When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole forty-five-minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty- five minutes back from physical therapy. She’d say that even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang, because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore. Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio, and I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.
-Ada Limón
I’m pretty sure the photo was taken by Farm Girl Kim; used with permission ❤
I’ve returned from my short road trip, to the land of my childhood. I stayed with my sister two nights, and then switched to my brother’s place for two nights, which is the very house we all lived in for years, years that went by in a flash. I went away to college when I was eighteen and never lived at home again. Even though my brother has changed a lot of things, the “envelope” of the house our father built remains the same, and the giant oak tree still towers over the back yard.
It also has been pruned recently, its canopy made much more compact, and it looks great. I wandered around the property taking in everything, but I forgot to go back with my phone later to take pictures. I was too busy focusing on the people, my people, so I have found some older images of the countryside and people that I visited, to illustrate my musings.
Wall art that has seen better days, and that we “let go.”
The day before I started out on this journey, I was glad to feel the leavinghomesickness depart and be replaced with happy anticipation at the meetings I would soon have. Just being with these dear ones and also talking about the experiences we’ve shared over the decades has filled me to the brim with thoughts and feelings I don’t think I will be able to sort out.
Nostalgia is a “sentimental longing for the past,” so it’s not that I’m feeling, but just plain wonderment at all the days and years of my life so far. I would not go back in time, and I know those times were not ideal, but looking back I am amazed at how wholesome they were. I was blessed to live through them with several people who remain, and still care about me, which is all a great gift.
The picture and the memory are blurry, but solid.
Over the course of four days, I had long visits and conversations with twenty people, counting the six little children who are my nieces and nephews; four of those children I hadn’t met before. I saw both of my sisters and my brother, and their spouses, and children’s families. Various of us told stories that others of us had never heard, from the distant past or from relatively recently.
I had lunches with three friends, one of whom I’ve known since first grade, and two since about eighth grade; between bites we fell into telling anecdotes about each other’s mothers, may God bless their memory!
The linoleum floor of our childhood has since been replaced.cousinsWe were small Brownies, and the orange trees and rosebushes were small, too.
As I drove back and forth through the orange groves between town and country, I restrained myself from stopping as often as I’d have liked to, to take pictures of the hills and the orange trees. It had just rained, and the mountain peaks were dusted with snow, but the hills are still showing golden and not green. The picture below was taken by my sister Nancy some years ago, later in the season.
When rain clouds are gathering and precipitating and rearranging themselves all over again, it is like watching a huge theater screen from my private box (my car), as I’m driving down the interstate.
This is exactly what was happening on Tuesday, and I did take pictures of that show.
I was thrilled to see cotton on the plants in the wide fields, and I pulled over to look more closely. But I couldn’t get a good view, because mud:
So I went along and along, and saw a rainbow pancake of light on the northern horizon, a very slim break in the clouds way beyond a field of melons.
By the time I got to Nancy’s, the storm was abating,
and the dust had been washed off of all the trees.
So there, I’ve put the beginning at the end of my tale. But don’t you think it’s hard, not to get the times mixed up when one makes a trip to the past? In many ways it is still present –definitely all these people I saw still are present — and may even be future. I feel the need of a pertinent quote… and the one that pops into my mind is:
Leaving my home, traveling alone among strangers; being with my dear family and so soon saying good-bye and leaving their welcoming home; returning to my homey spaces; leaving home again (as I am doing today) and becoming absent from my house and garden… A lot of this kind of drama has been mine, this month. I will write more soon about this week’s travels. I have to say, though, that none of my leavetaking has felt as painful as a scorpion!
LEAVETAKING
On the morning they left we said goodbye filled with sadness for the absence to come.
Inside the palanquins on the camels’ backs I saw their faces beautiful as moons behind veils of golden cloth.
Beneath the veils tears crept like scorpions over the fragrant roses of their cheeks.
These scorpions do not harm the cheek they mark. They save their sting for the heart of the sorrowful lover.
-Ibn Jakh (1000 – 1050) Spain Translated by Emilio Garcia Gomez & Cola Franzen
Tivadar Kosztka, Csontvary Fortress With Arabs Riding Camels
A few years ago I shared a link to this poem so that you could read it in its entirety on the Plough website. Today I’m posting the whole of it here. The poet takes us on a short journey through childhood memories, nostalgia, loss and grief, but doesn’t stop there. She shows how we can honor the memory of those we mourn by living out their virtues in our own lives.
With every autumn that we face, the winter of our life is following closer than ever. Darkness stalks, but I believe each of us has at least one match with which we can light our own “bright fires of love and work,” (and for some of us, even wit) and that these can continue broadcasting waves of encouragement indefinitely.
AFTER HELPING MY FATHER RAKE THE LEAVES
First, I took a running leap, and then, half buried in the heap that we’d raked up, I lingered, caught in a cocoon of leaves and thought. I still remember how they smelled, those castoffs autumn winds had felled— both old and fresh, both wild and clean, the sweet decay of summer’s green; and how they looked—small flags half-furled, hot colors from a chilling world. I breathed more deeply for a few enchanted seconds. More leaves flew as Dad watched, leaning on his rake. He must have known what seasons take. Leaves bright as fire broadcast their dark reminder: beauty was a spark that couldn’t last, the freshened breath of autumn air foreshadowed death. But even so, my father grinned and turned his face into the wind. Years later, I’d learn just how brave my father was, and how a wave of chill or doubt could leave him caught in his own grim cocoon of thought. A darkness stalked him, but he lit bright fires of love and work and wit, and faced the wind, and found his way for decades past that autumn day. And now I kindle every flash of memory that warms the ash of loss. I see his profile still, and face my autumns with his will.
Gladsome Lights 