A post about nature and personal philosophy, for Memorial Day, crossposted to The Clade
Imagine the torpor of a July morning, already humid at 8:30 am. The sun hasn’t reached beyond the tops of the tall pines, so the grass in the village park is still covered with dew that soaks through the toes of our white cotton sneakers. The warm smell of coffee and homemade doughnuts mingles with the musty air inside the old carriage barn, so seldom opened; it’s usually the dark undisturbed home of pigeons and bats. On the concrete floor inside the barn are rows of several long folding tables and more, perpendicular to them, have been carried out onto the grass in front of the tall, dark green barn doors. Piles of cloth cover all the tables, and haphazard stacks of cardboard boxes lie underneath them.
It’s 1959, or maybe 1960, and the wives of the village Rotarians – called “RotaryAnns” in those years - are getting ready for the summer rummage sale. The women lift boxes onto the tables and sort the contents: children’s underwear, pajamas, kitchen towels, shoes, dishes. They have a routine, perfected over the many years this event has been going on; certain items go on certain tables, in a particular order, and different women have their specialty that they arrange, and will later sell to the kids and village women who come to browse the year’s offerings. There’s a congenial banter going on among the women, who all know each other. My mother stands among them, prettier than most, lifting and folding men’s shirts; she’s smiling and saying a few words now and then so as to be friendly, but not really participating in the talk that’s turned to gossip. If I were an observant adult, instead of a child excited and distracted by the change in our normal routine, I might realize how bored she is, not so much with the task as with the other women. Instead, I kneel on the wet grass with my friend Lorry, our arms inside a big box playing with three black puppies who’ll be sold in the auction that will take place here tonight, on a platform under a string of lights, after the rummage sale and parade are over.
There are no men here, although every half hour or so a pickup truck pulls up and two men jump out and unload a refrigerator or chest of drawers or set of chairs someone has donated for the auction, sometimes bringing another box of rummage over to the women. The men wear white t-shirts and kid around with the women, especially the younger ones, but they don’t stay long; the division of roles is well-established and completely accepted. The truck stops at the front of the park before heading out on its next errand; here some of the older women are setting up a bake sale, and they indulgently pass a doughnut or a cookie to the men as they go by.
Suddenly there’s a shriek inside the barn, and then more screams; the women who’ve been working inside come running out, laughing and screaming. I can’t hear what’s going on, but then I see my mother leave her place at one of the outside tables and stride into the now empty barn. In a few minutes she comes back out, holding a two-foot-long garter snake in one hand. The other women stand, slack-jawed, watching her, as she walks to the stone wall that surrounds the park and carefully places the snake on the opposite side. Then she goes back to her folding, without saying anything at all, and gradually the Rotary-Anns, wide-eyed and subdued, filter back to their places and the chatter starts up again.
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This is the memory that kept surfacing in the days leading up to the recent third anniversary of my mother’s death. At first it startled me, but then I realized it was representative of how I always see my mother: unafraid of whatever lurks in the dark places, able to summon the courage to do what needs to be done, preferably without drawing much attention to herself. She did that literally, and symbolically, all my life, and continues to make it easier for me. In a way it’s odd, because she was a shy person who seemed timid or reluctant about certain things: travel to unfamiliar places, or certain kinds of social situations. But in the world she knew well, the natural world, she was completely at home and refused to tolerate any silliness about creatures or weather or tall grass or pricker-bushes; we were all part of a whole, a natural order of things with its own harmony and grace that called for curiosity, knowledge and respect, but not fear.
She loved to watch thunderstorms gathering in the west and then rolling across the lake where we later lived, the first fat drops making rings on the surface like dozens, then hundreds, then countless rising fish, and then turning the water the color of molten aluminum, and blowing across the surface in sheets that undulated like the northern lights we saw on winter nights. She loved the sharp cracks of nearby thunder, the jagged bolts of lightning, the distant rumbling as the storms passed out of the valley, the gradual light returning to the sky. We always went out to the other side of the house then, and looked for a rainbow. Even though we lost several big trees to lightening strikes close to the house, I grew up completely unafraid of storms.
The concept of nature-as-teacher, capable of imparting a personal philosophy, was already dying out among educated people in the 1950s, even in small towns like my own. Yes, on the farms surrounding it, there were people who lived according to the seasons and had a deep knowledge of the natural world and their place in it, and derived their life’s meaning from that and from their family relationships, where human births and deaths mirrored the countless others that were part of the observed natural order of things. My mother was more educated and better read than most people in our town, but somehow, perhaps as a young girl who spent hours in relative solitude struggling with asthma, she derived solace not only from books but from the world around her. Ours was a family that had moved “into town” from the isolated farm run by previous generations only when she was little, so our rural roots ran deep. Like her own aunts and mother, who had grown up on that rural farm in the early 1900s, my mother knew the names of all the trees and shrubs and wildflowers and delighted in their seasonal cycles; she considered all the creatures her friends, and passed all of this on to me. She called herself an agnostic, or even atheist, but she derived more of her remarkable “inner strength”, as she called it, from these natural sources than most people do from their gods.
When she could no longer go out and walk in the woods or along the lakeshore on her own, we brought her bouquets of columbine, early violets, and the rarely-picked white trillium that carpeted the deciduous woods that she and I had always explored together. To get there, we'd walk across the lawn where every summer we found snapping turtles moving between the river and lake after egg-laying, and where we once spent an entire morning watching a snake swallow a frog.
My father told me, afterwards, that in the last week he’d often found her seated in a particular chair, looking across the lake through the same windows from which we used to watch the storms. “Saying goodbye,” he said, causing tears to fill my eyes, as they still do when I imagine her there.
But this year, as I’ve thought it over again, I’m not so sure. I think, perhaps, she was saying hello.
