LETTERS FROM HOME: WITNESSING THE REBIRTH OF A HOUSE, DEATH OF A TURTLE

March 30, 2000

Dear Julie,

Roofers have been atop our house the past week, replacing broken tiles and repairing leaks. A week before, bricklayers reassembled our decrepit chimney. The replacement bricks and tiles were aged to suit our 85-year-old house. Houses and people are at their best when they're loved and respected.

Painters are due to start work as soon as we decide on the colors. Our house is getting a new life.

It is a reincarnation in a sense. The soul of the house is the same but its outward appearance is changing. The spirits of the people who have inhabited the house are still present in some mysterious way, their feelings for it submerged in our own.

What better antidote for life's everyday tragedies than reincarnation? The world is different if you believe you have lived before and will live again. Each experience, no matter how difficult, becomes an opportunity to understand ourselves better, to draw nearer to the Godliness within us.

As some country singer must have said, everyone deserves a second chance once in awhile.

Wordsworth:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

hath elsewhere had its setting,

And cometh from afar."

A cousin I'd never met came to town last weekend with her two daughters, 5-year-old Kiley and 18-month-old Ashlynn. Another cousin I do know was along. Brandon just turned 10, lives in Chicago and used to love Batman. Now he loves Pokemon. It's evolution, I suppose.

All of us spent an evening at my mom's and dad's house eating birthday cake, opening Pokemon presents and playing volleyball with the birthday balloons. Children are never bored, even when they say they are. They're just bored with the tired adults keeping them company.

The next day, DC decided the girls and Brandon should see the turtle her parents keep in their downstairs bathtub. Jacques has been a family pet for 29 years, growing from a mite of a water turtle into an adult with a shell the size of a hubcap. He is well-traveled, accompanying the family far and wide on trips in their camper. Jacques is the reason DC's mother gets turtle pins, turtle doorstops and turtle jewelry every birthday and Christmas.

But when DC arrived a few minutes ahead of the visitors, her mother had bad news. Jacques had just passed away, within the hour. The two of them carried him to his outdoor wading pool hoping for a miraculous revival but none occurred.

Crestfallen, she wondered what to do about the guests. Given they'd come especially to see Jacques, DC thought it best to tell the children Jacques was sleeping.

"He looks like he's dead," Brandon opined once standing over the tiny pool and motionless turtle.

"Let's go feed the ducks," DC said. The ducks were three blocks away at the Capaha Park lagoon.

One appealing thing about reincarnation is the idea that God gives us unlimited attempts to perfect ourselves. No one is hopeless. In our soul's infancy we are like Bill Murray's character in "Groundhog Day," fretfully encountering the same people and the same circumstances over and over again until gradually we begin to understand and accept them and ourselves. Then, like a child, we begin to discover the joy in an experience as innocuous as Groundhog Day or as simple as bouncing a balloon.

Spring is a dangerous time to be on the road with DC. She swerves to avoid butterflies. Last week, after she hit one, I comforted her by suggesting God might have decided it was time for the butterfly to become a sparrow.

"Nothing is more perfect than a butterfly," she said.

I don't know if a turtle can be reborn with wings. I hope so.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian