The first hawk I saw was sitting on a fence.I looked up to check my surroundings, and there was a second hawk, sitting almost directly in front of me, its white breast beaming in the sun.
I think writing this piece explains why I was sick for three days after visiting the girls about four days after Thanksgiving, when we shared a short day of delicious food and company. Somehow it all happened so fast, then everyone was off to work and here came Christmas in the flood of photographs online. I suddenly couldn’t move. I felt some deep underground stream, like an undertow of memories that called and called me back.
“I’m dying,” said some strange unknown part of myself I had to find, as I watched, astonished, that the hawks didn’t fly away as I approached them, as I cooed myself closer and saw, neither they nor any city dweller could break the hold we had on each other.
I had gone to take care of two daughters, working long
Black Friday hours and into the weekend of Advent,
the one working her way through her senior year in college,
on top of her hourly post at the fabric store, the other a seasonal
retail job in hopes of landing another good position in a firm,
her field after all … and me in my Subaru on the first day
of snow in our mountains, with a pot of hot, homemade
chicken noodle soup, some bread and pastries from our
favorite local bakery, and enough time on my hands that
I could spend the night if the day got late, if time got away,
as it always has a way of—well, as it often does. So I packed
a small bag and stacked pillow and quilt in the front seat
of my car, knowing their guest supplies are limited and
I’d be perched on a cozy couch for my bed that
night, if nature should arrange itself in such way that
I would stay. I did (or it did), as if you couldn’t tell. And
what I want to say is, it was the most natural thing to
slide corduroys over my flannel pants, slip a cotton shirt
under the sweater I had slept in (a cold wind howled
so relentlessly against the front-room window that
I would have frozen hard from the sound itself, if not the chill on
my side of the glass, if I weren’t wrapped in thick layers,
the tinkle of front-porch pottery chimes being played in that wind
so comically making me the butt of their musical joke),
and get outside, just get out in the weather of the day,
in the city.
And thank God we are women of yarn. I had brought
several scarves, cowls, crocheted items that sit in a heap
on my bedroom chair, with me often giving them a glance
or downright stare: why did I make you, all of you, when
lately I don’t venture into such cold climes that you
require? And of the laugh that this would prompt, at
me talking to my own handiwork my daughters have
taught me—urged and financed me to make, almost
as if knowing a pandemic were on the way and I’d be
looking to crochet anything longer than a broomstraw.
(Which I’ve done. Haven’t you?) What do you do when
the call comes in the early morning hours, on the day
of snow in our mountains, hooray!—Mom?—can
you … ? and of course I can, no matter what that sentence
gets completed with. I will. I can. I did. And here, you are–
listening to all that happened, when I donned most of
the fiber-artistry I brought and sought a chance meeting
of mystery on the main road just two roads over from
their own little lane, where a house perched on a knob
overlooking the southern Appalachians, a rusty, still-used railroad
track, and vestiges of warehouses from a bygone industrial
boomtime in this valley, has become again, a home.
The house dates from the twenties. 1928, I think? She told
me, but I can’t seem to remember. It was twenty something,
just as they are twenty somethings, and here we are, all
of us in the year 20-something. Do we even know, and
does it matter how this story, this poem, this unraveling of
my life, goes? Not really. How does your story go when you
are awakened in the night on a couch that sits on some
strange piece of land that your daughters now call home,
maybe a baby was born here years ago, you don’t know–
and, but, you simply know, there are hawks out there somewhere
in the cacophony of crows and morning cars honking their
way to work. Somehow, you know, to keep going against
the wind of your unreality, that insanity of the internet maybe?
And let it all begin again, to be, the breath of love that blows
against the glass of earth’s maternity. Advent. Birth of beauty,
birth of love. Let it be this beauty that now enraptures my soul
Georgia’s farmland is a broader back than I can straddle. The highway stitches me onto its straight, hilly spine. I have just buckled in a four-year-old daughter, and, still in the early minutes of trip euphoria, we are pacing down to the farm in Baxley, Georgia, for Thanksgiving. Yesterday we hurdled two state lines (“pick up your feet!”), leaving the North Carolina mountains, and now we have a well-worn, downhill stride into homeplace. Sounds are smoothing out in the car, with homey songs and chatter, so my mind can melt back into the years.
The Comer family has gathered in Baxley since the early 1960s, some 35 years running and more years than I have lived. After Granddaddy died in 1962, Grandmother moved into a little house across the yard from Aunt Millie and Uncle Al. Grandmother and the little white-framed cottage are both gone now, though I can still see her delicate figure in a pastel shirt dress and sweater, carefully walking a bowl of sweet potatoes to the big house for dinner. Over a span of fifteen years, from 1918 to 1932, she and Granddaddy had seven children-Harold, Hubert, Camella (Millie), James, Gerald, Barbara, and Murray. The last one, the baby, is my father; now, I nearly wince to hear my daughter call him Granddaddy Comer.
The air is crisp and cool; we whip down GA 36 through Jackson and Locust Grove, where farms, old clapboard houses, and railroad tracks paint a landscape right out of my memories. Zipping past a restaurant strip on I-75, we turn due east on I-16. This rural four-lane heads toward the Georgia coast, but today we’ll let it link us with another state road, keeping us stably fixed in quiet, stubby gray farmland. I nod at the sign reading GA 15-Soperton/Vidalia, and with my blinker give it the thumbs up. Highway 15 is still my favorite road in the world; during college, it was a faithful companion on my trips back up to Athens. The stores and houses marched past me like a parade of old friends in Blackshear, Baxley, Eatonton … the list went on as the clay got redder.
My excitement builds; we drift through one town, its rich, outlying farmland, then another. I see cars line up at houses along the highway, imagine the Thanksgiving meal they will share at a bountiful table. I can smell the oak burning in their cast-iron woodstoves, know the teenage awkwardness of lanky boys clustered around their pickups at the edge of a driveway. Farther south, we follow the cold, silent train tracks, their iron doggedness outlasting the loads and commerce they hustled in and out a century ago. The railroads built these towns; only later came a need for the black-top I’m pressing down.
The road stretches out what seem like miles of memories from my girlhood, when I would anticipate a day on the farm. Every time we’d pile out of the car, kicking pine cones under the tall, swaying trees in the front yard, my brother, David, and I would run around back to find a new litter of Uncle Al’s beagle puppies, or black kittens darting behind an empty flower pot. “My goodness, David and Suzanne are as tall as the pine trees!” we’d hear from our Aunt Millie, whose pretty face and name made me always think of sweet, creamy camellias. And of course all the familiar barnyard animals startled me with their sharp smells and sounds: chickens, ducks, turkeys, goats, pigs, cows, and a pony or two. Around the age of eight, I grew fascinated with horses, and Uncle Al had a Shetland pony named Dusty that he saddled up for us children to ride.
Uncle Al’s personality pervaded the Thanksgiving holiday like the smell of roasting turkey. Of course all the uncles loomed large, both in their physical size and in authority of wisdom and age. Their stature spread from a slow-spoken story with child upon a knee, to a far-away glance as they remembered their own Depression childhood and the parents who raised them in the poverty of tobacco farming on somebody’s else land. Though Uncle Al is not blood kin, as the husband of Daddy’s sister Millie, he made sure that Thanksgiving wrapped us children in the warmth of his home and his own bear hugs. I’ve always known, and know today, at age 33, that this is where I belong. He has drawn so many generations of our family together with a warm, quiet humility, that the spark of his unexpected humor still often rattles me.
A New Generation Whom I Didn’t Know, 1996
Memories of our Thanksgiving gatherings are as sharp as cranberries in my mind. Last year, when we drove up at the farm, all the Comer-Garner gang–some 30-40 uncles and aunts, cousins and parents–were scattered in groups all over the backyard, in the pastures, around the hot, steaming pots of fresh vegetables in the kitchen. I stood amazed, having been away for about ten married years and unable to rejoin the family at each harvest time. So many faces I didn’t recognize; whose gathering is this, anyway? I felt a little possessive of the sacred places and uncles and aunts whom I now see are the old folks–do they remember me the way I hold them fast to the center of my being?
From the picture window, I looked outside to see a new clique of young girls in the family, about eight or ten years old–Lindsay, Christina, Ashley, Rebecca. Yesterday they were babies, preschoolers giggling around their mamas’ skirts; today they are fast friends, swinging on the old board-seated swings that once were the territory of my childhood group. Kara, Kim, and I used to keep that rusty iron frame squeaking and thumping up and down in the dirt, our stories and boyfriend fantasies swirling like the long hair we’d tediously wash and braid that night. I marveled at their brown-blonde locks stringing in their faces, squeals filling the air, lanky legs pointed straight out to fly with the wind. Later the girls rushed down to the small pasture where a gray, sway-backed pony tenderly carried each one around the field.
“Oh, there’s Dusty!” I said to Kara, remembering the bony back, the awkward grip I tried to master to stay upright.
“No, that’s Smoky,” my cousin corrected me, and I stood silent, not comprehending the image before me.
During my early teenage years, the heyday of my horse obsession, Uncle Al purchased for himself a stallion. Smoky was almost mythic when Uncle Al displayed him to the extended family: a beautiful, mountainous quarterhorse, white-gray and muscular, an equestrian image of his tall, dignified new master. Smoky had been trained to compete, Uncle Al said, and was famous among fine showhorses in the area. Now he was older, a distinguished gentleman’s horse. Uncle Al loved him like a brother, I could tell, and I watched my Daddy notice, too. The respect made Uncle Al seem strong, yet vulnerable, an endearment that I had not seen openly in an adult. Smoky stayed over at the Baptist Children’s Home, where Uncle Al worked as Farm Supervisor and had free use of about a dozen gentle horses for his family, on holidays and such, to ride. In contrast to Dusty, the pony Uncle Al kept in a small barn and field behind the house, Smoky had a stall in a big, businesslike barn, along with the herd of resident horses, and Uncle Al took on a professional aura as he stood overseeing the riding ring, acres of land, fine cattle, and his award-winning cornfields. And if these places were the landscape, he and Smoky were the snapshot I still carry; together they were immense, intimidating to a thirteen-year-old girl who just once a year had the chance to comb, saddle, and breathe in the sour, rich, sun-ripened horse smell of these animals, and to sling a blue-jeaned leg over Champion, the beautiful Morgan horse I claimed as mine for the day, and ride as fast as we could go.
The Thanksgiving Day Horseback Ride would come after the enormous meal we’d share as a family at midday. Fervently, the women would lay out the hefty bowls of creamed corn, turnip greens, sweet potato casserole, crisp colorful salads, platters of turkey and smoked pork, cornbread dressing baked to a buttery gold. I remember Aunt Millie and Virginia’s faces moist with ardent work, but their smiles conveying the love of their labor. Desserts would line the sideboard in the dining room–my mother’s famous pineapple cake, pecan and pumpkin pies, something sticky-rich and wonderful from Aunt Gladys like peanut butter caramel pie, and plates of cookies.
“Mama, you ready? Then let us gather together.”
As Aunt Millie took off her apron, her eyes met her husband’s, and Uncle Al called us all around the big dining room table. He spoke proudly as head of his family, as Brother Garner of Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Baxley, and bid us bow our heads. Our robust, broad-nosed cowboy-uncle, that esteemed horseman, tractor-driver, and champion corn grower, bent his head down and in the voice of a child gave thanks–for the food so tenderly prepared by the women, for the family gathered around that table, for the mothers and fathers who have gone on, for little Carol and blessed Stevie whom he and Aunt Millie lost. He asked the Lord to bless our table, our family, to forgive our sins, to keep us humble and thankful of his gifts.
Our forks worked fast, with a mother’s scolding hand touching us if we got too loud or sloppy. But mostly the women smiled playfully to see us and our daddies feasting on all this homegrown food. “Al, how much corn you put up this year?” Jerry would ask, waiting with an empty plate in his palm. His fields brought us the sweet potatoes, greens, barbecued pork, too. We grinned to be subjects in the jokes of our big uncles: “Jerry, you see Kara’s plate?” Uncle Harold would exclaim. “She better not have got all that corn!” “Suzanne, are you gone eat that big piece of pecan pie?” Our answers had to rush out, to beat our giggles. It was true pleasure, there packed with family in the farmhouse kitchen.
When the dinner was finished, a near tangible shift of mood would silently overtake the adults, as each man, now round-full with food, sought out a place for his afternoon nap. Uncle Harold would be the first to drop off and the last roused. He got kidded a lot for his loud snoring and was sometimes the butt of a joke in the form of some costume carefully laid on top of him while sleeping. The children would scurry outside in their clusters again, return to a fishing pole or beebee gun, run down to the barn or sit quietly to plait grapevine wreaths for our hair. It was so easy to pretend we were pioneers surviving with a few fish, chickens, and trees for wood and pecans. The women lingered with low talk at the table, and Aunt Rose’s laughter would float musically through the warm house; this would be their short-lived rest before the tasks of clearing, cleaning, and calculating the next meal. We older girls would slip off with our minds clearly set; we tried to be patient before nagging our uncles:
“When we goin?” Kara would risk whispering underneath someone’s cocked hat.
“Where y’all wanna go?” my father would punch back, feigning no knowledge of our obvious desire.
The horses. We could imagine them standing out in the pasture, breath heavy, moist, grainy. The saddles, rich in wood-brown leathery oils, were hanging in the barn, next to them the bridles’ steel shining. Though we enjoyed the bountiful lunch, and threatened to slurp Aunt Millie’s creamed corn right out of the pot, horseback riding would be our day’s extravaganza. We had to rein in our urge not to bother Uncle Al too soon after dinner. One by one, as we rattled fathers and uncles from their snores, the men lifted a crinkled, red-brown eyebrow:
“You gone go with ’em?”
“I reckon. Roger, you gon’ ride?”
“Naw, I’m gon’ throw a worm in the catfish pond with Jerry.” No doubt Aunt Millie would slip down through the yard and join them, too. As a dutiful son, Roger helped Uncle Al catch the ponies and saddle them up for the children, but he always preferred to fish rather than ride.
“Jim? You goin, aintcha?” Uncle Jim, Kara and Kim’s father, would sometimes ride, but was just as likely to squint and spurn us in his comic way:
“What y’all wanta go get a sore rump for?”
We girls itched for them to gather up flannel jackets and hats and head to the yard. In what seemed like hours, we’d finally all pile in Uncle Al’s farm truck, four or five of us in the boarded-up back, and pad down the highway at a painfully slow gait.
I remember watching Uncle Al as he groomed his companion, preparing Smoky for our afternoon ride with the care of a statesman. I watched the other men, too. They couldn’t help but pause and regard the dignity in Uncle Al’s devotion to his horse. When Smoky and my uncle would emerge from the barn, a gray felt Stetson extending their domineering height, I sensed an awe for these working mates that I knew not how to speak of. Uncle Al depended on Smoky to help him watch over the cattle, canvas the land. In his eye was a great rider’s respect and trust. At other times I witnessed his gentle, motherly love for the little animals he birthed, tended, buried. Then, out on the trails, our plump-cheeked uncle was as playful as we were, spurring on our horses with an occasional tenor call, “Get up Champion,” “Let’s go Misty!” And no one could mistake the sparkle in his eye as he watched our bursting excitement, when a trail would open up into a hilly green pasture and we would roll down the slopes in a wide-open gallop. The sloshy mixture of fear, exhilaration, freedom, the heat from the sweaty-back animal–it all thundered a blast of “Hooray!” to Uncle Al, who gave us a wild, new experience we couldn’t match in our hometowns.
As the years passed, our stories blended into a blanket of humorous, rich memories of riding horses at Thanksgiving.
“Remember the time Uncle Al let us help him round up a field of cows at the end of the day?”
“Yeah, Kara’s horse took off right up the middle of those cows.”
“Split ’em up right down the middle! I can still see the long tail of her hat flopping in the wind. Seem like it was a real cold day.”
“And my horse nearly threw me off racin’ down through the pasture following Kara’s. I had to hang on for dear life!” These were battle-like memories.
“I remember when Kim’s horse ran away with her, and Uncle Al whipped it so bad that Kara stomped off mad as fire at him.” The lessons of farm authority were confusing for us, as we saw Uncle Al as the greatest lover of animals.
“Yeah, well, I had to show that mule who’s boss, especially with my niece on his back. That’s part of loving animals, too.” We paused to grasp his twist of logic, as he let out a heh, heh, heh to the other men.
“Remember sleeping in front of the fireplace with the sorest rear-end you ever had?”
One year Uncle Al let us ride home on the horses and keep them in his barn overnight. We were earnest mothers, tending to our own big, flared-nostril babies. It was special, too, for me to be able to spend the night at the Garners, since I usually returned for the night to my mother’s family gathering in a nearby town. By suppertime, the Comer crowd had dwindled to a handful–the women tired, with a damp dishrag or crochet project in their hands, the men slouched over a cup of coffee and a serious game of Setback–what they call the poor man’s bridge–and I felt a special pride to be among the Thanksgiving diehards. After supper, some of the older boys built a huge bonfire out back to roast marshmallows and shoot off firecrackers. Aunt Millie noticed we girls were restless underfoot in the kitchen; she took a break and showed us her own spark for having a little fun.
“Why don’t you ride your horses up to the bonfire tonight?” she asked Kara and me. “Be mysterious.”
She sank into the dark of her bedroom and reappeared with a colorful menagerie: scarves, shawls, beads, blankets. Kara and I transformed ourselves into Indian squaws with the garb, painted on rouge, braided our long hair, and waited, silent. Just as the fire blazed high, bronzing the ring of chilled faces around it, we slowly emerged out of the dark on our ominous bareback mounts.
Aunt Millie played up the questioning: “Look over yonder. Who’s that comin’?” We kept stony faces, dead quiet under the starry, cold night.
“Aw, that’s just Kara and Suzanne.”
“Well, now I don’t know. Al, what you reckon?” Aunt Millie’s voice grew shrill, and the icy cold crept up our necks.
“Look like some strangers come up. Injuns. Reckon they’s trouble?”
The little ones were wide-eyed, and it was beyond joy to have the big uncles play along in our joke.
So the years drifted by, and we married, scattered, bore our own children, and hardly noticed our horse phase diminish into a kid-sized past. The memories would always be strong if we got together, though, like a fenced ring we’d climb into and go around with one story after another. Now, in my early thirties, it was startling to see one of those horses actually before me again. And there I stood, jingling the changes in my mind as I looked at the elderly sway-backed horse. Of course I had failed to calculate the years that Smoky had been on the farm, side by side with Uncle Al as he tended sheep, swiped honey from his bees in their little white box-hives, shoveled grain for swine in their clattery, smelly pens. Now, with Uncle Al slowing down to a few animals to take care of, Smoky bore the image of the sway-backed Shetland who gave my generation our first good ride. It threw me.
A Chance Revisit, Spring 1997
Late in the next spring, the family gathered to bury my mother’s mother in nearby Blackshear, one town down the road. Many of our Comer relatives attended the services, and I stayed overnight with Uncle Al and Aunt Millie. The mood was nothing like the frenzy of Thanksgiving expectations. The house was quiet and dark when I arrived late at night off a barren highway. Though the occasion was to big my other grandmother goodbye, it afforded the extended time to visit privately with my Comer relatives–I had Uncle Al and Aunt Millie all to myself! Our conversation skipped along the points of my adult accomplishments–college, marriage, job, a child–but, like a hand in an old leather glove, it quickly slipped into the familiar family lore, and I was their playful, little niece.
What a keen chance, I thought, to recount the moment when I mistook old Smoky for Dusty–knowing Uncle Al loved a good story and would identify with the emotions I felt. He was resting under a reading lamp in his bricked-in back porch, where he likes to wind down with a Louis Lamour paperback creased open in his hands. Working with the sheep tires him a great deal, and he spoke of the thick sore that won’t soften on one heel. He’s also hard of hearing, so I sat up to project energetically.
“Is Smoky still doing alright?” I asked, hoping to trigger a cowboy’s lofty praise.
“Smoky died last year,” he said matter-of-factly, with a nasal, musical rise in his voice and his eyes kept low on the book. “Sam’s got his skull up in his barn.” Of their ten grandchildren, Sam is the one who has inherited the love of farming and animals, part of the land, and many of his Pa Pa’s chores.
Robust and wry, my uncle settled back in his chair, cutting a steely look right at me. “Yep, his body rotted out in the field, and Sam went and got the skull, hung it right up over the door!” he said again, this time with a twinkle, his low heh, heh, heh escaping from the cracked line of his lips.
I was again the girl of thirteen, wide-eyed and marveling, struggling to figure out this sidestep of humor my uncle had slipped by me. I thought I could prompt him to bare a sliver of human flesh, as he sometimes does with adults, but no luck this night. I was out-rodeoed. But at least it was by a resting giant, my Uncle Al. At least it was by a champion.
There are some of us who
take the journey of Christmas hard,
like soil frozen in time, soil that must be
thawed gently, to remove its stubborn
resistance to growth, to allow it to breathe.
There are some of us who will wither when
we are not allowed to do this, to take our
time at Christmas, and allow ourselves to
be born anew … it happens this way every year
for me. I am not one who will grow easily in
winter’s breath. I am not one who can easily
call up a dream … instead, I am one who is
easily manipulated into thinking I am one with
you and you with me … I don’t know exactly
what this means, except it is the way to go. And,
here we go in our grand new adventure called
time … called life … called hope and vision and strength and beauty and love. Notice I didn’t put a hard return there,
at the end of that line. I don’t know, my fingers wouldn’t allow it, just as they won’t allow it now, because I am life itself in the very movements of my fingers across these keys, across your vision, across your heart, and across the time, this time, it takes to read and comprehend and believe, in the breath of all of life, that these things are coming true. I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe the breath is coming into you, as it is coming into me like trees on the landscape that sway and yet are unafraid just to be trees. So might we be unafraid to be, just be who we are as we awake, as we awaken now, into our waking dream. Happy Christmas Dreaming,
everyone, happy Christmas dreaming into the holiest of times, when we have drawn close to the mystery of the divine in our hearts … it is diving down now into the recesses of our souls to find that one true treasure within us, that one true treasure we know within ourselves … it marks a time, it beats a rhythm, it holds a space we might once have known–I don’t know, do you know it? do you know what it is to be alive and to breathe from that first, primal place called Love, that primal place called reality that was shaped only by intention and by grace. I am going there now to find it, and may not return until it is too late … too late to know any better, to know anyone better than myself, simply sitting here, holding space in the Moment of time that calls itself Eternity, that calls unto itself a space of all Eternity resting in hope, and calls us all now to listen, to be witnesses to the divine entering our hearts … I have called you, it says, I have called and you have listened, and, listening now, you have been witness to a Divine Dream coming true in the recesses, the most beautiful recesses in your heart. I go now to make this dream a reality, a reality that most will never enter … before it enters them … go, now, most holy, sublime and tenderest thoughts! go with them, go with me, go with all who journey this day, and let us play into the vision of your truth, let us recall days of splendor on the earth, let us recall visions of dreams and regal, enraptured thoughts as we capture ourselves in this bright new reality. Let it be, let it be, let it be…
Accepting the challenge from Terry Boswell (fellow blogger), to write a poem about love in ten lines (sentences) in which each line contains four words and uses the word “love.” A few days late, but here it is, nonetheless! Thank you for the challenge, TerryB!
[Headnote for bloggers and FB readers: Thursday’s assignment in WordPress.com’s Poetry 201 course was to write an Ode focusing on the word “Drawer,” and using the device of apostrophe, in which the speaker in the poem addresses another person or object. I wrote this on Thursday, but felt it was a rambling, tearful mess, so I didn’t post it. Kind of fell off the blog-wagon for a couple of days. However, I have just reread it and believe it is the most beautiful piece I have written to date … I don’t know why, but my spirit sings as if to say, I have touched the stars. Enjoy, and thank you for reading. Suzanne]
It is hard to open a drawer on a day when snow lays sodden
upon the land, our deck, our drive, every surface under the sun
laden with the weight of last night’s snow. In each crevasse there is
something wet or messy–boots, gloves, muddy patches under
an eave where the old dog lies, soggy leaves around the edges
of the house and up the tread of wet car tires. Everything feels
sticky, mushy, moist, drippy, and just wet. So, to open a dry,
wooden drawer, dry with brittle memories buried away
in random stacks, is hard. Undesirable. Frightening, almost.
I am afraid, I admit, of this assignment.I am afraid because
today is the day
we remember my mother’s passing, one year ago, on
February 26, 2014. I would rather stay in the moment of time,
remember how to play with my children on their sleds, come
down the drive in an erratic speedy slide, give a big belly laugh,
and do it again. Again and again, until our fingers and feet are
numb, and finally we slog in and leave a trail of wet garments
by the door, dogs getting wiped down and chunks of snow
pulled from the shaggy hair on the backs of their legs. Oh,
goodness, why did we do this? What a huge mess. Did we remember
to put towels by the door? The wood floor is tracked with muddy
watery prints, even a bit of snow scattered around our stack of
outdoor gear.
It’s ok, in fact,
it’s downright fine and hugely grand that we have done this,
and we’ll do it again. After hot chocolate, a little lunch, a shower,
and rest. The adults, that is. The kids’ll take in some TV. Maybe
turn on a CD and lounge on the sofa together. I lose track, as if
snow has fallen in my mental drawer someone accidentally left open
and left by the door … so I drift … and settle … and dream …
I am the spoon to stir their hot chocolate, I live in the place
of their dreams, when they were young, and needed a tiny
vessel to place bits of food and learn to eat. I am the spoon that
holds so many memories of their childhoods, my childhood, my
mother’s place in my heart. I am the spoon that will not let me
put it down until I rest with the thought that I am alive today,
in wonder, in delight, in every precious memory of her slight yet
vibrant frame. I stir for you those memories, too, those memories
that will not let us go, and so we must go with them, into them,
and for them. We will begin a new day, holding on to the pleasures
of the past, and we will remake our memories into something
fine, such that we can dine on its remembrance forever, for
that is what we are, simply a remembrance of how things were,
and will be, and are. We have not come very far, but far enough
to realize that this is all we are, all we will ever need. Oh, feed me,
precious spoon of my memories! Feed me as only a mother can
feed her child, resting still with wisdom, resting still with grace.
No one can take this place from me, no one can take her place,
and that is all I will ever need to know. It is not selfish, it is not sad,
it is not ridiculous to say this on a day such as this, for I have seen
the wind, and I know it is mine to hold, as if holding a child forever
in its arms, safe from every harm, safe from my desire to be unsure
… I am sure, I am whole, I am … the lion and the lamb.
I am dreaming, now, and will not let go the thought that this is
truly who we are meant to be … a kind of oneness in the pleasure
of all eternity. I wrestle with her memory wanting to come undone,
but really, this is all we need to hold, just a memory of her memory
living in us, and living still so that when we hold it, it reverberates
with her goodness, stirs our sweet, inner mind,and blesses us,
for all the world to see. For all the world to see.
It is usually the limbs of the trees that make us think of fingers, fingers grasping the sky, extending upward, and sending our thoughts to things higher and brighter than old, dark trees in the dead of winter. But it is the snow, today, that captures our mind and, slipping away, calls my husband to say, “It’s losing its grip,” the snow gradually melting and falling in clumps to the forest floor. What we see, from our vantage point in the family room, is a series of powdery trails leaving the silent air in a fanfare all its own, as if to say, “We made it through our day, now you make it through yours.”
Hunh? What does this mean, or what does it mean to me? Well, first I must encounter the silent, slow movement of time, unaccustomed to my mind shining so bright a light upon it. It is first hurrying away, as if to tell me, “Don’t stay here too long. Let the wet winter wind bring a mind to it for you, and let the wind tell you its name.” It is solemn in its insistence that this is the way to go, to know the mind of the wind simply by breathing in and breathing out, breathing and letting the mind of wet weather settle in to your soul. “That is all you have to do to be free, now,” says the Wind. “Simply follow me.”
But I don’t want to. I want to simply sit here and keep typing, to lose track of time and let the mind settle its own way. But, “isn’t that the same thing as breathing, as thinking, as feeling with your fingers and setting down in type the words that come from the soul?” I don’t know, I only know I am folding up a feeling of delight each time I set in type these words as they flow, like snow falling, capturing the wind of my soul, and simply settling into me, settling all thoughts of freedom or not-freedom and all thoughts of feeling and of loss. It is found! It is found, the here and the now. It is found in me, and I am in it, like being lost in the wind, a letter folded and unfolded in time, enveloped in wind and told not to stay here too long—
It is the beginning of all time, the time beginning to begin again in you. Let it in.
The Fairchild Oak, Ormond Beach, Fla., by Andrew Armstrong, courtesy fineartamerica.com
Once upon a time
a child came to earth.
His father was the Sun,
and his mother was the Moon.
And he loved the earth as himself.
Though he was a boy, destined
to be a man like his father,
he came in the spirit of his mother.
And he loved the earth very much,
but he could not save it.
He tried
being a businessman,
with all the busy men,
but he could not save the earth.
He tried
being a farmer and a vinegrower,
with all the earth-breaking men,
but he could not save the earth.
He tried
being a teacher and a keeper of the law,
with all the law-abiding men,
but he could not save the earth.
So he went to the women,
and he sat near their center of work,
the bowls, brooms, and cries of hard labor,
and he cried. He cried and
he cried, and he cried.
He cried near the women kneading dough.
He cried near the laundresses washing clothes.
He cried near the women keeping houses
clean for the men and the children,
but he could not save the earth.
Just beyond the women and children,
he found a raw place in the earth
where it was sore from so much work,
and he lay upon the wound,
and he cried.
The noise of his wailing was too much
for the men. It disturbed their work.
The noise of his wailing
made the women scoff
and the children laugh,
but the animals came to him.
They licked his tears and tried to lick
his wounds, but they could not.
The animals stayed beside him anyway.
The man had cried so long
he poured out his very heart in his tears,
until finally he dried up and just blew away.
The ragged blanket that had covered him
eventually blew away, too, until there was nothing
left but a dark spot on the earth, where all
his tears had spilled.
And finally that, too, was gone.
And then the earth went to sleep,
or so it seemed,
for no one knew what was happening
down deep.
Now we know,
never a tear is wasted,
and never a tear is lost.
One day a little girl came crying.
She was poor, alone, and afraid.
She lay upon the ground where the man
had cried, and her tears awoke the earth.
Suddenly a great movement started beneath her,
and the earth opened up in small cracks.
The heads of tiny plants began to emerge,
then leaves and stems and tall, sturdy stalks.
More plants emerged,
and flowers bloomed.
The girl began to laugh. She laughed
and she laughed and she laughed,
loving and playing in the flowers. They tickled her
and tended her, as she stroked and admired
their beauty.
Soon the people came.
Already, some had come—
the young farmers and businessmen and lawyers
had slipped away from their work years before,
and set up small camps behind the crying man.
Some of the young women, too,
had escaped their fate of work. To lie beside
the crying man was better than grinding away,
they believed.
And so the poor child’s arrival was no surprise.
But the garden was.
And the great tree that emerged
in the midst of it all
was a shelter of strength
no one could have ever seen coming,
unless they had seen all the tears
the man had poured into the earth.
It was a river of love.
As the people gathered,
they shared their stories,
they sang their songs,
and by telling and listening with utmost care,
in the end,
everyone of them had seen it all.
“Stay in the river of love,” they sang,
though no one knew
exactly who gave them the song.
And they are coming still,
telling and listening …
singing and welcoming
anyone to tell their stories
about the great tree. . .
The branches gave buds to sweeten the air.
The leaves gave shade to cool the earth.
They painted the sky with the colors of light,
And the tree was bare and bright.
Even when the dry leaves fell,
the strong body of the trunk reminded the people,
the tree and everything around it is all right.
Even in deep darkness, it is always full of light.
“It grows in the river of love,” they sang,
“it grows in the river of love.”
Thank you for listening to my story, and
blessings to you, as you listen
to the tellings of the story
of the great tree inside you.
coolbreezeinthemountains 