Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [20]
“What did you do to yourself?” he asked sympathetically.
“I cut it while I was cooking,” I lied.
When my inquisitors finally climbed into their cars to drive home, I waved good-bye for what I supposed was the last time. I liked them. I even thought that I could love them, but I was sure that I was too urban for them, too anxious, too liberal, too tall. I was also a woman, which was a far larger problem in northeast Georgia than it was in Atlanta. When the chair of the committee finally called to ask me if I would come to Clarkesville, I could hear the weariness in her voice along with the elation. Months later I would learn how many families had left the church when they heard I was coming, and how much of their displeasure had been directed at her, but at the time all I learned was how pure bliss feels as it works its way from the flash of warmth in the feet to the fresh tingle in the scalp.
At my going-away party, the people of All Saints’ showered me with gifts, including a quilt with many of their names stitched into its squares. Ed and I put our house on the market. We found a rental in Habersham County owned by a scion of the Fieldale chicken dynasty, with a barbecue grill big enough to cook two hundred chickens. We prepared to leave the city in which we had lived, both singly and together, for half our adult lives.
Abraham and Sarah were well into their seventies when they made their big move from Ur, packing up all they owned for destinations unknown. I was only forty and I knew exactly where I was going, but it was still such an act of faith that I was dizzy with fear when the time came to leave. Ed was at the wheel of our pickup truck, which was loaded with the last of our belongings. The sun was going down. Through the back window of the cab I could see bicycles, potted plants, suitcases, sacks of dog food, and a cooler with the contents of our refrigerator inside. There was also a green plastic garbage can full of dirt that Ed had heaved onto the bed of the truck at the last.
“You are taking dirt?” I asked him as we stood in the driveway.
“I am taking compost,” he answered, but of course it was more than that. Ed was not only taking the rich soil he had made from years of lawn clippings, scraped plates, and bags of leaves lifted from city curbs, he was also taking a sacrament of the quarter acre that he had loved for more than a decade. On it sat the house to which he had added a whole room for my books before we were married, the same house in which we spent our wedding night. Every summer, in the small rectangle of full sun out back, he had planted green beans that took over the wooden rail of the deck. He had ringed the mailbox out front with broccoli plants and sowed cherry tomato seeds where our more refined neighbors would have preferred to see purple phlox. While those same neighbors brought their produce home in tan plastic bags, Ed presented me with split oak baskets full of fresh lettuce, arugula, and chard. Moving to the country was as much his idea as mine, but he was not going without his dirt.
When he turned the wheel of the pickup hard to the left on our way out of the driveway, a piece of lumber wedged in the bed smashed against the back window of the cab, so that my last view of our old house was through shattered glass. I thought I should cry but I was too tired, so I turned around and stared straight ahead instead. I am sure that Ed and I spoke during the next hour and a half, but I do not remember what we said. What I remember is how the light changed.
At first the view through the windshield was as bright as a runway at the airport. There were street lights, headlights, shop lights, stoplights. Even at night the city sky was a tarnished copper color, with flashing lights atop microwave towers and tall