We have a little home in the mountains. My neighbor’s 200 acre forest surrounds our place like a letter “C.” A few years ago he logged 100 acres of it. This year he logged another 50. That property was his to log, but I felt the loss of that wooded blanket that had surrounded us. At some point I decided the only way around the grief I felt was to go through it. I started walking among the stumps and slash piles daily. My grief became intimacy with what was left behind.
This summer my mother-in-law, a woman in her eighties in better shape than many half her age, asked if she could walk with me through the slash piles to get in her steps. She nimbly picked her way along the uneven ground and we talked. On the way home she asked me, “In your life time, do you think anything will ever grow here besides weeds?”
“Like Daisies?” I asked.
“What?” she stepped around a rock.
“Take my arm.” She dutifully reached for me.
“Do you feel steady? Look up and around.”
She caught her breath. “I don’t understand. How did I miss this?”
And we held one another surrounded by 150 acres of tall white daisies moving in the breeze.