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.

Too many contractions

I am five months pregnant, and I'm having contractions much of the time. Last night, they were so intense that they made me walk with a limp, and it seemed as though I were contracting for the majority of several hours with short breaks in between. I camped out on the couch, drank nettle tea, and let my husband fix dinner for the family. Then he worked in the garden, drove 5 miles to the gas station to buy gas for the tractor after it got stuck, took care of the chickens, and washed dishes. He went to bed in the wee hours of the morning and rose at five to go to work.

I am reminded of one of my favorite parts of the Bible. It is in the book of Luke, and it cracks me up every time I read it. Jesus says that if somebody sins against you seven times in the same day and says he is sorry seven times, then you have to forgive him every single time. At this point, Jesus had been teaching at great length without interruption, but that last instruction is just too much for his disciples. “Lord, increase our faith,” they say. I giggle at this because I just know that a millisecond before they said, "Increase my faith,” some of them must have thought, “You have got to be kidding me.” I can just see their faces drop in that moment before they got their act together and said the perfect thing.

I am in the “you have got to be kidding me” phase. When I think about it though, I throw in a little prayer and say, "Lord, increase my faith.”

I work long and hard every day with my children, the farm, and our home, and most of my work is totally invisible. I'm leaving a huge gap here, and I'm afraid I'm the only one who understands how huge the gap is. Folks are stepping up to help. Yesterday, Ian's father mowed most of our huge lawn. Today, one friend drove my daughter to orchestra practice, and another is bringing supper. Tomorrow, my mother is coming down to provide backup for me so my children can have play dates here while Ian goes to a farm auction. We are not without loving support, but I am still not clear how everything is goig to get done around here.

My midwife says not to worry. I have not shown signs of true preterm labor, and she has worked with many mothers who have experienced similar contractions, and then are still pregnant a week after their due date. But in the back of my mind I am trying to prepare myself for what it would be like to lose this baby. I'm also wondering what our life will be like if he is born early and with very serious disabilities, which makes me wonder if I will ever be free enough from family obligation to pursue my dream of being a farmer.

Lord increase my faith.

Spring

It has been a cold, wet spring, but now the sun has come out, and with it has come a time of almost feverish activity. You can't drive anywhere without slowing down for tractors so enormous they look more like spaceships than the little pictures of red tractors that appear in children's books. Yesterday, many of them were carrying tillage equipment, like huge, folded wings equipped with curving metal spikes to rake through the soil. Today, before seven in the morning, I saw a tractor hurrying down the road carrying plastic boxes of seed, ready to plant.

My husband left my daughter's orchestra concert early last night to go home and work while there was still daylight. With my ascent, he let my son stay up very late so he could keep working instead of putting him to bed, and when my daughter and I got home from the orchestra concert, we heard wild cries coming from the darkening fields. We looked at each other with horror, thinking that we were hearing unusually chilling coyote howls. My daughter hurriedly shut the outside cats on the back porch to keep them safe. It was my son howling. He had bit into an apple and wrenched loose one of his baby teeth way past his bedtime, and then run outside into the field to find his father. We could not see him in the dark.

The combination of my pregnancy, the weather, and equipment failure has left us awed by the amount of work we have to do -- even though we are not planting row crops. Most of the chicken work is apparently off-limits for me because of concerns about germs during my pregnancy, and I have still not learned how to operate the tractor with confidence, so far too much of this work is falling on my husband who is working more than full-time at his teaching job.

I am taking two lessons away from this time. First, I need to be pushier and willing to make more mistakes so that I can be a more active partner in this farm. There is no reason why I should not be driving that tractor as well as my husband is by this time. Second, we have been included in this wild and beautiful rhythm of working with the land, at least partially. I'm so grateful for that.

The ditch

We are thinking about not mowing the ditch in front of our house. Its steep sides make it frightening to mow, and my mother-in-law is concerned that the mower will tip and squash one of us. I hate mowing for both environmental and practical reasons, and I like the idea of planting wildflower seeds along that ditch, making it a haven for bees and butterflies. However, nobody along our busy street lets their ditch go wild. People put great time and energy into making sure that their ditches looks smooth and green, right up to the road. Most folks mow just in front of their yards, but some, like our two closest neighbors, keep their ditches clipped in long for swaths along the road.

As I try to understand what manicured ditches mean to people, I feel like I am trying to understand a foreign language, like attempting to decode the baffling implications of clothes and hairstyles. It seems to me that mowing is a way of presenting oneself to the community as somebody who works hard, who cares about the world, and who was generally not falling too far behind in life. If we were to stop mowing the ditch, I worry that this would be interpreted as a lack of care and organization. I'm even more afraid that people would see the wild looking ditch and think that we're hippies from the city, which certainly has a grain of truth to it. I do not want anyone to look at our house and decide that we do not belong in this community.

In Minneapolis, I would've felt fine about doing something different from the folks around me. In the country though, the house and the land around it do not feel like they are completely mine. Instead, they belong, in part, to the community. When we run into people who have lived in the area for a long time, they know our home. “Oh, the green house!” they exclaim, and then go on to describe other families they have lived there or comment on the changes that we have made. They comment on our chickens and notice some bushes that we have planted. They ask about the new cars parked in the driveway. This house has been a character in their lives for decades, and they feel friendly sense of ownership about it.

They remind me of the truth. This house is been standing here for 110 years, and many families have come and gone during that time. The community and the farmland that surround it have been here for even longer, and before that was the woods, and other communities of people. We are just an afterthought, and even if we live here until we die, the house may still be standing to receive another family. Although we own it, and I am very grateful to own it, the place will never be completely ours.

A person could look at this with an environmental point of view and come to the same conclusion about not fully owning the place. Looking from that point of view, it is our job to spend a short time on earth nurturing the natural communities that sustain us and include us. One very small way of doing that might be to stop mowing the ditch.

In reality, the ditch is only a very small part of our enormous, mowed yard. One neighbor suggested laughingly that we get some sheep, but I think he was only partially kidding. That sounds like fun, and I don't think it would evoke the same shock and disapproval as a wildflower garden in the ditch. But like so many other things, caring for sheep takes organization, money and work, and with the baby coming, I can't imagine getting around to it for at least another several years. God willing, we will still be here, and the house will still be here, and the land will still be here. God willing, the folks who have lived here the longest will still be around to comment on new sheep.

Shadows

Regi Haslett-Marroquin tells a story of growing up farming near the rainforests of Guatemala. Weeds sprouted in a day, and even when Regi’s family hung the pulled weeds in the air, their roots continued to grow toward the earth. When he was about eight years old, Regi’s father decided to try some herbicide on the weeds, and it worked. The robust plants turned to mush. Regi remembers his father studying the dead vegetation a couple of days later. He decided the chemicals were too violent to use in the fields where the family grew their food. They never used those chemicals again.

I expect that the fields around us will be sprayed with herbicide within the next couple of weeks when the ground dries out enough. I am waiting for this uneasily, wishing that more people shared the views of Regi’s father.

In the meantime, the skies have been gray, and in some places water lies bright between furrows of turned earth. The wind has been raw. My children have been playing inside for the most part, and my son is engrossed by a huge collection of Star Wars action figures and space ships, saved from my husband’s childhood. Our family room is the site of constant battle.

I wish I felt easy putting an end to this game. With all this talk about guns and shooting, shadows are gathering in my heart. As a survivor of gun violence and other abuse, I know a murky land that lays itself over the rest of my life. Gray vapors hover at the edge of my sight and evaporate when I turn to look at them directly. A dank coolness pools around me and wraps me in fear now and then.

Playing with action figures is a normal part of growing up for lots of kids. My husband thinks it is part of a developmental stage. I don’t want to keep my children from what most people consider to be normal childhood fun. Already, we don’t have a television, and watching a movie is a huge deal in this house. And yet, why is it normal for so many toys to be based on games of murder? Why is it impossible for a family to watch a baseball game on television without seeing people shoot at each other during the commercials? The prevalence of violence makes it feel more awful, not less, and I feel wildly alone and a little off my rocker because I can’t accept this as normal and fine.

The same feeling envelops me as I wait for the neighboring farmers to start spraying the fields. Like Regi’s father, I believe those sprays are violent. Most people feel the sprays are helpful and necessary, and that they prevent the misery of hunger. Perhaps they are deferring some misery, but I feel in my bones that future generations will be repaying that debt with crushingly high interest. I also remember the six-legged frog I held in my hand, and I picture the nearby sign that stands at the beginning of a corn field, honoring a child who died of cancer. Every week or so, someone ties a new stuffed animal to that sign. I feel lonely and even a bit frantic as I think that the collective wisdom of the culture is not keeping us safe.

I know from experience that nothing good will come from staying in a place of fear. So I am holding on to the memory of a dream. In this dream, I am standing at the bottom of a terrible, haunted stairway, its walls covered with peeling yellow wallpaper. The stairway is the symbol of all of the destruction left behind by violence. Fear fixes me to the ground, and I grieve that I will never be able to climb those stairs. I’ve dreamed this over and over, but one night Jesus stood with me at the foot of the stairs. He looked up the stairs, not afraid or even surprised, and then his laughter echoed warm and spacious in that narrow place.