​I stood on the train in Paris, clutching the metal bar as we slowed to a stop. “Mind the gap between the train and the platform,” the recording said, and when we were safely above ground, something about those words struck me enough to make me jot them down.
 
Yesterday, while looking for something else, I found them again. Mind the gap.
 
Our family lives in a gap this summer. Our house is torn apart, in the midst of a major renovation. It’s eustress, like I learned about in my Intro to Psychology class in college—a positive stressor—but a stressor nonetheless. We are reunited after a month apart and thankful every night to sleep in our own beds, but the rest of our main level is a construction site—filthy, unfinished, unsafe. In our un-air-conditioned sunroom, where it has been in the 90s all week, I cook our meals in a microwave, toaster oven and on a hot plate. We are hot. The kids are getting on each other’s nerves. I am never alone and running out of diversions, even as loads of work that I cannot do beckons from inside the house, since I can’t safely contain Deacon. I find myself wishing the gap between under construction and completion away, but of course that would mean wishing three weeks of my children’s summer away, and it will be over soon enough on its own.

Uncomfortably, I'm wading through some personal uncertainty as well, in a gap of not knowing. Not knowing isn’t my strength.

I find my sense of self in a gap too, this whole year. Of what I once did and what I do now, who I used to be and who I will someday be. So whoever I am now, in this season, shifts uncomfortably in the gap. I am unmoored; I can’t find my voice, can’t find my passion, can’t find my discipline. And if I’m not careful, I might wish away these questions, this uncertainty, this discomfort, yes, but along with it I would miss the peculiar beauty of these days. The preciousness of the faith inherent in not knowing. The gratitude that living in the moment necessitates. The simple pleasures of just being here, right now, of being aware that nothing else has been promised to us anyway.

I’m shifting my focus this week to minding the gap between: the way it is and the way it may someday be, what I am and what I want to become, what I do today and what I may accomplish someday. And maybe there are changes to make or work that should be done; maybe there is motivation I lack or hustle I haven’t found, but I rest in the knowledge that there can be time for all of that. It’s not always time for looking ahead or behind, sometimes it’s enough to just acknowledge and be present in the in between.

On the same day he took me for a loud, fast ride around the neighborhood in the gold, ‘69 Mustang both he and his son drove to high school, the Mustang he later carefully loaded on a trailer bought for just that purpose, he looked at me tearfully and said, “Thank you for carrying me this last year.”
 
A hundred meals flashed in my memory: some packed for two, with care and attention to detail, others for one, before, and then even more frequently after she was gone, and still others shared around our chaotic and banged-up kitchen table. And of them all, I think, the latter mattered the most.
 
That table wasn’t fancy. Extendable and bought for a fraction of its value from the “As-Is” section of Ikea; when we bought it we had thought it a steal. But ten years of scratches and spills, three kids with grubby hands and math homework later, and it had seen many better days.
 
And the meals, though homemade with love, fell far short of gourmet: turkey for Thanksgiving and ham at Christmas, yes, but mostly soups in the winter: boeuf Bourguignon, butternut squash bisque and pasta e fagioli, and simple dishes the rest of the year: ratatouille, tacos, Bolognese and baked chicken.
 
“Thank you for carrying me,” said the man who had jump-started my car when it had died on a winter night, filled with children after a visit to a friend’s house, who took out my trash and changed my flat tire while my husband was away, who often met my daughters at the bus stop while my son napped and chatted with them all the way home, who delighted in watching my son grow and always greeted him with a smile and a hug. 
 
I’m still mulling over all that our friendship with him has taught me. I’m still deciding what it means.
 
There is a gate in the fence that separates our yard from the one that used to be his. We put it there with hope that we would use it for years to come, not wanting to believe that maybe we wouldn’t get the chance. If pressed to consider the possibility of different neighbors, he joked, “Maybe we could write a provision into the contract,” but more seriously, “You could always lock it.”
 
So before he drove across the country, his Mustang trailing behind, while he stayed in our guest room, the one tucked into the eaves and overlooking the yard and garden next door that had not two days before been his, I heard my daughter in the back yard calling to someone I couldn’t see: “Sure, come on over!” I could almost taste the bittersweetness on my tongue as I saw the beautiful blonde child walk through the gate, from her new yard into ours. Can a gate be a legacy? A legacy that lets in a little girl with flip flops and a shy smile, who has a little sister and brother and parents who invite my husband to share a meal with them while I’m away?
 
I know what we gave him, I think, because he would thank us for it all the time. But I’m still coming to terms with what he gave us, along with the bags of empty food containers no longer waiting to be refilled. Sometimes it seemed that, to him, maybe I was a bit of every woman: mother, sister, wife, daughter, friend. But I think I’ll always remember him as the one who reminded me that I can live and love with intention and my days can impact others right here, over the fence-- right now-- not only in a someday down the road when my children are grown and not only back then, when my days looked different. Now. Around my banged-up kitchen table, with my tired eyes and bickering children, eating my ordinary food.
 
We'll miss saying, "Come on in," and a half-hearted, "excuse the mess," even as we get to know the warm people who have bought his home but could never take his place.

It’s not clear to me who did the carrying, but that gate in the back yard will always feel like hope and love. It brings us comfort to know it will continue enabling us to say, "Sure, come on over," even now that he's gone.