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Even in grief, you can choose
delight...
& Snow Ice Cream |
| Many people think that because the
Ozark Mountains are in the South, we don't get much snow . Not true.
Although most winters see only one or two serious snowfalls, this winter
has featured several of six to twelve inches. When these are combined
with ice, since our little town is hilly in the extreme (Carl Sandburg
once accurately described the Ozarks thus: "The mountains don't get any
higher but the valleys get deeper, ") you pretty much stay put.
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| Now, I used to adore being
snowbound. My kitchen and library are both well-stocked; what could be
better than a day off, holed up with my affectionate and always highly
entertaining Ned? Make a big old pot of soup, enjoy the rhythms of a
batch of whole-grain bread, checking once in awhile to lift the clean
cloth of its bowl and watch its brown belly rising up satisfyingly like
a brown full moon, then the warming aroma of its baking, checking in
conversationally with Ned as we both puttered around the house ... all
those books we'd been wanting to read, a game of Scrabble, the fact
that, thanks to the wonders of A) PCs and the Internet and B) being
self-employed, we could work if we took a mind to... well, it was
pretty heavenly. |
| As those of you who've read the
introduction to
PASSIONATE VEGETARIAN,
or the essay called 'What a Feast
We Had' (in
Book age) know, darling Ned died on November 30, 2000, on a
bicycle ride which turned out not to be out to the Conoco station and
back (his typical 3 times a week route), but into eternity. Ned was as
close to my heart as my breastbone. Like others who've lost someone they
love that much know, you grapple with the absence for a long, long time.
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| I am still grappling; I guess I
always will be. Grief lives in me seemingly as inextinguishably as does
joy: side by side, inseparable. Associations and the unavoidable
then-and-now comparisons are razor-edged. They are a connection with the
vanished beloved; they also skin you alive. And there is this: for
about ten days after Ned's death I was being surrounded by as much love
and support as a bereaved person could ever hope for. Then, abruptly,
there were three weeks of fierce, non-negotiable ice storms. I was
isolated: no one could get in or out, up or down, and at times I was
without phone or Internet. This left only the huge loss for company, my
recall of what we had done on past snow days, and what we might be doing
if : if not, had not, if only ... Peeled raw by sorrow and
incomprehension of what had befallen me, made captive by the ice in what
had suddenly become my, not our, little house, I, like the house, clung
to the now-impassable frozen hillside. |
| In retrospect I hardly know how I
got through it. The way we humans do: we just do it. One foot after
another, one breath followed by another. Spring eventually came. Let
others think of hell as burning pitch and lake of fire; to me it has the
bone-deep, soul-deep chill of those frozen, isolated days of new and
sudden bereavement. When I am snowbound now it is hard for me not to
reverberate back to those days: their uncoiling, smoking anxiety, the
terrible sameness of grief: my inability to make sense of it, the
thunder (in all that quiet) of the unanswerable whys. |
| And yet these are the facts:
those days ended. Eventually I laughed. Eventually I heard myself
tell a joke. Eventually food began to have flavor. Eventually I was
kissed, and sweetly, by the first lips that had opened mine, other than
Ned's, in twenty-three years. If I cried the first
just-starting-to-allude-to-spring night, when I first heard the
tree-frogs singing (because another season had come, and Ned was not
here to see it, and each new season meant another turn of the wheel that
was rolling me inexorably farther and farther away from him and the life
we had shared), I still experienced simultaneously the wonder of the
chiffon-soft April night air, the shy bridal veil scattering of the
white dogwoods blooming on the still-grey wooded hillsides.
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| Life was coming back to me, and I to
it. Not the life I planned, or wanted, or choose, but the life I had.
The grief was ever-present, monotonous, natural. I still cried a lot;
I still do. But side by side with it, I was sometimes, in C. S. Lewis's
lovely words, 'surprised by joy.' The process continues. Being snowed
in, this year, in my tiny cottage, has still been difficult. But this
year I decided to try taking it on. The world has more than enough
martyrs and victims; I need not add my name to that list. Each martyr, I
know, believes that his or her human sorrow is unique. Well, it is, and
it isn't; that in itself is part of what makes it human. But there are
other things that make us human, too, like resiliency; it is to that
portion of myself, and to what it is to be a resident in life, that my
highest allegiance calls me.
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| Snowbound this winter, I have been
forced to consider this: yes, I am bound by snow and ice, but even more
so am I bound by emotion, recall, association, reverberation. These I
have a choice in. This winter has brought more such days than any period
since the months after Ned's death; it also brought, thus, more
opportunities to rise. As far as I can tell, this rising comes out of
the best part of the self I possess so far, in service to the best part
of the self (meaning more mature, more ripe, more fully developed) I
hope to grow towards. This self that has incorporated, honored,
metabolized (at least partially) grief, in order that the next phases,
both inner and outer, can be revealed. |
| I had a gorgeous marriage, of a
quality many people don't get to experience for fifteen minutes, for
over two decades. I lost it, but --- I had it. And I have a future. And
a present. These, though unlike my past in the particulars, are still
connected foundationally to it. Both contain loving and being loved
(including, but not limited to, that self-love so urgently required if
we are to grow up and get through all our lives give and subtract). It
is a present which contains good food (I'm thinking, now, of a wild
mushroom risotto I made a few weeks back, with a teeny drizzle of
truffle oil at the end, on each serving). It contains friends, a lover
(with whom I ate that risotto), a white oak full of red cardinals, who,
when snow covers the branches and ground and hillside, twitter and dart
brightly as Valentine's hearts, moving and resting and coming to the
feeder outside my studio window. It contains delight. |
| So when two days of getting
snowed-in turned to three, then four this year; when I couldn't get out
and have face-to-face contact with friends or my new darling (who lives
far away anyway; that's another story), I thought, or willed myself to
think, that it was time to face up to the anxiety --- but not reside in
it. "All right! Enough! Time for some joy here, some pleasure, some new
associations!" I cast my mind forward, I cast it backwards. And, alone
in a frozen world, but warm in my house, present with my own beating
heart and the knowledge that we have to bring ourselves to toughness in
order to become tender, what I came up with was...
Snow Ice Cream, a delectable, vegan variation of something that gave
me pleasure as a child, turned out to give me pleasure as a 50-year-old,
and I hope will give you pleasure, too. |
| Of course you know to click above for the rest of the story, and the
recipe. So hurry up and do so, because spring is coming, and the ice
always, always melts. |
| ---
Crescent Dragonwagon,
March 1,
2003 |
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