How to get a hand up – This Side of the River

We are in the second year of drought at the bluff, having come full circle from the high and destructive Lake Michigan waters of 2020 to lower levels which now grace us with an expansive beach. We happily embrace the protective nature of lower water, allowing the bluffs up and down this stretch of coast an opportunity to reach repose, a breath of time to quell the worries up top about losing homes into the lake.

Nature is like that, with its highs and lows, its unpredictability and fickleness.

And yet, much of nature IS predictable: seasons turning, tides that rise and fall on schedule, sunrise and sunset, baby robins in the spruce each June. The weeds will still poke their pesky way into the garden, the deer will eat the black eyed susans, and the toads will hang out underneath the bird bath.

Even so, nature is also filled with unwelcome surprises. No wonder we become watchful and wary, scanning for potential threats. The roller coaster of worry is real; one year you are flooded and caving in, and the next joyfully traipsing upon wide, sandy, pristine beaches.

Chaos tamed for a time by calm.

Likewise, the human experience runs an emotional gamut; carefree days can turn on a dime by a swift and surprising threat. A cancer diagnosis. A silent and devastating stroke. A deathly ill child. Life goes from calm back to chaos and we are caught frightfully unaware.

At least we don’t get eaten in the real sense. In the rest of the animal world, there is constant peril from predators. Truth is, everything must kill to eat; the food chain is merciless in its hierarchy. Once, at our old home at Trout Creek, I was delighting in a male cardinal at the bird feeder in the middle of winter. His cheery, cherry mantle was lovely against the frosty snow. Without warning, a blur of steel blue swept down from above and grabbed the unsuspecting cardinal in a flurry of red fluff. A hungry sharp shinned hawk, an accipiter (a bird that eats other birds) was now somewhere nearby squeezing the life out of that wretchedly beautiful, shapely, lovely cardinal. All that was left were red feathers strewn across the snow. Delight into mourning in a flash.

Gain, loss. Hardy, sickly. Peace, fright. Life, death. We live into it, learning along the way that this is often how life works. We cruise along when things are good then, without warning, we find ourselves on our knees in sobs and suffocation and despair. We aren’t alone in this cycle. Fear and despair and mourning accompany the goose who loses its lifelong mate; the nesting wood duck forced to flee a marauding raccoon with an appetite for eggs; the trees bulldozed for yet another development; the doe who watches the bobcat steal her fawn.

Is there any good to come of it? I believe there is.

Our own crises awaken a buried sense of mortality when our blithe notion of timelessness evolves to a new understanding and esteem for the value and brevity of life.

It often helps us turn back to God our Creator for help, comfort, and mercy. In the animal world, life goes on. New chicks are born. Survivors of the floods stand against next year’s droughts. The dust of death and the ash of mourning are followed by the songs and sun of a new day; mourning slips into morning.

And that is what IS predictable. We will fall and we will rise up. Life’s vicissitudes will flatten us with fear then extend hands of help and hope in the form of neighbor and Creator. If you are in a season of despair, take courage. The nature of nature is to help you back up to heal and stand against the next thing that would steal your peace. Be assured. The rains end the drought, and the tide always turns.

Thanks for reading along.

J.A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

jpraywalton.writing@gmail.com

Image by Tom Ferguson from Pixabay

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We recently trekked west in the general direction of Route 66 for a winter sojourn in Arizona. The journey was filled with the ghosts and memories of my mother’s parents who grew up in Iowa in the shadow of World War I, finished their schooling and got married in the 1920’s, then hit the high, unyielding wall of the Great Depression. With a baby on the way, they joined thousands of others headed west in search of work.

From this side of the story, I can tell you that they were resilient, adventuresome, optimistic, and robust, with a peculiar grace that sanded off sharp corners that worry might produce. They were not temperamental, argumentative, or condescending-although I do clearly remember my grandmother, when frustrated, saying in a peculiarly clipped way, “Isn’t that the LIMIT?”

They were kind. My grandmother was particularly creative and resourceful. Her mother Sarah, my great-grandmother, was born to a family of Welsh slate miners in Blaenau Ffestiniog, Wales, a hard-scrabble life at best. In the 1880’s, Sarah’s family emigrated through Ellis Island to Illinois, then on to Williamsburg, Iowa to farm the fertile, loamy black dirt of the Midwest. From slate to soil, from roofing the tenements of London to feeding the new Americans. Dust to dust.

My grandmother Ella, Sarah’s third daughter, was born in 1902 into a farm life that did not suit her. She was a reader and a dreamer, with an early flair for drama and fun, and music and pageantry. Once, when she just couldn’t put down a book, she climbed a tree to read instead of doing her farm chores, “tickled” when no one could find her. She became a teacher, one who was much-loved by her students over a 50-year career. She was also a writer-today we’d call it a side-hustle-so apropos for the hustler she was. She produced hundreds of Sunday School circulars and 5 novels for young adults. Ella was the first in her family to go to college. To work off the farm. To seek out opportunities to develop her skillset and shape her character. She took almost any work she could find after she married (In 1928, Iowa did not allow female teachers to be married, so she lost her teaching job). She taught piano, was the camp director at Crystallaire Camp for Girls in Michigan, and directed the girls’ choir at her Congregational Church for nearly 30 years.

But it was Ella’s time in the American southwest that really made her who she was. My grandfather found work in Gallup, NM with the Santa Fe railroad, then was transferred to the Winslow, AZ office in 1930. My mother was born at the doctor’s office above the drugstore (yes on a corner in Winslow Arizona!), and they lived in a little duplex that is still there. What a time they had exploring New Mexico and Arizona! Long car trips, picnic lunches, keeping a shotgun in the car to fend off rattlesnakes. Arizona toughened them up for the long decade ahead.

My grandparents planted seeds and set down roots for a family tree that has cultivated three generations of “can-do” people. A daughter who was one of the first female chemistry majors at her university. A grandson who became a merchant marine captain on a supertanker. A granddaughter in the first generation of Ph.D. females in exercise physiology. And now the great-grandchildren have accepted the family mantle of hard work, deep faith, optimistic outlook, and plain old grit. True, each successive generation had more privilege that the one before it. But my grandparents themselves began with little but dreams in the high desert of Arizona and the humility of moving back in with Ella’s mother in 1934 when work on the railroad dried up.

I have been nudged into thinking about where resiliency comes from. Surely it is a gift from the same God who promises us a hope and a future. But our inherited outlook also comes from the people he sends us to show a way. How else does one family go from the abject poverty of Welsh mines to the hardscrabble work of farming, to college, then graduate school, and even to sea? To becoming a professor, a published author, an energy expert in France? And all in just a few generations?

This is not pie-in-the-sky pride at having a ladder to climb or from climbing it resolutely. It is about the faith and diligence and persistence it took our forebears to build the ladder.

From there they reached down to successive generations for a hand up. At my grandmother’s funeral, we were stunned by the dozens of people who told us stories of how Ella had influenced the trajectory of their lives. That’s the other half of the story-it wasn’t just Ella’s immediate family who benefitted from her drive. She mentored and influenced hundreds of children out there who came to believe in themselves and wanted to be just like her. She had that rare ripple effect that seeded generations of hard-working, civic minded people. Just think what she might have accomplished today as a social influencer.

Are you a ladder-builder? Ready to set it up, make the climb rung by rung, then turn around to give a hand to the next climber? What a world we could have if we all did that.

Thanks for reading along,

J.A.P. Walton

Email me with comments: jpraywalton.writing@gmail.com

Category: How to get a hand up

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