Rosa’s world

Rosa whips the big black poly bag open with a whoosh and heads up the stairs. Monday’s routine always starts the same: get the garbage out to the curb. She stops first at Richard’s room and finds herself fingering the receipts in the garbage can by his bed: Tim Horton’s, Pizza Hut, Subway. So nice that fast food still interests him more than fast women!

She dumps the contents and proceeds to her daughter’s lair, wading through the cast-off clothes, school assignments begun and finished, art projects, and assorted used glasses and plates from late night snacks, and finally finds her overflowing bucket – actually an old milk pail from her Grampa. Strange for a girl only 18 to be interested in antiques and memorabilia. Tissues, paper products, torn socks, crumpled assignments, a handbill from the Delirious concert, snack wrappings and fruit peels pour into her sack smoothly. Wait. Here’s something interesting. The handbill from the concert. Pink lipstick kisses all over it, and “Jason, Jason, Jason” doodled from one corner to another. So now it’s Jason and no longer Doug. How is a mother to keep track?

In the upstairs washroom, she finds three empty rolls. How can they waste so much of this stuff? Wait until they have to pay for it from their own pockets. That will teach them a thing or two about squandering!

In the playroom by the foosball table, four, slim, empty Mr. Jones glass bottles confront her. They love to be in a pristine wilderness and complain about litter in the parks. They decry global trade and the resulting degradation of the environment – and can’t even recycle their own trash. Some lack of constitency here, she thinks, as she tries to hold the bottles under one arm and heads back down the stairs.

In the kitchen, Rosa empties what’s under the sink and sees the huge square white pizza box haphazardly jammed in beside the receptacle. May as well have Yarrow Pizza on speed dial: double cheese, ham and pepperoni – for whenever she and John are away. Some day they’ll learn to cook for themselves. Everything I’ve tried to teach them will come back to haunt them, she thinks, and, leaving the sack by the sink, she charges up the stairs again for the laundry.

Richard, at least, has used the laundry basket, but she finds a T-shirt part way under the bed. As she pulls it out, a heavy book comes along. It is his Student Bible. She picks it up and turns to the place he has marked with a Kleenex: Proverbs 3. Her eyes fall on two verses: “If you want favor with both God and man and a reputation for good judgment and common sense, then trust the Lord completely; don’t ever trust yourself. In everything you do, put God first and He will direct you and crown your efforts with success.”

Rosa sits on the bed a moment and reflects: Each generation has to figure that one out; I’m sure glad he’s thinking in those terms. Silently she sends up a prayer on his behalf: “Watch over him, Lord, as he delivers the cherry oak tables he has been sanding for days. Help him in his business venture to learn integrity.”

In Elise’s room, it is a little harder to collect what’s there. Rosa decides to take only what is in the basket. But here, too, she sees her own old dark-green Living Bible that meant so much in her own teenage years. So wonderful to have the Bible in a language she could understand, she remembers, and not that foreign King James dialect. And now Elise has appropriated it. Without asking, mind you, but somehow that is not important right now.

Rosa kneels for a moment where she finds an empty spot on the floor and fingers the familiar book. “They are great kids,” she says to herself, thanking God in her heart for the privilege of having them born to her and John, and for being able to raise them together. “Wonderful kids!” she decides.

Helen Rose Pauls is a member of Sardis Community Church in Chilliwack, B.C.