Grieving Trees

My mother’s god-daughter emailed me this morning.  She and her mother had just found out that Mom died from the Georgian Court newsletter.  The phone rang mid-afternoon.  I answered to hear a voice say, “Mary Jo, it’s Mahjree Hahvee.”  Marjorie Harvey roomed with my mother for one year at Georgian Court College in Lakewood New Jersey.  My farm-girl mother completed four years, but Marjorie only stayed for one before transferring to Tufts.  She’d gone to private schools, rode horses, grew up in Boston, while my mother worked on her family’s farms and went to a one-room school taught by her mother.  On the phone, I hear Marjorie, who is 90 years old but very very sharp, say that she never met anyone better educated than my mother: because “she loved to learn” and was “so curious.”  The hours flew by.  It was a connection.  I sat in Mom’s rocker, sipping a cup of tea, looking at the Kool penguins—celluoid cigarette advertisements—in the corner cupboard that came from Jersey, listening to a voice Mom listened to lots of times, dredging up old knowledge (Anne was adopted, Jack was a lawyer and a judge, they lived in Cotuit and belonged to same country club on the Cape where Jackie Kennedy did).  If only I had a Kool to light up, I’d almost be my mother, sitting, saying yes, oh yes, mind drifting away to all the things she’d have to get done and to the woods with the dog, getting off the phone to state that Marjorie always was “a bit of a pain in the ass.”  Truth is, I wanted to talk about Mom.  The greater truth is, I wanted to talk to Mom.  But it was Marjorie, and, at least, she pointed out the direction I needed to go.

By the time I got off the phone, it was late afternoon.  My plans to walk in the woods were ruined.  The day was gray and the sky threatened rain.  I pulled on my winter coat and slipped out without the dog.  I’d had a headache all day, and I needed to be alone, to be free—not holding the end of a leash with a corgi ball of energy on the other end.  Achy and heavy, I walked the bumpy sidewalks, crossed the park and headed into the affluent neighborhood across from the community college, a place bereft of poetry.  My brain was grinding away about nothing worth mentioning, nothing I remember hours later, and half way through the route, I made a decision to stop thinking.  No more analyzing.  Analysis is a defense.  Against what?  I don’t know. Maybe I’ll know when I stop doing it.  Somehow, I stopped my mind and just looked.  I looked at the houses and felt nothing.  I’d hoped to learn from and talk to the lake, the trees, the frogs, the snakes.  But here there was just house after house.  Well kept yards.  Nothing to feel.  Until I looked up.  Against the gray sky I saw the limbs of trees looking less sharp, a little fuzzy around the edges, a little rosy, and, unless I imagined it, breaking out in light green fuzz at the ends.  The wood (even here) is coming alive.  The branches are lifting themselves up.  The first flowers are breaking through the hard earth.  All creation is groaning to be reborn.  Me, too.  Looking at real things, I began to feel strange sensations in my body—the body I’ve forgotten.  It’s still here, stronger than ever.  I go days without changing my clothes, weeks without shaving my legs.  But last night I poured warm water over them, and remembered what it felt like to sit in a Turkish bath.  I smoothed lotion all over my body.  Legs are stronger than ever.  No sign of slowing down except a pain in one knee when I take the stairs.  I’m ready for another pilgrimage.  I cross the road, and peek through the iron fence that safeguards the UMF chancellor’s house.  The lilac bushes have buds at the end of every stem with green tongues sticking out between the woody lips.  As I look at them, the misty rain isn’t annoying any more but opens me, too.

I run across the street at the sight of the white pine on the opposite side of Burroughs Park.  Like my dog, Panda, I race down the hill and across the open space to stand as close as I can to that pine.  Below is a skirt of orange needles and I stretch up tall.  The yard and the woods at Mom’s house were full of pines, and suddenly I am home.

Next, I know I have to visit the sycamore.  In New Jersey they are called buttonwoods.  This one is a beauty.  There’s a very thick and sturdy bough, low enough to climb.  A perfect perch for watching the park and the stream.  I love the way Sycamores lose their shaggy bark the higher they climb, some becoming pure white and ethereal looking.  This tree is almost Cyclopean with its one eye hole or is it a mouth?  I peer in, playing with it.  Talk to me, tree, tell me I have Jersey sand in my shoes.  Tell me that Mom is still in Jersey and in New York and here with me in Flint.

Last stop is the grandfather oak that has probably been here for over a hundred years.  This whole area before it was settled was oak savannah, and right up Crapo Street was a sanatorium called Oak Grove.  This tree and those on the lawn of the public library began growing before Flint was settled in the 1830s, when Indians walked and trapped and traded.  Before the factories.  Before the colleges.  Long before me and all my losses. 

Three trees.  White Pine, Sycamore, and Oak.  Three homes. 

I didn’t expect anything of this walk when I started, but by silencing my busy brain, I began to see real things and those real things told me things about the continuity of home.  My book was Trees, three chapters of trees.  Suddenly, I recall how much Mom loved trees.  When we were very young in our Sylvan Avenue house, we had a red pine right behind our property line.  We called it “the tallest tree” around, and it was.  You could see it for miles.  One day, men from Niagara Mohawk, the power company, said it had to come down.  With it came our tree fort.  We were at school when it happened, and, apparently, my mother stood her ground and fought with those men from the power company.  She tried to save the tree.

By the time she died, her spruce tree in the front side yard (planted from a sapling brought from New Jersey) was so tall she joked that if it ever had to be cut, it should be sent to Washington D.C. to be the National Christmas tree.  When I’d come home to visit her in the assisted living place and then the nursing home, she always wanted to go out in the car, and then she wanted to drive home (or up West Mountain or up to North).  The last year, she was too frail to get up the porch steps and into the house, so I’d get lawn chairs and we’d clump up under the low-hanging boughs of Mom’s spruce.  I still can see her sitting there drinking ice tea and happy that Peg Tulley from across the street was coming over with her little dog.  The tree became our home.

Under the spruce tree was like sitting at Mom's kitchen table

Two weeks ago, my sister sent the link to the Realtor’s site with Mom’s house for sale.  It didn’t look like the same house:  stripped of its cedar shakes, it was sided with new and boring aluminum, and, much worse, it was denuded of the ancient trees—rhododendrons and hemlocks—that fronted the sidewalk and made it cozy.  Whoever cut those old trees would have put down their steel saws had they seen the wall of pink blooms the rhododendrons made in June.  I was afraid to text Jen, “I hate to ask but did they cut down Mom’s spruce?”  No answer.  A week later, I texted my brother, who said “Trees had to be cut.  Everything was way over grown.” “Did the spruce get cut?”  “Yes,” was all he replied.  “Awful.”  I still don’t know whether they took the crabapple in the center of Mom’s yard.  It bloomed when she died, snowing pink on the windy night when we went to toast her with shots of scotch at her kitchen table and smoke the Kools that were left in a carton in the refrigerator.  Mom nursed that crabapple through outbreaks of fungus, tent caterpillars, old age, and it kept blooming for her.

Mom's crabapple--so what if it blocks the house

She had a way with trees, and her yard was a collection of specimens from all the places that she loved.  I hadn’t realized before I walked today that I needed to grieve the death of Mom’s trees.  They should have stayed.  She grew them.  But she grew me, too.  And here I am, Mom, making a collection of trees in my own different way on the first day of Spring since you left the world.  But I think there’s a little of you still here in me.  Help me to grow that, Mama.  She replies, “Go easy, honey.  Go easy.”  Her password.  Her secret.  Her wisdom.  “I always said, you analyze too much.” 

A Smoke on the Porch and Pockets in a Shirt

Last night, coming home with Panda in the dark, Eric, sitting on his front porch smoking, shouted across the street, “Mary Jo, I am really happy about that shirt you got me for Christmas.  It’s got two pockets in it … for my cigarettes.  I’m smoking one now.  How’s Panda?  I love your dog, Panda; he’s a great dog.  How are you doing?  Hey, I was just next door for FOUR hours.  It was nice.  Those people are great.  And you know what?  When I got back all the chairs were tipped over.  We have bed bugs, and they were sprayin.  Yeah, I killed five of them on me last night.  There was blood all over the bed.”

Eric tells me all of these things with the same level of joy.  He is truly happy.  Sitting there.  Smoking.  Relishing everything.

“And you know what?  Shandra likes me!”

Shandra is the supervisor of the group home.  She and Eric butted heads last summer over his panhandling, and she got him evicted in August.  He was back by late October, but our street was the poorer without him.

I ask him how his relationship with Shandra changed.

“No idea,” he shrugs, but then says with certainty, “It’s a miracle of God!”  he laughs and goes on to tell me how things didn’t work out in the forty-bed house, and, because he refused to go to Brother’s Keeper, he was homeless for a while.  They finally accepted him back to the group home on our street. 

“I’m happy here.  These are good people.”

I keep telling Eric that I am so glad … glad that he’s happy, glad that he got four cigarettes from the guy next door, glad that he’s returned to our street.  I genuinely AM happy.  I honestly missed him.  Who else is so friendly, so open?  His voice always was a voice that reached and drew me to him, and I’m sure it’s not just me.  It’s him.  He is a truly beautiful person.  When I gave him the plaid shirt for Christmas, it was a sunny day and warm.  He wanted to put it on immediately and took off the shirts he was wearing right out in the open.  I noticed that he wore a worn string of red beads (a rosary) around his neck. 

While I’m listening to Eric, Panda is scavenging.  I tell him to stop and finally have to scoop him up in my arms.  “Eric, I gotta get home.”

“Okay, Mary Jo.  Bye, Mary Jo.  Bye, Bye.  Come back tomorrow.”

I walk away smiling, feeling warm and enriched.

I get a few houses down into the dark, and his voice shouts out,

“I love you, Mary Jo.”

“I love you, Eric,” I shout back, and smile big into the night.  Life is so easy.  Why do we sophisticated ones complicate it?  Sit on the porch.  Smoke a cigarette.  Talk to strangers.  Accept gifts.  Enjoy the pockets in a flannel shirt.  Shout “I love you” into the night.  New Year’s resolutions.

Old Nativity

At Christmas Eve mass and through the evening, I fell into a gap of time, where one time and another become the same time.  I was a young girl at Grandmother’s in Nesco, I was a teenager at Mom’s in Glens Falls, and I was a wife and mother here in Flint.  After gazing into the fire for ages of time, I tucked myself into a cold single bed but imagined I was sleeping on the cot in my mother’s family room—the wood stove room—watching the orange light flicker with Mom sound asleep, breathing loudly, on the couch nearby.  Tonight, in Flint Michigan, we’d made a great fire downstairs with Mom’s wood, wood stacked up on the deck by the back door which we carried in the U-Haul along with my inherited furniture.  The embers from that blaze would keep vigil long into the night for the baby’s birth.

Midge, Christmas in Nesco, late 1940s

Awake before the family, I drank coffee and read the daily Advent reflection in the booklet provided by the church.  The entry was titled, “The Christmas Mystery as Cosmic,” and the author explained that the mystery of Christ is larger than what we see visibly in the life of Jesus.  “Christ is already part of the physical creation.”  I know this to be true.  Christ is God made manifest to the senses in the cool breeze, the land flowing with milk and honey, and people after his own heart.  I’ve just finished teaching The Hebrew Bible as Literature and could cite many examples of “divine fluidity”—God taking on human form to engage with chosen humans or God speaking to animals, fish, and plants to enlist their help teaching chosen men important lessons.  Was the cosmic mystery of Christmas connected to my own feeling of being mysteriously connected to Mom?  The fact is, since she “died,” I’d felt different, changed, quivering on the edge of some major revelation.  What was it?  How, if at all, did that mystery, connect with Christmas?

Handel, in the oratorio, The Messiah, has an aria that connects Christ’s birth, death, and rebirth or resurrection that begins this way:  “Behold, I tell you a mystery:  we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed; in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye; at the last trumpet.”

When I think of the mystery of Christmas, I think of the way T.S. Eliot articulates the complex emotional experience of one of the magi who made the very long journey to Bethlehem, following the star.  That poem begins, “A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of year for a journey, and such a long journey / The ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter.  As the magus narrates the journey, frigid turns to temperate, high places become fertile valleys, and travail turns to rest and peace.  “I had seen birth and death before but thought they were different.  This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death.”  The place was “satisfactory,” the birth was just Truth, and although the wise men went back to their places, they remained on the Way because there was no other choice.  “No longer at ease here in the old dispensation with an alien people clutching their gods.”  The journey took this man to a place that poet, Elizabeth Bishop, suggests can never be fully comprehended or appreciated in the lived duree of human experience where 

“Everything” is “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’: 

Open the heavy book.  (The gilt rubs off the edges

Of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

Open the heavy book.  Why couldn’t we have seen

This old Nativity while we were at it?

--the dark ajar; the rocks breaking with light,

An undisturbed, unbreathing flame,

Colorless, sparkles, freely fed on straw,

And, lulled within, a family of pets,

--and looked and looked our infant sight away.

This Christmas I am still beside my mother’s bed.  Her bed in the nursing home where she died.  I don’t like calling it her deathbed, because her death felt weirdly like a birth, and I am still looking my infant sight away.  My mother no longer exists.  I witnessed her death on the morning of May 16^th, 2019.  There is no such person.  Her passport has been cancelled.  Her bank account is closed.  Someone else is wearing her clothes.  But my mind has been and still is full of her.  I’ve journeyed to her bedside almost every day since she left us. 

“Grief means living with someone who is not there.” 

Who says so?  Grief means being occupied, visited, haunted, filled up with someone who is with you, in you, but who you cannot see.  I saw “this old nativity” on May 16^th, and I see it now (“—the dark ajar”) through the lens of my mother, Emmanuel. 

My mother, Midge with dog, Rex

Come to Bethlehem and see / Him whose birth the angels sing.

It was the middle of May.  I cancelled my pilgrimage walk and flew home.  Come quick.  She is dying.  I think it was a Wednesday.  I walked into her room and when she saw me her face crumpled up and she cried, “Mary Jo” … I think her arms reached for me.  “Oh, Mom.  It’s just another trip.”  How could I have said that?  Is that what she needed?  What followed was hours and hours of sitting by her bedside with her laboring for breath while the fluids filled her lungs.  She wasn’t unconscious, but she was struggling and not able to talk.  Sleeping.  How did it happen so fast?  Just two days ago, she’d eaten part of a banana and had a milkshake.  I left her that night because my sisters returned and Jennifer wanted to stay.  The nurses walked me out, telling me that I could sleep on their couch.  But I didn’t want to stay.  No privacy.  I wanted to be alone with her.  I drove up Route 9 and checked into a hotel, but I didn’t really sleep.  I was involved in her struggle.  When the text came from Jennifer asking me to come to the hospital early the next morning, I was ready. 

But was I fully in the moment?  It’s possible I checked my email before I left the hotel.  How could I have?  Why had I left the nursing home in the first place?  “I have to step away,” wrote Jennifer.  “I’ll be right there,” I responded.

The early morning sun was breaking through fog, and when I entered the room, there was a feeling of excitement, of sheer anticipation.  Jennifer may have told me some things about the night, but if she did, I don’t remember any of them.  I moved toward Mom, whose face was white and sunken, and her breathing was thick with mucus.  I had a good hour or two even alone with her.  I felt for her hand under the white bumpy spread.  It was warm, and I stroked it and held it, while I talked to her about my life, about my upcoming journey, about her journey, which I understood to be a continuation of the one she’d been making in her mind all winter.  “I drove to New Jersey.  I got into that old house.  It was so dark, but I found my way to Grandmother’s bed.  You’ll never guess who I saw?  It was that old country woman who said she remembered me from when I was a little girl.”  Mom was always running into people who remembered her, and she was always delighted by these meetings with people she’d known long ago.  I knew it was nearly time for her to set off, to “get going,” and I knew it before Patty, the occupational therapist said, “Sweetheart, it’s time” and before the hospice representative said there’d be little they could offer since “she is close.”  I already knew.  Mom and I knew something else.  This was just the beginning, the setting off, and it was always terrifying.  She sat with me when I was scared to go to England and later to Turkey.  “It will be so exciting,” she said before my trips; and, “I knew you’d handle it well,” in letters to me when I was away.  Now the roles were reversed, and it was me, with her voice in my mouth, saying “Mommy, it will be wonderful.  They’ll be so many people there to meet you:  Papa and Lillian and Ruthellen and Jesus, too.”  The whole gang.  I lay my head on her stomach.  I wanted to go back into the body that bore me, but I was the Mom now.  It’s okay Mom.  She coughed and opened her eyes.  Light brown ooze seeped out of her mouth.  I wiped her lip with a damp washcloth.  She looked at me and took a breath.  “There you go.  Good, Mom.”  I smiled as if I were watching an infant.  She coughed again.  Again, the deep look at me.  The ooze came.  No inhale.  Mom?  Mom?  Oh, Mama.  And I sat so still.  Here, Here, Here (and gone).  Here, Here, Here (I am).  It was crazy beautiful.  I couldn’t tell anyone what it felt like because I didn’t have the words and still don’t.  It just didn’t feel sad.  It felt momentous, mysterious, miraculous, powerful.  It wasn’t as if a hand reached down and took Mom’s soul away.  It wasn’t as if her soul ascended like a weightless star.  It was more like something settled on me—something comfortably weighty.

“When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, ‘Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.’ Elisha said, ‘Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.’ He responded, ‘You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not.’” (2 Kings 2:9-10)

Hours later after the family had gathered to sit with Mom, I helped the nurses prepare her body.  I pulled off her gray wool socks.  I gazed at the body I loved.  I kissed her.  She wasn’t warm anymore.  Even so, I didn’t want to leave her room.  I had the same feeling when we had to leave the church and go to the cemetery.  I didn’t want to leave the church, where she and I had sat side by side Sunday after Sunday and all the holy days, each knowing without needing to speak the depths of the other.  Intimacy with Mom had always meant occupying my place at her table.  I loved it.  But maybe “we” (she and I) were reborn the morning of May 16th into some new way of relating.  With tears in my eyes, I walked out of Mom’s room, behind the gurney and down the corridor.  I remembered back to the morning in January 1993 when she and I walked down another hospital hallway, after we’d witnessed together her mother’s death (or was it a birth).  I remember saying to Mom, “it doesn’t feel like Grandmom died.”  The attendants rolled the gurney with Mom’s body on it into the cold of the transport elevator and we went down to the back entrance of the nursing home and the waiting hearse that would carry Mom’s body to the funeral home.  After that morning, I kept walking.  I walked into the Adirondacks, trail upon trail.  I walked the borderlands of Scotland and England.  I walked to Holy Isle.  I walked for Mom.  I had two new classes this fall—classes that demanded I develop new, more intimate ways of relating to students.  I walked into the world with these students to work with seniors, to play with abandoned kids, to learn the history of Flint.  We walked for peace of mind.  Every time I left my comfort zone and wasn’t uncomfortable but recharged, I thought of Mom.  This new power I attributed to knowing her in a new way.  She was now in me, and I experienced her as an accomplice or collaborator in a way that I never quite did when she was “Mom” and I was “Mare-ee Jo.”  There is a tremendous power in witnessing a woman lay down her life … for me?  For us?  As soon as Elijah ascended in a whirlwind to heaven, Elisha picked up his fallen mantle, and he became another Elijah.

Midge, with me, Mary Jo, her firstborn at Glen Lake, Christmas 1965

Just as inexplicably as I felt Mom’s death was a birth, I feel her presence in my house this Christmas, a presence that helps me see the old nativity.  Emmanuel means “God with us.”  I feel my mother not only with me but in me.  Is her ongoing life a homely version of the incarnation?  Through this mystery, I’ve come to think that the religious aspect of an event is merely an unnoticed dimension of the ordinary.  I am surrounded by her things, and they trigger the feeling of being in other houses (hers and her mother’s).  But there was also this:  on Christmas morning, I had my coffee and was about to go upstairs to read when I felt a strong urge to just sit down and think about her and look and look deeply into the lights twinkling on the tree.  I remembered how we would sit together in her woodstove room drinking coffee waiting for the wood to catch and the room, which got darned cold at night, to warm up.  I felt the same relaxed feeling and leaned my head against my mother’s rocker as if it were her breast.  We are all babies.  Just as she needed to get back to her mother’s bed, I need to lean against her.  Maybe death was not only her birth but mine.  Into the world I come with thighs to shelter me, love to swaddle me, and many women’s hands to hold me up.  I feel supported.  Merry Christmas, Mom!  Merry Christmas worldlings!  Drink deep from the teat of the moment.  Feel its fullness.  Taste its rich sweetness.  Isn’t that all Christmas is about?  To see the divine in the ordinary things of our lives and to trust our feelings about them.  Emmanuel.  Mom with me.  Me with others.

Flint's "Rusty Beauty"

            On Sunday, the day I wrote the haikus in my previous post, I took my usual walk through the east side to St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Franklin Street.  The yellow leaves were falling.  The rain was falling.  My tears were falling … for more reasons than I can count or begin to sort out.  More importantly, I don’t want to write about myself but this neighborhood that I wear like a mourning coat.  Walking in the woods, I never feel alone but commune with all manner of intelligent life—trees, ponds, frogs, caterpillars, birds, and the occasional deer.  I rarely cry in the woods but always feel my spirits lift.  So why the tears on Minnesota Street and Iowa?  Well … I know that there is a different kind of solitude to urban walking.  I feel my aloneness more acutely, feel myself to be alone in a world of strangers or alone in a crowded world where I can’t find friends or a place that feels like home.  Walkers report feeling alienated on the crowded sidewalks of New York, London, and Beijing.  It’s no surprise then that I feel the weight of my existence as I walk past homes that have died and families that have gone elsewhere … to happy places.  Nowhere I would want to be though.  Usually, I feel my spirits rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.  But not this Sunday.  Standing on a corner, looking up into the rain and the leaves, I cried out, fierce anguish all over my face.  A big truck slowed.  A window slid down.  I saw a woman’s voice with a concerned face, and I heard, “God Bless You.”  That was enough.  Those three words.  When I got to church, the single man in front of me turned around and asked me my name.  Someone cared enough to ask my name.  “I’m Mary Jo.  And you are?”  “Harold.”  “Harold.  It’s very nice to meet you.”  Human contact.  A miracle.  I cried into my cupped hands.

“Walking here is so much more vivid,” says Hugo, my Chinese student.  “People actually smile and wave instead of rushing along in their own business.”  Faces, voices, yard ornaments (a “Let it Snow” sign hung on the neck of a scarecrow), stray cats, grapes, wet leaves on black branches and dark apples hanging like pendants on slender limbs of trees.  What remains—every little things—can seem precious when so much is wrecked, ruined, burned, emptied out. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was headed to church again.  The morning was gray but clearing up.  There had been rain in the night that freshened the air and sun was peering through a layered serene sky.  I didn’t mind the junked-up yards at all.  In fact, I appreciated the way life seemed to spill out all over the place:  a purple plastic saucer for sledding, overstuffed easy chairs, big screen televisions, bikes, plastic toys, a log cabin playhouse, twinkling orange lights and painted pumpkins for Halloween.  Halloween is a really big deal in neighborhoods like this one.  The people that still live here drape the bushes around their houses with the synthetic cobwebs that will linger through the rains of November and into the snow.  A woman passes and says one word, “church” in a voice hoarse from cigarettes or a freezing cold house or from mere disuse.  She’s walking toward the Methodist church on Davison St. and I’m walking the other way to the  Catholic church on Franklin but we are together on this street shore, picking through things; and I’m glad I’m not in some tiresome taupe suburb.  The sidewalk buckles on a rise, and I push through some wet grass to check out a cellar hole.  After listening for voices for a while, I turn to go my way but a piece of blackened wood sticks to my shoe sole.  I’ve stepped on a nail, and the charred wood is hard to pull off.  I can’t shake this place and still I don’t know why.

I go there every day when I’m out of inspiration.  I go there when I can’t muster the ambition to drive to the woods.  I go there because it’s easy and peaceful.  I go there because no one will judge me.  I go there to face the fact that I’m damaged and that life is damaged.  I go there because I never know whether I’ll be moved to despair or joy:  it can go either way. 

Last time I walked over there, it was a good day.  Gray again.  The most memorable east-side walks are made against the backdrop of the flattest, grayest days.  I was thinking about my freshmen students’ initial reaction to seeing neighborhoods like this one.  They were moved to imagine the people who’d lived in these houses.  The ruins softened them, made them less judgmental and sure, opened their imaginations.  Walking along, dreaming on foot, I saw a man in the distance, wearing a camo jacket and carrying a black plastic sack.  Maybe he’s got a can of beer.  I didn’t indulge my fancy further.  As he approached, I saw that he was young and red-haired.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?”  he said brightly.

“Yes,” I said, “Yes, it IS a beautiful day.”  Before he’d spoken to me, I wasn’t thinking that it was a beautiful day at all.  It wasn’t a particularly beautiful day, but when he said that it was and said it TO ME, the day changed.  I realized that it was warm, that it wasn’t raining, that it was late October and that the leaves were still to be enjoyed and that soon we’d have the oh so pretty early snow.  So much to look forward to.

Then I thought of Bryshon and his poem.  Bryshon is a young black man—a student at Whaley Children’s Center.  Some of my students were doing a Shakespeare project there, and this person, who had been through so much trauma that he speaks in a whisper, volunteered to read a Shakespeare’s line.  Standing next to him, he nudged me and pointed to a word on the index card.  “Melancholy,” I said and repeated the word for him.  “What’s that?”  “Well, it’s like depression,” and but I didn’t say is that it is so much softer, wider, deeper—infinite sadness.  He shook his head as if he understood and read his line, “I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs.”  Applause followed, and Bryshon smiled.  He read the line two more times, each time a bit louder than the time before.  Two weeks later, Bryshon told us about his Arden, his ideal place; and it is under the ground.  But his underground world is full of life, burrowing animals and little bugs.  He wrote about it in a poem that goes something like this:

The ground cracked,

But the soil is soft,

But the bark of a tee come down.

A bug bit up

And sky turn brown

Then the soil turn hard

Then the tree fall down the ground,

But the soil is always soft.

I love that line, “But the soil is always soft”—Mother Earth.  So much has fallen and died on the east side of Flint.  People have died in house fires.  Families have split up due to drugs and alcohol.  Mothers have been murdered.  “Generous Motors” left town and abandoned all their little kiddos with no bread, no milk.  There are “food deserts” all over Flint—that’s jargon for areas without grocery stores.  The people left, understandably, to find work and to find nourishment.  Here, holes remain where houses were.  The soil is always soft.  Porches sag and roofs cave in.  Moss fills in the cracks.  Ferns, the first plants to come back after mass extinctions, fill empty lots—ferns and grass.  Here, there were and are countless children who whisper because of all they’ve seen.  I wonder how many of them, like Bryshon, who know what it feels like to fall, would still say, “the soil is always soft.”

Zen has a concept of “rusty beauty”—things that are beautiful because they are damaged.  Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive.  Though I don’t fully understand why I am so drawn to neighborhoods like the east side of Flint, I know that they are much more alive than the track housing, malls, and fast food joints of Grand Blanc and Davison, where the population has grown in the last two decades by 200% while Flint has lost 100,000 people.  People who live in the suburbs may have found material warmth and wealth—but the direct message of the heart is often less there.  Poverty and dirt allow life to exist, allow life to shine out, because the middle-class conceptions of what is good are not at work killing it.  “In the slum, in some way,” writes architect Christopher Alexander, “the direct voice of the heart is there.”  It is there in the mud hut of an Indian village.  It is there in the shacks built by squatters on the hills around Turkish cities.  And it is there in the poor neighborhoods of Flint.  It is life, the force of direct human experience, misery, compassion, ignorance, and warmth all mixed up together.  It really is life.  Walking through ruins, participating in the affect of them on a collective psyche, wakes me up to the fact that I am alive, and while I am alive I must use my response-ability.  Listen.  Greet others kindly.  On days when I am feeling helpless, join the army of other helpless homeless and add my voice the voices of all who struggle, suffer, and find safety out in the street from the terrors of inside.

Grieving with East Siders on a Sunday

Walking in sad rain
Selfies by empty houses
Life gone long ago.


Long steps up to church
Holiness is such hard work
Driver shouts, "God bless."


Three black cats peeing
Where are all the east side songs
in a burned down yard?

My cypto-dreamhouse

Flint Hand-Me-Down

I’ve always preferred other peoples’ clothes worn to the shape of their lives.  For the last four weeks, I’ve been visiting older adults at the Lockwood Senior Living facility in Burton, and today was my last day—well, for the time being.  A few days ago, I emailed Candace the activities director questions for the participants to think over:  how did your parents or grandparents wind up in Flint?  What would be on your map of the world when you were seven years old?  Can you remember a favorite walk you took in Flint?  The talk was so warm, punctuated with laughter and groans.  At the end, most said, “Oh, I have really enjoyed this.”  Fran didn’t even get up to go to church this time.  “We don’t get to talk like this very often.”  “It helps to learn more about the people you live with.”  Reluctantly, or so it seemed to me, they pulled chairs back from the table around which we’d sat, released the brakes on their walkers, and headed off, either down to lunch or back to their private apartments.  Kurt, whose grandfather had come from the Ukraine with an invention that was “stolen,” got depressed and eventually killed himself, said, “You know, when all the people I knew are now gone, I have to ask myself why I am still here.  It occurred to me that maybe I am here for this,” and he gestured to the table around which we’d been sitting and sharing the memories of lives lived in a very different Flint—“when Flint was THE place to be.”

And here I am—a professor and aging woman who may one day live in such a place, whose mother died in a version of this place, and who continues to wander the east side, climbing through weeds to peer into the foundations of burned-down houses, listening intently for what the ruins have to say.  Since coming to Flint, I have found and loved people who help me to fill in the holes and cover the ruins with lives past and present.  First there was Fran, whose family—up from Tennessee—ran a boarding house for factory workers.  “When I’d go to cities without factories, I’d think ‘these are not REAL cities’,” she told me.  I married Paul, in part, because he’d walk down railroad tracks with me through Chevy-in-the-Hole and give me a walking tour of all the mills and buildings that once were and now were no more.  When I met this group of seniors, my joy was genuine (a partial satisfaction of a longstanding desire).  They clearly wanted to share with me memories more sparkling than heirlooms, more vivid than the black and white photo of Dolly kissing Joe in front of a shiny new Chevrolet.  Finally, here I am gazing into the faces of Flint people rather than char-burned holes, and as I listen, my images of the city shift and so do the sounds: instead of crickets and natural sounds that signal neighborhoods returning to nature, I hear the happy sounds of kids playing, the whirr of roller-skates on concrete, the noise of factories working, and voices of people who have lived through a lot and are still joking and laughing.  

The things they have touched are held out to me

Like the sleeve of an old coat

To try on.  I pull one arm in,

Listening to the story of its making:

There was a boarding house with a Victrola playing

European men—crushes—working at Chevrolet.

Baskets half woven in an upstairs bedroom:

“I learned basket-weaving in the hospital

After the electric shock.”  When Fran got cancer

She gave my husband her father’s violin

And told me how her own mother

never wanted him to play.

Norma tells of her father electrocuted at work,

but “GM gave my mother a job in cut and sew. 

I was five years old.  She married again,

and he was real nice.” 

Mercury balls the Papas brought home for toys

We didn’t know then what we know now

They really pinged.

Sidewalks so smooth you could roller skate down ‘em

And we walked everywhere … EVERYWHERE.

On Saturdays we’d go to the theatre

For five cents you could see a show

And if you had a dime you could get a bag

Of popcorn.  A boy threw an apple core at the screen

And the matron yelled, “That’s it,” and the ticket price went

Up to 25 cents.  That was too much.  We nearly died.

In the winter, they’d flood the field by the armory

And we’d ice skate.  There was a warming shed

Where we waited for rides

We didn’t have cell phones to call our parents and say

We’re freezing. 

Missouri, Wisconsin, Iron Mountain, Chippewa lands

Norway, Sweden, Scotland, Ukraine

Languages spoken at home

Beverly still remembers numbers 1-10 in Norwegian

But that’s all.  Rose left home at 12 on the firing end

Of a shotgun pointed at her stepfather:  “he beat me,”

Was all she could say.  Things were hard

The strike, the work, the noise, the neglect,

But when put into a new role, Rose

“didn’t think about it much, I’d just do

What needed to be done.

How?  Well, I liked people.”

No thoughts of suicide then.  Almost none.

“There was a pump in the front yard

And neighbors would bring their jugs--

The water from that artesian well

Was so cold—oh, it made the best iced tea.”

“Pa’s work partner in the factory was a black man.

It was hot in the summer so Pa bought a fan to blow

On both of them.  The man was so happy

He wanted to pay for half the fan.”

Early marriages, no furniture, tales of managing

Cooking, canning, sewing

Learned at the knee of a grandmother. 

Some came from parents who were adopted

Others were shunted from foster home to foster home

“No folk?” Well, my ma and pa made their own

Seven kids. 

The problem today is there is

No communication

Silence except for the click of keys

No talking

No sharing

No mixing of young and old.

We have to work on that, work to find one another again.  I made an effort.  I didn’t know if they would like me.  I didn’t know if they would share.  But I wrote the questions.  I threw myself in.  I ate the fried dough with brown sugar that Betty made every week.  I told them about losing Mom.  I ached when it ended today.  Not over.  Never over.  We have so much to preserve … before the growing season ends, before the snows of winter come.

St. Cuthbert's Way Day 7: Sabbath Rest

Landscape is always made.  It is a work.  As I transfer hundreds of photographs from my Smartphone to my computer, although I am relieved that they are safely stored, I am also very glad that I took the time to describe the feelings I had in relation to these places.  The pilgrim’s feelings and her interactions when she is out in a place are really all that matter.  In a poem where she torturously questions the purpose of travel, Elizabeth Bishop concludes quite humbly:

But surely it would have been a pity

Not to have seen the trees along this road

Really exaggerated in their beauty

Not to have seen them gesturing

Like noble pantomimists robed in pink.

The pilgrim witnesses the expressiveness of the world around her.  It is a matter of obligation and devotion to translate the language of trees, brooks, and stones into her own idiom.

I shared a taxi to Berwick with the men.  Despite Palle’s tiny bottle of mead and Robin’s insistence that I buy a tin of haggis to take home, there was no warm hug, no promise to stay in touch, no exchange of emails.  I thought of how often my mother had to part with traveling companions and wondered whether it was hard for her, too.  I sat with my sadness on the bench waiting for the Durham train.  Forward movement is the cure for all loss I suppose.  The train arrived, I stumbled on with my heavy duffel bag, and we were off.  I thought of the way the monks carried Cuthbert’s coffin for seven years all around the kingdom of Northumbria to escape the Vikings.  Before crossing to Lindisfarne, I had asked for my feelings of loss to be healed.  On the walk, every flower and thistle, every bee and cloud salved my scars and scabs.  But crossing over, I had let my feelings out of the bag a bit, and the result was disappointment.  Maybe like the monks I have to carry my dead:  dead father, dead mother, dead lovers, and dead hopes further along down lonesome lanes before I lay them to rest.  I was sitting by a cute old lady from Aran.  Wait.  What?  Isn’t Aran off Ireland?  How long have you been on the train?  She took out a Smartphone and showed me a picture of an electric bike.  “I decided to treat myself.”  She must have been 80 years old.  She, too, evidently thrived on movement.  My purpose in going to Durham was to visit Cuthbert at his shrine.  Healing.  But I had also decided that I would hole up and wool-gather, put together some of my thoughts about the walk, organize my observations before they drifted too far away from me.  I needed the solitude that I’d missed on Lindisfarne.  Wool-gathering.  Idleness.  Solitude.  Prayer.  Return to the Way.  Be with me, Island Saints.

The monks opened the casket and realized that Cuthbert’s body was incorrupt before they began their pilgrimage from Lindisfarne to an unknown place.  The flesh was soft, ruddy and flexible; Cuthbert looked like he was asleep.  This sleeping saint acted as guide on the post-mortem journey.  He saved the Lindisfarne gospels from the Irish Sea when a storm wrecked the ship they were on.  He also selected Durham as the site for his church and his cult.  The site has much in common with Old Melrose (where Cuthbert had first entered the monastery) and Dryburgh, which he must have visited many times.  All three sites are located on peninsulas surrounded on three sides by a curving river.  In Durham, it is the River Wear.  Cuthbert was buried in the first church as Chester Le Street until the Normans invaded and thirty years later decided to invest in the Cuthbert cult and build a massive cathedral to house and to honor him. 

O ancient stones

Quarried and carried

And piled to house

The remains of dear

Saint Cuthbert

Not just to protect

But to teach us his Way

Your towers are the color of earth

An ancient human forest

The lines, the chevrons, the patchwork

All designs he saw or felt

On his journeys through borderlands

Here written out in a building

We can cling to or walk through

A building that stayed strong

Through changing creeds, regimes,

Wars and the wearing down of faith

Because his way was and is

THE WAY

            As I walked down the nave and toward Cuthbert’s shrine, emotions came to the surface.  I felt as if I were going to cry.  

His tomb is in a raised place behind the altar called the ferestory.  Check etymology.  Feral.  I climbed up the stairs and was in the shrine, an island of quiet.  Though the cathedral was crawling with tourists, there was no one inside.  The slab said simply, Cuthbertus, and there was a light burning above it.  

At times during my two-day visit, there was also a tiny tea-light on the stone slab.  Behind the shrine, next to the lamp, was a headless statue of Cuthbert (Cromwellian violence) holding the head of King Oswald.  The real head was, at one point, buried with him.  I prayed for my mother, the women from my support group in Flint, for my daughter; but mostly I prayed for my pilgrim soul that had been awakened and wanted to stay awake and not fall back into a sleep upon ending the pilgrimage.  I prayed for healing:  the cancer in my ear, the diseases of my spirit, and my awful indecision.  I listened for a long time.  Music.  Beautiful choral singing filtered into the shrine.  What were these voices?  Leaving Cuthbert for a while, I followed to peek into a door which was promptly closed.  Around to the cloister, the chapter house door was open and a woman (my age) listening outside.  The chapter house was packed with middle-aged women absorbed in a rehearsal.  “These are four local rock choirs.  They are practicing for a concert next Friday night.”  I’M ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL, I’M ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL, DON’T PUTCHER BLAME ON ME.  DON’T PUTCHER BLAME ON ME.  OH, OH!  Saints are real.  Cuthbert’s body is fresh and flexible under that stone.  Mama, too, has gone to the mountain.  And I’m only human after all, human after all.  Somehow in all of this was the key.  Desire.  Vocalization.  Normal.  Human.  Accept your body and your humanity.  Move.  Sing.  How do I do it?  I began to speak to this other listener, and a conversation unfolded.  A-levels.  School in Newcastle.  Shakespeare.  “I love the way characters escape to green worlds where they are made new.”  She’d seen a student production of As You Like It in her hometown of Newcastle where the forest was the ruins of an industrial city and the students played with the idea of recycling, of remaking and rebuilding through reuse of refuse.  Wow.  Hymen, the god, was made of plastic bottles.  Before I met Fiona, sitting in the shrine with Cuthbert, I’d envisioned the cathedral itself as a big rambling wood.  The builders made a forest of stone to recreate the paths.  The stone ribs of the vaulted ceiling were the criss-crossed trunks of a leafy canopy.  The decorated columns and pilasters were beeches and oak deeply grooved, part of the patchwork of greens and golds.  Lines, squares, chevrons.  Landscape is made.  The builders knew this.  They, too, were walkers.  They, too, experienced their world in the way that I had just done.  They created with their art a get-away, a place to relocate and recharge, a forest for God but also for Cuthbert.  The living song, the fresh and lively conversation, that’s what was supposed to happen here.  We’re only human after all, but when we come together, we must sound to the angels like the wood doves sounded to me in the on the first day of my walk.  Women so fresh, so fat, so lovely.  Not like those dried up, grimed-up city-birds.

            “The cathedral is big, but Durham isn’t.  You should hop on the train and go up to Newcastle,” and Fiona listed in my notebook several literary sites that I should not miss.  But I stayed up late writing and reading.  I woke up to rain showers, and I was tired.  More importantly, I felt like I needed to get back to the cathedral … to the woods (even if it was manmade) and make more discoveries.  Interestingly (and I would learn this much later after returning to Michigan), in Britain’s conversion period after the Romans had withdrawn and missionaries were attempting to spread Christianity, trees and sacred places in nature were used as peaceful gathering places.  In fact, as Nick Mayhew-Smith notes, the first description of a church in Britain comes from the Life of St. Germanus, a text written around the year 480.  To prepare a number of native Britains for an Easter baptism, a church was built, “of leafy branches.”  Early Christians in Britain did not destroy pagan sacred sites but respected their power and used the peoples’ devotion to the spirits within the natural world.

            I wanted to see the cathedral perched on its cliff, to get a sense of its site, and so I found the way to the Riverwalk.  It was like being on the Tweed all over again.  Same plants—peas and giant Queen Anne’s lace everywhere.  I studied one for a long while and felt like I was back in the borderlands.  Meanwhile, a duck swam over the rapids and grabbed a slippery serpentine fish.  Snap, Snap.  In the corner of my eye, I saw it swallow the fish.  On I walked and started to cross over a bridge when an inscription stayed my steps:

Grey Towers of Durham

Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles

Half Church of God and Half Castle gainst the Scot

And Long to roam these venerable aisles

With records stored of deeds long since forgot.

I could sympathize with the writer’s desire to roam the aisles, but this writer’s cathedral was more archive while mine was Cuthbert’s woods, recreated by the faithful builders (men who probably revered the saint) as a teaching tool.  I walked uphill to the Cathedral, and I made my way to the shrine once more.  No tears today.  Instead, I felt like I was entering a holy place that was also very familiar and comfortable.  There were many people there.  “He talks to people,” was what a guide had told me yesterday, and I perked up my ears to hear his voice.  Sitting quietly along the back wall, I ran my hands along the curved wood of the pew side rails, and wondered about the carvings.  At the very moment I recognized a squirrel on the end of the pew, I saw a woman photographing a rabbit.  The rounded ends of each side rail were carved into the shapes of different animals.  No repetition.  Each one unique.  Otter.  Boar.  Lion.  Rabbit.  Squirrel.  Sheep.  Tiger with cub.  Whoever made these pews loved Cuthbert.  He understood that Cuthbert had a special closeness with the natural world and he wanted the creatures to gather in his shrine.  It was lovely and intimate.  It also made me feel my humanity as creaturely.  I had a sudden impulse to kneel down and touch the stone.  “Please heal my ear, Cuthbert.  I believe you can do it.”

            The Tower had been closed the previous day and was still closed in the morning of my second day, but by early afternoon, they had opened it.  I bought a ticket and began the climb up a winding, narrow, stone staircase.  It was impossible to pass two abreast, so I listened for oncoming footsteps and flattened myself against the wall when descending others needed to pass.  At the top—oo, how dizzy tizz to cast one’s eye’s so low.  The Wear foamed, and the farms and fields and distant low hills beyond the city limit invited.  But I stood transfixed by the sight of two perfectly white pigeons swimming in the air around the right tower and land together in the arcade.  Natives of the place.  Spirits?  Cuthbert and Bede?  I thought of Gabrielle’s rose.  I thought of the wood pigeons.  Again, I felt at home in the woods. 

Then I discovered the “Sacred Treasures Museum and Exhibit” that begun with displays of stone masonry and book art to the artifacts found in Cuthbert’s tomb, displayed in the Great Kitchen.  These were his personal things that had rested in the casket with him; the intimacy of it all was stunning.  But his casket had been opened so many times.  He’d been checked and double-checked to see if he was corrupt or incorrupt.  I think the body finally did begin to decay.  An ivory comb, a pocket-sized altar, the embroidered bands he wore with his vestments figured with Old Testament prophets, his pectoral cross (gold with garnet and bits of shell and glass, showing signs of wear), and finally his wooden coffin pieced together like a puzzle and covered with human figures.  Not an animal in sight.  “Stand back against the wall,” instructed a guide.  “You are standing in what was one of the monastery ovens.  You have to imagine this place full of monks preparing food and animals.  It would have been very busy.”  Right.  I began to smell the food and the smoke.  But mostly I was sensing the alive presence of Cuthbert.  There was his cross and his comb, and his altar.  He was somehow out of the box and present in this place with his things, offering himself for us to follow.  He was a man who walked and taught.  Who read and combed his hair.  He offered mass to crowds that pitched tents to hear him.  Because he didn’t worry about food, it’s ironic that he must minister to us in the Great Kitchen.  Maybe that’s as it should be since he is our food.  His word.  His way.  His reassurance that we needn’t worry.  Look to the eagle.  Trust your horse.  God works in mysterious ways.  When I left the kitchen, I walked right into the café and bought a cup of tea and a scone. 

            My final hours in Durham Cathedral were spent at Holy Eucharist the following morning at 8:00.  It was Sunday.  There were no tourists at that hour.  The market square was empty and the noisy bars finally quiet.  No photography was permitted.  The shrine locked.  The priests are serious about wanting this to be a place of worship, and we worshipped.  But more than anything I heard from the priest, I was touched by the warmth of an old man who opened the locked shrine one more time for me.  George Hetherington, an octogenarian, remembered that he’d been nine years old when he became a cathedral chorister.  The war was on, and we had to board at the cathedral.  We sung two services and had two rehearsals daily, and that was a lot of singing and discipline for a child.  We missed our parents especially at Easter and Christmas.  They kept you until your voice cracked, and I guess I sung here until I was 15.  They let German prisoners of war stand in the back.  You could tell by their faces that all they wanted to do was go home.  Like us.  I suppose we felt an affinity for them.”  “Affinity.”  That is Mom’s special word.  The feeling of connectedness.  Nature is fine in love and were tis fine, it sends a precious instance of itself after the thing it loves.  Affinities are tenuous and strong.  It’s up to the creature to decide what to make of them.  Everything or nothing.  When we were in the shrine, I knelt and prayed one last time.  Then, Mr. Hetherington told me to look up at the ceiling.  He was pointing to a roundel carving around a bell-pull.  “That carving is as detailed as embroidery,” said the elderly man.  He had looked at it with binoculars and explained the figures on it to me.  “What amazes me is that the workman who carved it must have known that the detail would not be seen by any people below.  But he did the work carefully and well and intricately anyway.  That is devotion.”  He took my hand, kissed it, and we parted.

            Just as I didn’t want the walk to end, I hated to leave this forest of stone.  But I had wended through it, noting the waymarks.  Architects and masons loved Cuthbert and were teaching his Way with every detail.  Like Cuthbert’s pocket altar, his comb, and his cross, the contents of my pilgrim’s pocket—cross, stones, compass, sheep’s wool—must be shared because only when we take out what’s inside can we really truly touch others.  Nothing was in the box, in the tomb, and the spirit of Cuthbert “talks to people.”  I’d asked Fiona if the assembled rock choir had a cd.  Oh, no!  They sing for themselves and for one another!”  George Hetherington, speaking of the ceiling carving said, “today whenever people do anything, they have to put it on Facebook or on television.”  The point is to do small things with great love, and, more importantly, to them for their own sake.  That is contemplation.  That is the Way.  That attitude is what (perhaps) enabled Cuthbert, who loved his solitude to preach and teach and even to be bishop, for a time, duties that carried him away from Lindisfarne and his hermitage on the even smaller Farne.  But he must have also known that he’d found home because he kept returning to those islands.  Places of wind, birds’ cries, and seals’ song.  Why do the seals sing?