Independence Day

We bought some guinea fowl about a month and a half ago, with the intention that they would keep down the sizable tick population and protect us from Lyme's disease. They are amazing little birds that could leap to stupendous heights even when they were tiny fluff balls. Because I'm not getting out much, I've mostly heard stories about them from Ian and children, and I have peeked out the window at our makeshift brooder which glows red at night because of the red heat lamp inside. It looks like a squat, round spaceship has landed toward the back of our garage.

I have spent some of my favorite times of the summer sitting in front of the white plastic calf hutch. On Memorial Day weekend, when Ian was converting the hutch, I sat there in the shade of the maples while my seven-year-old son assembled screws and nuts from Ian's toolbox into impressive fake fingers. I had every intention of being productive, trying to plan something with Ian while he worked with his hands, but he had to leave me frequently to get more supplies. My boy and I sat in the dappled shade, feeling time and the green world stretching out forever around us. I have not felt that way since I was a child myself, but I recognized the feeling immediately.

Ian and I sat in front of the hutch again yesterday, Independence Day. It was a long walk for me, but I made it. Ian opened the door to the structure so that the birds could leave it and begin to explore the world for the first time, and we made ourselves comfortable in the grass nearby so we could see what happened next. The birds were fascinating, like little dinosaurs with ancient faces that they were always moving and tilting to get a better glimpse at us. Even though their world was small in their little brooder, it seemed lively. Together, they all decided to preen themselves on their roost, and then it was time to hop down suddenly and hunt for bugs. A few of them jumped up onto their feeder and tilted their strange faces to get a better look at the sky through their open door, but none of them seemed interested in hopping out. With Ian sitting warm beside me, holding my hand, I felt like we were a new item watching a movie together instead of a long-married couple, sitting in the grass peering into a calf hutch. I was completely content.

We finally went back inside for lunch, but a couple of hours later, Ian asked me to look out the window at the little group of birds making its way tentatively across the lawn. I think that was the golden moment of guinea fowl on our property. Pretty soon, one of the cats stalked the birds and lept into their midst. About half of them fled up into the trees, and the rest ran around in a panic. The cat never caught any of them, but he apparently convinced them that they are in an unsafe place. The only one that seems to be here still is a little guy that apparently was not brave enough to follow the rest of the flock out into the world. Last I heard, he was alone in the calf hutch, honking to his friends. Maybe he will convince them to come back.

Watching trees

Every day, I have been watching the trees. I have not been able to spend so much time doing this since I was a child, and I'm not sure when this kind of opportunity will come to me again, so I'm taking a job as a tree watcher very seriously. It takes time to really watch a tree. If I stay fairly still and steady in the expectation that I am going to learn something important, then I pass in and out of a special kind of awareness about the living things around me.

The maple trees whisper in the wind with a unique sweetness that is almost an ethereal version of maple syrup. A person can eat too much maple syrup, but no one can ever be drenched too deeply in the sweet peace of the maples.

The old neglected apple trees, sheltering a patch of wild strawberries, are engaged in something holy and intense with all of the other unkempt shrubs and trees around them. Lying beside them, on the edge of a wild and shady patch of our property, I feel as though I have entered somebody else's church after an unfamiliar service has already begun.

The ash trees southeast of our house are imposing in their mystery and generosity. A couple of weeks ago, when I could not sleep, I felt called to go and sit outside on our dark front step, and I was aware of a change in pressure to the southeast. Somewhat reluctantly, I heeded the call to stand under the ash trees, and after some time of waiting in the dark there, I felt as if I were standing in a shower of blessings. Again, last weekend I lay for a long time underneath those ash trees, and once more I felt something powerful and mysterious. I kept picturing that a tall, dark-haired man had given me a necklace, and each large bead was a luminous piece of sky. Even though I was having contractions, I danced slowly and briefly with that imaginary man, swinging the blanket I had been lying on as though it were a shawl. I thanked the trees, and the imaginary man, and God, and then I went inside to lie on the couch, wondering if I were being disloyal to Jesus.

Back on the couch, I worshiped and listened for Jesus, being still and steady in the expectation that I was going to learn something important. I got the message that I'm not being disloyal. I pictured Jesus smiling a smile that is the source of all light. There was so much light coming from His smile that it would be impossible to comprehend all of it, but a few tiny sparks seemed familiar to me from the time I have spent watching the trees.

A tender time

I am officially having a hard time.

My midwife optimistically predicted in May that my frequent contractions might pass. They have not. They usually tighten my belly whenever I sit or stand upright. Getting out to the mailbox has become a tremendous achievement, which I am able to accomplish only on good days. My due date is more than three months away.

There is so much to be thankful for during this time. First of all, this is not causing us serious financial trouble. I keep thinking that if I were a single, working mother, I might be choosing between caring for this pregnancy and keeping my family housed. Second, we have been receiving an enormous amount of help from a large range of people, which makes me so grateful. Today I wrote 11 thank-you notes! Third, the baby is moving around, growing, and generally acting though he is not planning to come out into the world anytime soon.

Still, I feel something within myself growing fragile. On Sunday, I hovered on the verge of tears all day and ended up coaxing myself along with treats. "Wouldn't you like to read a novel?" I said with false confidence. "You haven't been able to do that in ages! You love novels." Later, with two novels completed, I had to find a new treat. "Sorbet!" I exclaimed to myself with exaggerated enthusiasm. "Mom is coming over, and I bet she could buy some sorbet on her way down!" The treats seemed to work, and aside from a few minor breakdowns, I got through the day.

During this tender time, I am very aware of the fields in the trees outside my windows. I check in with them regularly, calling to the fields, "Are you still there?" When I call them, I can feel them there, and they comfort me. Through the window, I see the leaves swaying against the sky, and I ask, "Are you still singing?" Even without smelling the scent of the outside world or feeling the gentle changes in the air, I can still hear the trees singing. I hear they are in the middle of a song that began before I gave them my attention, and that will continue long after my mind wanders from them.

I am also aware of how vital it is that we share the Light and that has been given to us. On my most difficult days, which could be so much worse, I pounce on beauty with the fervor of a big kitten practicing its hunting skills. Almost as much as I need water, I need beautiful acts and prayers and stories. We all have those within us, and we sometimes keep them to ourselves without ever realizing the power they could have if they were released.

A sermon

For couple of days now, I have been hounded by a character from the Bible. Jesus asks his disciples to go into Jerusalem where they will find a man carrying the pitcher of water. They are to follow him into a house and tell the owner of that house that the Master wants to have Passover in the guest chamber. This is where they have the Last Supper.

The man carrying water was going against the very strict gender roles of the time because carrying water was women's work. At least one Friend, Peterson Tuscano, believes that this man was transgendered. Another writer suggests that he may have been so secure in himself that he was unconcerned about gender rules. There are many stories that we could imagine about him, but whatever the situation, he clearly gave up cultural privilege to publicly do women's work in a community that was oppressive to women. I am inspired by his courage, and I am made tender by the ridicule and exclusion that he must have faced.

Within his house, there was a vacant room prepared for a feast. There was emptiness during the time of community in celebration. Peterson said the guest chamber may have been empty because the extended family felt disgusted by the way the transgendered man was going about things and decided at the last minute to boycott the planned dinner. I like that interpretation, but whatever the surrounding story may have been, it the image of it resonates with a sense of loss and exclusion.

This empty space allowed Jesus the space to do His work. It was confusing work, though. Earlier in the story, in the book of Luke, Jesus talks to a large crowd about how they must eat his body and drink his blood, and quite understandably, the teaching does not go over well. Most of his disciples stop following him at that point, leaving a small remainder of believers. I don't think that the faithful few understood what this talk about eating a body and drinking blood was about, and I do not understand it either. However, I think that the disciples knew that they were being deeply loved when Jesus shared that bread and wine with them. Maybe that is all any of us really need to understand.

I think that within each of us there is a spark of the man who carried the water, and I think in each of us there is an empty room. It must've been the Quaker writer Thomas Kelly who encourages us to weed out busyness and distraction because the emptiness that we seek to fill might be the place where God’s love can grow within us. Kelly encourages people to sit with the emptiness, and to prayerfully let it be filled by God, and not by our own activity. This is not a comfortable thing to do, but I believe it can yield something more nourishing and glorious than the pain spent in pursuing it.

What fills the emptiness might not make sense, just as the Last Supper did not make sense at the time. Like the disciples, we will know love when we feel it. Inexplicable love will show us that we have found what we were looking for, and it will leave us changed.

Spending Sunday morning on the couch

On Sunday morning, Ian and I had planned to do some farm planning with Regi, who is starting the Hillside Farmers Cooperative. We have joined that cooperative, and we were supposed to meet at his home at 8 AM. It felt wrong to me to show up at breakfast time without bringing food, so I was up at 6:30 AM mixing up some muffins, except it was one of those rare mornings when I was having one contraction after another. Usually the contractions don't gather much steam until later in the day, but I found myself uneasily waddling around the kitchen until Ian came down and firmly convinced me to use my common sense and lie down.

At this point, I took up my post on the couch and started bossing the children around. I was guiding them through the last steps of filling the muffin cups with batter when the dog woke up and greeted me. I thought to myself that he needed to go out, but I did not want to brave the contractions I would get by standing up again, and I wanted to keep the kids focused on their muffin making. It seems that the urgency of the situation had passed because dog companionably lay down near me on a blanket beside the couch.

We were just gearing up for how the children should put the muffins inside the hot oven, which can be a daunting step for them, when I smelled something funny. I looked around, and saw a river of liquid extending from the apparently sleeping dog, across the whole room and under the bottom of the easy chair. I told the children to abandon the muffins. Ian was outside doing something with the chickens, and I asked my daughter to go get him and put the dog outside while my son was supposed to grab our box of rags and throw every single rag on top of the mess to soak it up.

My son took a very measured and thoughtful approach to this job, carefully assessing the shape of each rag and placing it on the floor, apparently with an eye towards aesthetics as well as efficiency. “Just throw them down!” I told him. “Keep the pee from running underneath the wall!” But a moderate approach to rag placement was beyond him.

During the interminable time that Ian spent finishing the chicken chores, I got the children to overturn the easy chair and throw out the soggy clutter that accumulated under it. As she sometimes does when she is disgusted, my daughter started to retch audibly and genuinely as she carried a dripping piece of paper to the trash, but thankfully nothing came up, and she returned to work. I had just talked to children through removing the lampshade from the lamp so we could turn it over on its side and wash its base when my patience finally reached its limits and I stood up to help.

At this point Ian came in, told me to lie back down, and presided over the rest of a cleanup efforts. By the time he was done, and only our easy chair remained on its side, drying, it was already 8 AM. Ian took the muffins and went off to do the farm planning without me, my daughter brought her muffins upstairs to eat in peace and regain her composure, and my son sat down at the computer to watch SpongeBob SquarePants in Spanish. I stayed on the couch, feeling stunned.

Letter to the editor

Minnesotans are going to vote in November 2012 about whether the Constitution should be amended to define marriage as between one man and one woman. I wrote a letter to the editor opposing the constitutional amendment, and it appeared in the Saturday edition of the Northfield News. Ian and I were both worried about the letter to the editor in a way that we never would have been in Minneapolis. Some people who are acquainted with Northfield, an artsy college town, might not believe this, but we did not see a single sign advertising the Democratic candidate for governor last fall until we visited Minneapolis. And where we live, out in the country, the signs for the Republican candidate were very plentiful. The people that we depend on and care about here are, in some ways, a much less homogeneous group that they were in the cities.

People hold you accountable here in a way that I never did in the city. When I have written things for the paper before, I have heard about it all over town – literally. Whether I have been teaching the fitness class or shopping for groceries, people talk to me about it. And the same people who show up in one context generally are part of my life in other, unrelated contexts as well. A dear lady in one of my Zumba classes was the same one who bought me water when I was pregnant and nauseated during the spaghetti dinner at the children's youth group. The guy who came to fix our water softener goes to church with a farmer who rents our land. A friend whose children came over to play at our house last weekend appeared as a substitute playground aide at the kids' school.

We depend heavily on people that do not agree with us about everything. Last winter, when my first-grade son's teacher unexpectedly made him ride home on the bus instead of going with the youth group, he came home to find nobody here. The temperature was well below zero, and his fingers got so cold fumbling with the key that he had no hope of opening the door. There were two houses within a quarter of a mile walk of our house, and he found loving help at the first home. Last week, because I cannot lift things, Ian relied on that same neighbor to help put the topper on his truck so he could take the chickens and processing. If a menacing animal showed up here, and I could not handle the situation myself, I would call the neighbors. Ian has helped a neighbor in that way already because there is no animal control out here.

Pretty soon, we will be going to the township board to ask if we can build a barn for our chickens, and some of the people there have certainly heard about us from our neighbors and maybe have made the connection between my family and the letters and essays I've written for the paper. Everyone on the board undoubtedly has opinions about us based on what they have carefully observed about our house and land as they have driven past. Another farmer, who wants to build some of these barns in a different township, is apparently unable to build right now because an influential member of the board does not approve of the way he went about asking for permission. In some ways, I don't know where we stand here, and I want so much to fit in.

However, if I never give people a chance to know me, then I have no chance of fitting in. If I assume I know what people think, then I will never know them. If I fail to do what I understand to be right because I am afraid of what other people think, then my failure comes from a lack of love. I do not want to fail because of that.

This is what the letter to the editor said:

A large Quaker meeting in St. Paul, which has been performing gay marriages since 1986, has decided it will no longer offer legal marriage ceremonies to straight couples because it cannot provide legal marriage ceremonies to gay couples. It will continue to offer marriage ceremonies and spiritual support for both gay and straight couples, as well as to care for the marriages of its members. It will offer to help straight couples legalize their marriages through the court system, but will not legalize their marriages itself. My Quaker meeting in Northfield was asked to respond to the St Paul Quaker meeting’s decision, and it is still considering the request.

My first reaction to the policy was fear and anger. I believe that marriage is holy, and especially in today's culture, it can use as much support as it can possibly get. I have been blessed with a marriage that has helped me to heal, to learn, and to serve. I could not imagine how it would be helpful to withhold any kind of support or benefit from couples who are taking up the sacred job of marriage.

Then I spent a great deal of time considering the situation. I have listened very attentively to many gay and lesbian friends over the course of many years, and in their marriages (which are recognized by my religious community) I see the same struggles and gifts that I have understood to be the work of God in my own marriage. I have prayed for these friends as they help each other grow and sometimes struggle to stay together. I have admired their parenting and have been deeply touched by the focused love that I have witnessed between them. I have seen in them a solidity and commitment that can serve as the foundation of a strong community. By listening to and watching some of these friends carefully over the course of many years, I have learned how to be better partner in my own marriage.

As it is becoming clear that the citizens of Minnesota will likely vote on a state constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, my friends have expressed a grief and sense of loneliness that makes my heart sore. Their feelings make this issue real to me in a way that it somehow was not before, and I find myself feeling peaceful with the decision of the Quaker meeting that has suspended all legal marriages. The sadness and inequality surrounding the lack of legal recognition of gay marriage feels like a heavy weight to me. I wish it could be lifted, and I wish we could all rejoice at its lifting.

Memorial Day

Every Memorial Day, my family visits the Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis carrying bouquets of lilacs, lilies of the valley, and planters of flowers to set on the family graves. We mill around on the gentle, tree-covered slope that I have visited almost every spring. I usually scrape tree seeds and encroaching dirt off the gravestones of my grandparents and my great aunt and uncle, and I chat with my aunt and uncle and cousins. Then we leave to go eat brunch.

My mother and uncle have followed this ritual faithfully for more than 60 years, ever since their mother died suddenly when they were still children. It has been one of my favorite family traditions, and my children and husband seem to treasure it even more than I do. This year, I cannot go because of all of my contractions, and I have convinced my husband to stay home as well because he has a crushing workload. Convincing him was not easy. He said it is important to respect the dead.

“Grandpa wouldn't mind if we stayed home this year," I told Ian. "He would think that work comes first. And Mom said that Grandma would be worried about us and would want us to take good care of ourselves.” I said that instead of going to Minneapolis, we should take bouquets of flowers into our house and tell stories about family and friends who've passed on. Then we should all eat a treat. My husband reluctantly agreed to my plan before heading outside with his power tools to modify a calf hutch so that it can be used as a poultry house.

I picked up the phone right away and told my mother the news. What she said made me cry. She said that if Grandpa had been alive, he would've considered skipping the family gathering so that he could come to our place and help Ian. She said that his spirit would not be at Lakewood Cemetery as much as it would be on our farm. He would've wanted to be here, building chicken crates and maybe putting in the garden that I can't imagine that we will actually be planting this year.

He would have loved our old tractor. Mom says that when Grandpa retired from working as a welder, he visited the Smithsonian in Washington DC with his wife Char, who was the only grandma I ever knew. She lost him in that huge museum, and after many hours she found him in the basement, engrossed with display of old farm equipment. He talked about that equipment for years and could remember each piece in great detail. If he could talk to us now, he would have so many ideas for us.

I hurried outside to tell Ian this story, and I found him bending over a power saw with my son. "You're grandpa is not the only one with lots of ideas," Ian said, nodding toward our boy. As Ian slipped on his safety glasses and headed off to rip a board, my child eagerly and earnestly explained the difference between several different saw blades that lay on the deck. Grandpa would have appreciated such things.

So we will be staying home tomorrow. And I will stay home knowing that we are wrapped in a life that the old ones in my family might have appreciated. By loving the land, and by awkwardly attempting to do some of the work that many of them knew so well, I can love even those relatives that I will never know.

And so we will celebrate Memorial Day this year.