Finding My Voice

I have always written and yet never considered myself a writer. I’d written overly-long emails detailing the days’ events; I’d written formally first for college (honors thesis) and then for work (television producer). But up until my participation last year in my first writers’ workshop, I’d never considered myself a writer. And I’d never considered that what I was writing belonged to me. I was either proposing a theory about the relationship between Shakespeare’s English history plays and Elizabethan Historiography; telling the story of my children’s youth; or relaying a critical shift in public policy. I didn’t feel that any of the words to paper reflected me or what was in my heart or tumbling around in my head. But in this last year I’ve been writing in community with some amazing Women. They have taught me so much, but perhaps most importantly (and there have been a lot of important lessons) I’ve learned that in fact those stories are mine. I’ve learned that when I sit down to my laptop and let those words pour out of me, I am a writer and I have found my voice. What you see below – an essay titled “Sentinel” – was an entry in a local essay contest. While it wasn’t judged to be a winning entry, I was grateful for the newfound confidence to share these words: my words, my story. The triumph is not in whether I won the contest, the triumph was in having found my voice. Finally. I may never shut up.

Sentinel 

When the Bowdoin College community awoke on Monday October 30^th, it found the campus and its host town – Brunswick, Maine -- without power and suffering from staggering damage resulting from an historic storm that blew through the region late Sunday night. Among the heavy environmental losses were the felling of three, old trees on the Main Quad. Folks were surprised by the loss of these trees, noting that they had withstood dozens of storms over time. But later that week as both staff and students undertook a campus-wide assessment, clean up and recovery, a student journalist interviewed Biology Professor Barry Logan to get his take on what might have happened to these beautiful trees. Professor Logan suggested that if, as trees grow, the trees experience stresses originating just from one direction, they may develop root systems that give them more stability only in one particular orientation. But that type of influence on the development of root systems may have also left them particularly vulnerable, adding that “It very well may be that these trees have not grown in a way that protects them from winds in that different direction”. It seems that the trees were at least in part affected by the fact that the wind came from the southeast, rather than from the more typical origin of New England’s violent storms – the northeast.

This struck me. I was struck, of course, by the loss of these trees – I attended Bowdoin and reflect on my time in Brunswick as the unexpected adoption of a second home. I grew to love the predictable passage of Maine’s three, quirky seasons: winter, summer and mud. I became entirely dependent on year-round access to the cold, crystalline waters of Casco Bay. I felt unyielding awe of the forests and mountains as they tumbled and then spilled abruptly into the rocky Maine coast. And then, of course, there was the 33-acre parcel of majestic White Pines – the Bowdoin Pines – an old-growth forest that borders the Northeast corner of campus. These trees and their on-campus brethren offered a nearly ubiquitous rustle and hush when the wind whipped or the snow fell. Those trees, that sound, that blanket of quiet and calm.

It’s no wonder then that I felt a kinship to Maine’s lush natural beauty, having spent much of my childhood in my grandparents’ pine grove in the North Carolina sandhills. That was where I felt both rooted and free. I enjoyed my childhood in Durham – I had a tiny tight-knit family, and I grew up in a great neighborhood that boasted a lot of kids and a creek full of crayfish. I derived from my Durham childhood a life-long connection to a circle of friends and a type of groundedness that comes from (and with) a fairly rare and highly specific sense of place. But that pine grove was something else.

Very little could have competed for my affection with all that those 24 acres offered to me as a child. In that magical grove, I had climbing trees of remarkable variety – Long Leaf Pines, Dogwood, American Holly and the ever-unpopular Gum trees with their unfriendly, foot-piercing seed pods. My grandfather planted in the center of the grove an expansive circle of flowering bushes originally intended to attract birds and butterflies and into which I was sure we might also have attracted woodland fairies. In that enchanted circle, I hosted tea parties for the fairies, built doll houses with bark and sticks, and I found solace from a child’s woes through the recuperative powers of imagination.

We had persimmon trees whose fruits taught me the cost of impatience with the pinching bitterness of their tannins; and rewarded my patience with their unique, delicate, honeyed flavor. In the early mornings of North Carolina summers, we found in that grove blackberries to punctuate our cornflakes and milk. And besides the three children who inhabited that hospitable grove, there were as well all manner of other local critters. We’d take our dogs for walks in the grove, letting them roam freely while we got lost in our own imaginative play, or engaging them as contestants in races through obstacle courses. There were racoons, opossums, and thousands of birds. We would delight in efforts to track the prints of deer as they meandered along the sandy railroad tracks at the edge of the grove; and then we’d give up as the prints disappeared into the pine straw that covered the ground under the canopy of trees.

Standing watch over it all was a legion of guardian pines. Those long-leaf pines were my childhood sentinels. They yielded shade, a soft, thick blanket of needles that cushioned the sandy soil, and they whispered a gentle, comforting rustle when the needles were disturbed in the wind, the rain, or even a violent summer thunderstorm. When I wasn’t deep in the arms of that grove, I was very often curled up on my grandmother’s screen porch, transfixed as intent observer – the perfect spot for watching those thunderstorms, and for listening to the critters as they scratched, dug, chattered and toiled, entirely unmoved by my sequestered presence on the porch.

Now, many years later, I wonder how the cozy comfort of those pines has prepared me for this last year’s entirely predictable but unfamiliar storms. This past year has dumped me into a swift current of changes: children needing much less of me; older family needing much more. Elections, deaths, new taxes, old allegations and the resurgence either of #metoo memories or my own complicit – if unwitting – silence have all left me shaken, weary and uncertain in my footing. My own body feels a stranger to me – not yet out of commission but no longer as compliant as it once was. I don’t know where to turn for the comfort of games, hidden fruits and the unexpected company of a wild critter. Where is the sentinel? I have no guardian grove of Pines to shelter me and soothe my chattering, hyperactive mind.

And then, at last I found another kind of circle to inhabit. Whether through accident, providence or the enchantment of the written word I found myself for the first time in a circle of Women. The maid, the maiden and the crone – all gathering on crisp, October nights – to consider in their own words, in their own recuperative imaginations the power and the salve of tree, of sky, of critter. Women of every description and age gathering together as intimate strangers to share with one another the richness of their experience and the intelligence yielded from wounds that are tended in various stages of healing. These strong, resilient sentinels would help me to see that I might still be growing; that there is in this time of life opportunity for me to set my roots yet still deeper.

Did you know that trees communicate with one another? Did you know that the mature trees – the so-called “Mother Trees” – will share with the seedlings in their root networks their nutrients, their carbon, and their genetic wisdom? Did you know that even as the Mother Tree faces injury or imminent death that she will send in her final cycle of life spare nutrients to her seedlings? That she will communicate to them key information about the source of her injury?

Instead of seeking childlike comfort from a sentinel of trees, I will garner strength and solace in becoming like those trees. As I creak and sway I will cling to this circle of Women as we share with one another the crucial nutrient of encouragement. I will be steadied by the support of Women who will know me and hold me close and safe in my various stages of healing. As we are buffeted, we will help one another reorient to face those storms as they attack from unanticipated directions. And we will sustain one another through an unseen tatting of intricate, silken roots. We Mother Trees will share our wisdom, our breath, our presence, our knowing, our pain, our grit and our sinew. We will take care of one another in this unlikely fairy circle here in the middle of town.