A writer – you – is a time traveler. We move our pen across paper, our hands across keys and slide back and forth between the veil that separates past from present. If we keep a journal, we lose nothing. We visit what seems to have been lost. As I read the old piece below, I find myself sitting in the late afternoon shade of a little cabin on Luna Mesa in the Mojave Desert. It is 2008 and I am wondering if I will ever feel at home again.
What We Take With Us
Yesterday I picked up a carton of apples from the Cactus Wren used bookstore in Yucca Valley, California. The fruit was a gift from a man I have never met in person. He had not been able to ship the apples to my post office box. He is a writer and a teacher of writing, so he did the most sensible thing: he googled bookstores in Yucca Valley, called the Cactus Wren and asked if he could send them my apples.
The bookstore could have been the late Aradia Bookstore in Flagstaff, Arizona. Books filled shelves, tables and most of the floor. There was no resident white cat. There was a resident black poodle. The owner and I opened the box. A letter was tucked between the apples.
The scent of the fruit was as redolent as its names: Honey Crisp, Gala, Aurora. I was, for an instant, not in a little town in the Mojave Desert. I was 2538.68 miles and sixty years …I wandered in the old orchard behind my northeastern childhood home. I was eight. The scent of apples drifted in the late afternoon light. There was no need to steal an apple. The farmer and his wife gave them away. I heard my mother calling me to come home for supper. Her voice was gentle. It was not stretched tight by her fear. This Autumn she was home and she was not “sick”. I picked four apples, red for my mother, red-green for my father, yellow-red for my baby brother and yellow-green for me. I took one bite out of mine. Juice flooded my mouth. Sweet and sour…
(I can’t figure out how to turn this picture right side up. My mother sits with my brother and me behind my grandfather’s home in Wayland, N.Y. In fact, the three people in this photo were too often tipped on their sides – through no fault of any of them.)
Later I read my friend’s letter – its page scented with apple. My friend tells me that the apples are from the Auvil Research Orchard in Washington State. “The fruit has never been sprayed with malathion, Alar or any chemicals; the apples are sprayed with water and clay at just the right times to prevent bug damage.”
I wrote back: “Dear brother, The Mahakala prayer flags tremble in a molten invisible breeze. Mahakala is Kali is Time is That Which Eats Everything. Mahakala lives in the west. I sit in the shade at the west side of my cabin. I eat grated apple and chunks of pepperjack cheese. I’m grateful that Mahakala has eaten the harsh times of these last years. Mahakala does, as is his nature, continue to eat. I think He finds the stock market particularly delectable. Others also find your apples delectable: The staff at the Angelview second-hand store; the women who work the super-market check-outs; whatever scurried in last night to nibble the damaged apples I’d scattered under the fruitless mulberry trees.
Yesterday I heard two of the wealthy talk of being terrified that the stock-market would eat “everything they had worked so hard for.” I remembered my own terror in 2007 as my world fell apart. Then I understood: Everything I have worked so hard for will never be lost – that is the blessing of knowing how to be poor, of choosing time over safety, of writing and being possessed by writing. As long as memory and pen serve me, I will carry countless riches: the moon in a slot canyon of sky over a desert gorge; basalt shredding my fingers as I haul myself up an impossible slope; how morning coffee tastes as a prayer moves out from my breath: “For the furthering of all sentient beings, and the protection of earth, air and water.”
Sunday I hung wash on the new clotheslines. Thirty minutes later it was dry. The only resources used were my muscles, sun, wind and my delight. I made the bed with clean sheets and I thought of another prayer: gate gate paragate sarasamgate. Gone gone completely gone to the other side, never having left.
Sun-scented cotton, aching shoulder, apple light, wind eaten by twilight. Woman breathing toward the unknown rest of her life.
***
Carol Milstead, Thank you for sending us your response to Doris’ letter in Breakthrough, July 7.
Dear Doris,
How special for you to take time out your day to publically thank so many people. How moving it is to me you chose to use your limited time to recall kindnesses paid to you. I admire the way you handled the inevitable with dignity and gratitude. Many in your position would have used denial or questioned why they were in the space you were in. Instead, you accepted all of your situation as part of the natural progression of life without bitterness.
I think if I had met you earlier in your life, I would called you friend and loved you as deeply as the love you showed those whose lives entered yours. I can tell by the words you put in the paper that you were a person who took nothing for granted. You showed kindness to whoever crossed your path. That shows by all of those who helped you towards the end.
I bet as time grew shorter and shorter, you looked back over your life and mentally thanked all that passed through it. Some of them made you smile with a special memory. You, also, remembered with compassion those who were less than congenial. I see you with both arms open to help friend or stranger. I can tell you were never too proud to live. Calling out strangers as you did in your letter speaks to your character. As I said before, you must have been a person who was filled with joy at the little things in life. I hope that I may go forward and follow your example.
Thank you.
Sincerely, your admirer:
Carole Milstead
For our readers: Please send us your responses to this Breakthrough. Travel through time with us.
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