photo by Collyn Ware

“The morning air was like a new dress. That made her feel the apron tied around her waist. She untied it and flung it on a low bush beside the road and walked on, picking flowers and making a bouquet… From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything.”

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

If I could leap into the spring air, flinging my back leg so joyously that my heel catches my wind-worthy hair, throwing my arms back with abandon, I would do it. Today, everything is like a new dress. Today is a day for flinging off aprons and malaise, for ordering up some flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. 

May is a flinging and sprinkling time, the finally-spring days between winter and summer. There are tadpoles in the pond, rose-breasted grosbeaks have returned, and peonies are full-to-bursting. Anything and everything seems possible.

When the morning air was like a new dress, Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie awakens to possibilities that previously only danced around the edges of her life. The circumstances for a poor, young black Southern woman had not changed. But Janie sees beyond these circumstances, beyond a life of servitude to others, to the men who would be her husbands, to heartache and striving. She flings her apron and calls upon love.

In this season of uncertainty where dark circumstances roll in around us, pressing their thunderous weight upon us, we would do well to follow Janie’s lead. As the nuclear testing continues, as oppressors persist in oppressing, as factions banter and fight, we might as well just fling off our aprons. If only for a day, a glorious May day. Or perhaps if only for a moment of pure, unadulterated springtime sprinkling. We were made for this, and lest we forget the beauty of flower dust and new dresses, we should go about leaping, gaining whatever height we can.

Pablo Neruda claimed that You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming. Daily, there are those who are bent on cutting the flowers, plucking their blossoms and shearing their stems to the ground. These are the hell-in-a-hand-basket folks. While the child down the lane loads her basket to the brim with violets, they persist in dragging their brittle baskets of solemnity and fear. They will not see that you cannot keep Spring from coming. Worse yet, when it comes, they will miss it all.

And there is so, so much to miss! In My Antonia, Willa Cather writes:

After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.

Cather understands that spring lives without budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only–spring itself. . . the vital essence of it everywhere. Even on the red prairie, blindfolded, she is certain that she would revel in the nimble air and know that it was spring. Reveling, flinging, sprinkling–it’s all good. Even the oldest, most stoved-up of us feels nimble enough in spring.

Nimble enough to kneel on the ground, trowel in hand, flats of petunias and impatiens and geraniums before us. Our fingers tremble at the sight of spring soil, and as Margaret Atwood writes, In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. 

In Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Mae Crawford’s first two marriages–one arranged, one chosen–had left her springless, suffocating, and stifled. After two decades, she awakens, flings off her aproned life, and runs to Florida with Teacake, a younger man who, she believes, offers her a final flinging of the weight and loss of her previous life. Hope and love spring eternal. She leaps into new possibilities with the confidence and certainty of one who still believes in flower dust. 

In a Season of Flinging and Sprinkling, our former hopes and plans may still be springless, the dried and withered essence of buds-never-bloomed. Such is life. But if we refuse to loosen our apron strings, we refuse a season of new germination. Japanese haiku writer, Matsuo Bashō writes:

Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still…
Iris, blue each spring

Like many, I have to remind myself, daily, that there will be Iris, blue each spring. I have to rise with expectation and plans for flinging. I pray to see my day through flower dust and with springtime sprinkled over everything. This seems like such easy, joyous work. And some days it is; other days, it is simply work. It is easier to cling than fling. Cling to impending gloom, listen to the voices of darkness and fear, double-knot my apron strings. These are days of doubting and dreading, followed by nights of dreamless sleep.

Still, dry dreams and dry bones can come to life in the Season of Flinging and Sprinkling. This, I will stake my apron on. And tonight, I will enter my home smelling of dirt and flower dust.

One of my “farm” cats is very pregnant, due to give birth any day now. Gracyn, Griffin, and I are waiting with baited breath. Last week, Griffin told me that he knew how baby kittens are born. This took me back to a similar conversation with my oldest daughter, Megan, when I was weeks away from giving birth to her sister, Collyn.

I know how this baby is going to get out of your tummy, Mom. You do? I asked. I know about that little hole. I had learned by this point in my parenting life to suspend judgment, indignation, and/or shock. So I held my breath and waited. Yup, I know about that hole in your tummy where the baby comes out. The little hole is my belly button? (This was going better than I’d hoped.) Yup, your belly button. I nodded knowingly, and she continued with newfound confidence. When the time comes, you will put on the magic birth belt, your belly button will get really, REALLY big–big enough for the baby to get out– the baby will plop out, and then you will take off the magic belt so your belly button will shrink back down to normal. That’s how it happens. 

Later when I was recalling the conversation to Paul, he asked how I responded to the entire story. I told him that I smiled and said, “That’s right!” At age 4, the mystery of childbirth was better founded in stories of magic birthing belts and expanding belly buttons. For mystery–any mystery–would be tragically fleeting when the ordinary ways of the world with all their common sense and biology and certitude crowded in with adult bluster.

Holocaust survivor and author, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, understood this all too well:

“The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery…. Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.” [from God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas]

Oh to have open, wide-awake eyes, to be surrounded by and immersed in mystery, to live as a child who is not yet finished with this world, and to try your hand at stories and explanations that make your world an even more wonderful place. In the Sanctuary of Mystery, the world is not yet finished, and possibilities, like many-colored balloons, float above and around you by the millions. All you have to do is grab the strings of the ones you particularly like, pull them close to you, and experience the wonder. Looking, feeling, tasting, and smelling deeply, you know that this other-worldly experience cannot be tamed or named; here are mysteries that defy these worldly attempts, and when you are reduced to single words–unbelievable, unreal–no one thinks less of you. The Sanctuary of Mystery forgives the inarticulate and applauds the expressive. Truthfully, no words are preferable. Mysteries invite participants to stand silently in sore amazement.

Bonhoeffer claims that as adults, we may destroy mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal. Children are the teachers, the mentors and guides in the Sanctuary of Mystery. In the photo above, my son, Quinn stands, shoes in hand, with his good friend, John. Their friendship is, indeed, a mystery. Neither boy sees any boundary in their being–no black or white, no age, no IQ. Reading at age 3 (chapter books at age 5), John could have used his intellect to be lord over everything in their friendship. And if John had any sense of his potential power as a white male, he might have used this as well. Boundariless, both boys basked in the mystery of a friendship that took them to places that John had read about, and Quinn gratefully imagined through John’s retelling. His mother and I found them one Sunday during church fellowship time, escaped from the adult coffee-drinkers and lost in a serious reenactment of the Lusitania on the church balcony. Just as they were about to abandon the sinking ship, their little legs draped over the edge of the balcony, we intervened. Would they have jumped the 25 feet to the sanctuary floor below? Lost in the mystery of another time and place, the boundary between the real and the imagined stretched and blurred, I still believe that they might have. Time and again, John and Quinn honored the mystery that others, who would choose instead to live on the surface, who would take the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, would forsake.

Each spring when my hosta sprouts break earth sending green spires skyward, I revel in the mystery. How can the soon-to-be thin, broad leaves wrap themselves so tightly, so perfectly and powerfully into needle-like points that break through the dense clay of southeast Iowa? And how do they know when the time is just right to emerge from the caves of winter to the fragrant expanse of spring? And why are such green wonders perennial, coming back to life again and again and again? There is only one true way to regard a hosta: as a child, in wonder.

Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. As adults, we often let others name our qualities and define our world. Having removed the mystery from all of it, the namers and explainers work with dogged conviction, heads down, noses to the grindstone. They wouldn’t and couldn’t see mystery if it hit them right between the eyes. With their data and research reports and pie charts, they show us who we are. Your IQ test reveals, your aptitude inventory indicates, your leadership survey explains that. . . These namers and explainers begin their work with adolescents, testing them and showing them their prescribed paths forward. With certainty and zeal, they believe they are doing the work that needs to be done. You don’t even know what a community planner is or does? Not to worry, your counselor will schedule you into the right courses to pursue this career and advise the right university programs. But you always wanted to work in construction trades? Well, as a community planner, you will have lots of opportunities to consult with those in construction. 

When a person is called to a vocation, when a person uncovers a hidden quality or desire, when a person leaves a career after decades of service, moving towards a destination and position not yet identified, there is mystery. These decisions and acts defy rational, practical explanation. They defy worldly expectations. They fly in the face of calculations and prescriptions. While there are some who stand in sore amazement at such acts, there are more who cover their children’s eyes, clap their hands over their ears, and run away. Lest such inexplicable foolishness rub off on their offspring and lead them beyond the surface of the safe to mysteries unknown.

Years ago, a biology colleague held me captive for several hours in my office (he was sent by his department to school me) as he explained the scientific particulars of evolutionary biology. I listened, nodded to show agreement with those explanations and details with which I could agree, but asked the same question whenever he took a breath deep enough for me to get a word in: Can you explain First Cause to me? There was nothing, and then there was matter. What caused the matter to be? The first two or three times I asked this question, he reentered his dialogue as if I hadn’t spoken at all. Finally, as the supper hour had come and gone, I tried one final time. This time, he sighed, looked at me as a master looks upon an initiate and said: You just don’t understand. We don’t start there. I smiled, packed my computer and school work into my bag, grabbed my coat and thanked him for his time. He was glowing, puffed up with the victorious certainty of a job well done, convinced–I’m sure–that he had successfully initiated me into the fellowship of believers.

We don’t start there. How well I understood that they did not start there in the mystery of creation at the hands of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God. Of course not. Starting there would push the boundary of his scientific explanation. Starting there would–for the willing–force one to struggle along and confront the mystery. Starting there would provoke genuine awe and wonder that would dwarf the explanations and the accepted claims of his scientific faith. That would be life-changing at best, and life-shattering at worst. Mystery has that power, and those who accept this gratefully succumb to it. They understand that mystery and science/reason do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Like Bonhoeffer, I believe that living outside of the Sanctuary of Mystery is our downfall and our poverty. The good news? Mystery invites all to its banquet of wonders. Come as a child with open, wide-awake eyes. Come often and stay long. Bask in the fellowship of those who are not yet finished with this world. And be prepared to entertain all that you experience with sore amazement.

As we walked from our classroom through the hall to recess, I delivered the big news to my fellow sixth graders who surrounded me: Did you know that I am related to one of the witches who was hanged during the Salem Witch Trials? It’s true–my dad told me the whole story last night. I’m related to a woman who was accused of being a witch! On an ordinary sixth grade day in autumn, news of this sort was a genuine show-stopper. Literally. Sixth-graders clogged the traffic flow to the recess door when they stopped me to get the rest of the scoop.

You are joking, right? You aren’t really related to a witch–are you? How does your dad know this? She was hanged? You aren’t REALLY related to a witch. . . 

This was the stuff that childhood dreams are made of. I garnered instant celebrity status and was chosen by the captain of the kickball team who had “first pick” that day. Perhaps I had inherited powers that would catapult our team to victory. Perhaps I could read the other players’ minds, anticipating which way a player would kick the ball. Perhaps I was gifted in ways my classmates had never begun to imagine.

Or perhaps this was some sort of genetic justification of my own idiosyncrasies and propensity for the unusual. Come to think of it, I did have an odd sense of humor at times and a definite penchant for solitude, even as a child. Not to mention the fact that I rarely missed an episode of the television show Bewitched. 

According to Wikipedia (my second claim to fame–an ancestor that made Wikipedia!), Anne Greenslade Pudeator was a well-to-do septuagenarian widow who was accused of and convicted of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials  in colonial Massachusetts. She was executed by hanging. Anne married Thomas Greenslade and had five children before Thomas’s death in 1674. Having worked as a nurse and midwife, she was hired by Jacob Pudeator to care for his ailing, alcoholic wife who died in the following year. Anne then married Jacob who died in 1682 and left her with money and property.

Some have speculated that her status as a woman of means was reason enough for the afflicted girls of Salem and other villagers to target her as a witch. Her accusers cited the following offenses:

• forcing a girl to sign the Devil’s Book
• bewitching and causing a neighbor’s death
• appearing in spectral form to the afflicted girls
• having witchcraft materials in her home (grease, she claimed, for making soap)
• torturing others with pins and causing a man to fall from a tree
• killing Jacob Pudeator and his first wife
• turning herself into a bird and flying around the village

She was accused by two of the afflicted girls, Mary Warren and Ann Putnam Jr., as well as John Best Jr. and Sr. and Samuel Pickworth. On September 19, 1692, she was sentenced to death along with Alice Parker, Dorcas Hoar, Mary Bradbury, and Mary Easty. Then on October 2, she was hanged on Gallows Hill in Salem Town.

Eighteen years later, the General Court reversed the convictions of those victims whose families had advocated in their behalf. Anne’s conviction, however, was not reversed at this time. It wasn’t until 1957 that Anne was finally exonerated by the Massachusetts General Court. Her exoneration was due largely to the efforts of Lee Greenslit, a midwestern textbook publisher and my father’s relative. [My paternal grandmother was a Greenslit.]

In an article which appeared on September 11, 1954 in the New Yorker Magazine, Lee Greenslit explained that the name Greenslit was far more commonly known as Greenslade during colonial times. As an amateur genealogist, he hit the mother lode when he discovered this fact and was able to trace his lineage back to Anne Greenslade Pudeator and the Salem Witch Trials.

There are many theories about why these Salem girls–the afflicted ones–accused their family, friends, and neighbors of consorting with the Devil. These theories surrounding the girls’ fits and strange behavior range from stress, asthma, boredom, epilepsy, delusional psychosis, to convulsive ergotism, a disease from the ergot fungus that invades damp, warm rye grain. Regardless of the cause(s), the girls’ claims of witchery resulted in the deaths of 24 villagers: 19 were hanged, 1 was pressed to death, and 4 died during imprisonment.

According to USLEGAL.com, spectral evidence refers to a witness testimony that the accused person’s spirit or spectral shape appeared to him/her witness in a dream at the time the accused person’s physical body was at another location. It was accepted in the courts during the Salem Witch Trials. The evidence was accepted on the basis that the devil and his minions were powerful enough to send their spirits, or specters, to pure, religious people in order to lead them astray.

In spectral evidence, the admission of victims’ conjectures is governed only by the limits of their fears and imaginations, whether or not objectively proven facts are forthcoming to justify them. [State v. Dustin, 122 N.H. 544, 551 (N.H. 1982)]

 Spectral evidence was not only accepted in the courts but was often the only evidence provided in the trials of those accused of witchery. And it was more than enough to secure a conviction. You could simply claim that you saw the specter of another in a dream or vision and that the physical body of this individual was present at another place. You could claim that this specter flew, coerced someone to sign their name in the Devil’s Book, or caused another to harm him/herself or another. In truth, you could claim anything, and this claim–limited only by fear and imagination–would pass legal muster.

The Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence is a name-it-and-claim-it-safe-place. From the safety of your dedicated space, you can make claims–any claims–and sit back with a beverage of your choice to watch the fireworks. You don’t like your neighbor, your employer, your legislator, your teacher, your doctor, your parent, spouse or relative? Name an offense and let the accusation wound as it will. And if an individual is genuinely offenseless? Create an offense. The more outlandish, unbelievable, and unjustifiable, the better. Name it and claim it. It is just that simple–and just that deadly.

The Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence is an equal opportunity employer. You can be a libertarian or librarian. You can be a vegetarian or a veterinarian, a Parisian, a Philadelphian, or a Poughkeepsian. All are welcome, and qualifications are graciously waived. If you can accuse, if you seek to wound, you can work your accusational magic alongside other passionate employees. Health care and retirement packages are commensurate with your accusational prowess and experience.

Actually, spectral evidence has nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with specters. If there is a ghost of a chance that the accused has said or done or felt something, one can face the judge and jury with confidence: Here is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me God. 

In the Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence today, social media reigns. One can launch accusations into cyberspace from the safety of home, office, or wherever a smart phone may travel. Where once we would have cried foul at such groundless accusations, today we may shrug and mutter But what can you do? Such is the way of the world now. 

But when a 13 year old in Missouri takes her life after weeks of public shaming through Facebook and Instagram, it is we who should be shamed for our careless acquiescence at such acts. Today, as in the past, spectral evidence kills. At best, it robs unsuspecting, undeserving individuals of hope and kills their faith in humanity; at worst, it robs the world of precious lives.

Years ago, a student told our class that he admired a coach because–in the coach’s words–he meant what he said, and said what he meant. When the rest of his class nodded approvingly, I asked: Is it admirable to simply say what you mean and mean what you say? Anything you say and anything you mean? Just say it with conviction and passion? So I could say that it is o.k. to steal my friend’s car, I could mean it, and this would be admirable?

Silence. The class just looked at me until I persisted: This would be admirable? This would be o.k.? Finally, a student admitted that she’d never thought about this perspective. Others looked on, the foundation of this smug aphorism crumbling before their very eyes. Where there is no logic, there is no value or truth.

Logic and sufficient, relevant evidence matter deeply. Yet, those who live in the Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence don’t know this. Or they simply don’t care. For them, there is no need for opening or closing arguments, for witnesses and cross-examinations. They don’t need to make their case, and there are no documents, depositions or photos to enter into evidence. The accused never take the stand, and judgment comes quickly and without contention. Name it and claim it, baby.

As much as we look back on the Salem Witch Trials with awe and horror, we should look first at the log in our own eyes. Spectral evidence of the modern sort abounds. We may not hang, press, or drown the accused today, but we punish and wound them nonetheless. We try them through social media, through the press, and through gossip. And the accused are left broken with their hearts in their hands, their reputations in tatters.

Anne Greenslade Pudeator was guilty of nothing but living during a period in which a group of afflicted girls held her fate in their hands. But in the Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence, those girls could confidently wield their power. When there is no need for evidence or logic, accusation rules in this vacuum.

As a descendant of Anne Greenslade Pudeator, I can take heart in Lee Greenslit’s resolve and ultimate success in clearing the family name. Though I can no longer blame my weird sense of humor on Anne nor claim any special mind-reading powers. My celebrity status was memorable but short-lived.

Still, witch hunts continue, and there are afflicted girls, boys, men, and women too countless to name. They take sanctuary in spectral evidence and the power it affords them. We need more Lee Greenslits who will doggedly pursue the truth, a truth founded in real evidence. The Anne Greenslade Pudeators of the world deserve no less.

In the days before Holy Week, I have found myself thinking about what might have been: a mother whose son outlived her; a teacher and friend whose days were just beginning; a Savior whose love and mercy would knit the unraveling world together. As it should have been and as it should continue to be, sacred stitch after sacred stitch.

I have found myself thinking about my own children who might have been. Conceived in love, knitted together in a mother’s womb, fearfully and wonderfully made. [Psalm 139: 13-16] I have found myself dreaming again of who these children may have grown to be and have imagined them seated at Easter dinner beside my other children, a cozy clutch of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. And again, I have mourned their absence. Perfect-buds-yet-to-be returned to spirit.

In her novel, The Light Between Oceans, M. L Stedman gives us Isabel, a woman desperate to be a mother and destined to miscarry all of her children. Stedman writes:

[the] losing of children had always been a thing that had to be gone through. There had never been any guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length.

This is the biological reality of it all: there has never been any guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. And the fact that countless women experience this thing that had to be gone through is cheap solace in a world of bubbling and bonneted babies. In truth, no guarantee lives too quietly alongside hope. It fails to be heard in the midst of life songs. And for a time, it ticks in the shadows in a dreadful and inevitable countdown to death.

Stedman profiles Isabel’s loss throughout several miscarriages. This passage, in particular, took me back to my own grief:

The old clock on the kitchen wall still clicked its minutes with fussy punctuality. A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it. The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through the mill. Isabel had managed to sit up a little against the wall, and she sobbed at the sight of the diminutive form, which she had dared to imagine as bigger, as stronger – as a child of this world. ‘My baby my baby my baby my baby,’ she whispered like a magic incantation that might resuscitate him. The face of the creature was solemn, a monk in deep prayer, eyes closed, mouth sealed shut: already back in that world from which he had apparently been reluctant to stray. Still the officious hands of the clock tutted their way around. Half an hour had passed and Isabel had said nothing.

Daring to imagine your child as bigger, stronger–as a child of this world and not merely a child of your dreams is the courage of one who dares to thumb her nose at biology, striving, instead, towards love. For as Stedman writes: Once a child gets into your heart, there’s no right or wrong about it. There is just love and what might have been.

When a child who has lived solely in the heart and dreams of a mother dies, grief is often solitary and veiled in shame. Why did a body meant for child-bearing fail? What sins have manifested themselves in this death? How can one legitimately grieve in the overwhelming face of platitudes: You wouldn’t want a child to be born with such defects; You are young and can have more children; This is God’s will–who are we to question? 

When there is no tangible evidence of a life lived, grief is often swept away quickly. No child, no real reason to give yourself to the grief that is expected and acknowledged when a child has lived–if even for a day, an hour, a single moment. In the eyes of many, what might have been is a but a wisp of love and loss.

When there is no funeral, no memorializing of life, loss is silenced. Others too soon forget that you would have been a mother in five months, that the name you have held in your heart will go to another woman’s son or daughter, that an ultrasound picture is all you have to fill the empty pages of a baby book. You bear no stretch marks, and you wear your real jeans. Once again, you are a mother-in-waiting. You dread the visits to your OBGYN office where you are surrounded by beautiful, burgeoning bellies and smiling receptionists.

In her collection of poetry, Conquest, Zoe Brigley writes:

So many women come to me saying, “I have lost too,
and this one, and this one”. So many embryos retreat
to flesh: the live cell of the mother. Don’t tell me that it
will happen for me, when the only sure thing is a miracle:
the sperm nuzzling in its nest and the egg that opens, explodes.

In your world of brutal biology, when the only sure thing is a miracle, when so many embryos retreat to flesh, you drown in what might have been. It pulls you under just as surely as any loss. What might have been does not forgive the fact that your child was an embryo or a fetus–not a real child.

Still, as dark as Mary’s loss at Golgotha was, her child torn from the love and life that might have been, it gave way to life more glorious than she could ever have imagined. This is the promise of Easter: that death is overcome, and what might have been has come to be in life everlasting, in grace and peace beyond measure.

This is the promise that sustains all of us in the midst of pain and loss. And this is my prayer for others who grieve what might have been–children, dreams, loves and lives: that we never mistake the absence of the tangible for what is real and true and life-giving and that, each day, we claim Easter’s promise of what has come to be.

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

I am a child of metaphor, born from magic and genetic instinct so strong that it shatters the literal, sending shards of otherness into living space. And each shard is a sacred facet which holds its own, offering a way to grace, a path beyond the thing into a nether world of possibilities. This knocks my socks off every time.

American author Bernard Malamud writes: I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. The Sanctuary of Metaphor is a bountiful one in which one can feed the multitudes with a single loaf. Not just choosing between two roads in the woods but taking the one less traveled by, choosing a life path that has made all the difference. [“The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost] Not just fog but yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes. [“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot] Not just faces in the crowd but petals on a wet, black bough. [“In the Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound] Not just the hands of a man and a woman but their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. [Rabbit Run, John Updike] Two loaves where there seems to be one. 

As a child, my play was grounded in metaphor. Nothing was ever as it was, as it seemed. Narratives spun naturally from rocks-turned-precious gems, boxes-turned-doll palaces, a single piece of rope-turned-tourniquet-for-battle wounds. Some may call it make-do-ness, but I prefer to think it was more magic than utility.

One particularly muddy morning in the park as I was working with a group of preschoolers in a city-sponsored program, I had to tell the kids that we couldn’t take the balls or jump ropes out that day. When they whined, I offered up a solution: We could pretend that the merry-go-round is our spaceship. Thirteen preschoolers said nothing but their faces said everything. You’re crazy, lady. There’s no spaceship here. I persisted: But we can pretend this is our spaceship. Still, no takers. So, I jumped aboard the merry-go-round and called out: We have to take off in two minutes! Two minutes until the storm hits! Let’s go everyone–take your places. Hurry! And that was all it took to double the loaf we had been dealt that muddy morning. We rode that merry-go-round-turned-spaceship until snack time, when I led a then reluctant and sweaty group of three and four-year olds to the shade for Kool-aid and graham crackers.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. [Jose Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and statesman]

I do believe that metaphor is one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. It is, indeed, a tool for creation that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, the literal into the symbolic, the concrete into the abstract. There is little more magical than this transformation in a world gone soft from those who continually attempt to rescue us from all that is difficult. Well-intentioned as these folks may be, they are no lovers of metaphor.

The magic of metaphor requires investment, a willingness to see a thing for what it is and what it may be, to work with the writer or speaker to uncover the intended meaning. Metaphor asks for a willing suspension of disbelief: It is a field of lavender, but what else? What more? Seated before the magician, we wait expectantly for the rabbit to be pulled from the hat. We invest ourselves in the act. We hold fast to the truth of metaphor: one loaf will become two right before our very eyes. And when it does, there is no applause greater, no celebration more pure than that born of metaphorical magic.

Aristotle writes that The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar. In his essay, “Education by Poetry,” Robert Frost claims that metaphor is all there is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go, but it is the mind’s furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble metaphors we have rolled up.

To relish noble metaphors, to apprentice ourselves to the masters of metaphor, to train for the mind’s furthest–this is truly all there is of thinking. With apologies (somewhat sincere apologies) to ACT, SAT, and any other standardized intelligence tests, there should be but one true test for matriculation: that students successfully read, understand, and elaborate upon a noble metaphor. Give them a great poem, a literary or philosophical passage, and charge them with going the distance, probing and performing their magic on a thing until it becomes the intended other. Frost called this process ulteriority: saying (or seeing) one thing in terms of another. Ulteriority is not for sissies, and it literally separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls. It is more than sufficient to discern the genuine graduate from the pretentious pretender.

Writer Joseph Campbell says that If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. And just what metaphors will we change? America was once a melting pot that became a salad bowl. Finding these metaphors lacking, some argue that we must change the metaphor now. To what? Only time and the multicultural lobby will tell. But as Campbell claims, this metaphor will undoubtedly change the world.

And as much as I love a great metaphor, I admit to also loving really horrible ones. Like these that came from the Washington Post Style Invitational Bad Simile and Metaphor Contest:

1. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
2. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just
   before it throws up.
3. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry
   them in hot grease.
4. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East
   River.
5. McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
6. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
7. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
8. He hung from his arms like a piñata, and Mary was the birthday-boy with the stick.

These student writers may not be ready to matriculate with their peers, but oh there is a place for them in this world! Metaphors-gone-wrong have sustained me through many lonely hours of paper-grading. Alone, after everyone else had gone to bed–or retired to more entertaining things–I laughed long and loud and, for years, kept a notebook of the hall-of-famers. What more can you say to a student who has just given you hailstones that leap like maggots when you fry them in hot grease but thank you! From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU!

Years ago when our church van broke down at noon in a small Nigerian town, we were told that it would be hours until someone could make the repairs, and we could be on our way. When others saw defeat, I instinctively saw opportunity. I tore a single sheet of paper from my notebook, and muscle memory took over as my fingers folded, creased, and folded until an ordinary piece of paper became a sleek aircraft. I could feed the 5,000 (actually more like 25) with this. For an hour, this paper airplane–made precisely the way my dad had taught me–transported all of us from the oppressive noonday sun and the tedium of nowhere to go and nothing to do. We traveled to places we had only seen in picture books, exotic places of fairy tales and dreams. Until a well-meaning Nigerian gentleman shooed the children away when he thought they had worn out their welcome.

You see, I have lived with and trained under a metaphor master, my dad. His paper airplane-making skills were only the tip of his craft, though. He taught my siblings and me to see the ordinary objects of our world in terms of something else and to use language well so that we might take others with us as we transformed one loaf into two. In his composition handbook, A Shape A Writer Can Contain, he writes:

Let’s say you want to write, or try to write, or are asked by your teacher to write. You sit there in your desk. Throughout your elementary school years, you have sawed, squared, and planed that oak which is the English sentence. And you have stored those sentences in your mind. But now you don’t know what to do with the lumber in your attic. What you need is a blueprint, some shape you can contain while you go on and inward with your thinking.

This metaphor has sustained me throughout my life–as a teacher and an individual. It has served me well when I desperately needed a shape to contain my wonderings and wanderings and when I strove to lead others who also needed such a shape. I have lived as a two-loaf person, blessed among single loafers.

How do you begin to measure the worth of such an apprenticeship? Honestly, I’m not sure that you can. But I am convicted that you must share the wealth by apprenticing others in metaphor. There will be those who turn their backs and hold their noses, preferring anything and everything literal and one-dimensional. And then there will be those rare ones whose astonishment in the presence of a great metaphor is reward enough for your efforts.

In the Sanctuary of Metaphor, I think it best to let Robert Frost to have the last word here:

       Unless you are at home in the metaphor … you are not safe anywhere.

As I was blow-drying my hair one morning about 15 years ago, my son Quinn appeared at the bathroom door–fully dressed, backpack in hand–and announced, You need to get going, Mom. Remember, you have a faculty meeting this morning. And he was right. I was running late, and I did, indeed, have an early morning meeting. But when did he change from son to personal assistant? When did he willingly turn off early morning cartoons, pack his own backpack, and wait on me?

Several years later, my husband and I sat in our car in the mall parking lot behind the Air Force Recruiting Office where a bus traveling to Lackland AFB in San Antonio was soon to depart. We watched as our daughter, Marinne–all 95 soaking-wet pounds of her–lugged her gear to the bus, boarded without looking back, and left us for basic training. When did she get such resolve, such courage, such fierce confidence? And when, weeks later, we attended her graduation ceremony and heard her address adults as ma’am and sir, saw her stand at solemn attention in dress blues, somehow taller and older than the girl we had known, I turned to my husband and said, When did she become this woman? 

It was shortly after this that I joined my daughter, Megan, in Switzerland for a short European vacation. She had just finished a semester of study abroad in Spain and flew to Zurich to meet me. From there, we rented a car and drove through the country to Geneva. Megan drove, Megan handled the money, Megan ordered the food, Megan led. And I followed. I recall a moment in which, childlike, I opened my hands to reveal a palmful of euros and said What do you need? And when she suggested that we tandem para-glide in the Alps? I followed her lead, and we leapt off an alp into brisk, Swiss air, strapped to two guides who (thankfully) were veteran gliders and appeared to have all limbs still intact and no visible scars. When did she become the mother and I, the child? When did the strong-willed child become the fully competent adult?

A few years later, my daughter, Collyn, gave birth to my first grandchild, Gracyn. I stood at her hospital bedside, heard the doctor deliver the news that Gracyn was breach, and he had just ordered a c-section. And I watched her fear give way to the sacrificing love of motherhood. When did my baby become a woman who would bear a baby? When did the girl I had taken care of become a caretaker herself?

The past years have been a progression of transference, each year, each event giving way to another watershed moment of child-becoming-adult, of those who-needed-cared-for becoming those-who-care-for. Such is the progression of time and the natural order of release. But oh, how the years have flown! All parents say this. And cliched as it is, it is nonetheless a bittersweet truth.

It is this handing over of care-taking and decision-making that both amazes and scares the living hell out of me, though. For I know there will be a time when I am wholly dependent upon my children to check up on me, drive me, care for me. And as grateful as I am for my four glorious caretakers, I also lament the inevitable final transfer from mother to child.

In a season of transference, I don’t think it is much about power but, rather, about purpose. When you are the mother-in-charge, you have a clear purpose that guides your every moment. You go to bed thinking (obsessing?) over the parenting decisions you made–or failed to make–and you mentally run over the calendar of events and appointments that you must not forget. Lest one of your children doesn’t get a fluoride treatment or you miss the Muffins with Mom event at school or someone’s PE clothes aren’t washed and packed for the next day. Your purpose is to stay on top of things. One step ahead of the game, always. You are needed to run your family, for most mothers understand that most fathers will fall into bed and, within seconds, snore their way into oblivion. No mental calendaring for then. No siree.

This season requires deliberate repurposing. When your daughter calls to ensure that you have told everyone about upcoming Christmas plans and when your son asks you to text him when you arrive at your destination (to make sure you made it in one piece!), you repurpose. You have raised responsible, caring young adults, and your new purpose is to celebrate this. Some may whine about being relegated back into a kind of childhood, but not you. You relish the transfer. You wear a coat of many colors: joy, comfort, peace. Look at my children, the responsible ones! See how they care for me! 

The season of transference begins when we are often too busy, too preoccupied with the daily grind to notice. But it begins and inches forward, the tortoise in our world of hares. Its slow and steady feet move imperceptibly, but they move. And on that day, in that moment in which you catch sight of the tortoise, you blink hard, and your breath catches.

In “Letters to My Daughters,” poet Judith Minty writes:

I give you this to take with you:
Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can
begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.

In a season of transference, there is joy in the uprooting, for nothing remains as it was. In many ways, I am an uprooted woman. My children are grown, my life’s work retired, I need transplanting, to begin again.

If tomorrow brings some sun, I will separate the hostas that have overgrown their bed and transplant them under the lilac bush in a spot where grass doesn’t grow. In this season of transference, I’m looking for a spot where grass fails to grow, where I might plant my uprooted self for repurposing.

And I will take much solace in the fact that my children-turned-caretakers will see that I’m regularly mulched, watered, and fertilized. Indeed, one could do worse.

I used to imagine that my three sisters and I were living a real-life, Nebraska version of Little Women (except in our version, Beth lives to love and hang-out with her sisters for perpetuity). The March girls/the Welch girls . . . Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth/Shannon, Timaree, Erin and Kael . . . different place and different time, but sisters nonetheless.

As my father was dying this summer, my sisters and I were blessed to have shared his last days with my mother and countless visitors who came to sit, bedside, recounting their favorite memories, the lessons he taught them, those that made them who they were today.  My sisters and I tag-teamed, we used the gifts we had, gifts born from an exquisite blend of our mother and father. We stayed until we had to rejoin our own families for a time, leaving our parents in the watchful care of another sister–or two.

My sister Erin’s efficiency and expertise at nursing rivals seasoned RNs. While my father was in the hospital, Erin listened and took notes as  the doctors and nurses spoke or delivered care. She served as a conduit of information, delivered hourly updates through text messages,  and anchored us all in a semblance of order when our world was chaotically spinning out of control. And when my father came home with hospice care, it was Erin who stood, shoulder to shoulder with the nurses, watching how they changed sheets, cleaned his wounds, administered medications. I looked on in sore amazement, for I could not imagine how she had become so brave, so competent. One afternoon when she left to return home for a few days, leaving me as the sole sister, I could only think of the moment when my mother left after the birth of my first child. As my mom pulled away, I stood with my head pressed to the window and cried, Don’t leave me. I can’t do this by myself. As Erin drove off, my hands turned cold, and it was all I could do not to run after her car, to beg her to stay for one more day until I could learn from the master.

My sister, Timaree, can plan and multi-task with the pros. Like my mother, she can see out for days and weeks to come, anticipating what needs to be done. Even though I am the oldest sister, as children, I learned early that Timaree was the one to speak to sales clerks, to make phone calls, to lead. Content to follow, I stood behind her as she shouldered her way through conflicts and situations that scared me spitless. Timaree ran our high school’s student council. Timaree choreographed our cheerleading and dance routines. Timaree led with a clarity and confidence that left me breathless. And, if the truth be told, envious. Author Louise Gluck writes that Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer. I was the church mouse who watched from her shadow, grateful–oh so grateful–to have this dancer’s shadow to rest in. So it did not surprise me that Timaree organized the meal after my father’s memorial service, and she weeded my parents’ backyard.

My youngest sister Kael and I shared more time together in the weeks that led to my father’s death. We sat in hospital waiting rooms together, ate supper in the hospital Subway (undoubtedly, the staff there knew our orders by heart), and later, spent days and nights in my parents’ home. Anyone who has met Kael is immediately drawn in by her hospitality. Everything about her says Come in. Stay awhile. She is the hostess with the mostest, able to greet and comfort those who came to our home with coffee cakes, casseroles, and tears. For the days I spent with her, she was my confidante. The one to whom I could voice my fears and grief. The one to whom I could unabashedly laugh and cry without fear of judgment. Daily, she comforted others, and as she did, I felt strangely warmed in a peace that truly passes all understanding.

Together we were better. I don’t think the March sisters have anything on my sisters. I have seen the power of their gifts and felt the grace of their presence, and I cannot imagine a life without my sisters.

They have given me stories that have delighted students in three states. Ask any of my students if they recall the turtle story, and I’d bet that they could retell it in glorious detail.

When my sister, Timaree, and I were 5 and 7, we begged my mom to let us get two small painted turtles at the local dimestore. In a moment of certain weakness, my mom consented, and we came home with two turtles–one red, one blue–a plastic turtle bowl with a fake palm tree, and a box of turtle food. Life was good. Until the day my turtle disappeared.

Convinced that Timaree was playing a trick on me, I marched down the stairs and into the kitchen where my mom was washing dishes and my visiting Grammie was drinking her tea. I confronted her, adamant that she return my turtle to the bowl before he dried out and died. What happened next lives on in infamy.

Behind me, three-year-old Erin entered the kitchen. Grammie shrieked, throwing her toast skyward. My mom gasped. And I turned to see one tiny, green turtle foot dangling from Erin’s bottom lip. I screamed. Erin screamed, and her mouth stretched and gaped, revealing her tonsils–and my turtle who lay prone, lifeless across her tongue.

You killed him! You ate my turtle! Gagging, Grammie turned away. My mom stepped away from the sink and demanded, Spit it out. Here in my hand, right now. And there it was: a motionless, blue-shelled turtle in my mom’s palm.

Later, my dad said that Erin’s system must have been lacking something to make her want to eat a turtle. Too young for sarcasm, I believed him and told Timaree to stand guard over the remaining turtle, lest he meet a similar fate.

My sisters and I donned high heels that my Aunt Susie had worn in the Miss America pageant and strolled the sidewalk leading to our house like a grand runway. We judged each other on how well we walked in high heels, in how elegantly we could turn, throwing our heads around in beauty pageant splendor. Our little girl feet stuffed into the pointy toes of high heels, we clomped our way into imagined glory.

We rode stick horses in packs around the neighborhood, we transformed wooden crates that my dad gifted to us into circus elephants and stallions. We organized neighborhood missions–elaborately planned and mapped on large pieces of newsprint over Kool-Aid and graham crackers in the McDaniel boys’ garage. Never mind that we didn’t really intend to carry out these missions. It was all in the planning, the Kool-Aid mustaches, and the furtive glances at the two cutest boys we had ever seen. It was all about sisters together.

The girls across the street told us that we should never roller skate over a section of sidewalk that had buckled, creating a kind of ramp that sent up momentarily airborne. They claimed that fires from the pit of hell had erupted, breaking the cement and creating a hole straight to damnation. They warned us that one false step, and the Devil would get us. And so, my sisters and I skated right up to this spot, exited the sidewalk and inched our skates through the grass and around the hole, and resumed skating. For years, we were bound in a shared conviction that we could escape hell if only we skated and biked with caution.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that, like most siblings, we often annoyed each other, took advantage of each other, even tortured each other. We borrowed clothes that we didn’t return and that ended up in heaps in our closets on the very day that our sister had to have them. We offered to pay a younger sister to retrieve our Barbies from the basement (because it was the basement and it was scary), and later reneged on our promises. Because we never had any money, and after all, this was the role of an older sister and the lot of a younger sister. We haggled and re-haggled over who got to use the car. Around the supper table, we disagreed, argued our views, and sometimes left the room in disgust.

Still, we marveled at each other’s words and deeds, at the choices that, secretly, we could never see ourselves making but that were perfect for our sister. A thrift-store aficionado, Kael put together outfits that often took our collective breath away. We whispered to each other and to our mother, She is NOT going to wear that to school, is she? But when she did, and when her classmates not only accepted her attire but emulated it, our fears were silenced. When Erin took a job as a Girl Scout camp counselor in Pennsylvania (clear across the country! in another state!), I admired her courage and conviction. And when she came home, every inch of her body ravaged by weeks of mosquito bites, I could honestly admit that I could never have done what she did. When Timaree sang in our college swing choir, she never failed to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. I longed to open my own mouth and hear the clear soprano voice of my sister burst forth. And I longed to dance with the ease and innate grace that she did. When she sang and danced, time stopped for me.

In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison describes the interactions between sisters as sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be. Oh yes, I’ll take me some sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings from the sisters I am blessed to know as friends. Double-size my portion, please. No triple-size it. You don’t have to count calories when it comes to sister-size portions.

As shining and splendid as sisterhood is in childhood, it is that much and more in adulthood. In her New York Times Notable Book, The Dazzle of Day, Molly Gloss writes:

You know how it is between sisters in their middle age? that old old friendship, how loose-fitting it is? the comfort and safety in it? how you can let silence lie between you without it taking on any weight? how you can let words out of your mouth without wariness or precision because you know your sister will listen to what’s worthwhile and let the rest fall out of her ears into the air? how you can be surly, unreasonable, stupid, in the certainty of her grace?

What could really be better than loose-fitting friendship between sisters, like a much-loved pair of sweat pants (because jeans, with all their zippers and buttons, are unforgiving for those with middle-aged apple shapes)? What could be more satisfying than letting silence lie between you without it taking on any weight? In real-life, where we must be eloquent and articulate, filling the space between others with something reasonable and meaningful, the silence between sisters is a gift of inestimable worth. Who but a sister can let the worthwhile stuff sink in and let the stupid stuff simply blow away like the insignificant chaff it is?

And where else can you rest in the certainty of grace but in the presence of your sisters?

So here’s to my sisters who have made and who continue to make me a better human being. We are better together, and for this, I could not be more grateful.

For years when my son, Quinn, was a boy, I drove with the raucous sounds of battling from the backseat. Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Transformers, action figures come-to-life in the hands of a little boy. For years my backseat was strewn with the casualties of battles won and lost, fought and refought during those 11 miles to school and back. And for years, under every sofa cushion, every end table and bed, there were homemade creatures carefully constructed of computer paper, folded sharply into killing points, and stapled excessively to withstand active combat. Such is the life with a little boy. Such is the life.

One day, after having failed to draw my students into Macbeth’s world, I grabbed a handful of Power Rangers from the backseat, smuggled them into the high school in my book bag, and reenacted the death of Banquo and his son for every class. I knew the sounds to make to enhance the performance; I’d been hearing them for years. And never mind that the Power Rangers were not dressed appropriately. They filled the bill quite nicely, and even today, students proclaim that this was one of the best days ever. At least it was one of the most weirdly unique. But such is the life of a mother of little boys who learns to use what speaks to other little boys (and girls).

Today, my little boy has a man-sized body, but his heart still beats boy. Last summer as I was cleaning his bedroom (because boys do NOT clean), I found a paper creature, points intact, under his bed. Had this survived the years between boyhood and college? Had he, perhaps, made this recently, secretly battling in the depths of his basement bedroom? Or had he stashed it there, unwilling to part with this vestige of boyhood, of kingdom-saving battles that were neither escapes from real life or foolish fantasies but life itself?

And today, as my grandson, Griffin, makes the 50 yard trek from his house to ours, he rarely comes empty-handed. A tractor, an action figure, an engine or four-wheeler, he comes bearing the treasures of boyhood. Sometimes we play with them, and other times it’s enough that they have made the trip and rest snuggly in his pockets. Just in case a boy needs his stuff.

These days, he yanks his coat off, dropping it where it falls, and says, Can we get the monsters out? The monsters are the action figures that have survived Quinn’s childhood and have been stowed in a Rubbermaid container in the closet, just waiting for the next little boy who will battle again. Dinosaur-like creatures, one surviving Ninja Turtle, three Power Ranger evil creatures, a kangaroo-looking ninja master of sorts, and random pieces of Transformers lie before us with shiny promise. What guy to choose? What battles to fight? 

And when the battle noises begin, I feel strangely at home once more, comforted by the growls and gasps, the staccato strikes of weaponed arms on the floor–or furniture–and the melodramatic sighs of death and defeat. In those moments, I am transported to my son’s childhood, when his life spread gloriously before him–and after me.

But my boys are not all boasting and battling. Beneath their warrior exteriors lie hearts that often take my breath away. When Quinn was 7 or 8, we spotted a dead doe on the shoulder of the road as we pulled from our drive onto the highway. The battle noises stopped. And then he said, Someone should do something about that. I glanced in the rear view mirror to see that his hands were strangely folded in his lap, his eyes colored with concern. I think you should call the governor, Mom. This just isn’t right–that poor deer. It’s dead, and you should do something. 

When I explained that the governor really couldn’t do anything about deer that had been accidentally killed on our highway, that the driver didn’t intend to hurt the deer, and that we would, undoubtedly, see more dead deer on our drives to and from school, his stoicism unnerved me. There were no more Power Ranger battles that day, and we rode in silence the remaining 10 miles. Pulling up to his school, he shouldered his backpack–along with his heavy heart–and made his way across the parking lot to join his classmates who had lined up by the school door. I watched him carry this weight and felt my own heart break for the death and loss he would continue to shoulder with age.

Last week, I bumped into my daughter, son-in-law, Gracyn, and Griffin in the grocery store. If you could bottle the gleeful reactions of my grandchildren upon seeing me, I would buy it. Lots of it. Gracyn immediately asked if she could ride home with me. This was dangerous business–taking one without the other. Her mother consented, and we made a quick, quiet get-away before Griffin could really take stock of what was happening. About 20 minutes after we had unloaded the groceries and were preparing to make homemade slime, my daughter called.

Griffin was beside himself. First he asked if Sissy would come back to life, convinced that her disappearance meant death. Later, as they buckled him into his carseat, his anguish mounted and he cried, My Gracyn is lost in there! We are leaving her! Having moved from death to loss, his grief was palpable. His Gracyn was gone. My daughter called, on speaker, so that Griffin could hear his sister’s voice. Not convinced, I said Bring him over when you get back, so he can see that she’s o.k. and hanging out with Grandma. 

Ten minutes later, he burst into the front door, leaving it open while he kicked wildly at his boots to remove them. One arm freed from his coat, the other still constrained, he stomped up the steps, made his way to the kitchen and looked. There was his Gracyn, seated at the island in the throes of making homemade slime, her hands in blue goo and the surfaces around littered with empty glue bottles, a shaving cream can, a box of food coloring, and assorted measuring cups. See, I’m here, Buddy. I’m not lost, Gracyn reassured him as she plunged her fingers in and out of the slime. Worry drained from his 3-year face, and he turned his attention to other matters, like who got to squirt the next dose of shaving cream into the bowl.

As my boy prepares to leave and begin a new life in a new community as the teacher and coach he has trained to be, there are too many moments when I mourn the passing time, my toyless backseat, and the stapler-I-can-always find-now. Yesterday in my entry way, my son’s size 12 Nike tennis shoes sat beside my grandson’s toddler boots. Boy shoes. Wonderful boy shoes with all their mud and stink and scuffs. Oh, that there would always be boy shoes that litter my entry way!

In The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein writes: . . .and she loved a little boy very very much—even more than she loved herself. How I love these boys, how their battling and balling, their boisterous days and poignant moments have blessed my life.

They will leave, these boys, having grown into fine men. And I will take heart in the knowledge that, as Neil Postman writes, they are living messages we send to a time we will not see. [The Disappearance of Childhood, 1982]

Indeed, Quinn and Griffin will take grand living messages into this world and a world I will never see. But I’m keeping some boyhood with me in a Rubbermaid container on the shelf in my closet. And from time to time, I may take it down, open it up, and listen to the battle sounds of boyhood, released from captivity, once again

Photography compliments of Collyn Ware, wonderful mother of Griffin and sister to Quinn

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truthfully, if someone were to ask me what I am currently reading, I may not be able to tell them. In this season of retirement and many, many books, I empathize with Emerson who cannot remember the books he’s read any more than the meals he’s eaten. Even so, they have made me. 

In the car, I listen to a book on Audible. At night when my husband is sleeping–or trying to sleep–I read on my back-lit Kindle. And for all the other times, there are glorious books in print. On the floor beside my bed, on the bookshelf headboard, and blocking my view and reach to my alarm clock are stacks of books. Books arrive via Amazon too often to admit. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry–it’s all good. No, it’s all great.

One of my unspoken talents is that I am above average when it comes to vicarious living. My mom relates that I teared up within a few measures of the opening theme song to the television program Lassie. I anticipated the danger that Timmy would find himself in and the worry that would line the faces of his mother and father. Often, I mouthed the words of television characters, wholly unconscious of the fact that I had left my world and entered another. I cringed at the theme song for I Love Lucy. Intended to be funny, sitcoms threw me into fits of anxiety. Don’t do it, don’t say it, don’t do it, I would mutter under my breath. Immersed in these worlds, my muscles contracted and knotted for 30 agonizing minutes. Yes, I would say that my vicarious living is Oscar-worthy.

 Not only do I live vicariously through the characters in the books I read or listen to, I live vicariously through the imagined lives of their authors. In J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, his protagonist, Holden Caulfield says:

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

Like Holden, the intimacy I feel with the authors of great books makes me want to just call them up. Just to say how wonderful their works are, how these works have made me. Just to hear the voice of those who have birthed such marvelous characters and plots. For weeks after I finished Hillbilly Elegy, I searched for ways to directly contact J. D. Vance. I felt compelled to communicate with him, for his book profoundly moved me, and I genuinely wanted him to know. After reading Lilac Girls, I yearned to call Martha Hall Kelly. We would be friends, I just knew it. Around my kitchen table and over many cups of coffee, we would talk books–those we had read and loved and those we had yet to read.

Driving to and from town (and more times than I admit, sitting in my driveway), I listened to Camron Wright’s The Orphan Keeper and lived through 7-year-old Chellamuthu’s life as he was kidnapped from his small Indian village and then sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. Later adopted by American parents and growing up in Colorado, he longs to find his Indian family, to return to the home he can barely remember. When he is finally able to travel to India to search, I spent agonizing minutes as the car idled in parking lots or in my driveway, convinced that this next chapter would bring an end to his search and answers to his prayers. Ezra Pound writes that Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. In the hours I listened to Chellamuthu’s story, I was intensely alive. In the moments before sleep, I could hear the Indian reader’s voice, a fourth dimension to Wright’s character development. The Orphan Keeper was a ball of light in my hand, a brilliant narrative orb that illuminated the places and people of another world.

My life, like most, is a relatively insulated one. I’ve been blessed to travel some, but the majority of my life has been spent in the Midwest, at home and at work. Generally speaking, my trials have been personal ones, particular to my life and circumstances. And from my insulated, singular perspective, I often fall prey to the kind of self-indulgence that blinds one to the world at large. And then I read a great book that humbles and silences me. American author James Baldwin wrote:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

When you realize that your heartbreak has lived and breathed in 17th century Spain, in the dusty streets of Kabul, through the blizzards of the Nebraskan frontier, through the foot-binding rituals of China, through the poverty of Appalachia or Southern India, through the helplessness of Nazi-occupied France and the sacrifices of the French Resistance, with invisible men and women, with mothers and fathers whose dreams for their children cling to faint breaths of hope, then you know that your loss has connected you with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. Then you turn the last page of that book with reverence, for you feel the weight of each sacred and universal word.

I can still remember the fervor with which I talked books to my high school students. As I was reading a good book, I recounted scenes, shared characters, and read passages of perfectly-crafted dialogue or setting. I sold books with an unabashed passion. I lost myself in this selling and retelling, and occasionally found my students losing themselves as well. Truthfully, there were too many days during which I read when I should have been cooking supper or walking into school. Once, I actually walked into a parked car in the faculty parking lot. It was a particularly good chapter, and I really believed that I could walk and read at the same time.

In The Fault in Our Stars, John Green writes:

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

This is it me exactly. I become filled with this weird evangelical zeal, convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. I babble, I foam at the mouth, I sigh and sing. If only the world would read this book and be healed.

These days, I don’t drive and wave to friends and family who pass by. I’m too busy listening to a good book. Hey, I’ve grown, though. I can now do two things at the same time: drive and listen. But don’t ask me to drive, listen, and wave. Three things at the same time are entirely too much for a reading retiree like me.

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

from “A Blessing”, James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems

This is a season for blossoming, literal and metaphorical. Lilacs are budding, tulips have braved the uncertainty of March and burst forth in all their perennial splendor, and beneath the rotting leaves of last autumn, there are tiny green sprouts waiting for just the right sun.

As I watched my granddaughter at dance class last week, I witnessed another season of blossoming. No longer a child, she took her place in the line of 7-8 year old girls and danced. What I saw both delighted and pained me, though. A child would dance with abandon, all arms and legs, strands of hair pasted across a damp face, and eyes, like bright fish, darting wildly about the room. A child would not see the eyes upon her. A child would sing with the recorded music, losing herself in the familiar melody, safe among a cozy clutch of little girls.

But Gracyn is no longer a child. As the music began, I watched her begin to move. Small, subtle movements as she were a marionette whose strings were held much too tightly by the puppeteer. The arc of her movements restrained, she fixed her eyes ahead, casting furtive looks to the girls beside her now and then. The clipped rhythms of her classmates’ tap shoes echoed throughout the room, but hers were muted taps, the uncertain taps of adolescence that would soon descend upon her. When a classmate flapped with too much vigor sending one shoe arcing over her head and across the room, girls giggled. But she did not. I could almost hear her thoughts: Is it o.k. to laugh? What if she is embarrassed? What if this were me? What if this happens in the recital? What if. . .? 

Standing against the wall, I wanted to scoop her in my arms and say, throw your arms to the sky, laugh with your eyes, tap loudly enough to wake the dead. I wanted her to dance like we did when she was little, collapsing in a sweaty mess of glee. More than anything, I wanted to postpone the inevitable self-consciousness that would soon overcome her as she moved into adolescence.

Before I was a mother, I was moved by Ann Sexton’s poem, “Pain for a Daughter.” In this poem, she writes of her daughter’s obsessive love for horses, a love that drives her to the neighbor’s stable to care for their flaming horses and the swan-whipped thoroughbred. When a horse steps on her foot one day, she limps home, the tips of her toes ripped off like pieces of leather. In the final stanza, Sexton writes:

Blind with fear, she sits on the toilet,

her foot balanced over the washbasin

her father, hydrogen peroxide in hand,

performing the rites of the cleansing.

She bites on a towel, sucked in breath,

sucked in and arched against the pain,

her eyes glancing off me where

I stand at the door, eyes locked

on the ceiling, eyes of a stranger,

and then she cries. . .

Oh my God, help me!

Where a child would have cried Mama!

Where a child would have believed Mama!

she bit the towel and called on God

and I saw her life stretch out. . .

I saw her torn in childbirth,

and I saw her, in that moment,

in her own death and I knew that she

knew.

For a moment as I watched my granddaughter dance, her eyes locked on the wall in front of her, I felt as if I were looking into the eyes of a stranger. Like Sexton, I saw her life stretch out into adolescence and beyond. I saw the pain of first love and loss, the pain of self-doubt, the pain of childbirth and the ferocious, all-consuming love for a child. And I knew that she knew. Oh the brutality of such blossoming! In its tender beauty lie the thorns of adulthood.

Lately, I have watched how Gracyn cares for her brother. When she asked to have a sleepover at my house–precious time alone with grandma–she included Griffin. As they walk from their house to mine, she walks alongside him like a caretaker, urging him to stay the course and not become distracted by unusual pine cones or sticks that might be used as weapons. When he correctly identifies a letter of the alphabet, she looks on with a seasoned pride and says, Good job, Buddy! There is so much life beyond her life, and she is seeing it, feeling it,and knowing that it is her responsibility to affirm it. She is blossoming.

And when she feels the pain of another, I see her mother at about the same age. It was an unusually warm spring day, and the neighborhood kids were playing in the backyard as I cleaned the flower beds and prepared them for new mulch. Suddenly, my daughter was beside me, looking up intently as she said, What’s wrong, Mom? Are you o.k.? I said nothing, stunned momentarily, for I had no idea what had prompted her to ask. Until she said, You were making that face. And then I understood: the sun in my eyes, I was squinting and scowling as I raked and worked my trowel in the dirt. I’m fine, I reassured her, I just forgot my sunglasses, and I have to squint to keep my eyes open. She looked up at me dubiously, scanning my face for signs of distress, and then finding none, ran off to join her sisters and her friends. Such a small moment, but a blossoming, indeed. I saw her life stretch out before her and knew that she knew. 

And yet, there is joy in the blossoming and blushing. The little girl who would once stick a feather in her hair becomes a young lady who prefers dangling earrings. Full skirts and ruffles give way to printed leggings and tunics. And frenzied romps on the trampoline with your brother? Well, they only give way to more ladylike jumping when a friend is around.

But when she and her brother are alone, she is all arms and legs, all shrieks and giggles. In these moments, if she would step out of her body, she would surely break into blossom.