Becca Brin Manlove. Photo by Patina Photography
I’m a slow blogger, a fast kid-catcher (as Grandma Daycare), a carbon-sinner tree hugger, and a believer in both magic and science. I’ve lost two good men to heart attacks, my mom to Alzheimer’s, and my dad while he was living with me. So naturally, I’m blogging about gratitude. Also, writing essays about mistakes I make while celebrating life in northeastern Minnesota. My unpublished novel is about a crabby retired teacher who is either an earth angel in training or in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. My book, Hauling Water won some nice awards, including an IPPY. If you’re a Writer’s Agent, I could use your help.
We believe the trees’ movements are arrested and might even feel a bit sorry for them. But do they watch us scurry, jumping in and out of cars, we short-lived beings, spending our brief moments in running around, rather than taking a seat on the ground, letting our attention send down a tap root? Don’t we wonder if the rose-breasted nuthatch is out in this gentle rain, pipping up and down the bole of a tree, because it’s hungry?
David was incandescent with some adventure, but he didn’t tell me where we were going until he drove straight through the lake access and out onto the ice road of Cathedral Lake.*
“Oh shit!” I unbuckled my seatbelt and rolled down my window. “David, you can’t drive to the islands. Ice around islands can be weak.”
I knew he’d survived tumbling two stories to a cobblestone street in Germany when he was five. When he was 18, he was at the helm of a sailboat in the middle of the night when a wave washed him into the ocean. Watching the boat skim away, no one aware he was overboard, he flailed his arm and just happened to catch a rope trailing behind the boat. He survived being a door gunner in Vietnam, engine malfunctions in his helicopters, and misdiagnosed Lyme’s disease. The man was unsinkable. But was I?
By then the yard was full of first responders and an ambulance.
What had seemed a winter-bleak street, strangers peering at me from behind their curtains as I followed my old dog around the block, became instead a lane of homes, golden with lamplight, harboring kind souls.
Somewhere, in heaven or on some other plane of existence, Mike Manlove is laughing at my comparing him to fungal networks. He gets to use two phrases he liked, “The fungus among us? I resemble that remark.”
Kawishiwi, an Anishinaabeg word, is translated as “River Full of Beaver Houses.” I’ve been told there is another meaning that is closer to “a place where the spirits laugh.” When my first step into the river let me know my old Muk boots leaked, I remembered the second meaning.
We can’t know what a child will pick up, what put down, what break and discard or break and improve, what they might uncover or dream into being.
My body (and it’s buzzing mind) is an AirBnB, a temporary rental unit for the flow of life.
We think of interruptions and interrupters as unwelcome and rude. But islands intrude with such beauty, we celebrate their disturbance.
Like any transplant, I was shocky at first. Not sure if I’d thrive or whither here. Roots need time to tap around in the new soil, see if it’s hospitable.
And in those places where life is thinnest and hardest, gratitude can gain a toehold. Life won’t be stopped there either, even though we are sometimes astounded that it hasn’t.
Gratitude by alphabet for all things rooted (both actually and emotionally) in love and life.
