Finding the Phoenix: Epilogue
In the southeast corner of the uncut field. we buried what was left of the barn.
Nails, truss joiners, leftover melted bits of canning jars (antique blue ones with the wire-top lids--ouch), anything that withstood the furnace-y heat and didn't fit in the demolition crew's dump truck is now beneath a crumbly mound of black and rust-colored clay, resting in the earth's tolerant embrace.
Also nestled in that embrace, uncomfortable and restless, is our shame. We had too much stuff. So much that we couldn’t remember it immediately when the insurance company gave us the chattels form to list it all.
We didn’t start the fire, but…we kept feeding it things, and it ate our stuff with impunity.
A local handyman business did the dirty work of clearing away what didn't burn--the metal siding, clanging in sheets as the vice grip of the loader grabbed hold and pulled. Seeing the bulky skeleton of our old riding lawn mower rocking slightly atop the other twisted debris in the dump truck, its rubber tires, gear shift knob, and vinyl-covered seat not even a memory now, I wondered what other tolerant soil would receive this latest deposit of our human consumerism. It might have been leaving the land we live on, but...it wasn't going anywhere, really, not for a long, long time.
Now, every morning, I can see the barn grave site from the bathroom window, and the contours of the path leading to it. It pricks my conscience in ways I didn't expect. All of the other paths that wind through the field and the woods are soft grass-carpeted walking paths. You could almost wander them in your bare feet if not for the blackberry vines. But the path to the buried barn detritus is rough-cut and stubbly, a mix of bare soil and knobs of bull thistle; the first time I make the trek, I tripped over the fibrous stalk of a mangled iron weed plant, and landed humbly on my knees. Huh. Isn’t that interesting.
At the end of that first long walk down the new path, the mound of clay looks tired and spent. I find a mostly flat clump of dirt to sit on, and look to the north. The young goldenrod waves gently back and forth, and I can’t see where the barn used to be. It’s just me and the rest of what we used to own and didn’t use much. The morning after the fire, I went on a purge binge. I sorted with extreme prejudice, packed the truck with bags of it all until no more bags would fit, and our local Goodwill patiently priced the things I brought them. It felt like progress, albeit akin to tossing bricks into the Grand Canyon. We still have three other outbuildings full of old wood, garden tools, and enough supplies to host “make-and-take” craft retreats well into the Spring.
Because he likes a project that works the deepest part of his critical thinking skills, Patrick spent the days and weeks after the fire pouring himself into plans for the rebuild. He sketched out the new barn’s footprint, obtained estimates on lumber, labor, and electrical wiring costs, imagined a new space to ply his wood-turning craft, and made sure there would be ample room for the lawnmower (yes, we owned two) that we store in the old old goat barn, thank goodness, and a brooder for future chicks. He was so excited about the possibility of new space, more space. Every day after work, he’d greet me with a revised draft of his blueprints, a slight tweak to the layout, his eyes bright with new barn expectations.
Then demolition day came. Patrick saw it all come down, get loaded up, and hauled away. It took three trips across our little bridge, until only the two trees remained. And he saw the kind, thoughtful handyman pull the dying trees out by their roots. The willow gave up easily. But the sycamore held fast, determined not to leave the only soil she’d ever known. It was a poignant tug-of-war and we knew who would eventually win, but not without her pulling the 4,000-lb backhoe loader’s rear wheels off the ground. Patrick would later tell me it was hard to watch.
We were building the new chick brooder behind the house one sunny evening after work, and he said “Now don’t kill me, but I’ve had a new thought on the barn rebuild”. He’d shared so many revisions with me in the past several days, this didn’t surprise me. I looked at him expectantly, as the words “you know, we don’t have to rebuild right away” came to rest in the space between us.
He was right.
We could wait. Let the land rest from her trauma. Clean out the other barns (again, with extreme prejudice) and see what remained, and decide from there just what sort of new barn or shed we really needed. Watching that sycamore reluctantly give up its ghost triggered an epiphany in Patrick, as did the long, slow procession and burial of whatever didn’t burn or melt. Hadn’t we learned our lesson? he asked. Did we really need a new barn that we’d fill with more stuff, when we already had more than we needed?
Out of the ashes came the phoenix of a gentle but clear lesson.
As only the land can teach.
Overhead Lights
I stood on the deck facing south the other night, and felt the familiar late-August tug of melancholy that settles into my gut for pretty much the remainder of the summer season. The field to the east is uncut, but also un-planted, a thick tall carpet of weeds too high for the zero-turn mower. I love its wild and abandoned appearance, and also wish I could just walk right through the collection of soft and prickly stalks to the sycamore saplings that mark where our responsibility ends and the next farmer's begins, and not emerge itching or carrying multi-legged stowaways in my socks.
To the south, at the end of a graceful lawn slope, is the old old goat barn, not to be confused with the former new old goat barn, that burned to the ground July 15th while we slept (see the July 29th post for that story). The old old goat barn runs west to east, it's sliding doors opening to the north and south, and still echoes with the ghosts of our Boer goat-raising days, specifically kidding season, and I smile, remembering the blond triplets we caught one winter and had to bring into the house for the night, because their mother wasn't quite taking to them enough to feed them, and the temperature was dropping into the teens almost as we watched. The three of them fit in a laundry basket on the floor by my side of the bed. I awoke the next morning with my hand resting on a sweet small furry head that was bleating for room service.
But tonight, the barn is quiet, and empty of livestock, and as my gaze sweeps from east to west, I notice there are no more lightning bugs blinking their hypnotic mating dance that welcomes the start of summer. I ache with missing them, the memory of June still fresh and green in my mind as I stood on that same deck, mesmerized and clapping as their flashing lights signaled "hey baby, whaddya think of me now?" in rapid-fire succession. Their arrival, after nine long months of peering into the blank inky wooded canvas, is the end-of-winter confirmation I hunger for. No turning back now, no chance of one last, errant snow squall. Spring bursts open all around us, heralded by these 1/2" floating sparklers, by the thousands. An on-deck standing ovation seems the only appropriate response.
In my late-August funk, it's easy to forget to look up on a cloudless, moonless night, and see the thick swath of the Milky Way that arcs overhead. Stars, arranged and set into black velvet precisely, wait patiently for my attention. When I do look up, it's always the same--my eight-pound head falls gently backwards, and my mouth slowly drops open, not just by the architecture of the human skeletal construct, but also in awe. Lightning bugs, thick and fast for the past three months, have passed the torch upwards so that mere mortals can still be dazzled and stopped in our tracks by tiny lights, some blinking, some resting. A streak of meteor draws a thin bold line in the dark sky, and I realize that my neck will start hurting soon, because I'm not dropping my gaze until I see a couple more (c'mon, I know you're out there...). Five minutes become thirty, and I promise to do extra yoga stretches in the morning to put my neck and shoulders right again. I collect six more streaking meteors, wish one of them would make contact and land in the open field to the east of the old old goat barn so I can be late for work the next morning after talking to the press, and then go back inside.
This is why we live here. This is why we had the electric company take that darn security light off the pole by the driveway. This is why we wake up in mid-August, and mid-November (Persieds and Leonids, respectively) at 3:30a.m., stumble groggily out the back door and make our necks hurt for thirty minutes. We happily hand over the mortgage payment for our front row seats at an almost-nightly light show.
As long as we remember to look up.
Looking for the Phoenix
Between the humid and breezeless hours of midnight and 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, July 15, our 24’ x 48’ pole barn burned.
Down.
We slept through the red-orange flames eating every inch of wood framing and trusses, the sounds of shattering glass as the side windows exploded, the melting of Rubbermaid totes that held camping gear and bundles of magazines, the acrid smell of plastic electric fence insulators surrendering to the intense heat.
And we didn’t hear the last soft, short peeps of 35 chicks that Patrick picked up at the post office the Friday before, tucked into their brooding pen for the night. Forget about the other stuff we no longer have. It’s that image I cannot bear.
I tended to my morning routine as I usually do: wake up around 5:00 (seriously, it’s my body’s clock, and there’s no ignoring it), straighten the living room, wash the previous night's dishes, and go check the rabbits' water and food. With the delivery of our next round of meat chicks—Rainbow Rangers this time—I would naturally expand my morning chores to include checking their water and feed, stooping to gently scoop a couple of them into my hands, saying good morning and then resting my palm flat as each one decided whether to hop back into the pen with the others, or stand on their tiny new legs, surveying the pellet-floored landscape from a perch two inches above their peers.
But not this morning. As I made my way down the path behind the house and turned the corner where a stand of cherry saplings and pokeberry stalks jutted out just past Patrick’s wood-turning shed, I saw the remains of the metal siding, buckled from the heat and leaning inward, and swaths of blackened grass stretching 15 feet on each side. Random still-smoldering “hot spots” sent wisps of smoke upward where the wood-framed trussed ceiling used to be, beyond the spine of the metal roof that now dipped toward the dirt and ash-covered ground below. A willow and a sycamore framed the doors of the south entrance, and now stood charred, their leaves crisp and black, waiting for a non-existent breeze to carry them to the ground.
Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Over and over, my vocabulary limited by a filter of shock. The magnitude of the scene filled my every sense, and I just stood, unable to register what had happened.
Then, Patrick. Must tell Patrick. NOW.
Barefoot, I ran back to the house, my feet covered in wet, dew-drenched clippings (he had cut the grass Saturday). Just because this is how my mind was working at the moment, I wrenched open the mudroom door, and looked for a rag to brush the wet grass off of my feet first before walking through the living room and then upstairs. I didn’t want to leave a trail I’d have to clean up later. Irrational thought can sometimes hold the gift of practicality in its hands.
Out of breath by the time I reached my still-sleeping husband, I knelt gently on the edge of the bed, his back to me, and touched his shoulder. “Good morning, sweetheart”, I trembled, “I’ve got something shocking to tell you”.
I’ll remember the look on his face for quite some time, as he turned the same corner I did on the path, past the stand of cherry saplings and pokeweed stalks, and saw…
Then, a flurry of movement—9-1-1 calls, pacing back and forth from the front porch to the kitchen for coffee, out back again to stand in disbelief before a middle-of-the-night story that had written its own ending, listening as the wailing strains of volunteer fire department sirens drew closer and sounded like they were right in our driveway. They were.
Our good and trained neighbors put out the remaining hot spots, and marked their paperwork with “cause undetermined”. We'd made previous plans to visit with friends that day for lunch two hours away, and decided that, with the scene declared safe, we could leave. A little windshield discussion time would be good trauma therapy.
But my mind stayed fixed on the image of those chicks, and the growing reality that I didn’t truly know, immediately, everything that we stored in that barn. It would be several days before our list was drawn up and comprehensive, and a few more conversations interrupted with "you know what else we had in there...". I felt the “filthy” part of “filthy rich” in a humiliating way. To have so much stuff that it took days to remember and list it all...
It’s two weeks to the day, and I walk past the scorched ground and dangling metal on my way out to the woods. It still renders even my inner voice silent, and the full image rests uncomfortably in the pit of my stomach. How could we have slept through this? Then more questions surge forward: How could two people accumulate so much stuff that has so little to do with their every day survival needs? Why didn't the dry grass catch fire and burn more of the field and the trees on the meadow ridge? Can we still use those blackened t-posts? Was our tipi liner stored in there? (yes, it was). Where did the tires on the riding mower go? And the tiller? Is that the leaf blower? Wow.
Change, in any form, slides along a continuum of refreshing to shocking in its impact. We've been living more on the shocking end these past two weeks, as items we knew and used no longer look like they did (if they were metal), and others are simply gone. Yes, we were raising the chicks to eventually harvest and eat them, so death was on their calendar, like it is on every living thing's calendar. But not like this. We'll never know exactly how it started, or how many other living things succumbed to the licking flames. 35 chicks and two trees. At least. Sudden loss of life, any life, is hard.
Put this where you will in the magical thinking part of your mind, but at dinner the night before, I had just mentioned to Patrick that I was looking forward to cleaning out that barn as a great project on a cool, sunny autumn day. I imagined myself sorting and organizing (it brings me such peace), and reorienting the barn's purpose toward next year's chicken enterprise, making it easier to access our gardening equipment, and creating a place to work on thrift store furniture finds that begged to be re-purposed. The unseen, unheard fire did my work for me, and in less time than it would have taken me, I'm certain. Underneath the lingering shock was a small and weird glimmer of gratitude.
I wonder what that area of land will look like, once the remains have been pulled down, the nails and metal truss brackets pulled from the ashes with an industrial-sized magnet, and the rest back-hoed into the tolerant soil. It's been nearly ten years since anything blocked our view of the field to the north. Over the years, silently and steadily, behind the skeletal sagging remnants of that once-proud barn, a new landscape has been emerging from the old seventeen-acre corn and soybean field. Fast-growing sycamores and black walnut trees, alongside vast thickets of blackberries, ironweed, and nettles, fill in the space easily and without boundaries. In a matter of hours, in the dark of night, we re-gained 1152 square feet of visible field and sky.
We will most likely rebuild, but it won't happen overnight (creation and destruction live on opposite ends of the reality spectrum). In the meantime, a simple haiku I heard in college gently and profoundly floats to the surface.
Since my house burned down
I now have a better view
Of the rising sun.
Amazing Grace
Sitting on Mac and Audrey’s porch-deck, listening to the calls of birds I don’t recognize. Yet. Could be in the mourning dove family, for the three “ooh, ooh, ooh” calls at the end of a sequence, but they throw in a high-and then-low series of notes, and I’m trying to imagine what they look like on perch.
It’s great to be here in Dupree, South Dakota.
The trip out was brutal the first day—17 hours on the road, and Patrick’s driving stamina wearing thin in spots, but he rallied, after I had helped where I safely could (2 1/2 hours’ drive time while he napped in the shotgun seat), and rolled us into Pipestone, to rest our weary traveler bones at the America’s Best Inn for at least eight hours, until checkout time at 11:00. We missed the free continental breakfast, and felt smart about choosing sleep over waffles.
It takes me longer now to recover from a day of hard miles on the road. I suppose I must accept that I’m really not thirty anymore, and won’t be again on this Side. But I still expect that I can do all the activities I used to do, and at the pace I used to do them. My body is trying to coach me through this period of denial, and she’s a patient, but sometimes harsh teacher. She knows what will get my attention (the episodic sciatica, blood sugar drops, and edema in my feet), and plays those cards with precision timing against my arrogance. Eventually, I submit and stop moving, as she tried to tell me to do, nicely, four hours previously.
I’m struggling with this whole aging thing. Not any different from anyone else in that weird mid-life phase that is going on its fifteenth year now, but it’s mine for the first time, and so I get to plead resistant newcomer status. Does anyone really “age gracefully”? I’m stuck on the “gracefully” part of that misnomer. Understanding first what grace is seems to be essential. Then we can tack on that aging part and see if they really fit together to describe the experience.
When I hear the word “grace”, I imagine it as a mantle on the shoulders of a person who is also peaceful from the inside out. This is someone not fussed by external adversity, because her soulful core is anchored in the solid fact that she is good, and capable, and strong. Grace means that she doesn’t let petty annoyances move her to harsh-toned words. Grace chooses her words for her, and they are compassionate ones. She isn’t immune to the sharper side of own human-ness; she simply doesn’t allow it to lead her actions, or even her thoughts. On rough days, when she’s tired and irritable, she directs the conversation inward, soothes and talks herself through that with ample helpings of self-compassion. She accepts that there will be other days and moments like this one, and so she can keep her eye on how she’ll feel when those moments pass. She also knows how to apologize and ask for forgiveness.
I see grace as a practice toward compassionate acceptance, and a deep desire to invite others to relax into the reality that surrounds them. Grace understands that no one hits a home run the first time or every time at bat; she cheers the rules of the game that allow for second chances. She is the grandmotherly “there there”, the comfortable and wise lap that I crawl up and into when I feel misunderstood, done wrong, injured, and excluded. Even if my circumstances are the result of my own misguided choices, she loves and accepts me anyway, and encourages me to see things differently, starting with my own unfinished self.
If any or all of that is even the slightest bit true, then the idea of “aging gracefully” is completely plausible. So is “growing gracefully”, and “forgiving gracefully”, and “accepting gracefully”. Grace softens the rough edges of those and other challenging human experiences, and inches us forward to our intended origins as individuals (whom did the Creator imagine us to be, before we Became?), and as a collective of people trying our best to hang together in service and celebration. Let the bone aches and gray hair come. We will be ready for those moments, from the inside out, and show the young ones they’ve nothing to fear, really, as their own sciatica awaits delivery in the coming decades. They will still be valued, still belong to the tribe, still be loved and treasured for who they are, not what their bodies can or cannot still do.
In this moment, sitting and not moving, no miles racing beneath the tires of the truck, I can let all of my aging self rest secure in the knowledge that I’ve earned this spot, I’ve worked hard for it, and be grateful I’ve been given one more road trip with the man of my dreams.