I was 18 when I began keeping vigil with all that was lost; which is to say, I began writing.
My youngest is 18 now.
His older brother was home this afternoon for a quick half-hour, just in time to hop in the car with his father and head south to my husband’s family home 300 miles away.
I waved from the mudroom as they pulled down the driveway and then Aidan and I turned to empty the dishwasher. As I was bent over the silverware it hit me. “All three of you share something I don’t,” I said.
Home.
Turns out, it’s hard to give your kids something you never had, and not for the obvious reasons.
While it’s been healing to offer the kind of upbringing I needed, it’s also surprisingly painful, especially now that they’re the age I was when there was hardly a home or parents to turn toward.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about moving. Far away. By myself. Like the time I lived in London or the time I backpacked through Europe or the time I went out to the Rockies. At 18 and 23, my boys are like bookends of the age I was then. It must be time.
Integrity is one of several paths. It distinguishes itself from the others because it is the right path, and the only one upon which you will never get lost.
I came across this passage in a framed print at the second-hand store years ago, and slowly it wove itself into our family fabric, especially as my boys entered adolecence and I asked them to recite it again and again.
I leaned into that instruction myself, intuitively, 30 years earlier, after a miscarriage, as I prepared to leave my first teaching position. A colleague remarked on my diligence with the end of the year paperwork. “Why bother,” she said. “You’re leaving for Vermont.”
It was something I would hear echoed, again and again, each time I left a job, a rental, a relationship.
Integrity.
Ending well.
Tonight I looked for jobs across the ocean.
What must it be like to have a home to which you can return? I wondered this as my older son sat beside me on the stairs before he left with his father. “I’ll be leaving right away when we get back on Sunday,” he said.
I marveled at how he could “drop-in” to the familiar sights and sounds and smells of a lifetime, and then be on his way again, securely rooted and released, without any need to grasp or hold on or catalogue the memories before they vanished.
The restlessness I feel inside is almost unbearable. UPROOT, it says, UPROOT!
I don’t want a house or a husband or a community.
But I’ve cultivated a lifetime of tools that enable me to stay with what hurts and what is uncomfortable and what makes me want to run.
I used to joke that I had as many blogs as my mother had children, and I’ve since surpassed her fecundity, and yet a Google search with my name and this particular topic comes up empty.
Perhaps it’s always been too fragile a thing to share with others.
Perhaps what I felt then is what I feel now–that any telling would be unworthy.
The incident, if that’s what it’s called, or the miracle, took place before I’d begun writing publicly, and maybe that explains it, and yet I’ve scanned my journals from that time and there’s nothing there either. It’s as if it was all a dream. It would make more sense as a dream.
Source of all we hope or dread Sheepdog, jackal, rattler, swan…
Even the verse out of which the miracle sprung was more like a dream than a song.
We hunt your face and long to trust That your hid mouth will say again, let there be light…
I guess I’ll have to start from scratch in the telling.
A clear new day…
We lived in The Little House at the time, of that I’m sure, and the incident or miracle would have taken place sometime during the publication of James Redfield’s Celestine series but sometime after the release of James Taylor’s two-disc live cd.
My mother and I read The Celestine Prophecy together, albeit 300 miles apart. We’d begun reading the same books during the summers when I was in high school and college–everything from the classics to historical fiction to works centered around consciousness, particularly after she entered recovery, which was just after she needed two escorts to walk down the aisle at my wedding because she was too drunk.
My mother was sober when I left my home at the sea three years later following my first miscarriage. I settled at the foot of the Green Mountain National Forest beside a brook in an 1800’s Cape that the landlord called, “The Little House.”
By the time the snow began to fly that year, I miscarried a second time.
But when we thirst in this dry night…
The winter of ‘93-94 was one of the longest, coldest, whitest winters of the twenty-five years in Vermont since. There were still patches of snow on the school playground where I taught well into May.
“Why bother doing what nature will do herself?” the old-timer used say to my husband, in his thick Vermont accent, as Casey shoveled off the back porch again and again. Howard often lumbered past our backyard in his rickety jeep, living as he did up behind our place, a good mile or so in the woods, off an old logging road which passed by his hunting cabin.
In the softer seasons, and sometimes in the winter on snowshoes, Casey and I’d would hike up that road into the woods, about a 1/2 mile up, stopping at a little bridge that crossed the brook that ran past our house.
Everyone loved visiting us at The Little House, all those friends and relatives we’d left behind at the shore, and we all still reminisce about it despite its family of mice traipsing across the hearth and the squirrels in the ceiling and the dirt foundation in the cellar and the astounding hatch of black flies from the brook each June.
We arrived at The Little House in our twenties and by the time we’d outgrown it, I’d lived there longer than I’d lived anywhere, and something else, we’d become a family–with two boys–a five-year-old who called the landlords (as we still do) Uncle Lenny and Aunt Diane, and a newborn who doesn’t recall being born in the tiny bathroom upstairs.
I can still feel the embrace of the mountains around The Little House in Autumn, and the sound of the brook when the door to the small balcony off our bedroom was left open on summer nights.
Once at dusk, I approached a deer in the field until we were face to face, and then afraid, I was the one to turn away. Once I fell to my knees in the garden during a rainstorm, overcome with a sense of release I hadn’t known possible. Once I ran up the woods road behind the house, blinded by grief, and when I arrived at the small bridge, too out of breath to cry out, I discovered a profound communion with the brook and the light as if everything would always be alright.
Just before we left The Little House, we returned to the sea. My mother and I were in the middle of the most recent Celestine book which I would finish without her. I would sit beside her bay window on that visit, my youngest, barely a month old, at my breast, as my mother took her last breaths, her body poisoned by cancer.
We drink from hot wells poisoned with the blood of children…
It was that line, from track 15, on the first cd of the 2-disc, live collection that once reverberated through The Little House, for months or years, like a haunting.
“Are you sure you don’t have the receipt?” I asked my husband, again and again. Casey had splurged on the collection as a birthday gift for me at a time when we couldn’t afford such indulgences.
He had tried wiping down the cd, cleaning the player, skipping past the song and returning to it, but track 15 continued to pause and repeat the same chilling place:
We drink from hot wells poisoned with the blood of children…
“It doesn’t even sound like a James Taylor song!” I complained. “I wish it wasn’t even on the cd.”
Eventually, we remembered the order of songs so that we could stop the cd before the poison well, we remembered that after Shower the People, a song which was sung at our wedding as I brought a rose to my mother, came How Sweet It Is, a song which played on our recessional track, and after this, the jackal and the rattler and the poison.
Once to rid the Little House of squirrels, Casey placed poison in the crawl space above our bedroom only to later find the blue pellets in the drawer in the tiny bathroom and somewhere even more alarming–under the small pillow in our son’s crib.
“Quick, stop the cd!” we’d holler to whoever was closest to the cabinet that stood at the top of the stairs on the landing.
Sometimes we’d make it just in time to avoid hearing about the poison.
I loved that landing. I did so many firsts atop it. I practiced yoga and fashioned an “altar.” I read books about things that made no sense but which beckon me still—women’s circles and journeys and talking pieces. I labored on that landing too at the top of the stairs with both of my boys. I stood on the landing outside the guest room where we placed our son’s big-boy bed. “It’s okay,” I said. “Mommy’s right here.”
At night, Casey and I would sit on the landing at the top of those stairs and look across at the built-in shelving that we filled with framed photographs of our extended family—his siblings and mine, grandparents and aunts and uncles, a nephew, our first niece. We’d lean on each other’s shoulder and talk about whatever needed talking about. Finances. New jobs. Is the house getting too small? Should we move to the town where we want Lloyd to go to kindergarten? Will he ever get to be a big brother? What if my mother has cancer? What if she dies.
Once I cried there by myself after I’d put the baby to bed, weeping to Casey when arrived home to find me seated the alone on the landing at the top of the stairs, “I can’t remember what it was like to earn a real paycheck,” I said. “To have a real job, a real life.”
There was a small window at the top of those stairs beyond the landing, small because The Little House didn’t have a full second story, so the window and its deep sill were right at floor level. When I sat at the top of the stairs, I could pivot and look out the window to the stonewall and our first flower garden, to the big evergreen and the swing, and beyond that to the brook as it arrived down the mountain in our backyard.
One early morning while practicing meditation at my window sill altar, I saw a black bear lumber by.
But I was seated at the bottom of that narrow staircase when it happened. The stairs the only place in The Little House that was carpeted, with a sturdy woolen-white fabric. It’s only now in this telling that I realize that the carpet was reminiscent of the one on my grandmother’s stairs, just as rugged, but in light shades of green, a favorite stilling place when I was a girl.
My memory is that I was alone in The Little House that day, which would have been rare, and my guess is that it was summertime and the front door was open so that the breeze caressed my bare shins as I sat on the bottom stair with soles of my feet on the tile floor.
It was in this moment, in this place, that the Celestine book that I had been reading with my mother met track 15 of the 2-disc James Taylor collection given to me on my birthday.
As the book instructed, I meditated on my experiences of “transcendent love.” I did this even though I barely knew what meditation or transcendence meant, and then needing someplace to direct the love that I was to gather at the crown of my head, I sent it up the stairs behind me, to the cabinet with the stereo, and in particular to the cd player, and specifically to disc one of the two-disc live collection, targeting track 15.
Source of all we hope or dread Sheepdog, jackal, rattler, swan We hunt your face and long to trust That your hid mouth will say again, let there be light
A clear new day…
Inside this meditation of love may have been the time I knelt in the garden in the rain finally knowing in my bones that I had loved my young son well enough that even if I died, he would be okay.
But when we thirst in this dry night We drink from hot wells poisoned with the blood of children…
What I’m certain was gathered in the folds of that meditation of love as it unfurled from the crown of my head to the top of the stairs was my experience in the woods behind The Little House on the day that I ran sobbing up the mountain until I was out of breath. That day, I grieved for a loved one who had been betrayed, and bending over the small bridge that crossed the brook, out of breath with my hands on my sides, I suddenly found myself in a transcendent communion with the water and light.
And when we strain to hear a steady homing bee Our ears are balked by stifled moans And howls of desolation from the throats of sisters, brothers, wild men Clawing at the gates for bread…
I gave everything I was to that meditation, and I sent it swirling from my crown up the stairs to the cd player off the landing.
Even our own feeble hands Aim to seize the crown you wear And work our private havoc through The known and unknown lands of space…
When I finished the visualization, I stood up and knew for certain that everything had changed.
Absolute in flame beyond us Seed and source of Dark and Day Maker whom we beg to be Our mother father comrade mate…
And still, as I climbed the stairs and pushed play, I expected to hear what I had always heard, the haunting stutter of pain.
Til our few atoms blow to dust Or form again in wiser lives Or find your face and hear our name In your calm voice the end of night…
Even after I’d heard the New Hymn play all the way through more times than I’d heard it skip and sputter, each time without a skip was another surprise. Even now, when I think of it, I feel the echo of the haunting skip in my bones.
If dark may end…
On the early September morning that my mother took her last breaths and my youngest nursed at my breast, I felt that same sense of Everything being okay. That summer had been the hardest, rainiest, darkest ever of our years in The Little House, and I didn’t mind because that was how I felt inside with my mother’s impending death.
Wellspring gold of Dark and day…
In the intertwining of their two lives, my mother’s passing and my son’s arrival, I understood that there was no way to avoid loss or heartache or brokenness, that in abiding presence to what is, there is within the Mystery, bliss.
I want to tug only on those things that are truly ripe. I want to let everything else take its sweet time. (Virgo New Moon, Wise Harvest, Dana Gerhardt)
My youngest brother & sister, 1994 at the farmhouse where we lived for 7 years when we first moved to Vermont. Medburyville. With “Mayor” Lenny Chapman.
As an adult, I’ve never been an author of fiction, and yet I remember delighting in it on Thursday mornings in the 4th grade after I finished my DRA (Directed Reading Activity) and got slip my hand hand into a packet of prompts that hung on the wall near the door: one pocket for characters, one for setting, and one for plot–and then I got to imagine a story on the page.
I loved the surprise of it. Not knowing what strips I would get. Not knowing what story would unfold.
It’s the same with the writing I do now even though I harvest the strips from my own life: this quote about the Virgo New Moon at the top of the page for instance, and a vision that has been rippling in my mind’s eye of my mother on the front steps of my first house in Vermont, 20 years ago.
I’m not sure how or if these strips fit together or what may come of either, but they beckon and I follow…
My mother disliked Virgos, for instance. My father was a Virgo. My mother cautioned me about my choice in a husband, scolding me that it was only a matter of time before his easy nature revealed a truer self–one with a critical need for perfection.
She was right and she was wrong. My father and husband must have different risings.
My mother loved astrology. The tarot. The runes. Transcendental texts. All things beyond.
I came to it slower, and then sprinted after it all in her passing.
In the years before my mother’s death at 57, before we knew she would be dying, I left my hometown by the sea for a little house in the Green Mountains of Vermont, the one pictured above. Though my mother was 50 at the time, she still had little ones at home–the youngest of my 8 siblings, my only brother and the very last sister, twenty-two years my junior. I brought the two of them up to enjoy a week in the woods while my mother enjoyed a rare week to herself beside the sea where I was born.
When she arrived to fetch her youngest children from the home of her oldest daughter the following weekend, the two of them were covered in bug bites and bruises and had so much to tell her. That next morning, while the children were still sleeping, I was surprised to come down the stairs and spy my mother out on the steps that led up from the field to our front lawn.
She sat there on the stones in the warming sun of a cool, summer morning, with a steaming mug in her hand, embraced by the mountains.
I was struck in that moment by the quality of her presence. Her stillness. Of the stark contrast of this to her lifetime of doing.
I paused in my own busyness in witness.
It’s where I find myself now. At the same age. In the same season. The sleeping children–my own. The house–the one my husband later built–the home my mother never met. And the stone steps? Brand new.
For ten years, I’ve had to leap out the French doors to place myself on the front lawn.
But with the ripening of August and age, I am invited to step down.
To sit.
To be still.
To receive the embrace of mountains.
And the warmth of the early morning sun on stone.
The unexpected communion, across time, with my mother, at the same age I am now.
Two Owls Calling 