Digging in the Dirt

Most young children compete with their siblings for their parent’s affection. My sisters’ and my rivals, however, were my father’s plants.  He adored lush ferns and bright colors, lipstick red summer geraniums and the bold purple of miniature lobelia.  Our lawn was golf-course green and weed-free (and he was not above employing a few chemicals to keep it that way).  Watering, fertilizing, clipping and weeding were his sports arena, his temple and his escape.

When I ultimately had my own home, yard and children, I discovered that growing things, digging around in the soil, was a balm for me, too. 

 

The plants and trees I nurtured existed in a separate sphere from the sometimes routinized and often chaotic world of mothering four children, now ranging in age from 21 to 13.

 

I am drawn to my summer garden in the dawn, before anyone stirs inside. In springtime, I prepare the beds and start my dahlia bulbs and herbs in pots of kitchen compost soil.  By August, the flowers are a tangle of bright colors.  But in October, as I cut back my dahlia stalks, dig out the tubers and turn over the earth, I am reminded how the seasons of a garden mirror those of our lives. 

 

And so it was natural, 18 years ago, when I lost a baby at 14 weeks that I turned to the land to make sense of my grief.  The pain of losing that child was sharp, unlike anything I had experienced.  I had pictured my baby, imagined him in our family’s silhouette.  There were mornings I didn’t want to lift my head off the pillow, days I forced myself to simply get through, and tend to the needs of my two living children.

 

Grief craves ritual, and that summer, I was determined to plant a tree to memorialize our son, to root him in our land and fix his place.  I felt a primal need to make something thrive after something so precious had perished.

 

Feeling barren and broken, I chose a small but sturdy Japanese maple with deep burgundy pointed leaves. We were a transient family in those days, moving from town to town every few years for my
husband’s job as a journalist.

The place we call our “constant home” is on a lake in  the Adirondacks to which my family has returned for five generations each summer.  It was there, in a simple ceremony of poems and prayers, that we planted the tree under the spread of a giant fir.  As I covered the roots with loamy soil, I felt the barest flicker, a hope that my battered heart might begin to heal.

 

Throughout each summer, passing the tree in my walk between beach and house, it’s impossible not to wonder what our family would have looked like with a different configuration.  We were thrilled with the birth of our twin girls in 2000, but a loss doesn’t get erased by joy, only diluted. That sorrow is buried within now, marked in our trunks like the inner rings of a tree. The maple reminds me that life is indomitable.  We may never get over losing those we love, but we can navigate through it.

 

In 2003, the war in Iraq claimed the life of a friend in a very sudden way.  It was our first close brush with the death of someone my age and it hobbled us.  In the autumn after his funeral, a group of friends planted hundreds of white tulips on the grassy bank near his house for his widow and daughters.  The activity connected us all and joined our grief in one supportive web.  That spring, the riot of color that bloomed filled up some space, it lessened the ache.

 

My children are older now, and I’ve come to that place in life where I’m parenting my parents.  The seesaw has tipped for my sisters and me as we head toward the inescapable fact that we will lose them both.  Yet I cannot quite grasp what it will feel like once they are gone.  When I am unable to hear my mother’s voice on the phone, or loop my arm through my father’s on a walk, I imagine it will throb like a phantom limb.

 

I’ve not yet decided how I will honor my mother, but I know what I will do to memorialize the man who loved to put his hands in the dirt.  I will plant a White Birch, the lavender pink bark etched with whorled black lines in the shape of God’s eyes. We will place it near the shores of the lake he loves, by the dock where he spent his afternoons.  And when I cover the roots of the tree with earth, I will know that a little piece of my father will live on there too. 

This blog was published in Martha Stewart Living Magazine, April 2013, pg. 170

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Sisters Offer Support On All Occasions

Guest Blog by my sister, Nancy McLoughlin

 

The Hawaiian island of Kauai has a wild native weed that grows on its shores.  Its roots dig 30 feet into the lava soil, intertwining with those of their neighbors to form an unbreakable net, anchoring this groundcover to the earth.  It is hard to tell where one plant begins and the other ends.  Without this ancient weed, harsh tradewinds and storms would have blown away the island soil, flattening the island terrain and making it uninhabitable.

My sisters and I are like that weed.  The three of us wrap together into each other’s soil.  We support and sustain the lives of nine children, three husbands and five aging parents between us.  It is often hard to tell where one family breaks off and the other begins.

In times of need, we form our own root like net around the ailing.  In times of abundance, we share the spoils of a happy occasion or holiday.  It would be hard to imagine it any other way, yet friends comment upon how unusual it is for siblings to choose to spend vacation time together at the expense of other new opportunities.

My oldest sister had the idea to drag the other two of us across the world on a solo-sisters celebration in Hawaii.  She billed it as a gift to ourselves and from ourselves.  I have never been very adventurous, and spending 12 hours on a plane crossing into a new time zone is asking a lot from me.  I weighed the heavy thought of all those collective sneezes and coughs in recycled airline air like one big billowing tornado of disgust.  I like my routine and my health, but I like being with my sisters more, so I forged ahead.

After much grousing and last-minute attempt to cancel on my part, we were off.  It was a full day and night of travel.  A youth behind me babbled in Swedish and kicked the back of my seat.  Her father took off his socks and propped his bare foot up on the arm-rest in front of him (next to me).

The three of us shared a room at our hotel.  That’s the fun part about being sisters.  The bickering and sarcasm about who should sleep where began almost instantly.  After losing a brief firefight, I relinquished the two queen-size beds and staked my claim on the roll-away cot.  My bed became known as “the Hannibal” due to its likeness to the hand cart that wheeled notorious Dr. Lecter in the “Silence of the Lambs” thriller.  It spent its days standing upright in the corner like an authoritative figure.  The Hannibal had straps and restraints just like the one in the film, and when I slid on my black eye shade for sleep, the image was complete and my sisters howled with laughter.

Even with my white noise machine humming, the room was anything but silent.  Lying awake in the Hannibal, I felt a shift in the mantle I had been wearing for all my mothering years.  As I drifted off to sleep, I was less of a wife and a mom.  I transformed back into a full-time sister all over again.



Megan Lucier, Nancy McLoughlin & Lee in Kauai, Hawaii
 

It had been 25 years since my sisters and I had slept in the same room, yet the identity was as comfortable as my own skin.  Until marriage and kids, these sisters were the closest human beings I had ever known.  I could almost hear the beating of their hearts in the room, slowing down and speeding up in sync with my own.  After all these decades, the DNA worked together in a sort of musical harmony once we were together.

On the trip, I was reminded that sisters “said” things to each other that no one else could say.  “You really didn’t need to get up at three in the morning and make the last trip to the bathroom,” my Boston sister informed me after the first night. “It wasn’t warranted.  You just need to tell your bladder that it isn’t feeling full, because it didn’t sound at all to me like it was.”  It was nice to know that there was a late-night listening audience.

Sisters had contests like the one we shared on a beach walk.

“Who do you think wins in the “in-law competition?” stated the oldest introducing a favorite topic of ours.

“Well, I think the answer to that has changed over the years,” I added.  “I would have answered one way a few years back, but I think you have put your blinker on and zipped into the left lane, passing us all on that one recently,” I told her.

I was referring to her father-in-law’s propensity to lie down in his driveway and “take naps.”  This was such a frequent occurrence that the neighbors had taken to tiptoeing over and sliding a pillow under his head, waiting for him to wake as they phoned the kids to let them know.

The athletic component of our trip (matched in enthusiasm by the dining segment of each day) unfolded with an excursion.  Traveling up the mountain of an old sugar plantation, we donned headlamps, rubber gloves and water shoes before inner tubing through five flooded miles of irrigation ditches (which were quite muddy).  It was meant to be informative and fun.

Part of the “thrill” was a series of five completely pitch-black caves that we floated through with our headlamps turned off, as directed by the tour guide (ideally so we could bash into the rock ledges and spin dizzily in our tubes in complete and utter blackness).

 

Megan, Lee & Nancy
There was no reason to think that anyone would like wearing the obligatory smelly rubber shoes and gloves that had been on the bodies of strangers prior to mine.  My sisters watched in hysterical giggles as I tried to overcome my revulsion enough to get dressed in the loaner gear.  I spent much of the water tour plastered to my tube in a frozen stillness that was not out of fear for my safety, but horror.

I wanted to touch the germ-infested tube in as few contact points as possible.   I would have felt less contaminated perching inside King Kong’s open mouth on one of his molars than on the rubber tube.  I did it without complaint.  My crablike position rocketed me to the head of the pack, placing me farther away from my sisters, who craned their necks to catch a glimpse of my misery and roar with glee.

The river trip seemed to go on forever, but the sisters holiday did not.  It was over before I knew it and I was back on the plane next to a mouth breather who alternately snoozed and sipped cocktails for most of the journey.

When I look back on the trip, I think about the holiday season.  I am reminded about gifts that have a lasting value as I make my own Christmas list (new knives for the kitchen) and try to fill the needs of a family of Internet shoppers.

I know my sisters are the best presents my parents ever gave to me.  After 50 years, I marvel that the three of us could briefly leave our grown-up lives behind and travel to a faraway place to find ourselves together again laughing like little girls on spinning inner tubes.  The trip is over, yet the value of the experience is not.

When our mother called to hear about the trip, I could hear the smile at the other end of the telephone.  “You girls have done this all by yourselves,” she answered when I thanked her for having had the good sense to deliver three daughters in three years on purpose.  “There were times I thought I couldn’t last another day when you were all very young and your father traveled all the time for work.  I wished so much that I had a sister to talk to.  I was exhausted, and you three could be wild together.”

“Still can be wild together,” I thought as I chuckled about the river tube trip.  Like the weed in Hawaii, strong families and healthy generations grow out of roots that are set down by sisters who have woven themselves intentionally into each other’s lives.

 

Nancy, Lee & Megan
Sisterhood is a gift that keeps on giving, even if there is a weed or two involved.

By Nancy McLoughlin

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Christmas Past and Future

I’m one of those people who never reads a book twice or doesn’t like to see a movie again.   But twenty years into my marriage, I broke my rule to re-read “Crossing to Safety” by Wallace Stegner.  

The book had originally been a bridal shower gift from a friend of my in-laws, and I’m embarrassed to say I can no longer remember who she was.  But I vaguely recall that the accompanying note said it was a mandatory tale for anyone embarking on marriage; a simple story of commitment and friendship amidst the backdrop of life.   It sounded banal enough that I set it aside and in the throes of wedding planning, it was left behind with my in-laws.  The day after our September wedding, my new husband and I left for China.

“Peking” in 1988 was still a relatively backward city. Residents wore Communist Mao suits and bicycles were the major mode of transport.  Bob was teaching at the Chinese Law University and our living conditions were Peace Corp poor; a concrete dorm room, jungle toilets down the hall and no potable running water.

If at first this all felt like an adventure, by December, I was missing my family desperately.  One of my sisters was pregnant, and this would be the first Christmas I wouldn’t be there.  The fun of paring our lives down to the basics had worn off with the advance of the holidays in our drab and secular surroundings. 

When our first big package arrived by sea from Bob’s Mom, I enthusiastically assembled the foot-high fir tree with attachable ornaments, and hung the stockings she had included.  Snuggled under a few holiday music cassette tapes was the paperback “Crossing to Safety.”  I was eager to open it, desperate to connect with anything familiar back in America.

The tale of a husband and wife on the cusp of their new life together and their burgeoning friendship with another couple quickly absorbed me.  The novel moved from Wisconsin to the apple orchards of Vermont, familiar territory for me growing up in the Adirondacks.  And then, with time, the challenges began, the things that life often hides under its skirts when we first take our vows.

 

The simplicity of the story and the sparse eloquence of the writing captivated me. There was no sex or violence, no swear words, dystopia, or green aliens.  It was a tale about life the way it is really lived, with loss and love, successes and failures, disappointments and triumphs. The characters came alive with Stegner’s beautiful prose.

 

Two decades later, I was a seasoned wife with four children in various stages of leaving the nest.  The world had left its mark on us all.  When my journalist husband was injured in the Iraq war, we were all tested.  We celebrated in his recovery, while coming to terms with the preciousness of time together and the importance of resilience.  We were no longer the doe-eyed couple who believed that one’s path in the world could simply be forged from the sheer force of good intentions and hard work.

 

I had decided that re-reading “Crossing to Safety” would be a wonderful way to honor our twenty year anniversary and yet I was slightly worried that it might disappoint.  This second time, I was determined to re-read the story without any rose colored glasses.

 

Devouring the novel as a young bride far from home, I had originally identified with the newlywed couple at the beginning of the story.  Twenty years later, it was the older couple, the road-tested version of the newlyweds, with whom I felt a kinship.

 

I empathized with what life had thrown at the characters, the medical scares, the dings and dents, the disappointments, the strength of the women’s friendships, the determination to go the distance and see things through.  The gift of “Crossing To Safety,” I understood in hindsight, had been receiving a blue print for life.  At the time, I had simply been too young to comprehend.

 

 

Looking back now at that first Christmas with Bob, I am nostalgic.  Life in China was simple and unencumbered.  We had no children or mortgages, no mound of bills, savings or possessions, just the strengthening foundation of a growing love.  We would need to call upon that in the years to come, to summon up what we had worked hard to construct.  But as I write this, 24 years down the road, I am grateful and proud that we have done more than simply survive.

 

I can still see that stark Beijing dorm room, feel the thrill of devouring a great book that has more than stood the test of time.  Although I couldn’t have imagined then what course our lives would take, as I now prepare to gather the brood for another family holiday complete with traditions, music and food, I wouldn’t trade places with my old newlywed self for all the tea in China.

  

Happy Holidays and may they be filled with remembering what's important.

Lee

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