Recently I found myself sitting on a cliff in Portugal. My husband and I had spent the morning hiking through forests and cliffside, navigating gnarly terrain and narrow paths too close to the precarious edge of doom for my liking. The sun was soaking us to the bone, radiating into every crack of flesh and rock it touched. The crashing, thunderous waves of the wild Atlantic pounded mercilessly at the rocks below us. And there in my hand was an orange I had plucked from a tree only hours earlier.
I didn’t know I had never eaten a real orange before I ate that one. Here I am in my 54th year of life thinking I knew what an orange was. I was wrong. When we stopped for a mid-day picnic, it was the orange I was most looking forward to. I tore through the skin of that orange with my nails and was immediately astounded by the fragrance that rose up in a wondrous, saturated orange-y cloud perfume, even amidst the blowing, wild winds. That fragrance remained, intent on accompanying the orange until the very last bite. I separated the seamed segments an orange so hospitably offers itself in, and popped the first piece in my mouth. The moment my teeth pierced that membrane, an explosion of intense, vibrant, zesty juice filled my mouth. My eyes popped open. My lips struggled to stop the sweet nectar from spilling down my chin. My whole body jumped.
“What is THIS!”, demanded my every cell.
“An orange! THIS IS AN ORANGE! This is a REAL orange!”, I laughed out loud.
I ate it all, enraptured by every bite. Nothing else was allowed into my thoughts but the warmth of that sun, the sound of those waves, and that wondrous miracle of that orange exactly as God had made it. It was a moment of absolute ecstasy.
I followed that orange with many others on our trip, but I will always remember that moment and the honest gift that orange offered to me. I thought I knew what something was only to be astounded to learn how fooled I have been. It’s a theme I’ve been thinking about in my own life, in many ways lately. The stories I’ve been told that were simply folded into my understanding of the world. The ways of being I’ve accepted because it’s easier than starting something new. The facsimiles of things that suffocate the possibilities of what actually is.
How many real oranges have been lost to me because I accepted the familiar as true by default?
I don’t want anymore stored, bland, pulpy oranges in my life. I’d rather have none at all. I’d rather wait. I’d rather one more dance with some golden-balled tree, rich with sun ripened oranges than a lie. Same can be said for those woody apples and limp asparagus. Same can be said for watery milk and bland, soggy-boned chickens. Same can be said for my relationships and my place in this world and what I’m here for at all.
The death of a child is catastrophic. I pray, truly I pray, you never know such pain. If you have and you do then I need offer no further explanation. What such anguish also brings into one’s life, if it’s allowed to stay and not pushed out the door by distractions or avoidance, is great clarity. One simply cannot entertain the squabbles and ridiculous quibbles of life. Things that once felt monumental disintegrate into nothingness. There can be no energy given to frivolity and made-up injustices because there is no energy to give. Everything, in grief, goes to grief. And slowly, as grief begins to recede, millimetre by millimetre, a little room is made in a shape only filled by a little more love. But that’s it. Grief or love. Love and grief.
Things have changed for us since our daughter Mila’s death. We are slower now, more purposeful in what we offer and with whom we engage. We prefer quiet to gatherings, hikes to entertainment. Our friendships are fewer but deeper. The extraneous has fallen away. We simply don’t have the capacity or the desire to entertain the machinations of this culture or the bureaucracies or systems or people in life that make falsities a prerequisite of relationship. There’s a great gift in that but, it comes only through protecting what we need to endure and letting go of the rest.
Things are changing for us in many ways, but ways that all seem to ride in with the same message - nothing is permanent. I grew up moving constantly. I left home and then kept on moving constantly with the military. Here, on this farm my loving husband and I worked so hard to buy and grow and fix-up we thought we had found our forever home. We want this to be our forever home. Everything we have we put into making this house a home for us and our children. And, now, maybe it won’t be. Now, maybe things are so bananas in this country that we will have no option but to leave.
We don’t want to think it. We don’t want it to be true. The thought of it fills me with trepidation. So, I take that as reason enough to think of it some more. No one thing can ever be that precious to us. No one thing can have that kind of control over how we choose to live this one precious life. Fear is, after all, only a lighthouse illuminating what’s there anyway. Best to look so you can navigate those waters before you get pummelled.
It would break my heart to leave my home, but even a home can be a proxy for home. And if that’s true, and I think it is, what is the deeper truth buried in there? I’ve been thinking about that a lot as the sadness and worry at the thought of what may befall us fills my heart. What if we have to make these decisions? Will we be okay? Can home be something other than a place? Is the truth of it that home has never been a place at all?
At the same time, I have had some important relationships in my life end. I will write more about this in a way that seems fair and honest to me at another time, but for now, it comes in on those same winds when, as a woman in mid-life (if I’m lucky) I’m trimming back what is no longer mine to tend. Maybe, it never was either. I’m learning that still, now, in this fifth decade of my life. Maybe, like the apple trees we recently pruned, what will grow in the spaces that are left behind will be abundant, lush, and more healthy than what was.
Maybe, just maybe, there will be some unknown fruit that takes me by surprise like that orange kissed by the salty waves of the ocean. A fruit so wondrous and exotic I could never have imagined it in my wildest dreams. Faith in the gifts in the unknown. Faith in the exquisite perfection of God’s creation. Faith in the juicy abundance of what’s waiting. I’m going with that.
Note to readers: the regular narrated versions of my essays come in a separate email. This week, as a happy-to-be-back from my book editing gig, I will be sending out the narrated version to all instead of just as I regularly do for my paid subscribers as a perk and a thank you for their support. What’s now different is a second audio clip for paid subscribers that I’m dubbing “The Back Forty” that will, hopefully, if the substack gods help me figure out a glitch, start up sometime next week. More to come.
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