Emotional Baggage

June Kendall is on the telephone, cheerfully arranging a visit. She may be divorced from Connie's father, she explains, but she is not divorced from his family, and there is certainly room for a guest - Connie's room, in fact. Connie Kendall, listening to one half of the conversation, discovers that she is the one being moved to the sofa bed in the living room, and she is not pleased about it. Her mother calls it a character builder. Connie calls it a stiff neck. Then she asks who exactly she is giving up her room, her health, and possibly her sanity for, and when she hears the name Helen, something slips out of her hands and breaks on the floor.

The guest is Helen, her father's sister, and Connie insists Helen hates her. She reminds her mother of the teasing about her hair and the way she looked, of things broken and blamed on her, of tantrums that always got their way. June remembers only a few run-ins and nothing nearly so terrible, which convinces Connie that nobody is on her side. She storms out of the house declaring she will stay somewhere else for the length of the visit.

Somewhere else turns out to be Whit's End. Out back, John Whittaker has been clearing away clutter and has ended up with lumber, a pile of bricks, and some sacks of feathers, with no idea yet what to do with any of it. Traci Needlemeyer finds him there, wanting to talk about a party on Saturday that she has decided to skip. Her reasons run through cheerleading tryouts, an alternate, a flag bearer's spot she wanted, and a chain of people she is certain planned the whole thing to make her look like a jerk. Whit gently points out that she is stacking up a great many unsupported conclusions and has not spoken to a single one of the people she is blaming.

The phone interrupts them. June is looking for her daughter, and once Traci spots Connie slipping upstairs, June admits she cannot understand the grudge at all. Whit finds Connie clearing a space for a cot and asks for the real reason, because teasing alone would never make her this angry. At last it comes out: Helen is the one who introduced her father to Lindsay, the woman he left her mother for. Connie learned it from Lindsay herself, and she does not believe her mother knows. Whit tells her that when something terrible happens, the easiest person to blame is often the one who hurt us before, and that her blame has grown far out of proportion. Connie says she will handle it her own way and refuses to talk further.

Traci, meanwhile, comes back delighted. She has been asked to be flag bearer after all, and every scheme she imagined turns out never to have existed. Whit uses the moment to explain grudges: how bad feelings grow, take up more and more thinking time, and eventually infect everything a person does, like hauling a huge rock everywhere you go. Traci suggests drawing a picture of someone with that rock on their shoulders so they can see how silly they look, and Whit, delighted, tells her she is going to be part of the picture.

The picture is a relay race called Bricks or Feathers. Partners run across the field four times, choosing either bricks or feathers and carrying back one, then two, then three, then four. Connie assumes the game is easy, since all anyone has to do is pick feathers. Traci picks bricks every single time. Connie finishes last, dragging a sack with ten bricks in it and asking why on earth anybody would choose bricks over feathers.

That, Whit tells her, is exactly the question. She has been carrying a load of emotional bricks for a long time, doing as much damage to her soul as the real ones did to her arms, and in life a person can trade bricks for feathers at any moment. Connie protests that she has tried again and again and cannot change the way she feels. Whit agrees that it is impossible for her - but not for God, who hates her pain even more than she does and will help her be rid of it if she asks. She admits, quietly, that she never has. Grudges are dangerous, Whit says, because they make us forget or stop caring about doing what is right, and that is why Jesus asked for a forgiving spirit: it takes our focus off the problem and puts it back on Him.

When June arrives, Connie says she is ready to explain everything, but there is one thing she has to do first. She is going home to get her room ready for Aunt Helen - and she uses the word "Aunt" for the first time in a very long while. Whit notices, and tells her mother that Connie is changing her bricks into feathers.