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| Menacing storm clouds over our ridge farm last spring. |
On Monday, April 15th,
after a late afternoon at the library helping my eldest son gather research for
his World War II project, we came home to our ridge. As we drove down our farm
lane, I shared my benediction with my son as I noticed the fringes of redbud along
the greening forest and our cattle grazing on pasture after a prolonged winter.
Each time I come over the rise and dip of our knob and behold the picturesque
meld of landscape that defines our farm, I am grateful. No matter what has
happened in my day, I feel nestled, even safe, in the sustenance that is our homeplace.
My husband greeted us at the
door. “Have you heard about Boston?” I had not even checked Facebook at the
library, as involved as we were in our short research of the enormity of World
War II. “Bombs went off near Copley Plaza at the end of the marathon.” Without
knowing anything more, I felt sick. Boston is a city where we are both familiar,
where I once lived, worked and went to graduate school, and where my husband
was planning to be this week for an annual club dinner (he did not attend,
after all, but had a lovely visit with many old friends in the area). We moved to Kentucky
five years ago but we will always be New Englanders at heart.
Before I could process the
Boston Marathon horror, my husband came closer so our boys would be out of
earshot. “I picked up some trash on the side of the road and got pricked by a hypodermic
needle,” he said. I went into my usual mode of rapid-fire questioning when
presented with something jarring. Yes, he’d called the doctor and made an
appointment for a blood test the next morning. No, he’d burned the evidence in
the stove, left in its Hardee’s bag, after a fit of anger and so no one else
could be harmed. We called a neighbor, not telling her why, to ask if she’d
seen any vehicles drive past when we were both off the ridge to get our boys
from school. Any vehicle driving past our farm is cause for a pause and a wave.
No one lives on the county road but us so it isn’t especially well
traveled—however, it is a short-cut connector between our larger ridge road if
you don’t mind the bumps.
I saw my husband and our
youngest son as I passed and waved to them at an intersection before they
headed home. I remember thinking, with their arms outstretched towards me from
their car windows, “They look so joyful!” They came back to the ridge before we
did, a few hours later. My husband notices details and stopped to pick up the
Hardee’s bag. The constancy of trash along the roadside, or dumped wholesale
down a gully, is a sad occurrence in parts of Kentucky where there often seems
to be little regard for the land or its intrinsic beauty by the people who were
raised in these hills. This is not a judgment call, just fact: just as many
seem to disregard their pets by not spaying and neutering them and allowing
them to roam and become other people’s problems.
My husband has built a working
cattle operation in the past few years from run out farmland and he works very hard.
Even though we struggle at times, we don’t even take the farm subsidies that
are available to us through the Farm Bill because we regard it as unnecessary welfare.
[“Send it back to Washington to pay down the deficit!” my husband said when our
local agency said it was there for us. “That’s not how it works,” was the
reply. Just imagine the logic, for a moment, of being paid to not grow something?] I admire someone
who, in his 50s, has the conviction that this is what we should be doing with
the rest of our lives. Neither does he hesitate to pick up trash, barehanded, on
our barely-traveled farm road where it always seems such a deliberate
violation.
My first thought regarding
the needle prick was that he has health insurance (I was denied). My second
thought was more selfish and entirely mother-driven: “thank goodness it wasn’t
one of the boys.” My final thought was “what if?” I didn’t linger long with
that question. In my upset over the needle incident and its possible outcome,
as I watched the coverage of the tragic Boston bombing, I realized there is no
predicting the senseless events that occur in our world. Neither is any place
safe or immune from the possibility of tragedy, whether natural or triggered by
human interaction. There is a strange calm in this knowledge. My anxieties do not
revel in the things I can’t control but in the things that I can.
I winced at the irony of
receiving a “service message” phone call as I wrote this: “The FBI says there
is a home invasion every fifteen seconds,” it began. “If you allow us to
install a new security system…” at which point I hung up the phone. If bombs
can burst and kill and maim in a crowded city street in America, or a troubled
person can enter a suburban school with a semi-automatic weapon, then a tossed
and dirty needle can pierce a hardworking man’s hand on his own peaceful bit of
farmland. No one is exempt from being violated and, like everyone, my family
has had its share of harmful acts from external sources. Yet we can never allow
ourselves to be defined by our misfortunes or the difficult things that happen
to us along the way: victims always wallow in the mire and blame while victors
rise and move forward from the wreckage.
Even if we are able to find
the person who used and threw away the needle, the damage may have already been
done. So now the question is do we live in disgust or fear of every bit of
“trash” or person who wishes to do harm or do we listen and look for those
moments of quiet beauty, as when the whippoorwill calls across our fields at
the edge of twilight? Or when neighbors let us know that they saw one of our
cows struggling to give birth and then offer to help our boys while their
father is away? [But I do need to boast for a moment: by the time the neighbors
arrived, our boys had corralled the mother and pulled its calf safely and with
all the finesse of seasoned midwives.]
I had to cheer what David Ortiz said at the Red Sox game on Sunday: “This is our f@#$ing city!” This is our f-ing
country, too. I don’t often say this, and at the risk of sounding jingoistic:
“Love it or leave it.” At least respect, nurture and honor it. Don’t trash it.
Please don’t deny that we have major environmental or societal problems and
accept that our own small orb in this immense universe is in trouble—and, God
willing, or not, we can affect the outcome of our planet and
how we interact.
My heart is with the
families who have suffered loss of life or massive injury in last week’s
bombing and as a mother I also feel for the family of the brothers in the Boston
tragedy. At nineteen, the youngest brother is only four years older than my oldest boy. Where was
his mother or his father for the past few years? Even though he seemed Americanized and had even
become a citizen, did he feel alone and homeless? Without home or country? Feeling displaced, or without place, are disconcerting places to be—sometimes with no firm or familiar ground.
We may never know what drove these young men, or other people, to hurt
innocents in the name of a cause or personal hurt. What causes someone to
explode rather than to quietly implode? I will never understand a religious
faction that advocates killing or hatred—and, throughout its long history,
Christianity, as a religion (not the person in whose name it exists), has not
been immune to this, either.
While we live on an
inconsiderate planet, where people, animals—and the land—seem increasingly disrespected,
I still know there are those who run back into the fray to help or who stop to
assist a stranger, to take in a stray animal, or who are willing to share their
time or what they have with their neighbors. When there are random acts of
violence and terrorism—as there have been throughout our world’s history—we
must also assure that we never lose our humanity and hope for goodness. If we
do, those who terrorize, or who bully or disregard the rest of us, will have
won.
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Each spring, violets bloom from the detritus of fall––always a reassuring sight in a weary world.
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“Love thy neighbor as
thyself.” If we could just remember this basic creed and put it into more regular
practice, whatever our religion (and it is a tenet of all faiths), the world
would just be better. Practice random acts of kindness—daily, even hourly—in
quiet benediction or loudly to the hills or the city canyons. And pray—pray
especially hard for those who wish to harm us or through their own sad lives,
can’t seem to help it (whether from their hatred, envy, greed, ignorance or
inadequacies). Sometimes, in a crazy world, it is all that we can do.
You come back when you're ready!
Catherine
