green time

I would like to see time. 

Beatrice was in the back seat. I glanced at her in the mirror.

Not like seeing the future, I don't mean that. I mean what time is, what it looks like. Maybe it's a kind of ... greenish air.

Oh, yes, I said. I'd like to see that too. Maybe it's like ... water. Something you can't really hold, something that moves.

Maybe.

I sat at a familiar light, resting my hands on top of the steering wheel and enjoying a pleasantly fizzing excitement about where this imaginative, philosophical discussion with my six year old might lead. We were both quiet. My mind started reaching towards the mysteries of time and space, past and present, life and death.

Bea's voice suddenly ruptured the pregnant silence of the minivan. She had a new idea.

Mama, could you play It's Raining Tacos on your phone? Pleeeeeease? Or, wait, I know! Cat Flushing a Toilet!

The moment had already passed, as all do. Then I had to disappoint my girl because if I hear one of those autotuned monstrosities one more time I will have to run away to Australia, where children surely have better taste.

At the end of June, I drove us to North Carolina for a week. We met up with friends in the mountain town that is situated near my beloved UU camp that I went to in the summers growing up. My family spent time there too, as my dad would serve as minister for week-long family camps in between the youth camp sessions my sister and I would attend. I went most summers between age 9 - 17. My Mountain camp friends were precious to me, and many of us exchanged letters during the 50 weeks of the year that we weren't in camp together. I was a counselor the summer after my dad died, in 1996. I visited once more with college friends in the fall of 1997.

And that was it - until a few weeks ago.

We rented a house in the mountains with our friends. The last stretch of the drive seemed interminable. Everything in the car felt sticky. Bits of popcorn and crushed Pringles coated the floor mats. The children had driven each other and me insane after two days of being car-bound. When we finally arrived, I pulled into the gravel parking area, opened the door, and paused, feeling the green mountain air gently and insistently push all the accumulated stress of the drive, the irritation with my children, the uncertainty about where we were, and the worry over whether all of this was a good idea right off my shoulders, my back, my hips. The air passed in and over me and took most of that stuff along with it. I breathed deeply. It smelled exactly right. Like home.

The next day we met up with a dear old family friend at the Mountain. Lee is a folk musician and storyteller who has been river guiding on the Nantahala for forty years. My dad and Lee were particularly close. When I got out of the car at the Mountain and everything looked and felt just as it should, just as it always has, I felt my heart stretching, pushing at my sternum. I stepped with Lee, my children, and our friends out onto a place called Meditation Rock, where one is surrounded by the blue and gray and green mountains, the abundant sky, the spirits of those who came before us, and began to cry. It was so beautiful. I missed my dad.

Lee cried with me. He understood. Kit Howell! What a joy it was to be on Meditation Rock with you.

Our summer travels since Mike died (Vermont, Colorado, New England and New York last summer; North Carolina and New England this summer) are fraught for us. A year ago, I wanted to give my children all the things they couldn't have in the years Mike was sick. Adventure, freedom, travel, new formative experiences in beautiful places. It was hard though; we were still reeling, in pieces, grieving Mike and grieving the family we used to be, uncertain who or what we now were. I thought farflung adventures would help us figure that out, or at least help us to know that we still were a family, albeit deeply broken and diminished.

Did it? I'm not sure. I cried my way through most of those trips. I felt Mike's absence acutely in the places we went that he had loved. Vermont was heart breaking. Our Colorado river trip cracked open my grief in a terrible, scouring way; that canyon was big enough to hold the fathomless sadness coursing through me - and so much more - so it just kept pouring out. I barely slept; the space and the sorrow wouldn't let me. I was grateful to be there, but it wasn't easy (for me, or I suspect, anyone else close to me on that trip).

My last time at the Mountain was in 1997. I fell in love with Mike in 1998. He had never been there; we never visited. I had to acknowledge that I had stayed away from an incredibly special place for many years because Mike wasn't interested in going, and I wasn't interested in pushing the issue. It never even came up; I just knew he didn't want to go - for a number of complicated reasons - so I didn't ask. Last summer that realization would have made me sad, worried about the ways we let each other down in our marriage, but I'm okay with it now. We were imperfect people, doing our best to love each other in our imperfect marriage; certain priorities came to the fore in our shared life while others fell to the side. That's what happens. You build something together; you make choices.

The truth is I was grateful that we'd never been to the Mountain together. I didn't have to feel Mike's absence there in the way I had to in Vermont last summer; this was my place, my family's place, and I was full of relief to return to it, feel it's abiding hold on me. It's something I can bring along into this uncertain, unfolding future with my children. Being there knit the pre-Mike parts of me closer to the post-Mike parts of me. That whole week, seeing old friends and visiting special places, plunging into the shock of cold water at the base of a waterfall, navigating gentle rapids with my children, seeking daily ice cream cones, and sharing it all with friends who were seeing it for the first time tethered me to myself. Time felt like something palpable.

Our marriage was a tree. We sent our roots down into soil that our parents and grandparents and countless others that I will never know prepared for us, soil that our childhoods enriched, that our friendships made fertile. But the tree was us. Mike was my person, and I was his, and maybe this metaphor would work better with some entwined trunks imagery but I'm just going for it: one tree. One life we shared. We grew our careers and homes and children from that place of strength and connection. One's twenties and thirties are so full; in the scant time we each had for ourselves I might go to a yoga class or take a run or see a friend for a drink. Mike would pray or meditate, read a novel, take a walk. But those were the stolen hours, essential yet peripheral. Everything else was directed towards feeding the tree: meals together, plans for the kids, decisions about what to do with the garden and where to take a vacation.

Our tree was very beautiful. Its roots were complex and knotty and overlapping; it's branches were heavy with vibrant green in some seasons, bare and stark in others. The reality of the tree, it's weighty, undeniable aliveness, was never in question. For better and worse it was ours, it was us, it was ever-changing and yet ever-steady. The center we moved from. Even when Mike was sick in bed for days on end, unable to speak, the tree was undiminished.

When Mike died I felt as though our tree had been hit by lightning. The tree where I lived and the tree that was also me was destroyed. I was burnt and hollowed out and ashen. I didn't want to die, but I didn't know who or what I could be now, in this strange disorienting landscape: exposed to the elements, without strong leafy branches overhead.

Being at the Mountain felt like new life sprouting up through cracks in charred, blackened wood. The soil our marriage grew in is still there, still full of life and possibility, and our roots were protected in the darkness. The nurture I soaked up as a young person in North Carolina is still real, and can be part of my life moving forward. What a relief, what a blessing, to be reminded that I don't have to make all this shit up. That moving forward without Mike does not mean leaving the place where our tree flourished; that the same place can surprise me, nurture me, and thus my children, still.

What I - and we - have now is definitely not a tree. It is not even a sapling. But it isn't dead either; there are weird mushrooms clinging to the burnt bark, vibrant wildflowers growing in the ash-enriched soil, and tiny tree shoots here and there. There is a whole world pulsating beneath the surface -  bacteria multiplying, worms tunneling - unseen and mostly unknown even to me. I have no idea what kind of organizing vision is at work here. Who and what and how I am without Mike remain open questions.

But through it all the strange green air of time is moving, making connections above and below, and setting this tender wreckage aglow.