Hope springs eternal.
MY MOTHER BELIEVED in hope. She was its most devout supporter.
A month before she died — shortly before her 92nd birthday and soon after breaking three ribs and bouncing back in time for the five o’clock sherry hour — my mother wrote the last of a thousand letters to me. She wrote to thank me, again, for a book about orchids that I had given her on my most recent visit. She wrote that she was tending an orchid that had proffered luscious, deep pink flowers. They were tired now and she had cut them back, hoping for a fresh blooming. She closed on a tender and slightly unusual note, but since it was still winter in her England and in my New England I didn’t read too much into it at the time. Keep well and warm, she said, and find some joy every day.
My mother had the the soul of a poet and the hands of a farmer. Her hands were long and strong with squarely perfect nails; strong, eminently capable hands, hands to wield an axe to chop the logs to build a fire, with fingers to milk a cow, shoulders to hold the tired head of a fearful calving heifer, arms to shepherd three daughters to adulthood — and beyond. And when the work was done she found joy in the music of words. Books and stories and poetry. And dictionaries. Because the right word, and getting the word right, mattered to her. Before she fell in love with the small herd of Jersey cows that she tended along with her children, my mother was a proofreader for the newspaper in the Lancashire market town where she was born. It was a job she loved. It was sunshine for her soul.
Children, and words, and her creatures: cows, sheep, cats, a beagle hound, a neighbor’s horse grazing in the home field, and a flock of chickens, for good measure. My mother’s kingdom. It was hard work. Hard labor in the sun and rain and cold. Labor of love. She found joy there.
“Keep well and warm, and find some joy every day.”
I realize as I write these words about my mother that her legacy is large — and living. My writing has lain fallow during much of this long pandemic year and what I always regard as my primary vehicle of expression has sat idle. But I’ve spent almost every day at the farm, helping to take care of the horses and their stalls, moving deeper into communion and communication with the natural and animal part of my world and myself. It’s been a hard and healing year. While I’ve stayed blessedly strong and healthy, family and friends have suffered. My sister endured the Coronavirus and has recovered her health and vigor. For that I am grateful each day. A beloved friend has been lost. I grieve, each day.
It’s been a hard and healing and learning year in which I’ve had time to step back and recognize the Great Separation of humans from their original environment — a phenomenon that this strange period of semi-isolation has thrown into relief. My evolving intimacy and Reiki work with horses has opened my eyes and my heart to the possibility of reunion, to the possibility of a kinder world in which humans commit to communicating with each other, and species learn to communicate with each other — again. The work that I practice each day has opened my eyes and my heart to the hope that we can begin to explore the abyss between them and us, and look for ways to heal the damage of the Great Separation.
It’s about time.
Hope springs eternal.
One of my mother’s favorite poems in recent years was by Richard Wilbur, second poet laureate of the United States. A copy that I clipped from the The New Yorker lives on my refrigerator door, decorated with whatever flowers offer themselves for picking.
Ecclesiastes 11:1
by Richard Wilbur
We must cast our bread
Upon the waters, as the
Ancient preacher said,
Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.
That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River’s flooded shore,
Helps us to believe
That it’s no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.
Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,
Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.
