Betty Whitaker Jackson

I’ll try to post first draft writing each day. Send me your comments and suggestions.

Chapter 1

I’ve always loved butterflies. There’s something magical about how they hatch, how they change from squishy caterpillars to the jeweltoned beauties they are, how they choose the tiniest weed flowers and most outlandishly colored bouganvillas to visit, and how they can dance and flutter at will.

Now that I have my new body and live in this magnificent paradise called heaven, I’m glad to know there are still butterflies to delight me, but here they live in that transformed state of eternal beauty. No more do they crawl, go through the painful cocoon stage, or emerge, transfixed, wondering what just happened. I wish I could tell my fellow believers on earth that resurrection is real, that indeed there are no tears, there’s no pain of cancer, there’s no demanded separation from those we love, there is only the sweet reward Jesus promised. While I have plenty of company here, I eagerly wait to embrace my other three children, my gorgeous grandchildren who must find their own way through life, and my great grandchildren whom I never got to cuddle and promise my love.

I suppose you’re wondering why my life story warrants all these words. It’s because while we’re living life, the day to day, the birth to death, the restrictions of time and place, we’re so very limited, so tied to what I now call the mundane, the affairs of the world, that we can’t get the butterflies’ perspective. We forget where we’re going, we lose our way, but I see things so differently now. I remember reading St. Paul’’s words (by the way, we’ve met and talk sometimes. I love to hear him tell about his adventures, especially how God sustained him through the shipwrecks and the storms he knew in the old days) which said that someday, meaning now, we would see things clearly. It’s delightful to see why things happened back then. I didn’t know why Daddy left, or why my sainted grandmother, who now lives right next door in my mansion here, had to raise Buddy and me. I didn’t know why everybody called me Sis. Was it because they didn’t like my name, Bessie? I didn’t like it either, to tell the truth.

Grandmother told me the other day that Buddy, my brother who was only a year older than me, couldn’t say Bess. B’s are hard for little kids to say. So he called me Sis, and after that, everyone else did. But I’ve learned that when people don’t know your name, they don’t know you. Maybe that’s the way they wanted it.  I know my father didn’t want me. I know my mother left too. But my grandmother love me, and now I get to spend eternity telling her thank you. There are still some things I don’t understand, but now it doesn’t matter.

I knew I was poor. Dirt poor. Sort of like Jesus, when I think about it. He never had a roof over his head. At least I had that, thanks to Grandmother. Somebody in the church had a small cot she borrowed and put in the corner of the sewing room. I remember sleeping  in fetal position, even after I married Loren, because my feet hung over the metal bar at the end of the cot I called my bed until I was eighteen.

I remember stuffing cardboard in my shoes, if I was fortunate enough to get a pair that year, so the Texas sun-drenched stones didn’t scorch my feet. I remember the feed-sack dresses and how they itch my skin. I remember eating grits three times a day. I remember the relentless teasing at school, and the teacher yelling because I had no pencil or I couldn’t find a paper bag to cover my arithmetic book. I remember lunch was a stick of jerky grandpa had managed to buy for his own lunch and divided it in half, sort of, for Buddy and me. Buddy got the bigger half. He was the boy and needed to grow up big and strong. Then I think of Jesus whose disciples, fishermen by trade, had to ply their trade every day or they didn’t eat. I know what it feels like to go to bed, go to school, go out to play, go to church and hear my stomach grumble with hunger.

When Grandmother reminded me that all we needed was Jesus, the Bread of Life, she meant it. I didn’t know what it meant then. How’s a ten-year-old supposed to know about metaphors? That wisdom came much later.

Even Buddy abandoned me. When he was sever or so, he didn’t want his little sister tagging along with him. When he got a bike, who knows where that came from, I was so envious. True, I had roller skates to clamp onto my shoes, but when the soles of my shoes were shredded, even the skate key couldn’t keep them from falling off. I had perpetual scarred knees. Grandmother used pine tar on me, lots of pine tar, so now I didn’t know if I was peeling scabs or stuck on poultices from my bare knees. Everybody saw what a klutz I was. Finally, I stopped skating.

Evenings we huddled at the foot of grandfather’s chair. The only lantern was lit. He read Jesus stories to us. His soft southern drawl put me to sleep, thinking that someday I would walk where Jesus walked. Sometimes I would find Galilee and Samaria and Jerusalem. They sounded so much better than the dusty street of Arlington, Texas, the unpaved streets we knew, the outhouse, we used, and the torrid summer sun. I saw the settings of the Bible stories and fantasized they were beautiful and places to visit. What I didn’t realize until I finally visited them, that there were dusty and how places there, that the beigeness was so like Arlington. I remember that none of the houses on our street were painted, that there was no grass in the yards, and that absence of color and beauty made me treasure the rare chance to see a butterfly or a surviving roadside weed.