Yesterday, driving down a neighborhood street, I glimpsed a mimosa tree. The muscle memory of stripping the thin leaves of its drooping branches still lives in my fingers. Did you know the small leaflets look like tiny green beans when you collect them on a plate? My eight-year-old self discovered this three feet up the splendidly climbable tree that once grew outside my grandmother’s home somewhere on a hill in Tennessee.

   Last week, I bought fresh butter beans from a local market. I blanched them and put them up just the way my Mississippi mother-in-law taught me. This week, seasoned with bacon, just like she said, I put a big pot on the stove, and the steamy southern smell filled the house. Suddenly, my husband was back home, and I was a young bride with chestnut hair and good knees.

   Memories.

   “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”   Luke 2:19

   I wonder what they were? The things she pondered?

   Such an unexpected and intimate verse to close the story of Jesus’s birth. It doesn’t tell us she prayed or worshiped, though I’m sure she and Joseph did both. It tells us that Jesus’s mama remembered, and that she treasured her memories.

   Making memories is an intentional pastime for me these days. Same for reaching back for old ones. However, mine are no longer being pondered only in my heart—they’ve exploded all over our house. On tables covered with bowls of seashells from dozens of walks on the beach. In books filled with pressed dandelions picked by once tiny hands. On shelves where our children’s misshaped pottery and other crafts from long ago do more than gather dust. And on cabinet doors where our grandchildren’s artwork reminds us that we have a place in their lives. Making a home for these things is my way of using the passing of time to my advantage, and maybe, just maybe paving a memory road home that others will travel long after I’m gone.

   Will our children and grandchildren remember the treehouse out back, or the fairy forest secreted beneath the trees? Will the boys remember their granddad’s dark study filled with jet models and paintings of aces dogfighting their way across the sky? Will my children remember my flour-covered aprons and the fresh flowers on the table? One day, many years from now, will the smell of a hot chicken pie fill their home and take them back to a time they will call simpler? Will they remember warm fires, long dinner blessings, and Jesus? I hope so.

   In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for more pavers for that memory road I’m working on.

   The grandchildren are coming today. I stopped by the neighborhood mimosa this afternoon and snipped a short, low hanging branch. We’ll be serving green beans in the fairy garden this evening. Everyone is welcome!