Gathering

My sister, Amy, crawls across the grass, toward a cluster of wrapped gifts lying on the ground. Choosing one, she lifts it with a fiendish grin and crawls back to her place in the circle of family and friends seated among the trees. We are gathered for a festive afternoon of frivolity, fellowship and food at our annual Apple Fest.

At the moment, all of us, infant through elder, are playing the “Present Game,” and participants thieve one another’s collected cache of gag gifts. We practice acquiring and relinquishing as we retrieve mysterious packages, then have them taken from us. The game ends with the opportunity to share, as presents are evenly distributed to all.

It seems nothing short of a miracle that we have been given this opportunity, once again, to gather together. In early June, Amy nearly died from severe head and brain trauma sustained in an accident involving a horse. Today, she is crawling as a matter of choice. When the game concludes, she rises to her feet and walks off to talk and laugh with a fellow Apple-Fester. No more neck brace. No more wheel chair. No more walker or stomach tube or pain-killing medications.

I am humbled to contemplate the unending grace of this gift. That we are all here enjoying one another’s company—eating apple lasagna, rum-soaked apple cake, apple crisp and even apple meatballs—is enough to make me realize how little we know about the wild abundance of blessings bestowed on us.

Prayers and positive thoughts have connected us in ways we never imagined were possible. And they seem, only now, to be opening doors to new awareness of the ties that somehow bind us together.

During another game, we discover that others among us have fallen from horses, a few of us have fallen out of kayaks or canoes, 75 percent of us have fallen down stairs, and all of us have fallen in love. Other surprising connections are revealed. Two women in the group provide therapy to people grieving over the loss of a pet; some of us love bugs, frogs and snakes; two speak foreign languages and have come from foreign lands.

Many of us gathered for the day play instruments, garden organically and like to sing. Two of us have hot tubs and the rest of us are willing to go for a soak. Another owns a horse, while one has a car named after a horse. One of us had her last child at the age of 42 and that child, now 35, stands holding the family’s newest member, infant Emma Kay. And nearly everyone claims to love to read and to walk in the woods.

I look around the circle of smiling faces and listen to their laughter peal across the meadow. I taste the fullness of summer in each inventive apple dish, toss a Frisbee with the kids, serve some coffee to a friend, walk the river shallows with my favorite six-year-old, Nick. Standing there, I think of how this fine scene comprised of friends and family widens with its own joy and wonder how far its connections will continue to go, who it will touch and in what magical ways—this gift of grace.