Insert thought: wouldn’t it be such an interesting thing to be born, grow up, raise your own family, bury your loved ones and die in the same three-mile radius of earth? If anything, I wonder if we’ve really robbed ourselves of one of our greatest treasures: a sense of identity to something greater than our own temporary existence as marked by the connection between land and family, earth and blood, landscape and relationship... Hmm. Interesting.

Anyways, I turned left at the blinking light across from the Sugarcreek Gas Station (still shrouded in garish construction tape and chalky gray dust), strode past the streams of country music, conversation and clinking beers that spilt out of the town’s one very small, family-owned bar, and arrived at the library several buildings up the road. Of course, being as small as it – less than the space of my parent’s entire downstairs flooring – it was closed by the time I walked there at half past seven.  The blue box out front was ready to receive my gift, however, so I pulled eight or nine tomes from the bag, gleefully poked them through the yawning slot one at a time and then shook out the empty bag in relief. It had been heavy on the brief walk over and the imprint of the double straps was still cut into my shoulder.  The greatest thing, though, was as I was walking away from having dropped off the books, I remembered that I still had this Berry novel sitting at home on the bedroom window sill, waiting to be paged through. Yes!

Naturally I spent most of my half-day off on Friday on the sofa in my cozy little living room, devouring the book, savoring a mug (or two) (ok, fine, maybe even three...) of coffee... and the day was beautiful.

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“I began to know my story then.  Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead.  What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for awhile.  And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through.  From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it.  But grief is a force and has no power to hold.  You only bear it.  Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

            Sometimes too I could see that love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in.  Though it contains all the world, the sun, moon and stars, it is so small as to be also in our hearts.  It is in the hearts of those who choose to come in.  Some do not come in.  Some may stay out forever.  Some come in together and leave separately. Some come in and stay, until they die, and after…I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me.  When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are.

            And so I have to say that another one of the golden threads is gratitude.

            All through that bad time… when “missing” kept renaming itself more and more insistently as “dead” or “lost forever,” I was yet grateful.  Sometimes I was grateful because I knew I ought to be, sometimes because I wanted to be, and sometimes a sweet thankfulness came to me on its own, like a singing from somewhere out in the dark.

            I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.”

                   - - excerpt from Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

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Photos Captured at the Fredonia Victorian Dazzle Fest

Saturday, 18 July, 2009