness of the night, with only the sound of her ticking kitchen clock, within the vagaries of my own soul, I weep.