How To Give Back
Thoughts on expressing gratitude
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How To Give Back
Can't Stand the Cold
My family’s earliest memories were born in hell. The hell of a burning steamship on a November-cold lake. A hell where too few lifeboats filled too quickly, where families decided in a sleep-groggy instant which of them should stay behind, where prying the clinging fingers of the young mother from the side of the over-filled lifeboat and watching her sink in the icy water seemed like the right thing to do.
Their journey from Holland had ended on two lifeboats, five miles from shore in the middle of the night. Just two lifeboats, with hundreds left behind, and the ones who didn’t burn in the rigging froze to death in the black water, close enough to see the fires lit for them on the beach.
What was left of them settled far enough from the water so they could just see it over the tops of the trees from the windows of the upstairs bedrooms, close enough so they could never quite shake the cold of it. As if in the time it took to row those five miles, listening to their flesh burning and screaming, the ice had worked its way under their skin, a permanent layer of cold, a prickly mutation handed down.
We lived there, in an ark of a house set firmly on a hill. Somehow it seemed so right that whoever came to the farm had to climb that hill, the one where every winter more than one car didn’t make it, and had to be towed up the driveway with the tractor. We secretly relished the excitement, relished how hard it sometimes was to be where we were.
We had walled ourselves up in our anguish, until it felt special. As if through our suffering we had saved ourselves. And we had. We had saved ourselves from ordinariness and messiness, from dirt and ugliness. From everything but the cold. Cold that crunches under the skin when we touch it. Cold that forgets that Jesus ate with people who were dirty and ugly and not special, that He suffered, that His anguish is special enough. Cold that doesn’t want to give up our hell for His.
The Truth of Scruffy
Scruffy lives in a box on a shelf in a closet. He was supposed to live out his days in a display box on the wall, but I never found just the right case for him. Or maybe it was that I couldn't imagine putting him in a place where there would be no air, the fear of suffocating him stronger than the fear of dirt and bugs. Like the time when he and my son were three, and while Scruffy turned in the washer, my son and I sat on the floor of the laundry room and sobbed.
He was the things we wanted to be true, captured in stuffing. It was Scruffy who got the time outs in those days. It was Scruffy who started the fights. It was Scruffy who didn't like it when Mom went away on an airplane. He was the other child in a house with only one. We had breathed imaginary life into a stuffed companion, because it gave us delight, and it entertained our son.
I had had my Lucky, when I was a girl, and a handful of other stuffed animals, to entertain me, dancing across the bed when we should have been asleep, my sister and me. And outside the branches of the pine trees, blowing in the wind, snapped together against the night sky like the jaws of dark green alligators. A green that was not just cold and dark and mysterious, but a lonely green, even though I would never have used that word for it then. Then it was just scary, and a little wild. Inside, our menagerie twirled and cavorted in stuffing happiness, as if their very seams contained the secrets of the world.
My heart remembers the Scruffy years with a sweet, longing ache. And maybe it isn't the longing for the thing that had been, but the longing for the thing that had never been, that gives us so much pain. Our longing for the Truth of Scruffy.
He was the things we wanted to be true, captured in stuffing. It was Scruffy who got the time outs in those days. It was Scruffy who started the fights. It was Scruffy who didn't like it when Mom went away on an airplane. He was the other child in a house with only one. We had breathed imaginary life into a stuffed companion, because it gave us delight, and it entertained our son.
I had had my Lucky, when I was a girl, and a handful of other stuffed animals, to entertain me, dancing across the bed when we should have been asleep, my sister and me. And outside the branches of the pine trees, blowing in the wind, snapped together against the night sky like the jaws of dark green alligators. A green that was not just cold and dark and mysterious, but a lonely green, even though I would never have used that word for it then. Then it was just scary, and a little wild. Inside, our menagerie twirled and cavorted in stuffing happiness, as if their very seams contained the secrets of the world.
My heart remembers the Scruffy years with a sweet, longing ache. And maybe it isn't the longing for the thing that had been, but the longing for the thing that had never been, that gives us so much pain. Our longing for the Truth of Scruffy.
Fear Not, I Will Pilot Thee
My
father used to sing in church. I forget that, sometimes, all these
years later. In a men's quartet, that sang so often that we called
them “The Quartet,” and we all knew who she meant when my mother
said The
Quartet was coming over after church on Sunday night. So long ago
that I forget exactly when he stopped, when he had the operation that
took his singing voice away.
My uncle must have sung in that church too. The uncle I never met, the one who left for the war, left his sickly parents and his youngest brother, left the chores and the cows and the machines to be fixed through the winter.
He fixed planes instead. Flying “the Hump.” Flying through mountain peaks too high for their planes, looking down to watch the tops of trees, their green limbs the only beacon through the fog, spelling the pilot when he got tired, or riding in the back with the supplies. Fixing things. “When we are flying blind through the mountains,” he wrote, “I'm singing that song, 'Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me.'”
He died first that year, in the spring, crash landing on one of the supply runs. His mother died in the fall. His father three weeks later, as easily as if he had seen her pulling out of the yard on her way to town, and he had run to jump in the car before she left.
And for my father, there was nothing to do for it, but do the chores, and get up every morning to milk the cows, and keep the machines running through that winter that must have seemed like the coldest that had been for a long time, when looking down at what your hands were doing was the easiest thing to do, like looking down at where you had been on a winding mountain road, because everything ahead is just steeper and higher.
What is courage, but doing the task in front of you. Living the day God gives you. Watching your child walk out the door every morning. Riding in the back seat of a car on its way up the mountain. Singing.
My uncle must have sung in that church too. The uncle I never met, the one who left for the war, left his sickly parents and his youngest brother, left the chores and the cows and the machines to be fixed through the winter.
He fixed planes instead. Flying “the Hump.” Flying through mountain peaks too high for their planes, looking down to watch the tops of trees, their green limbs the only beacon through the fog, spelling the pilot when he got tired, or riding in the back with the supplies. Fixing things. “When we are flying blind through the mountains,” he wrote, “I'm singing that song, 'Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me.'”
He died first that year, in the spring, crash landing on one of the supply runs. His mother died in the fall. His father three weeks later, as easily as if he had seen her pulling out of the yard on her way to town, and he had run to jump in the car before she left.
And for my father, there was nothing to do for it, but do the chores, and get up every morning to milk the cows, and keep the machines running through that winter that must have seemed like the coldest that had been for a long time, when looking down at what your hands were doing was the easiest thing to do, like looking down at where you had been on a winding mountain road, because everything ahead is just steeper and higher.
What is courage, but doing the task in front of you. Living the day God gives you. Watching your child walk out the door every morning. Riding in the back seat of a car on its way up the mountain. Singing.
When the arms of mothers aren't enough
What I remember most about Katherine was her arms. Warm arms, substantial arms, the kind of arms that strain against the sleeves of a cotton blouse when they hug. Arms that comfort. The arms of God are mothers' arms.
She came to us to pray, to us, the fourth Sunday of the month after second service prayer team, waiting at the front of the sanctuary for the lost jobs, the wayward daughters, the upcoming surgeries, the struggles with sinful thoughts, coming to us for assurance.
She came to us for hope. I touched her arm and prayed, startled when I touched her, startled that I found myself in her soul, for a moment, just long enough, startled by the blackness inside, so dark I could hardly stand up in it. We prayed, each one of us, and then I let her go, thinking my arms had caught her.
Sometimes arms are broken. Like the summer my mother had a boil on her arm, the left one, the side I sat next to at the table when I was five, when my head was just tall enough to lean over, after dessert, and rest against the thickest part of her arm, the softest part, the part where the flesh spreads out beneath the shoulder bone.
And later that week Katherine took her life, with her daughters' jump rope, in her basement, slung over some beam, I suppose. Did she search through a pile of castoff toys to find it? Did she step on the lid of the toy box?
Sometimes we just fail.
Could I have pulled her out of that? Should my arms have been enough? Only the arms of God could have snatched her up from that. And they did.
She came to us to pray, to us, the fourth Sunday of the month after second service prayer team, waiting at the front of the sanctuary for the lost jobs, the wayward daughters, the upcoming surgeries, the struggles with sinful thoughts, coming to us for assurance.
She came to us for hope. I touched her arm and prayed, startled when I touched her, startled that I found myself in her soul, for a moment, just long enough, startled by the blackness inside, so dark I could hardly stand up in it. We prayed, each one of us, and then I let her go, thinking my arms had caught her.
Sometimes arms are broken. Like the summer my mother had a boil on her arm, the left one, the side I sat next to at the table when I was five, when my head was just tall enough to lean over, after dessert, and rest against the thickest part of her arm, the softest part, the part where the flesh spreads out beneath the shoulder bone.
And later that week Katherine took her life, with her daughters' jump rope, in her basement, slung over some beam, I suppose. Did she search through a pile of castoff toys to find it? Did she step on the lid of the toy box?
Sometimes we just fail.
Could I have pulled her out of that? Should my arms have been enough? Only the arms of God could have snatched her up from that. And they did.
The Deadest of Ideas
When bad ideas die, do they go to heaven? What about the good ones? What about the ones that started with so much promise and then seem to slowly pull themselves in from the edges and wither?
The first person I ever knew who died was Gus Ray. It was a name that always sounded smoky and gritty to me, or maybe that's just how I remembered it later. Gus Ray. The boy who tried to kiss me on the playground in kindergarten. All I can remember is an outline of a round face, more gray now in my memory than it must have been alive, as if his very skin knew the way it would end. The boy who lived on the rented farm, who too often left us waiting on the kindergarten bus while he finished his lunch or found his shoe, and his mother, with her husky voice, would stand at the door of the bus and tell the driver, too loudly, what Gus was doing.
My mother told me while she was pulling my dress over my head, getting me ready for school. We wore dresses every day to school, even on winter days like that one, when we climbed the snow drifts on the playground and dug cave rooms in the dirty piles the plows had made. We wore pants underneath our dresses, that we took off after recess and hung up on hooks outside our classroom, never really drying before it was time to wear them home.
There had been a fire, my mother said, overnight at the rented farmhouse, and Gus and all of his brothers and sisters had died. And her face tilted at me like a question, like there was something she wanted me to say or do, but I didn't know what, didn't know what would be right, what would shed the idea of him away from me.
And then it was over, and the place where the farmhouse had been slowly grew over, until I could barely see the outline of the walls from the windows of the bus, and I don't remember ever wondering where his parents had gone, or thinking it at all odd that two adults had come out of that house, and six children had not.
Where is God in our bad ideas? The ones that started good? The ones we try to shed like lost children or playground mishaps? The dead ones? Is He bound by our ideas? By what we call success?
How dead was the idea of being us? Of wearing our dust, and grit, and failures like some never-shedding, eternally unshruggable skin? Just so we could go home.
The first person I ever knew who died was Gus Ray. It was a name that always sounded smoky and gritty to me, or maybe that's just how I remembered it later. Gus Ray. The boy who tried to kiss me on the playground in kindergarten. All I can remember is an outline of a round face, more gray now in my memory than it must have been alive, as if his very skin knew the way it would end. The boy who lived on the rented farm, who too often left us waiting on the kindergarten bus while he finished his lunch or found his shoe, and his mother, with her husky voice, would stand at the door of the bus and tell the driver, too loudly, what Gus was doing.
My mother told me while she was pulling my dress over my head, getting me ready for school. We wore dresses every day to school, even on winter days like that one, when we climbed the snow drifts on the playground and dug cave rooms in the dirty piles the plows had made. We wore pants underneath our dresses, that we took off after recess and hung up on hooks outside our classroom, never really drying before it was time to wear them home.
There had been a fire, my mother said, overnight at the rented farmhouse, and Gus and all of his brothers and sisters had died. And her face tilted at me like a question, like there was something she wanted me to say or do, but I didn't know what, didn't know what would be right, what would shed the idea of him away from me.
And then it was over, and the place where the farmhouse had been slowly grew over, until I could barely see the outline of the walls from the windows of the bus, and I don't remember ever wondering where his parents had gone, or thinking it at all odd that two adults had come out of that house, and six children had not.
Where is God in our bad ideas? The ones that started good? The ones we try to shed like lost children or playground mishaps? The dead ones? Is He bound by our ideas? By what we call success?
How dead was the idea of being us? Of wearing our dust, and grit, and failures like some never-shedding, eternally unshruggable skin? Just so we could go home.
The Secret Language of Birds
Music was always the most absolute of things to me. Notes as true as concrete, each one its own picture, like something to be counted on, immovable.
Even in first grade, I could tell when the music teacher transposed the music in our songbook a whole step higher, and I wondered how anyone could make a mistake like that, playing the wrong notes, not the ones written on my page, and I quietly called her stupid, secretly angry that she was doing it wrong, and secretly pleased that it was I who had discovered her error.
Perfect pitch they call it. And it wasn't until some time in high school that I learned it was different. Who knew that everyone didn't hear that way, didn't pick perfect tones out of thin air on demand?
My father, when he could still hear them, could tell each kind of bird by its song. Not just a few. Hundreds of them. He kept a list of any he had ever heard. And when he sat at the supper table, one day around first or second grade, and told his parents and five older brothers and sisters they were listening to a white-throated sparrow, they laughed, as if that secret were far too great for their small brother.
Does he ever remember not knowing that secret language of birds, I wonder? They say that perfect pitch is inherited. I once tried to test my father's pitch to see if that were true, but he had no language for the notes I played, and he stood at the piano and smiled at my trying, like I had once seen him smile at a city person in the barn reaching for an empty pail of milk, until I gave up. He heard in tones that only made sense to God and him.
I imagine it is as if each dead stalk of weed at the edge of the field, each fence post, each decaying pile of brush could hold a private sanctuary, love poured out. and even when the snow covers the uneven clumps of plowed field, the voices of the birds must pull what's good and light from the ground and from behind the trees, until even the air is thick enough with it to wrap around you. Alone in the fields, in the woods, what good could that be to anyone else but him?
And me, with a voice so thin and small, I could hardly produce a tone that anyone would recognize, so small that at my conservatory audition the professor looked up from her notes to see if I was opening my mouth, as I stood behind the piano lost in the uselessness of hearing a perfect tone in my head, so disconnected from the one that comes out of my throat. What good was a perfect tone to a piano player? Except wrapped in the center of that perfect tone, when everything is right, it seems I could hear the heart of God.
What had God poured out, like wasted perfume, on a vessel for whom it seemingly has no use? Except to Him. The secret language of birds. Who else would spend such beauty, just for the joy of sharing it? Love, poured out, wasted for the pleasure of loving us, utterly useless, except to prove the genuineness of it. A language we will know, even when our ears have grown past the age of hearing, wrapping us in the heart of God.
Even in first grade, I could tell when the music teacher transposed the music in our songbook a whole step higher, and I wondered how anyone could make a mistake like that, playing the wrong notes, not the ones written on my page, and I quietly called her stupid, secretly angry that she was doing it wrong, and secretly pleased that it was I who had discovered her error.
Perfect pitch they call it. And it wasn't until some time in high school that I learned it was different. Who knew that everyone didn't hear that way, didn't pick perfect tones out of thin air on demand?
My father, when he could still hear them, could tell each kind of bird by its song. Not just a few. Hundreds of them. He kept a list of any he had ever heard. And when he sat at the supper table, one day around first or second grade, and told his parents and five older brothers and sisters they were listening to a white-throated sparrow, they laughed, as if that secret were far too great for their small brother.
Does he ever remember not knowing that secret language of birds, I wonder? They say that perfect pitch is inherited. I once tried to test my father's pitch to see if that were true, but he had no language for the notes I played, and he stood at the piano and smiled at my trying, like I had once seen him smile at a city person in the barn reaching for an empty pail of milk, until I gave up. He heard in tones that only made sense to God and him.
I imagine it is as if each dead stalk of weed at the edge of the field, each fence post, each decaying pile of brush could hold a private sanctuary, love poured out. and even when the snow covers the uneven clumps of plowed field, the voices of the birds must pull what's good and light from the ground and from behind the trees, until even the air is thick enough with it to wrap around you. Alone in the fields, in the woods, what good could that be to anyone else but him?
And me, with a voice so thin and small, I could hardly produce a tone that anyone would recognize, so small that at my conservatory audition the professor looked up from her notes to see if I was opening my mouth, as I stood behind the piano lost in the uselessness of hearing a perfect tone in my head, so disconnected from the one that comes out of my throat. What good was a perfect tone to a piano player? Except wrapped in the center of that perfect tone, when everything is right, it seems I could hear the heart of God.
What had God poured out, like wasted perfume, on a vessel for whom it seemingly has no use? Except to Him. The secret language of birds. Who else would spend such beauty, just for the joy of sharing it? Love, poured out, wasted for the pleasure of loving us, utterly useless, except to prove the genuineness of it. A language we will know, even when our ears have grown past the age of hearing, wrapping us in the heart of God.
Anticipating Pie
Someone asked me to tell the pie story the other day. It's a story that makes people laugh. Not like the stories my husband tells, of strange foods and strange countries, of scaling and conquering, of firsts and bests and physical feats. Pie isn't like that. Pie is comfortable. Pie is safe.
It was the thing my older sister chose to make, for the first time, when my mother was in the hospital and she was in charge of the cooking. Never mind that she misread the recipe, creating a hopeless, fragile circle of dough, too frail to move from the table to the pie plate without breaking. We stood around the kitchen table, offering ways to make it right, each suggestion sillier than the last, until it became one of those stories we tell each other, our arsenal of things we share.
Never mind it was my sister, who couldn't have been older than seventh or eighth grade, cooking for the eight of us plus two hired hands. Never mind we secretly despaired at the missed opportunity for pie. Never mind anything dark beyond our glowing circle, our kitchen, our table, our pie. It's the memory of the silliness that sticks to us, like the crust had stuck to the table, a scene that always looks a bit floury and white and dry around the edges in my mind.
And by now, every year the Thanksgiving pie is perfect, and we each make two or three of them, as if making up somehow for that memory. I was the one who first counted them, some small attempt at fairness, I suppose, no more or no less for each one at the gathering. And once they were counted there was no going back. Each one of us should eat our quota.
And we eat. Three, four, even five pieces each some years. We put our names on the family web site to commemorate our feat, those of us who dare it. We tell our pie story to our friends.
We are remarkable at unremarkable things. We have made our story about the pie. As if the other stories we might live were unrealistic expectations, or despair, or would take us beyond the kitchen window, the one that always looked as if the enormity of darkness beyond might push itself in on us.
What if, instead of anticipating pie, we were unremarkable at remarkable things?
It was the thing my older sister chose to make, for the first time, when my mother was in the hospital and she was in charge of the cooking. Never mind that she misread the recipe, creating a hopeless, fragile circle of dough, too frail to move from the table to the pie plate without breaking. We stood around the kitchen table, offering ways to make it right, each suggestion sillier than the last, until it became one of those stories we tell each other, our arsenal of things we share.
Never mind it was my sister, who couldn't have been older than seventh or eighth grade, cooking for the eight of us plus two hired hands. Never mind we secretly despaired at the missed opportunity for pie. Never mind anything dark beyond our glowing circle, our kitchen, our table, our pie. It's the memory of the silliness that sticks to us, like the crust had stuck to the table, a scene that always looks a bit floury and white and dry around the edges in my mind.
And by now, every year the Thanksgiving pie is perfect, and we each make two or three of them, as if making up somehow for that memory. I was the one who first counted them, some small attempt at fairness, I suppose, no more or no less for each one at the gathering. And once they were counted there was no going back. Each one of us should eat our quota.
And we eat. Three, four, even five pieces each some years. We put our names on the family web site to commemorate our feat, those of us who dare it. We tell our pie story to our friends.
We are remarkable at unremarkable things. We have made our story about the pie. As if the other stories we might live were unrealistic expectations, or despair, or would take us beyond the kitchen window, the one that always looked as if the enormity of darkness beyond might push itself in on us.
What if, instead of anticipating pie, we were unremarkable at remarkable things?
The Sound of Listening
There's a funny thing about Dutch people. We don't talk when we eat. Something I didn't know until I was gone from home and some other Dutch person named it, and then I knew it had been true, with five older siblings and two hired hands at every meal, there had only been quiet at our table while we ate.
It was I, they tell me, who filled the silence at the table. Until about the time I went to first grade, and then, perhaps it was the volume of the world that stunned me into silence. So much to listen to. And then I, too, learned the sound of it.
I learned my father's voice, achingly sweet, like the sound of a handful of marbles held tightly in your hand and crushed together, the kind of sound that makes my throat hurt with the richness trapped inside of it, like the ribbons of color suspended inside those marbles. I've been trying all of my life to describe my father's voice, and all of the years I have to listen will not be enough to get it right.
It was the sound that started every meal, the sound of my father's voice praying. And then the sound of listening while we ate. What did it sound like? Like a gift. Like warm mashed potatoes and gravy, and dessert at every meal. Like my mother's white cotton blouses and the smell of sheets hung on the line. Like something to sink into.
And at the end of the meal we took turns reading the devotional and Bible verses in the book we picked up every month from the table in the back of church. Even I took my turn as soon as I could read and it was the last thing we heard before we got up and the boys went out to the barn where they whistled along with the radio while they milked the cows and the girls chattered silly things while we washed and dried the dishes.
This quiet, this funny gift we learned, this offering, left many things unsaid. Perhaps a few of the good things, but mostly just the bad. And we measured every sound, like we measured the humor of my father's jokes by the length of time he smiled before he began to tell them, careful because we knew how important every word could be when most of what we say is silent.
It is the center, the quiet home, a gift I can give, and the place to hear the voice of God, this sound of listening, this peace. And I will spend all of the years of listening I have to get it right.
It was I, they tell me, who filled the silence at the table. Until about the time I went to first grade, and then, perhaps it was the volume of the world that stunned me into silence. So much to listen to. And then I, too, learned the sound of it.
I learned my father's voice, achingly sweet, like the sound of a handful of marbles held tightly in your hand and crushed together, the kind of sound that makes my throat hurt with the richness trapped inside of it, like the ribbons of color suspended inside those marbles. I've been trying all of my life to describe my father's voice, and all of the years I have to listen will not be enough to get it right.
It was the sound that started every meal, the sound of my father's voice praying. And then the sound of listening while we ate. What did it sound like? Like a gift. Like warm mashed potatoes and gravy, and dessert at every meal. Like my mother's white cotton blouses and the smell of sheets hung on the line. Like something to sink into.
And at the end of the meal we took turns reading the devotional and Bible verses in the book we picked up every month from the table in the back of church. Even I took my turn as soon as I could read and it was the last thing we heard before we got up and the boys went out to the barn where they whistled along with the radio while they milked the cows and the girls chattered silly things while we washed and dried the dishes.
This quiet, this funny gift we learned, this offering, left many things unsaid. Perhaps a few of the good things, but mostly just the bad. And we measured every sound, like we measured the humor of my father's jokes by the length of time he smiled before he began to tell them, careful because we knew how important every word could be when most of what we say is silent.
It is the center, the quiet home, a gift I can give, and the place to hear the voice of God, this sound of listening, this peace. And I will spend all of the years of listening I have to get it right.
Like Trees Walking
By the end of the summer the trees on the bluff by our house will be gone. Not all of them, just the ones at the edge, at the very top, where the ground has started to slip away beneath, and the balance has begun to shift in favor of the fall, and not the ground beneath, and the next big rain could pull them down, dragging too much of our backyards with them. The neighbors tell of the flood of '92, and how they woke up early that Saturday morning and watched their trees slide down the hill. Most likely the end of summer is only thinking wishfully, and instead the first warm weekend will bring the chain saws out.
My mother used to say that my father would sooner lose an arm as lose a tree. When I was five the interstate came through our farm, cutting fields into odd pieces stranded on either side, cutting through the crick and the ravine, through the trees. The Black Walnut trees. The stand I imagine my father had walked from the time he tagged along with his older brothers. You know them, doing that. Like you know your hands. You know the pattern of roots sinking into the ground, which ones are good for leaning against, the smell of their leaves, the path worn between them, how far you need to stretch your head back to see the tops of them, so far your mouth hangs open just a little bit. Who would imagine something like that could ever go away?
And the men from the highway sat at our kitchen table, day after day, until it was done. Funny that I can't remember my father saying a word in all those meetings. I only remember an enormous silence, a stillness that froze his face, and his arms by his sides, and made me stop at the doorway, unable to break through the thickness of it to reach him. That summer the dust from the construction blew in from the east and settled on the tables and windows and the wash hanging on the clothesline.
The next summer we tried, once or twice, to walk through the culvert they built for the crick to run through, but it was long, and wet, not anything like walking under the trees, and my father had to carry me through the deepest part of the water. So we unlearned the boundaries of the woods we had known, and learned new ones. Some time after the last of the big equipment was gone and the first of the cars came, my father climbed the fence and planted trees, enough that years later, driving through, someone looking out the window might wonder what was different about that section of the road. It was only the dog that couldn't stop protecting the boundaries of his territory, slipping through the gaps in the fences on his nightly rounds, until he was hit by a car, and the thing that had been simply ugly became an unimaginable, eternal wound.
Like trees walking, the things we cannot imagine losing march out of our lives. Which is better, learning new trees, or haunting the old ones? And when we make the wrong choice, doesn't our Father carry us anyway? How tenderly my father must have lifted his dog from the side of the road and brought him home.
My mother used to say that my father would sooner lose an arm as lose a tree. When I was five the interstate came through our farm, cutting fields into odd pieces stranded on either side, cutting through the crick and the ravine, through the trees. The Black Walnut trees. The stand I imagine my father had walked from the time he tagged along with his older brothers. You know them, doing that. Like you know your hands. You know the pattern of roots sinking into the ground, which ones are good for leaning against, the smell of their leaves, the path worn between them, how far you need to stretch your head back to see the tops of them, so far your mouth hangs open just a little bit. Who would imagine something like that could ever go away?
And the men from the highway sat at our kitchen table, day after day, until it was done. Funny that I can't remember my father saying a word in all those meetings. I only remember an enormous silence, a stillness that froze his face, and his arms by his sides, and made me stop at the doorway, unable to break through the thickness of it to reach him. That summer the dust from the construction blew in from the east and settled on the tables and windows and the wash hanging on the clothesline.
The next summer we tried, once or twice, to walk through the culvert they built for the crick to run through, but it was long, and wet, not anything like walking under the trees, and my father had to carry me through the deepest part of the water. So we unlearned the boundaries of the woods we had known, and learned new ones. Some time after the last of the big equipment was gone and the first of the cars came, my father climbed the fence and planted trees, enough that years later, driving through, someone looking out the window might wonder what was different about that section of the road. It was only the dog that couldn't stop protecting the boundaries of his territory, slipping through the gaps in the fences on his nightly rounds, until he was hit by a car, and the thing that had been simply ugly became an unimaginable, eternal wound.
Like trees walking, the things we cannot imagine losing march out of our lives. Which is better, learning new trees, or haunting the old ones? And when we make the wrong choice, doesn't our Father carry us anyway? How tenderly my father must have lifted his dog from the side of the road and brought him home.
Think Small
My father thought of small things. He thought of grains of oats. Every year, some time before it was fully spring, he kept a handful of oats wrapped in a wet paper towel in a glass jar, on top of the china cabinet in the dining room. Maybe it was a nice warm place to keep them. And I would watch him, after lunch, reach for that jar and unroll the paper towel and see. He showed me the sprouts growing their way into the folds of the towel, soon to fill up the jar, like pale green promises of a summer of fullness.
Who knows why I thought of playing in the back of the truck parked in the big shed across from the barn, on that summer evening? There had been so many times when my sister and I, too short to see over the side, had boosted ourselves over the open tailgate. So I reached up and pulled the latch.
The oats were part of what we fed the cows. Not taking as much time and worry as the alfalfa, or so it seemed, but there they were, filling the bed of the truck. And I pushed back as hard as I could. But two trails of them dropped to the cement in little piles, leaking out of the not-quite-closed gaps on either side of the tailgate.
I could have run away, and let them spill on the cement floor, the floor that smelled of cold and grease, even in the summer evening. It would have been after supper when my father and the hired hands were busy in the barn with the evening milking, the whine of the milking machines and the radio insulating them from everything outside. And there I was alone, the only one to hold back the mistake I had made. And I held on. Stuck between, not strong enough to push it back and crush the few unlucky grains caught between the tailgate and the side of the truck bed. Stuck with guilt. Stuck in a place too big for me.
So I held on, bracing my weight against the tailgate, first with one foot then another, pushing against the heaviness of my arms, until there was no thought of anything else and my life had become the truck, and the oats that must be saved, and the smell of cement and grease, and the faint sound of the milking machines in the barn across the yard. Until the milking was done, and my father came to push the tailgate closed.
All it took was one quick shove and it was done. And never mind the few grains crushed in the effort, or the piles that could be scooped from the floor. My father had come to make it right. But the guilt still hung in the damp air, even as the blood crept back through the veins of my fingers. And the bigness of what I had done stayed on me, and a chafing thought grew in my mind that my father had not done it right, had taken too long, hadn't seen how hard I had tried. And the thought of it made me run from the shed to the house at the opposite end of the yard.
Think small. Think of the too big places our Father has rescued us from, and the way we chafe at His hand, like He hasn't done it right, like He doesn't understand or care, like He owes us. And think of how it makes us run away.
Who knows why I thought of playing in the back of the truck parked in the big shed across from the barn, on that summer evening? There had been so many times when my sister and I, too short to see over the side, had boosted ourselves over the open tailgate. So I reached up and pulled the latch.
The oats were part of what we fed the cows. Not taking as much time and worry as the alfalfa, or so it seemed, but there they were, filling the bed of the truck. And I pushed back as hard as I could. But two trails of them dropped to the cement in little piles, leaking out of the not-quite-closed gaps on either side of the tailgate.
I could have run away, and let them spill on the cement floor, the floor that smelled of cold and grease, even in the summer evening. It would have been after supper when my father and the hired hands were busy in the barn with the evening milking, the whine of the milking machines and the radio insulating them from everything outside. And there I was alone, the only one to hold back the mistake I had made. And I held on. Stuck between, not strong enough to push it back and crush the few unlucky grains caught between the tailgate and the side of the truck bed. Stuck with guilt. Stuck in a place too big for me.
So I held on, bracing my weight against the tailgate, first with one foot then another, pushing against the heaviness of my arms, until there was no thought of anything else and my life had become the truck, and the oats that must be saved, and the smell of cement and grease, and the faint sound of the milking machines in the barn across the yard. Until the milking was done, and my father came to push the tailgate closed.
All it took was one quick shove and it was done. And never mind the few grains crushed in the effort, or the piles that could be scooped from the floor. My father had come to make it right. But the guilt still hung in the damp air, even as the blood crept back through the veins of my fingers. And the bigness of what I had done stayed on me, and a chafing thought grew in my mind that my father had not done it right, had taken too long, hadn't seen how hard I had tried. And the thought of it made me run from the shed to the house at the opposite end of the yard.
Think small. Think of the too big places our Father has rescued us from, and the way we chafe at His hand, like He hasn't done it right, like He doesn't understand or care, like He owes us. And think of how it makes us run away.