When we trapped time in our hands

On Motherhood: Is it love that keeps us living?

It’s been eight months. 

You’ve been on Earth for as long as my body was your home. I tell you about how I’m trying to make you a home here beneath the trees where everything pulses green.

Not a home in the way of shelter, but in the place of belonging. A place where we can root ourselves into the earth to learn from it, to give and to give and to give.

A place to grow.

Not to grow up, but to grow full — full on the feeling and the living and the meaning.

I teach you about the kinds of trees in the yard — black walnut, hemlock, poplar, and blue spruce. 

I tell you about the mother trees and how they’re the glue that holds the forest together. How they’re homes for forest life and how they help other trees grow. How they give some of themselves away to keep the forest safe, to keep it thriving. A mother gives her secret, silent resources for the plenty of the whole. That is her [my] gift.

I tell you the names of birds, the ones we listen to when we sit on the porch swing in the morning — the robin, the goldfinch, and the Carolina bluebird.

I show you where to find the woodpecker in the black walnut tree.

We count the squirrels and watch the dogs chase them along the fence line.

I show you irises just starting to raise their green stalks to the sky, the rain collected on the petals of the daffodils, and the red amaryllis that has bloomed in a pot on the kitchen table.

I learn the names of trees we pass every day on our walk by the river — Hickory, American beech, Sweetgum, River birch.

I show you how the branches are turning from bare to bud and tell you how it’s the mark of spring.

The mark of a new season.

How a season brings change and how they’re nature’s reminder that nothing is permanent. Seasons teach us to find the rhythm, to find the flow. To not stay stagnant. To shift and change and grow and begin again.

I read you Mary Oliver’s March and Worm Moon and Emily Dickinson’s Dear March—Come in— and Aracelis Girmay’s, March, March. 

We learn about love and time and grief and joy.

I tell you about how trees live off sunlight and how we aren’t that different from them. We all need something to survive.

Is it love that keeps us living? 

There isn’t anything in this world but mad love. Not in this world. No tame love, calm love, mild love, no so-so love. And, of course, no reasonable love. Also there are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?

I never said it would be easy, my darling. The living and the loving. But this is what it means to be alive, to watch the seasons change, to grow, and to love and to be. 

A mad love.

I love you so much that it keeps me up at night.

This love. It was never a choice. It was mad from the very beginning, from the moment you made me your home.

In March the earth remembers its own name.

I want to remember everything about you, about this time in our lives. 

This time when we’ve been offered time itself.

It’s just you and me and the trees and everything is dressed in green. 

When the world tries to get in with all its demands and its urgency I take us to the canopy of trees where the wind sounds like the ocean and the green-leaved sky shimmers. 

We look up and we are quiet and we are still. 

I tell you about how trees hold on to memories, how their memories are stored in the tree rings and in the DNA of the seeds.

Will you remember this? 

Will you remember when the days belonged to us? 

When the season was ours.

When we trapped time in our hands.

Will you remember this?

---

---