Here's another little story I wrote for our Lenten reflections about my parents, who have just left for a two-month working trip to Asia. A recent e-mail confirmed that they have arrived in Bangkok safely.

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My mother gave away the curtains. She slid them off the rod in our living room, folded them, and pressed them into the hands of our visitor as if it were no big deal. She let them go as if she really didn’t want them, but I knew that wasn’t true.

They were the color of onion skins, with delicate brown embroidery, hundreds of stitches that painted flowers and swirls. I hung them at my mother’s living room window shortly after we moved back from Kenya with very few possessions and little money. Though we’d always believed that we were wealthy (and we certainly had lived where poverty was evident and unforgettable), in Wheaton, a wealthy Chicago suburb, I think we might have been quite poor. We weren’t allowed to say “poor” of course, since an altered setting did not suddenly negate the world’s truth, but with two daughters in college, my parents lived like graduate students. Others climbed the ladder toward financial stability, but I watched as my parents descended it, by choice, rung by rung. They laughed off the idea of ever wanting to “arrive,” while other people their age signed mortgages and bought dream cars. Then, as now, they told us that “arriving” was an illusion, and that whether you ever settled down physically or not, the dream was to move, always journeying, changing, living with the cleansing tension between enough and too much.

But my mother loves beauty, and she filled our lives with certain possessions that made her children understand that life should be marked by sacred spaces and delightful rituals. My parents understood that grace was incarnational, and that spirit meets material and that is good and needed. We had Sunday teas in the familiar Dutch blue and white china; at each new house we buried our noses in favorite books and breathed deeply. Ah, the smell of home. My childhood, covered, surrounded, held by the things that bound me in the love of my family: the photograph of Bengali boats, framed in dark wood; vases of roses, fresh from market; the cedar chest of blankets. The first thing my parents did at each new house was to air our blankets and make our beds, sweet beds that felt like strong ships in the middle of quickly changing seas.

Soon after arriving in America for college, I’d experienced a moment of pure, unadulterated capitalism as I stood in Target. I had a little money. I needed an alarm clock. I realized I could buy one. After eighteen years of incredibly limited purchasing, charity clothes and suitcases from America that contained everything I needed, from toothbrushes to underwear, it was an unbelievable discovery. I could buy what I chose, and then I would have it. I would have it and be able to use it and then, when I made more money, I’d be able to buy more. I looked around my parent’s townhouse and realized that with a little money, I could begin transforming their graduate school look into something a little more elegant. I scoured thrift stores, searched through piles of dross to find the few treasures that would make my parent’s first American home, a small townhouse at the end of a quiet street, beautiful.

I hung my mother’s curtains with love; I believed she loved them. And then, a few weeks later, in one dizzying instant, she gave them away to our visitor, a woman who had recently arrived in America, too, who admired them as they hung at my mother’s window. “They are pretty, aren’t they?” my mother said. “Would you like them?”

My mother grew up below the poverty line. In high school, she cleaned dormitories to buy the material to make herself a dress. In college, she worked three jobs and paid semester by semester. “There are always people who are less well off,” she’d say, and tell me about the family they knew who ate sandwiches made from the fibrous inner skin of banana peels.

So what could I say to my mother when she gave away the curtains?

Recently, on a rainy evening, I stomped into a poetry reading and met one of my students there, a woman from a background of pain and poverty. She was soaked. I thought of my mother. I took off my raincoat, a recent gift, and pressed it into her hands. “Take it,” I said. “Someone gave it to me and you need it.”

I reveled for an instant in the freedom of releasing something to someone who needed it more than I. It felt good. But unlike my mother, astonishing giver extraordinaire, I agonized later over my gesture. Would the student even wear it? It was a really nice raincoat, but she’d said, as I handed it to her, that it wasn’t her color. Would it go to waste? I really needed a raincoat, I thought. Why had I given it away?

But my mother slid the curtains from the rod, beautiful things, and gave them away.

I realize again: how am I called to live? I imagine a rushing river. I kneel down at the bank and dip my hands into the strong current of water, and I keep my hands open, ready to receive what the current brings to me and ready to release it again just as quickly. It is the only way to experience joy, I think, to give away my curtains, and my coat, and all that I would lock away.