For me the high point of Thanksgiving was a gentle conversation with my kids (the Atlantic offspring in person and the Pacific two by phone), about a delicate subject.
My wife died a year ago. We celebrated Thanksgiving just a few days later. Not surprisingly I hardly remember it and in fact I don’t think I could even tell you who was there, except I remember we had turkey.
This year, all of us were more coherent although no less grieved. Our conversation was about how we might have holidays in the future, starting with this Christmas. I was raised without celebrating Christmas, so I feel particularly at sea without Mary’s guidance – and really, for all celebrations and holiday events. The Rev Mary was the empress of events – she loved those rituals, and kept them well.
So the kids and I talked about holidays without Mary, family celebrations that had been designed for the pleasure of small children who are now grown adults: the holding of family gatherings for a family that is almost daily more separated by many degrees of latitude and longitude.
This morning as I sat looking out over the marsh sipping coffee, thinking of the changes since our family center-post left, I tracked the slow flaps of a good-sized eagle up the Dyer River past my window. Then I put the coffee down in astonishment.
Across the river from the house are the Five Trees. These huge trees were the center of many of Mary’s descriptions of her beloved marsh, pillars always present in her pictures, poems and stories. The northernmost of the five, with its three crowns, appears in dozens of photos of the river wending through the salt marsh.
Look up at the picture I took of the marsh around 80 or 90 days ago, at the top of this blog. You can see that northernmost tree with her three crowns; one of her sisters is to the left. The various tide and goose photos of the past few days show others of The Five.
Here’s the tree this morning:
Overnight it’s become a two-crowned tree: the distinctive shape of the marsh is changed from what I’ve come to expect in my daily parsing of life here. Aside from seeing the altered landscape, you can I’m sure also see the connection between the new two-headed tree and our Thanksgiving family conversation. The ache and sadness of losing a beloved person will never leave us. But we also know that as a family, we adopt new shapes and allow change even while our love and our loss remain. Heraclitus is famous for having said, “Everything flows.” The broken tree reminds me today that around the flow of change is an ageless peace and stillness that embraces us all.
