St. Cuthbert's Way Day One: Beginning

One doesn’t go to Melrose half-heartedly.  Cuthbert, arguably the most important of the northern (striding) saints was a shepherd before he entered the monastery, and he journeyed to Melrose only after he’d had a vision of a bright light ascending to heaven and learned the next day that it must have been the soul of the Celtic priest Aidan, who’d founded the monastery at Lindisfarne, and who had died on the night of Cuthbert’s vision.  The heart of Robert the Bruce, the medieval chieftain who unified Scotland, is buried in the ruins of Melrose Abbey.  From Edinburgh I rode in the front on top of a double-decker red bus through the little towns and along streams, watching the beautiful country roll out on all sides of me, eager to be walking through it and seeing it all up close.  I’d longed for this pilgrimage for several years, but I’d been immobilized by an abusive relationship, by my own anxieties, and by my mother’s failing health.  My mother’ soul departed in May right as I was supposed to begin the walk, and, of course, I postponed it.  Now I had the additional burden of grief to carry with me to Holy Island.  I got off the bus and headed to the abbey after dropping my bag at the B&B.  I climbed the tower and looked out for the pig and dog gargoyle, but the sculpture that impressed me most was the open-mouthed face, hanging out over a corner molding, saying “OH!” in terror at the height, in awe at the beautiful landscape, or in song to the Lord of blue sky.  Though my feet were on the ground between the River Tweed and the Eildon Hills, my mouth was open just as wide.

           Melrose to Lindisfarne is not a traditional pilgrimage route like the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.  It was laid out in 1995 to commemorate important places in Cuthbert’s life as well as its progression from shepherding to entering the monastery to walking the hills to far flung settlements in the borders to preach the gospel.  Cuthbert lived the tension between serving and loving people to wanting to be alone with God; and Lindisfarne (cut off from the mainland by tides twice daily) seemed to symbolize life on the edge of eternity.  But even Lindisfarne, situated on trade routes, with its bustling monastery and entrepreneurial endeavors was too crowded for him, and he eventually withdrew to live in hermitage on the isolated island of Farne.  In preparation, I’d read two early biographies—one by an anonymous monk in Cuthbert’s community and the other by Bede—and was, therefore, familiar with stories that have become iconic:  Cuthbert’s vision of Aidan’s soul ascending; Cuthbert’s study of John’s gospel with his friend, the Abbot Boisil, who was dying of plague; Cuthbert’s ministering to an angel; his unconcern about food while walking great distances; the ways that animals—eagles and otters—tended to his needs; and, finally, his setting off for Farne in a December storm to be in hermitage before he died.  I set off from the U.S., touched down in the UK, and stepped off the red bus in Melrose, knowing some things but in the dark about so many more.  At best, I hoped to converse with Cuthbert, hoped that by walking in places he knew or maybe by just walking a long distance (something new for me that was perfectly normal for him), I would learn a way that would make me new and that could teach me something about he spirituality of this early Celtic Christian whose gentleness and affability made him the Church’s choice for spreading the new Roman rite.

            Stone crosses were erected all over Northumberland to remind people that the whole landscape was holy.  They gave a reverential tone to any and all journeys made on the big pilgrimage that we call life.  Cuthbert was one of the northern saints who spread Christianity by walking and teaching and celebrating mass (hence the pocket-sized altar that was buried with him) as much a part of his intimate belongings as an ivory comb or the small sized version of John’s gospel.  When he arrived in a settlement, people would assemble in tents to hear him read, teach, and heal them by his presence alone.  “But wasn’t he an awfully extreme personality?” asked a dentist I ran into along the Way, presumably thinking about the monk’s desire to live as a hermit.  I doubt this dentist knew the details:  for instance, that on Farne, Cuthbert built the walls of his cell high enough to close out even the beauty of his surroundings so as to concentrate more fully on God.  Despite all of this, I do not think of Cuthbert as extreme.  I feel rather an affinity for him.  He craved solitude.  He knew that there is a richness to solitary existence in which one is connected to trees, plants, hills, birds, and the Creator of all by silken strands of attention, thought, and feeling.  The earth seems to want to be seen and known.  Cuthbert was a witness.  The silent traveler moving through the Borders is also a witness.  Though there are no stone crosses, there are beech trees, butterflies, sweet peas, the Eildon Hills, bridges lost and found, and a hawk that fed me wisdom as surely as an eagle dropped dolphin meat on the seashore for Cuthbert.

            On my pilgrimage, Cuthbert functioned as a guide, a human waymark.  The majority of people in the secular West are not capable of affirming real experiences that connect us to the natural world and its inhabitants.  I could not post on Facebook that I’d met an angel, that sweet peas cheered me on, that I saw my mother’s hands in the moss-covered gnarled roots of an ancient beech near Lilliard’s stone, the tree dead and alive at the same time.  But walking with Cuthbert gave me someone who had had similar experiences.  I could set my own against the stories others told about his and felt less crazy or less alone.  Maybe you are laughing or feeling skeptical.  If so, consider that most Americans fear being alone with their thoughts for more than six minutes.  Few would walk 70 miles alone in wild places and like it.  And most are frighted with the false fires of distraction.  “He will heal all those in need” read the window in the tiny church in Maxton.  A woman I met contacted the pastor of a tiny stone church that was legendarily established by Cuthbert; and Reverend Sheila opened the church so I could see the Hebrew inscriptions I’d read about.  In one of the windows was the verse, “he healed them that had need of healing.”  “The key word is need,” said the woman I’d met.  Most people are not aware that they need healing and help.  She is right.  Wrapped up in our comforts with the whole world seemingly available at the touch of a button, we really don’t need anything.  In America you hear people say as a matter of course that we live in our own private “bubbles.”  A sign on the pub door in Fenwick said “Turn off your phone and talk to your neighbor.”  The first step of any walk is to become aware that you need something whether it’s as little as clarity, fresh air, relaxation, the sensory awareness of your body in motion or as much as connection and inspiration.

            The map I was using indicated that the first day would be the longest day.  Melrose to Jedburgh is 15 miles, and the way passed through many small villages and made many twists and turns:  up the Eildon Hills, along the River Tweed, and finally down the meadow path that followed the old Roman Road to another river and bridge.  How would I manage it?  On top of that, it was showering just before I started off.  “What will I do?”  “Bring an upbrella,” quipped the husband at the B&B who’d cooked my breakfast.  “Got one,” I said.  “No, I’m jokin.  Not a tough lady walker like you.  No.  That’s just not done.”  So stuffing my rain poncho in my pack, I set off and the rain stopped.  The first real difficulty I faced was psychological:  leaving comforts and security.  A warm, dry B&B and my big duffel bag that contained dry clothes for all occasions and an extra water bottle.  Without it, I had to make do with what I had.  Looking up into the misty, dark, conical Eildon Hills, I set off.  The whole steep ascent, step by step, I was getting used to the tingle of fear and letting it become excitement.  I was finding my walking rhythm.  I was opening my eyes and ears to all that was going on around me.  Straight up the red path into hills that were once, in the ancient past, volcanoes but are now heather-covered, I passed fireweed, a lone foxglove, protective ewes with their big lambs.  I began to see heather but kept my eyes on the summits and imagined the legends I’d read about fairies that lived under these hills.  My mind began to loosen up with my muscles, and I was growing less self-conscious with each step.

            On the back side of the hills, I descended into woods and heard a chorus of birds.  At first I thought they were mourning doves, but the song was four-noted and energetic:  Hoo, Hoo, hoohoo.  I heard the flap of wings.  These were large blue-gray birds with white rings around their necks and white bands on their wings.  I supposed they were a kind of pigeon but so very different from the grimy birds at home that scavenge in cities.  These were fat, wild-looking, and choral!!!  Listening became my practice.  Listening and noticing and so long as I was engaged I was no longer frightened, and I was aware of how good it felt to travel without the burden of a bag even if I got wet or ran out of water or needed food.  I began to trust that what was in my small pack would suffice.  Happily, I took all the detours one of which was to Dryburgh Abbey, and along the way—a detour within a detour—I chanced upon a “Temple to the Muses” constructed to honor James Thomson, the Borders poet born around 1700, who loved the natural world and who, according to the plaque, is considered a proto-Romantic.  Also on the plaque was an excerpt from his poem, “Spring” (1728):

                                                            Thus the glad skies,

                                    The wide-rejoicing earth, the woods, the streams

                                    With every life they hold, down to the flower

                                    That paints the lonely vale, or insect-wing

                                    Waved o’er the shepherd’s slumber, touch the mind,

                                    To nature tuned, with a light-flying hand

                                    Invisible, quick-urging through the nerves

                                    The glittering spirits in a flood of day.

I meandered through the Abbey, talked to everyone I met.  Along the Tweed, I stopped to sketch the Eildon Hill that I’d walked around, and in a kind of ecstatic state, I jotted down my own simple “poem.”

I ate the fruit of the forest

I felt light rain on my skin

Heard the rhythmic chant of wood doves

My soul is alive again.

The only time I felt lonely was going into a coffee shop in St. Boswell’s where the colognes and fine clothing of people out with families and friends on a Sunday afternoon accented the wild mess I’d become.  I took my soup and juice and fled to the riverside.  Finding a bench along the Way, I befriended a cat, and then, along came a equally odd looking woman all in blue, veiled, carrying a white cat, who she called “Elijah,” in a sling.  A chocolate lab walked next to her. 

            Because the pilgrimage felt, in part, about finding a way to have a voice and finding a way that responded to a call, I marveled at the fluent prophecies that poured effortlessly forth from this very odd young woman if woman is what she was.  “Yes, he [speaking about Elijah’ has eyes of two different colors.  That’s for Elijah and Elisha and because God wants us to join together.  She spoke about covenant and Mary as the arc of the new covenant who birthed Jesus, who is returning soon.  There have been signs in Jerusalem:  three extra stars in Leo, and next year is 2020.”  She told a story about swimming to the bottom of the Tweed and pulling up 12 stones and carrying them in her rucksack—“for the twelve tribes of Israel and because Scotland must be unified.  And it will be, she predicted, “because (it’s a secret) but Robert the Bruce’s heart has been dug up and reburied in Jerusalem.  This is the only way for Scotland to be renewed.  I have given my whole self to Jesus.”  When I asked her about the Hebrew inscriptions in the parish church in Maxton—along the route, she gave me her cell number and said to call when I arrived.  She would ring up the Reverend Sheila and see if she would open the church.  When we parted ways, she prayed that God would open my eyes and ears and that my spiritual pilgrimage would be fruitful.  As I continued pushing my way through the grasses and tangled plant life along the river, I thought about Cuthbert.  When he decided to enter the monastery at Melrose, the first “job” he was given was to offer hospitality to strangers.  On one occasion, a worn-out man arrived and was fed, his feet washed, and he was given a place to rest.  Overnight it snowed, and the guest arose and departed early, leaving no tracks in the soft snow.  Cuthbert felt—“felt” is too weak a word—he knew with his heart that this was an angel.  I wondered about Gabrielle Mary. 

            The path eventually wound round behind the gray stone church, and I could see two women (one veiled with a blue scarf—Gabrielle!—and another with bright gold hair almost like a halo).  They were obviously waiting to welcome me.  I called, but they didn’t hear, and I walked along the wall and entered the gate.  Gabrielle came forward holding out a white rose whose stem and leaves were wrapped in a blue bag.  “It’s a thornless rose.”  It is Jesus saying something about you.”  “St. Cuthbert’s Church at Mackistun” first appears in the records some 500 years after the time of Cuthbert, but like several of the auld kirks on the way, it could have been served from Old Melrose and maybe even by Cuthbert himself.  The Hebrew writing on the way—way up high—are verses from the psalms:  “Blessed are the people that know the joyful sound” and “Come let us worship and bow down.”  The women didn’t know what the inscriptions meant, but Gabrielle—ever sensitive to names—talked about my name Mary Jo … “Joseph, John, mercy.”  She said that Sheila was connected to the Hebrew word, “shelah” (I think it is really “selah”), but she understood it to mean “pause, pause, take it all in” and told a funny story about immersing herself in a pool on top of Mount Sion and being watched by a proper rabbi (or was it a hermit) who called to all passersby, “shelah, shelah!”  When we parted, she kissed me on the lips, and I left, clutching my white thornless rose.  Was this some kind of annunciation?  I felt I was being called to look and listen very closely—to see all phenomenon as gifts, signs, or messages.  The angel Gabriel approached Mary with a lily, and all annunciations are invitations to trust in something that sounds impossible or preposterous.  “Let it be done to me.”  Later that evening, I texted Gabrielle (she’d given me her cell number) to thank her for the kindness, but she never replied which, once again, made me wonder about who or what she was. 

            When I think about my experience placed next to Cuthbert’s, I have to wonder what enabled him to feel that the guest he welcomed was an angel.  Certainly, there could have been naturalistic explanations for the lack of footprints in the snow, yet Bede researched the life and the incident stands as one of the first stations in Cuthbert’s holy life.  When I stood with Gabrielle and Sheila in Maxton Church, she spoke about angels.  “They are all around us.  I saw a huge one once just before a storm when I was trying to visit my mother.”  I asked the two women if they’d heard the thunder.  I’d been hearing it all afternoon in the clouds over the river.  Thunder but no rain.  “I didn’t hear thunder.  Listen, God is speaking to you,” was what Gabrielle said.  But there was actual thunder, and it was confirmed by several trout fishermen I passed.  Still, there was the moment a white bird with an enormous wingspan took off just as I’d passed under the branch on which he was perched.  There was the fact that I’d somehow made it on foot 20 miles to Jeburgh just before the hostess of the B&B was going to call the police because “it’s nearly twelve hours since you set out, and you are walking alone.”  Things happen.  “There are things happening all around us and we don’t know what they are.”  This observation made by my skeptical dentist friend serves as a kind of secular credo and mantra for my journey.  Neither he nor we know anything much about the natural let alone the supernatural world, and my feeling, my strong feeling, my faith is that these levels of experience interpenetrate.  Didn’t God “prepare” a great fish to swallow Jonah?  Didn’t he speak to the gourd to enlist its help in teaching his prophet a lesson in mercy?  Maybe the early and medieval Christians were wiser than we in reading the created world as a book or a story.  If so, how poverty-stricken we moderns are who don’t even read books anymore. 

            To read the world’s book, you must step out and walk.  A story unfolds.  The walker must tell it or sing it, but it is a joint creation that is both yours and the world’s.  The anonymous Life of Cuthbert gives us a tiny glimpse of a musical procession along the banks of the Tweed.  Cuthbert had been invited to the village of a man called Sibba who lived somewhere beside the river.  He arrived “with a company of people,” singing as they walked.  They were singing psalms and hymns.  A few years later, in 680, a herdsman called Caedmon would begin composing beautiful hymns in Old English, much to everyone’s surprise, including his own.  Cademon was one of those people who are convinced that they can’t sing.  Whenever party pieces were called for, Cademon would slip away.  One night, he went out to the byre to feed the beasts and fell asleep there.  A man came to him in his dreams, called him by name and asked him for a song.  “I don’t know how to sing,” said Caedmon, “that’s why I left the feast.”  “But you shall sing for me,” said the man.  “What shall I sing about?”  “Sing about the Creation of things,” said the man.  And Caedmon began to sing—in his own voice—a song he had never heard before.

            I wandered into Jedburgh shattered on a Sunday night.  It was dark and raining lightly.  The pubs weren’t serving food and, worst of all, I’d forgotten the name of the place I was staying.  Panic set in.  My bag had been delivered to the B&B whose name I’d forgotten.  How would I find it?  But my confusion—delirium even—came out of a total loss of concern about where I’d sleep or what I’d eat.  And it was, I think, a sign that I was really truly on the way.  There had been a moment along the old Roman road when I wanted to lay down in the deep grass, under the sacred protector tree (whose name remains a mystery) and pass the night in wonder.  Perhaps I was living the parable of hidden treasure from Matthew 13:  “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.  When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”  Even on my first day out, I knew that there was something challenging but immensely valuable about the project of pilgrimage, and it was even linked in some way to Jesus’ use of the parable as a teaching tool.  What is the treasure hidden in the field?  How is it comparable to the kingdom of Heaven?  Jesus, who Cuthbert followed closely, walked, walked everywhere; and he, too, sought places of solitary prayer and contemplation.  Perhaps even Jesus’s teaching grew out of the ecstasy of dreaming on foot.  And maybe the kingdom of Heaven is knowing the field from the inside out … the topographic sublime.

          

Love Letter

I couldn’t throw away my mother’s phone book.  The impulse to save is, I think, linked to my superstition about wrecking spiders’ webs.  Although some of the people listed in that book didn’t visit her even once from the time she fell and then kept falling (“I’ll wait till your Mom can go to restaurants” was the excuse one “close” friend made), most of them were very loyal.  Was I loyal?  A letter that turned up, saved in that phone book, addressed to me, typed on onion-skim typing paper and photocopied, gave me pause.

            “Dearest Mary Jo,” (Mom was rarely this effusive) … Dearest!  “It was pure joy to hear your voice Friday morning.”  Pure joy?  My voice?  “I had not worried that you were safe, but it certainly was reassuring to know that you were really safely at the university.”  The emphasis on safety is Mom through and through.  “When I got home last Saturday, it was a very lonely feeling to think of you so far away.”  I’d been living at home for the latter part of the summer of 1993, having given up my apartment in Boston and preparing to leave to teach in Ankara, Turkey.  I was thirty, and on the couple of occasions when I had to live at home for any length of time at that point in my life, I always got physically sick.  I never figured out why.  But from this vantage point, any sickness or ambivalence I felt then is completely forgotten.  What I remember vividly is Mom packing the two duffel bags I was allowed to take—for a whole year!  She packed those bags as carefully and tightly as a bird weaves grasses together to make a nest.  Cowboy boots were filled with socks and underwear and extension cords.  A small computer printer, clothes for teaching, books and papers, and even a box of oil paints, were arranged masterfully.  I held the hefty bags inches off the floor and stood on a bathroom scale in the front hallway of the house, checking to make sure they did not exceed the airline’s baggage weight limit.  Checking in at Logan Airport in Boston, I had to surrender the oil paints.  I remember handing them to Mom, who was always encouraging me to draw and paint.  I remember feeling a lump in my throat.  “I’ll keep them for you, honey.”  Like everything we had no room for.  Mom saved and kept all safe.  I don’t remember being overly emotional at parting.  Mom stood with my sister, Jennifer, and my then-boyfriend, Michael, and later she would tell me with a certain amazement, “I couldn’t believe how easily you got right on that plane.”  In truth, it was never easy.

            The letter goes on to detail the adventure that Mom, Jennifer and Michael had after they left me at the airport.  They explored over-priced antique shops on Beacon Hill, and a homeless man hit Mom up for a cigarette.  She offered him the one she was smoking, which he took gladly, so as not to have to open her purse.  She’d warned me about that very thing as well as not walking on frozen lakes, not being near water in electrical storms, always unplugging toasters and coffee makers, and not forgetting to call home.  That was Mom, but before she was a mother, she had wanted to travel and had even applied to teach school in Japan.  It’s possible, though I don’t remember her saying anything of the sort, that I was fulfilling a dream she’d let fall by the wayside.  “It was a very lonely feeling to think of you so far away.”

            I hold the pages of onion-skin, and I remember the manual typewriter vividly.  I can even see her sitting at the end of the kitchen table where she always did schoolwork or wrote bills, with a cigarette burning in a nearby ashtray and a cat at her feet.  Oops.  Scratch the cat.  Near the end of the letter, she tells me that “Mr. M is enjoying himself outside on a true fall day; I’m watching him as I type.”  This was Mohammad, a cat I’d adopted during my graduate school years.  He’d suffered a leg injury a few years before I went to Turkey, and it just seemed better for him to go home to Mom and the yard rather than stay in a basement apartment in Central Square, Cambridge.  Mom even started sleeping downstairs on the couch to let my cat in and out at night.  That arrangement became permanent; she never returned to her bed upstairs.  “I love you very much.  Mom.”  I fold the letter up, and sadness washes over me.  Did I really appreciate this love?  Was I even aware of it?  Oh, Mom it is a very lonely feeling to think of you so far away.

            The initial take-away for me was that I should stop doubting the love of significant others.  I regretted falling under the influence of a series of therapists—each one tried to get me to criticize Mom for her failings.  “I just respond to what you bring in,” said my latest one, when I weakly protested that Mom was the only mother I had, and I loved her.  Mothers are human beings in an impossibly demanding role.  Easy targets.  I know because I am one now.  I am nearly 56 years old, and over the long haul of a mother-daughter relationship, each of us goes through so many changes.  Mom had to start over many times in her life, after losing a husband, after starting to teach school again in midlife, after realizing that she needed friends, after she retired.  She needed the same kind of loving attention a young one needs.  Life cycles.  People do not stand still.  While I think my husband is right and that I did tend to revert to the good girl role when I went home, so what?  If I never felt I'd won her approval, is that her fault or mine for not trusting that it was there all along.  “I love you very much.  Mom.”  I contemplate the letter and the photocopy, and then I realize that it is possible Mom never sent this letter.  So even if I have difficulty receiving and believing, maybe Mom got distracted or self-conscious.  Maybe I got a phone in my apartment and called her.  Maybe the words were never sent, never said.

            On the walk to St. Mary’s Franklin Street to Mass this morning, I walked and sweated and thought about how horrible it is to be constantly preoccupied by doubts about love.  Did Mom love me?  Does Paul?  Does my daughter?  More importantly, did or do I love them?  As I worried the subject of love like a King Lear or an Othello—tragic—I was stopped along my physical and mental path by a brown rabbit.  A miracle.  He let me get very close to him and never jumped sideways into the thick brush along the stream.  We regarded one another.  I spoke, he stirred as if listening.  I stepped, he stepped--forward not sideways, as if showing me the way I was to go.  Walking past him carefully, I said, “have a good Sunday, bunny.”  Funny  that I felt so blessed and even loved, not by the rabbit, but by a force of goodness that gives us natural and worldly answers to our questions if our eyes and minds are open. That little moment reminded me that I know love every time wild humans come close, when they let us look into their eyes and speak a word to them, and when they go on their way.  The truest, deepest, most real loves have not ever been and probably cannot be worded.  Maybe love is pheromonal or a product of rhizomes in the roots (as it is for trees that know and attempt to assist their grove-mates).  Maybe love is as simple as the urge to look and listen to an other, to help, to seek out, to rejoice when the spouse returns at day’s end or the teen daughter from a late date.  Safe and sound. I know my mother loves me, and I love her dearly.  It’s natural for reactionary thoughts to arise in our minds.  They ripple the surface, but we shouldn’t let the impulse to judge events, information, and people as either good or bad, right or wrong, loved or unloved cause a tsunami that will surely shipwreck us.  We have to ride the waves, enjoy them, and trust the deeper currents.   When a little brown rabbit didn’t flee from me, I realized that belonging is love.  And I belong to the rabbit as my dear ones belong to me and all of us to the loving Creator.  And Mama, dearest Mama, maybe I imagined it, but when that rabbit looked at me, you felt a little less far away.  Love.  Mary Jo.

           

Entropy: Visiting a Ruin on Gillespie Avenue

We were headed out to plot out some local walks for my new First Year Experience class, called "Finding Your Way," about the literature and practice of walking, but we got sidetracked as usual.  We were in the car, driving north along the Flint River up Industrial past Leith to Stewart, and we turned left and crossed the bridge which once was the best view of the Buick Plant.  Today it is a brownfield that is reverting to nature.  We drove through the historic black and ethnic neighborhoods near the plant.  There is really nothing much there now … you have to use your imagination.  And that to me has always been the really wonderful thing about living and walking in Flint.  If you live in a fully operational city, you are inside some kind of big human artifact—a machine or an assembly line.  Everyone is slotted into a neighborhood, an occupation, a route that they take more or less every day.  Even their leisure is scripted according to institutions and systems in which they have little to no say in their scheduling.  The factory workers in Flint were among the highest paid blue-collar workers, but can you put a price tag on liberty?  No wonder they fantasized about three acres in Burton or a cottage up north.  Things are altogether different if you live in a has-been city, a burnt-out city, a postindustrial rust-belt city like Flint.  The centers of such cities around what used to be factories are now ground zeros.  Pits of devastation.  “You know, this area was white as late as the late sixties,” says Paul, as we intersect with North Saginaw.  “What happened?  What caused this?  I don’t think we can blame it all on the factories closing.”  We are near the Burston Field House, and that gym is where the Clarissa Shields trained for and won the Olympic medal in boxing.  Paul remembers a story he was told by the son of an old dulcimer player.  There was a street—Gillespie Ave.—where Germans from Russian lived.  They immigrated to pick sugar beets in the Michigan Thumb, but the work probably got too hard and the factories were too tempting.  They can from the towns to what was, in the early 20^th century, a booming metropolis.  “Let see if there’s a church.”  We drive to the top of a hill.  The grasses get longer and are golden and wavy in the evening light.  A trumpet vine with its orange flowers is climbing all over the remains of a house, and I imagine invisible spirits or animal musicians blowing away on those floral horns.  At the top of the hill, there is a church--old and somewhat gothic.

The door is open.  Inside, devastation reigns.  There is a mesmerizing word set on fire scrawled in spray paint across the sanctuary:  Entropy.  It’s frighteningly accurate.  Entropy is a science word, from physics, I think, about the degree of randomness or disorder in a system.  When I look it up later, the word explains Flint:  “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.”  I hear a car door slam, and I get a little scared.  I quickly duck out of the ruined church without taking a photo of the only remaining and unexceptional window of colored glass.  Outside, Paul has noticed the signboard.  It was last used as a Masjid—a mosque.  That’s interesting.

Our curiosity has been piqued, and Paul suggests that we check out the City Directories in the Flint Public Library.  These books contain lists of businesses and residents by street—every street in the City of Flint, published nearly every year since 1870.  Starting with 1942, we look up Gillespie Avenue.  "What was the cross street?" asks Paul.  "Buick."  Sure enough, there was “First Reformed Church” which is clearly a Protestant Church, German, and the Pastor is listed as Rev. Albert Weinbrauk, which is a German name.  Oddly, we don't find many obviously German family names listed as residents on the street.  In order to figure out when the church was built, hence when the "community" was established, we have to go back in time, and check earlier books.  It was there in 1923.  It was there in 1921.  But it wasn’t there in 1916.  Eventually, we figure out that it was built around 1920.  Then we move forward in time to see if we can find out when the church became a mosque.  The 1972 Directory lists the building as “Muhammad’s Mosque of Islam #53.”  So after it ended life as a church, the building became a  Nation of Islam mosque, referred to as a "temple."  

The Nation of Islam (NOI) was a black Muslim movement that grew out of Black Nationalism.  The movement was founded in 1934 in Detroit by Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole in 1897 in Sandersville, Georgia).  Poole, who moved his family, parents and siblings, north to Michigan, was among the hundreds of thousands of black families forming the First Great Migration leaving the economically troubled and oppressive South in search of safety and employment.  Poole claimed that before the age of twenty, he'd seen three black men lynched by whites.  He settled the family in Hamtramck and struggled throughout the 1920s and 1930s to find and keep work.  Inspired by Wallace Fard Muhammad, who claimed to the the Mahdi (Muslim messiah) and who preached black independence from white culture, Elijah Muhammad took over leadership of the fledgling Islamic movement when Fard mysteriously disappeared, clinching for his followers his identity as Allah.  Group infighting eventually led Elijah Muhammad to leave Mosque #1 in Detroit for Chicago, and he moved around the northern midwest, growing the movement.  Much of its appeal was to black men, who tended to stay away from church because it didn't address their needs.  The NOI had its own program for economic development: Elijah Muhammad purchased land and businesses to provide housing and employment for young, black males in NOI-owned bakeries, barber shops, coffee shops, grocery stores, laundromats, night-clubs, retail stores, or as drivers in its fleet of tractor-trailers.  By 1959 there were 50 temples in 22 states.  The temple on Gillespie Ave. is listed as #53, so it may have been one of the last ones established before Elijah Muhammad died in 1975.  By the year 2000, however, the building is listed in the Directory as “Flint Masjid."  The NOI was disbanded in 1976.  Some readers may recollect the famous clash between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, who made the haj (one of the five pillars of Islam), became a mainstream Muslim, broke with the NOI (which was blamed, by some, for his assassination).  Over time, the movement decayed from within, and an orthodox Islamic organization was formed, that came to be known as the American Society of Muslims.  

Paul and I close the books, knowing that we've only begun to dig into the rich history suggested by these few but important facts.  We locate Gillespie Street on the huge street map of Flint that hangs over the library tables.  As we leave the library, we chat about the way such major movements of people, religion, economics, and community can be glimpsed through tracking the simple history of a single building.  “And remember," I say, "the current ‘Muslim House’ is just down the street on Saginaw."  “Right,” says Paul, “There’s a whole institutional history in this.”  

Piecing together that history from the remains, from stories heard, from bits of facts culled from books is work, and it is creative.  It teaches us to dig in, understand, be inspired by past times, and let those times inform what we make.  There may be no more first, second, or third shift, but there is plenty of work for those of us who stay in Flint.  The city may be dead and the smart people fled to suburbs, but those who stay inhabit a ruin.  And there is something sacred about ruins … you are walking through layers of time, the deep psyche of the city, and the collective unconscious of the people who came here, worked, played dulcimers, prayed to God or Allah, and either died here or moved on.  It’s our job to wake up and discover the lives here, and use the wisdom that is laying all around us in the artifacts and echos to make new communities at spots where the river is fordable or the view is nice or where the decay has allowed a whole field of prairie grass to grow.  There is something mesmerizing about entropy, but we mustn’t just photograph the ruins or the graffiti.  It is the human task to work against entropy and to make order where there is only fire, ash, rotting wood, and soggy mattresses decaying in the street. 

Let It Rain!

Maybe I am a lousy sister

“You have used confidences to curry favor with Mom for years.”  “If you want me to count the ways you’ve broken trust, I will.”  “You didn’t save my wedding dress out of spite.”  “How could you not see that picture of me on top of the trash.  You did it on purpose!”  Every text felt like a stone hitting my body.  I know I haven’t been perfect, but am I that bad?  Down, down I fell.  Even worse, they attacked my blog as “lies, lies, stories not your own, partial truths, "gaslighting," you cut us out of Mom’s death, we mattered, too.”  Yes, I know, I know.  But blogs are personal.  I was there when Mom died.  She opened her eyes, took a breath, and exhaled for the last time, looking into my face.  In that moment, that haunting moment, nothing mattered but the relationship I’d struggled to have with her.  It was personal.  Just because I didn’t include you when I wrote about that experience doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge your value.  I know you are part of me and I you, my brother and sisters.  We nurtured one another, giving and receiving.  I remember leaning on Katie, my rock, when I struggled with emotional problems.  I remember talking to Jennifer about books and ideas and praising her poetry.  We all, following Mom, looked to brother James as the man of the family.  At least, that's how I remember it.  We played the roles mysteriously assigned us within our family culture and have, since becoming adults, struggled to separate, to be ourselves.  Me, too.  I have a right to BE, too.  The lost wedding dress and coveted collectibles seem to me to be merely objective correlatives for the emotional gaps and misfires of human love.  It was a terrible storm.  But I want to take my siblings' criticisms seriously.  Did I "use confidences" to win Mom's love?  I guess it's possible.  The thing is:  Mom used me as a sounding board, as a confidante.  She shared her worries and feelings, and I reciprocated.  Of course, she was a worrier and, of course, she worried about her children--all of them, but I never felt this kind of talk was "trash-talk" or a betrayal except maybe once when I was entrusted with a very personal and sensitive story.  I'm sorry that I shared it.  Even worry is no excuse.  Going through decades of family photos, I see that Mom had much more adult relationships with my sisters.  She went on trips to see them, they did things in the world together.  I don't think I ever separated from Mom but was stuck by her side, which meant being stuck at the kitchen table listening or on the other end of the telephone line listening.  Mom's sister, Ruthellen, called Mom "shithead," and I was "little shithead."  I, too, could be envious of the relationships the others had with Mom; but I am not.  I know that each one is unique and important.  Each one is a story that should be told.  Now, every time I write a blog post, I risk alienating my family members further, since I don't seem to have the right words.  But I write of my Mother and my brother and sisters because I want to understand how the cracks got so big that the earthenware bowl of family must be tossed in the dumpster.  It's old.  It's beautiful.  In the bottom there is a delicate design of three sisters in bonnets fishing from a log with a bull frog looking on.  It came from great-grandmother.  It was passed down.  We can fix it.  Please save it.  I texted this to my brother just this morning.  Proof that the things themselves signify so much more.

--------------------------------------

"Let it Rain!" (post from last week that I was reluctant to share)

I'm back in Flint.  It's Sunday, sun shining.  I need to be at Mass, but I have to drive Paul to Bishop airport to return his rental car.  We finish the errand too late for me to make 10:00 mass at St. Mary’s on Franklin Street.  So I drive to St. John Vianney, but the pews are packed and the people dressed up and the priest’s voice flat.  About to be boxed in by a handsome middle- aged woman and her well-groomed husband, I give them my seat and flee to the vestibule.  From a bench in the back, I hear the liturgy of the Word.  Moses speaks to the Israelites about the location of the ultimate commandment which is not far away in the Heavens but in the secret closet of each heart.  When the gospel rolls around, I hear Jesus answer the question put to him by a young lawyer, “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life,” with a parable of a traveler fallen among thieves, stripped, robbed, and left for dead on the roadside.  The officially religious people—a Priest and a Levite—looked on this man and walked on.  Only a Samaritan (the good Samaritan) stopped and tried to help.  He bound up his wounds, poured in oil and wine, put him on his beast and led him to in Inn, making provision for him.  The take-away is plain:  we must do the deeds of mercy.  The gospel somehow gave me permission to leave the liturgy before the eucharist.  It felt stale and I was restless, dying to cry out to someone … the clouds?  The sky?  My mother?  My God, my God?

I drive from Chevrolet Avenue over to the old Flint Farmer’s Market.  I park and head off down the river.  I have no route or destination.  I hear a voice from the soundtrack that kept me company on the 12-hour drive back to Michigan yesterday: “Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever gonna make it home again.  It’s so far and out of sight.  I really need someone to talk to, and nobody else knows how to comfort me tonight.”  That’s Carole King’s voice.  Where is mine?  And, for that matter, where is home for me?  I don’t know.  And I don’t know whether the issue is making it home or escaping the gravitational pull of Mom’s home where all the antiques and collectibles newly liberated from their fixed positions orbit like little moons or the balls of a juggling clown.  Careful, careful.  They auction people weren’t careful.  “They really trashed the house,” texts my sister.  I think I hear an undertone of reprimand.  Hopefully, I imagine it.

From above the Flint River, swifts dip down to sip the water mid-flight.  No lead in their flight or mine.  I walk fast.  The sun is hot; thank heaven for the cool breeze.  Out from under the overpass of I-475 I’m on Lewis Street (one of the poorest streets on the east side).  I cross to the shady side of the road, and suddenly I hear this music.  The building is whitewashed.  No name of a church or a denomination.  Just a sign that reads “Jesus Christ is Lord.”  

I try the door but don’t force it.  I put my ear to the door, trying to make out the lyrics of the rousing gospel sounds, “All men who love God praise the rain, praise the rain, oh let it come down.”  I hear something like this.  The voice booming and the choir echoing in wave after wave of music falling down on me.  I feel like I’m resting against the big voice on the other side of the door.  The big voice that I cannot see.  The big voice that is calling my own voice out of me.  I don’t care what people passing by might think.  Drug addict.  Prostitute.  Someone who is hurting.  Tears run down my face.  Rain rhymes with Pain—the rain of troubles.  But the rain of tears washes away pain.  I notice the purple stains of mulberries on the sidewalk and the sign for Art’s Pub and Grub across the street.  It’s been closed for years.  “Let it rain ai ain!”  Later, when I’m back in my car, I use my SmartPhone to google the lyrics that I think I heard, and all the sounds fall into place.  

“Open the floodgates of Heaven.  Let it rain.  Let it rain.  Open the floodgates of Heaven.  Let it rain.  Let the rain come down.”  The church must have been playing a YouTube video the same one I was watching of Bishop Paul S. Morton, Pastor of Changing a Generation Full Gospel Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.  On the YouTube clip, he sets up the song by asking the congregation to put themselves in the presence of God—to find themselves in the Holy of Holies.  I recognize the Old Testament imagery of the tabernacle in the desert, and I remember that words in the Hebrew Bible are often compared to dew and drops of rain.  “I believe that somebody here tonight just wants Him to open up the windows of Heaven for you.”  Mm hmm.  I’m feeling all of this from sound alone, sound so strong it carries me into the presence of both God and Mom, and she is with Him.  And I am just crying on the other side of a door.  Open the window, Lord!  Mama, can you hear me?  Pray for me?  I love you, Mom.  They see me and know my love as I know theirs. 

When I get back home an hour late, Paul is still at the table going through old family photos.  Where’ve you’ve been?  He asks, and I tell him that I had a very interesting experience. I don’t tell him that a preacher I never saw and an invisible but audible congregation, moving within the space of that white storefront church on Lewis Street, gave me my voice back. 

Thinking back over the past week when I was home, working with the auctioneer to clean out Mom’s house, I realize that I was as stolid as one of her earthenware crocks.  Her house looked devastated without her organizing presence, and I when I was there, I wanted to cry but didn’t.  The couch she slept on for twenty years in the wood stove room was gone when I arrived.  Who took Mom’s bed?  The white bone china of great grandmother’s was all mixed up with Staffordshire face mugs and other knick-knacks, strewn carelessly over the blue carpet that still smells like cat pee even though the last cat was buried out back years ago.  Mom’s beloved things washed up in a wreck.  “Oh Mary Jo, I’ve made a mess of our lives,” were her first words to me after breaking her hip.  No, Mom, it’s just the way life goes.

She’s gone.  Never will she answer the door.  Never will she smoke a cigarette at the table.  Never will I smell the Kools and listen to her fret.  Never will I hear my name pronounced Mare ee Jo.  Never.  I want to scream at someone.  I want to cry for her.  At the cemetery, I moved toward her still unmarked grave and would have thrown myself down on the brown sod if my daughter hadn’t been with me.  Instead, I held myself together.  I did the job of executrix.  I took the fraternal beatings.  Swallowed the tears.  Swallowed the pain.  Stood up and got the job done.  But I felt and still sometimes feel like a frightened child with a world of whirling objects spinning around my head.  I am dizzy as I remember how the corner cupboards spilled out her Christmas Santas and blue and white German Meisen.  Kitchen cabinets gave up her favorite dishes—Poppytrail with the homely farm scenes.  Blanket boxes dropped their linens and embroidered handkerchiefs.  A silver-plated tea service was rejected as were the dozens of brass candlesticks standing mute in the corner of the dining room.  “They don’t sell.”  No one in this generation wants such things.  The cherry drop-leaf table that I worked at for years bid goodbye to the house, to the yard with the pressure of my pencil making words and sentences in its finish.  The furniture, now better called by its old English equivalent, “moveables,” left at the speed of light.  Is this what surviving a cyclone feels like?  “I want to go home, I want to go home.  There’s no place like home.”  That’s Dorothy’s voice.  Where is mine?  At the House of Frankenstein wax museum in Lake George (my daughter’s favorite tourist trap), the scariest exhibit for me is not the ax murderess or the witch burning or even the electric chair.  It’s the black hole.  A tunnel you walk through, trying to keep your balance while a vortex of stars whirls around and around.  “Kat I can’t do it,” I say in a panicked voice.  “Close your eyes, Mom, keep walking, and hold my hand.”  I made it through holding onto my daughter’s words.  God, I hope that Mom held fast to my words as I imagined talking her through the dark and whirling passage of her final hour?

Kat and I stayed up north in a rented cottage on Indian Lake, continuing the family tradition.  Our cottage is just down the road from where my father died and where my mother stayed for years.  Mom kept us returning to the same lake where we’d been traumatized by finding Pop’s dead body.  Calling and crying.  Pairs of loons winter separately and find each other every summer at the same northern body of water.  Mom probably didn’t imagine her kids as loons, but I think she did hope that hurts would be healed if we just kept coming back.  She tried valiantly to keep us connected to our lost father through immersion in the spirit of the lake.  It did and didn’t work.  Ritual cannot substitute for sharing feelings, and words are all we humans have.

 After one hectic day down at Mom’s house in Queensbury (50 miles south of the cottage), when we return Home to our cottage at dusk, I grab a paddle at the “office” and run down the hill to the lake.  I’m going for a “ride” in a kayak as Mom loved to do.  I revert to present tense because I need to relive the experience.  I paddle to the middle of the lake and let go.  I drift.  I can see the house on the hill (Camp Mary) where Pop died.  I see the mountains growing black in the fading light.  The sun is bright in my eyes.  I drift, and details of my parents’ bodies and lives come back to me.  My father’s printed boxer shorts, the way he’d meticulously fold toilet paper on his thigh before wiping, the smell of his aftershave.  My mother rubbing Vaseline on the infected wound on her leg, her arthritic hands, her love of weeding and going out to the wood pile, the orange fires she made in her wood stove from late autumn through cold springs.  Random details.  The rocking of the boat is lulling.  I lay back and feel I am leaning on their recovered lives the way I’d lean into Mom’s chest when I’d ride on her lap as a child home from Indian Lake, watching the lights on the dashboard, watching my father’s head drop and hearing Mom’s voice wake him, “Joe!”  When Mom kayaked, she stayed close to shore, afraid of deep water.  I’m not afraid.  I go out deep.  When I was a little girl at the Jersey shore, I’d beg my father to “carry me out deep” where I’d get to jump off his shoulders into green surging waves of ocean, sure that he would catch me.  I see now what a gift that was.  Carry me out deep!  Open the floodgates of Heaven!  Let it rain!  Let it rain!  Such details like Mom’s collectibles liberated for some new combinations in the lives of their children fly around and around in my mind.

I paddle back.  My daughter is waiting to fish.  We fish and catch two large and feisty small-mouth bass, which we admire and release.  Up the hill and into the cabin, I settle into the flannel nightgown, compliments of Mom’s stockpile.  I grabbed the last down comforter, and I AM comforted that somehow she is still provisioning the vacation that meant so much to her.  I boil water and pour it over a tea bag, stirring sugar into the teacup with a delicate sterling silver teaspoon—Lancaster Rose.  She collected a set for each daughter to give us for our weddings.  I know for sure that I will not let Mom’s things sit on shelves or be mere decorative flourishes in my life.  They are free now to be used, to inspire, to sing in their own way about her grace, her love, her benisons.   

Back in Flint, when I think of the vacation and try to picture my cabin, I instinctively go to hers.  Her big tree, her deck, her gas stove, her table.  It takes a real effort to remember the interior configuration of my own cottage, hard to focus on just my view.  And tonight, that feels okay.  It tells me that I remain in her orbit, that she continues to organize and animate the beings she created.  We had one stormy night at the lake this year when it rained, really rained.  And the floodgates of Heaven opened.  (Perhaps Mom opened a window.)  And in the morning, the mountains exhaled their visible breath.  My mother’s last word, the barely audible sound of breath leaving her lungs, is now part of the world-breath that hovers over the trees, hovers over the surface of the waters, and I know that one day, at an hour I cannot predict, my last exhale will merge with it, too.  Until then, the small voice in my own heart, responding to her last “word,” says:  let us love the things of this world and one another, let us dizzy ourselves with the fullness of it all.  I felt my own soul rise up at the sound of birds and Mom running water to fill the coffee percolator.  Wrapped in her mantle, I go outside to breathe through every pore a new day after rain.

Relic

The destination of my pilgrimage had shifted from Lindisfarne to the family home, a blue cape cod on Sylvan Avenue—the first street in what became a massive suburban development in Queensbury that laid waste to woods in its wake.  “She had a hard life,” said a woman I met once on a plane.  I must have told her about Mom’s hip break and gone on to review her life from the time she was widowed at age 50.  She never remarried.  Never even dated.  “How could I?” was always her comeback.  She took care of her parents as they aged and died.  Her children left physically and some left emotionally, too.  Her response:  fill the house, every inch, pack it tight (Mom was a genius at packing), finding little spaces for everything she couldn’t let go of, things precious and potentially necessary to someone someday.  In her house, nothing was lost; and while she lived, no one was permitted to order the chaos.  “I know where everything is,” she’d say, even when she really didn’t.  For years we’d been moving piles of newspapers and magazines off the kitchen chairs so there would be room for guests on feast days.  “Just put it down by the washer.”  “If not there, then, there’s room in the bathtub upstairs.”  We even used a junk car, the 77 Olds for storage, as well as our greenhouse that was rotting in the back yard by the fence.  We, her children, always obeyed.  For years we carried piles of stuff round and round, looking for places to put it.  We had been immobilized artifacts and ephemera--history--and spoke of the furniture and collectibles as if they were sacred.  Perhaps that is why neither of my siblings who lived near Mom had made any effort to clean the house in the eighteen months between her fall and her eventual death.  “It” was too “overwhelming.”  Yes.  They have jobs and lives.  Yes.  But there was more to it:  the stuff Mom collected was imbued with sacredness.  How could she have trusted me with the job of handling the “tangibles,” disbursing them, unsettling all that was sacred in what was to some eyes is an antique store and to others is a hoarder house?  When I arrived and began the work, sure enough, every piece had a talisman-like power to lead my mind back through the years to gone worlds and once dear places:  the northern mountains, the southern pine barrens and across the Atlantic.  There was garnet from the North Creek mines, hunks of slag that looked like meteorites from Batsto, jars of shells and grains of beach sand, a paper mache coal mine with a balsam wood elevator, grade school stories corrected by her, machines to bunch asparagus, railroad lanterns, pictures of the Yorkshire Dales and ruined abbeys, and even her high school scrap book.  Nothing lost but me.

On the drive from Michigan, I was reading about the cult of relics in medieval Europe, and, like any pilgrim, I felt I was going to Mom’s house (her shrine) to be in the presence of an invisible person.  Relics that turned up were thought to do so by the grace of God and were understood to be messages to the pilgrim from the beyond.

First day of the cellar clean-out, the dump truck arrived and up came the boxes full of children’s clothes.  I recognized each outfit, and it was hard to let them go.  But the dump truck was there to be filled.  College books.  Luggage smelling of mildew.  College books.  Buddhism.  The Turko-Grecian War.  Hurry, hurry, time is money.  “Throw it,” “You can’t keep that,” “They are mildewed.”  “No baby clothes.”  Pressure to look fast and discard.  A box came up with another box on top.  It was black with swirls of color.  Thin enough to have held stockings, lingerie, sets of pocket hankies.  Too pretty not to open.  I stopped long enough to read the fine print:  “Barton’s.”  It was a chocolate box, and when I opened it, I was stunned.  

There was a faded old photograph that captured, even with a quick look, joy beneath gray layers of time.  The reflection of the flash was a bright spot still shining in the window behind the kitchen table.  A family group sat around a table sharing a watermelon.  The women held up their pieces.  The table was covered with an oilcloth.  I flipped it over, and, miracle of miracles, the people were named!  There was Uncle Frank (my mother’s favorite).  He is visibly happy.  I can see the ring on his left finger and his striped trousers or maybe that’s the long dress worn by Cornelia Grawe (who must be cousin Mildred’s mother).  Frank wears a suit and tie, and the women are wearing the high collared blouses of the late nineteenth century.  Their dark hair is swept back and pinned up.  My great grandmother, Kate Wescoat, is sixth from the left.  She is young—no babies yet.  I know she married Philip Wescoat in 1900, and so the photo must have been taken around the turn of the century.  The photo speaks to me of the joy of living in an extended family.  The pleasure of sitting down together for a simple meal—just a watermelon.  Even when I was a kid, my Jersey relatives had such meals.  If we visited Grandmother Walker (born a Wescoat) in the early summer, we’d have meals of strawberry shortcake.  In their world, strawberry shortcake was not dessert.  Ruth Wescoat made big casseroles of fluffy biscuit, and the red red juices of strawberries layered with whipped cream filled us up.  Whatever fruit was in season was always the main dish. 

I knew instantly that this photo would be my best find, my relic, and I found it on the first day of a week-long clean-out.  I felt sure it was a message from my mother (historian and saint).  Who else could have nudged me or turned my attention to that chocolate box that contained a photo about the real sweets available in this world?  I posted it to Facebook with the wish that my Mama had rejoined her family group at such a table in the world we mortals cannot see. 

But the real message is for the living.  Four of us, four children, grew up in Mom’s crowded house, and, despite the fact that she bought things in triplicate, there is a sick feeling of competition, as if there is not enough to go around.  It’s possible that Mom was too much the historian, too much the teacher, leaving each child with needs for attention and affirmation that went unsatisfied.  Four rooms.  Two girls (13 months apart) had to share a room for there to be enough space; and one now resents that, resents that she wasn’t treated as a separate individual.  As we matured, each adult child wanted Mom for themselves, claimed her, sought to be her favorite.  Even though I shared the watermelon photo, Jennifer had to see the original and clearly wants to possess it for herself.  Where does this capitalism of the heart come from?  What experiences feed into a belief that the essences of life can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on love, stage a hostile takeover of history or happiness?  It’s based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there’s not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away.

Antique Salt Water Taffy Box / Inside was Mom's hair

It's as if she just stepped off the beach or climbed down from a tractor after plowing a field

Medieval saints were often exhumed and some found to be incorrupt.  Their books, shoes, jewelry, and even their bodies were taken as relics.  Days after the clean-out I dreamed of objects unearthed, objects appearing.  Shirley Temple in her original box.  Her white dress is stiff with age and dust, and her eyes rolled back are yellowed.  Open an ancient looking Fralinger salt water taffy box to find my mother’s honey-colored pigtails still soft and bright.  Open the box.  Open the box.  What would my mother look like now?  In my dream, I opened a box to find her body changed:  skin like brown-black leather and fingers like sticks.  And even in the dream, my siblings and I quarreled over her mummified remains.

But the relic photo has an urgent message from the rural extended family to the suburban children of a diasporic farm girl.  Family should not be taken for granted.  Place and position mean nothing.  Family exists in its extensions.  “This is my body.”  “It is good. It is sweet.  Take and eat.”  My sister, Jennifer, rightly noted that the people in the photo arrange themselves in a Last Supper kind of pose.  But I prefer to see the ritual carving of a watermelon world as Mom’s wish for us to share and enjoy and come together.  If we grab and hoard, then the spirit of Nesco, will be truly lost as this photo almost was.  There is something for everyone in Mom’s house—a house that represents her mind and spirit if not her body exactly.  “Do this in remembrance of me.”