From Out of the Valley

By Anita Wahlstrom

My Omi is an optimist.
Brightness, hope, cheerfulness, and joy flow out of her with a kind of confidence and wisdom that I can’t quite describe, except to say that when I sit with her and talk with her this power pours out of her soul and begins to fill me.
Today, I arrived knee deep in the valley of my life. “How are you?” she asks
“How have you been?”
“What you been doin?” Her eyes grab me.
“Oh the usual, work, stuff like that,” I reply.
“Things are pretty good, I guess. I try to raise my voice a little to sound hopeful and happy.
“How have you been?” she asks again. So, I go to the positive. But eventually my voice lowers and softens. I am still there in the valley—trudging through the muck. I stay there for awhile—talking and telling her. She listens. She validates.
Then it happens. She guides me across the valley and guides me up to the highest peak of the mountains surrounding my life, and with a graceful swoop of her outstretched arm, she illuminates everything. She shows me the flowers, the bright grass, the sparkling waters that reside in the valley.
“I admire your courage,” she says. She’s talking about me teaching church lessons, which, for me, are equivalent to jumping out of an airplane.
“My courage?” I answer. “I don’t know about that. I don’t know if I have much courage. I don’t know if I do a good job, you know. I chuckle and laugh. Looking away from the green towards the muck with a comic abandon. Do I feel most comfortable when I am stuck?
“You know you do a good job. You know it Anita. You do.” She doesn’t give up. And I’m here on the mountain top. I see the black spots but from here it is hard to miss the beauty—the fields of flowers, the rows of glittering leaves.
“Well, I guess I do sometimes. I am learning. I know that much”
“You have to tell yourself that you do a good job. You have to think this way.” She says. I smile. I relax. I let her optimism—this power she has—flow into me.
“Yeah, life’s pretty hard.” I say. Why do I like being stuck in the mud?
“That’s’ life” She smiles. She laughs. Her eyes sparkle. “Things could be more worse. They can always be more worse. We have to be grateful. You have to be grateful—Always grateful”
We talk about a lot of things, good and bad. She walks me out today. I hug her ten times. She grabs my face. And now I can’t remember what she said, but I feel her still inside me. And because I am her granddaughter—I have her genes, her blood, part of her being in me—I don’t plod down the mountain and I don’t even skip or slide down. I spread my wings and fly.