Grace

She’d been in bed for half an hour, chatting and singing and dancing and hosting the usual evening soiree she has every night with her baby dolls.  I’d hugged him good-night, told him to sleep well, reminded him we’d be up early for his sixth grade Bible study in the morning, and sent him off to bed as well.  There were no more emails to answer or phone calls to make.  The laundry was going and the dishwasher set to run. 


With the duties of the day complete, I sat down in the leather chair with my laptop and invited the puppy up to snuggle beside me.  (I know you’ve just fallen out of your own chair at the thought of OCD me allowing a dog on the furniture, but just so we’re clear, it’s the only piece of furniture she’s allowed on, it’s leather so I can easily clean it, and there is a huge blanket covering the seat so she’s not even really touching it.  I know.  What can I say – it happened when I was recovering from my surgery last year and needed her warmth while watching hours on end of HGTV, and you know what they say about teaching an old dog new tricks?  That saying is spot on, my friends, and it’s been her chair ever since). 


I opened Ann Voskamp’s blog, attempted to make sense of the prose turned poetry she pours daily into my soul.  Sometimes, I think she’s writing to me, though I know it isn’t true.  Her words, in all their backwards, reversed order beauty, offer exactly the reminders I shouldn’t need, but do.

Her post that night was about kids and fame and the insatiable need for attention epidemic that’s currently sweeping our land, and how funny, I thought.  I just wrote a little something about that myself.  I need to meet this woman one day.  I think we’d be fast friends.

I didn’t hear anything unusual upstairs.  He was going to the bathroom, brushing his teeth.  Doing the things he always does when I send him up to bed each night – stalling tactics, if I’m honest, because he never spends that much time on his teeth in the mornings.  

It drifted down slowly, floating around me like a cloud.  It took me a second to realize what it was, and when I did, the words on the screen in front of me blurred into nothing.  I breathed in, deep and long and full, and the weight of it all lifted right off my heart.  

The tears spilled over, the screen now just a mass of swirling colors as I took another breath, drawing it in, allowing it to fill the emptiness.

He had sprayed his cologne.  He had sprayed it again, finally, after days and weeks that seemed so heavy with the guilt of my mistake, and I know it’s ridiculous to read anything into an eleven-year-old boy putting cologne on.  I know he hasn’t forgotten and neither have I.  


Still.   


That scent . . . .


It smelled like forgiveness to me.