Dear Readers ~ I, and the nineteen-year-old girl, appreciate your eye, your heart, and your comments. If you are new to this blog I invite you to circle around to the beginning chapter. To recap; this is a story of recovery and discovery which comes forward as part of my healing from a traumatic injury that occurred in December 2018. If you begin with the January 23, 2020 entry ‘Failure in My Bones‘ you will come through the ‘front door’ and find the context.

 

 

The question is not what you look at, but what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

 

 

The yellow bus carries us to Michigan and brings us back to Ohio. It feels good to retrace the path of the beetle that brought me here. We enter the long lane through the middle of the cornfield. As the bus is parked beside the barn, I scan the meadows and the woods and feel that The Farm is where I belong. I can sense the face of ‘all is well’ hidden in the dense necklace of trees.

I want to be responsible and ‘pay my way’. I ask the manager what I might do to make myself useful. He suggests so kindly that I might enjoy collecting eggs each morning, filling as many of the cardboard cartons stacked on the metal swings as I choose. He gives me instructions, lining a flat-bottomed basket with straw and showing me how to carefully and quickly remove the eggs when a hen is sitting on the nest. He chats and gives me advice as I start my training. It feels good to have a job.

The next morning, I walk to the barn and push the sliding door aside. I relish stepping into the heat and ammonia fumes. Hundreds of hen’s bustle, pecking in the feeding troughs filled with cracked corn, scratching in the thick sawdust underfoot, cooing to one another in their soft exchange. So gentle. I walk slowly along the perimeter of the barn, my left hand carrying the basket and the right fishing into the soft nests searching for warm eggs lifting them carefully out of the boxes.  The routine eases me into the day and leaves me with plenty of time to explore the rolling meadows. I make my way down the hill to the stream at the base of the ravine. I feel as though I am searching for the tracks of my elementary schoolgirl-self mixed in with the imprints of the raccoons and rabbits.  

I have grown up playing outdoors every day after school and all through the summer. Mom removes breakfast dishes from the table shooing us into the backyard. She leans out the back door and whistles at lunchtime, knowing that we are close enough to hear her distinct sound. Back outside for the afternoon, I explore the neighborhood or head to the woods behind the school knowing to be back and close enough that I can hear her whistle us in for dinner. My last segment of any given summer day ends reluctantly when the streetlights turn on. This is the signal to head home and stay in the yard. On the front lawn, we collect lightning bugs in jars as bats compete for diving insects in the circle of light between the tall maple trees arching over the curb.

This open land of The Farm feels very different. There is freedom here. No visible houses. No cars. No streets. No streetlights. No sounds aside from nature humming and thrumming, or the band’s bluegrass-inspired music drifting lazily out of the farmhouse. There are only a few reasons for me to go inside; to use the restroom, make peppermint tea, or to get something to eat that contains peanut butter and bread. As the light fades and the grasses come alive with lightning bugs, I climb into the borrowed sleeping bag on the front room floor. Beyond the curtain, I can see my apple tree twinkling with firefly lights.

The Farm tunes me into the natural rhythm of each day. Butterflies, dragonflies, sheep, and cast shadows lead my attention across the meadow. They zig-zag here and there. I listen to layers of bird’s voices, mostly hidden from view, calling from high and low along the edge of the open space. I watch as a pair of Redtail hawks’ dance together calling, swooping, and diving before each finds a branch from which to watch for their squirrel or chipmunk meal.

I lie in the meadow. I cloud dream. I watch the huge masses slow-moving overhead. I imagine a life lived on The Farm.  I imagine belonging.

The Way of Life is open on the grass beside me. Lao Tzu speaks. Each verse ignites a desire to learn. 

28

‘One who has a man’s wings
And a woman’s also
Is in himself a womb of the world’
And, being a womb of the world,
Continuously, endlessly,
Gives birth;
One who, preferring light,
Prefers darkness also
Is in himself an image of the world,
And, being an image of the world,
Is continuously, endlessly
The dwelling of creation;
One who is highest of men
And humblest also
Is in himself a valley of the world,
And, being a valley of the world,
Continuously, endlessly
Conducts the one source
From which vessels may be usefully filled;
Servants of the state are such vessels,
To be filled from undiminishing supply.

60

Handle a large kingdom with as gentle a touch as if
you were cooking a small fish.
If you manage people by letting them alone,
Ghosts of the dead shall not haunt you.
Not that there are no ghosts
But that their influence becomes propitious
In the sound existence of a living man:
There is no difference between the quick and the dead,
They are one channel of vitality.

 

8

Man at his best, like water,
Serves as he goes along:
Like water he seeks his own level,
The common level of life,
Loves living close to the earth,
Living clear down in his heart,
Loves kinship with his neighbors,
The pick of words that tell the truth,
The even tenor of a well-run state,
The fair profit of able dealing,
The right timing of useful deeds,
And for blocking no one’s way
No one blames him.

 

Three days after our return from Michigan I wander up the rise walking beyond my ‘all is well’ apple tree. I feel a bit timid yet curious. I have noticed this large fenced garden yet did not feel that it was my place to enter. I have stared at the large tropical looking leaves tumbling over the wire fence which stands higher than my shoulder. I have been drawn ever closer to the riot of blossoms and vining stems. Today I lift the rusty latch and push the heavy wooden gate entering into the next layer of this new world called The Farm.

The garden path is warm and feels familiar underfoot, composed of the same thick sawdust as the hen’s scatter and scratch, forming a cushion that both cradles and lifts me as I step forward into the lush enclosure. I recognize young pumpkins hiding their blossoming orange among huge leaves. I can identify the heavy scarlet tomatoes bending low; a few caterpillars (menacing-looking horned creatures larger than any caterpillar I have ever seen) are chomping the leaves surrounding the ripe orbs. I duck this way and that moving aside as the buzzing, zipping and droning bees, grasshoppers, and butterflies flutter past.

I sit down and listen.

I lean back and watch.

The heat is radiating up from the earth. I gently brush away the ants crawling over my bare legs, black and green caterpillars munch the softest, almost fur-like foliage on plants that tower over my head.

I stay a long while.

As I stand to leave, I notice movement through the thick growth beyond the fence. I make my way over to the far end of the garden to have a better look. The heat of the afternoon seems to be playing tricks with my eyes. I stop. I cannot be sure what I am looking at. The land rolls gently away from the garden down a grassy slope to a sparkling pond just outside the door of a hug-the-ground contemporary house.

What is this place?

The light dances off the water’s surface creating a shimmer that makes me blink. I look again. The sliding glass door opens and a figure steps out walking toward the water.

I watch.

Perhaps this is another vision; a residual piece of my ‘this will help you’  ‘all is well’ time travel.

The form moves to the water’s edge, stops. Her hands to shoulders, remove a long white garment. She steps over the fabric gracefully lifting onto her toes she arches and dives, disappearing into the pond.

I wait.

I wait patiently.

My fingers loop through the wire fencing, my forehead pressed against a metal strand. The surface of the water breaks several times, yet I cannot see.

After a while, the figure rises from the water; a slender nude woman.

I do not look away.

She is backlit and bends in silhouette taking her near waist-length hair between her hands. In slow motion, she gently twists the length releasing a stream of glittering droplets falling to her feet. Standing upright she gathers the garment over her shoulders; she gazes beyond the still pond while separating her hair into three strands. She weaves a single white braid.

I watch her turn slowly and dissolve, like a dream, back into the shadows of the house.