The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [99]
The words are like the cool voice of rain after heat lightning. I resolve to walk tomorrow through the wetlands and prairie grass restoration areas, and the oak savannah. The monks are engaged in establishing a native habitat arboretum on their land, and I need to drink it in, to say good-bye. Spring has been slow in coming, but now the new pine cones, aglow with pollen, push aside their blood-red cauls. Now the oak buds’ embryonic, waxy fingers begin to open in the sun.
ROAD TRIP
It was hard to leave Minnesota: oak trees, birch, and maple; the loons and blue herons and snowy egrets. I will miss them, and the snapping turtles sunning themselves on the log at lakeshore. I was surprised to feel relieved, as if a weight had been lifted from me, at the Mobridge crossing of the Missouri River. It felt good to leave behind the glacial drift prairie and come onto the high, near-treeless plateau of western Dakota: the moonscape, the miracle, of shortgrass country. And when I walked into a truck stop where a young man who looked as if he was born wearing his cowboy hat was saying into the phone: “I’m jes’ now gettin’ me some lunch,” I knew I was home. “Language is the only homeland,” says the poet Czeslaw Milosz, and here on the range, where there are many more antelope than people, if a discouraging word is ever heard, at least it isn’t “deconstructionism.”
It was hard to leave the monastery, with its dignified liturgical rhythms, hard to face that moment of truth when—wonder of wonders—I filled out the weekly attendance pad at Spencer truthfully, checking the box marked “Member of this church.” Pentecost Sunday.
It is bone-dry here, and people tell us it’s been like that for much of the spring. Yesterday we had one of our rare, quiet, straight-falling-down rains, and today, at my first Presbyterian worship service in ten months, the lay preacher, a farmer, gave a rousing call to worship: “Good morning,” he said. “I guess the first order of business is to thank God for all the rain we got last night. Out at my place, we got just forty-hundredths, but maybe some of you got more—Praise the Lord!’ ” Inspired, indigenous, from the heart. Home, home, in the wild West.
PLACES AND
DISPLACEMENT:
RATTLESNAKES
IN CYBERSPACE
Place can stick to us in western South Dakota. Walking past the high school on a wet day, it is easy to tell which of the cars belong to the country kids. They’re caked with mud up to the windows, having come the twenty or more miles to town on slick gumbo and gravel roads. It’s easy to lose track of place, too. My friend Alvie in the nursing home talks often of her ranch house on the Grand River. She says, in a tone of wonder: “I can’t remember if we sold it, or if it’s standing there empty. But I sure like to picture it, and the wild plums in spring. I remember it all the time.” Periodically, she’ll ask me, “Is this Lemmon or Morris-town?” the town some twenty-five miles to the east, which is where she lived as a child, where she moved when she and her husband retired. Alvie has misplaced her place, but in the far reaches of her mind it still comforts her.
Alvie tells me that her father always told her she was my grandfather Totten’s first patient when he got off the train in Morris-town in 1909. Of course the town knew a doctor was coming, and her father had been lying in wait. He grabbed him and took him straight to the apartment above their hardware store, where Alvie lay ill with both measles and pneumonia. I have no idea how much of this is true, how much is family legend. But it’s good to see Alvie so alert; telling this story always perks her up. My grandfather stayed with the family for three days, she tells me, and her dad never forgot it. Stories like this place me here, as do the graves of the two small boys in our family plot in the Lemmon cemetery. My grandfather had been unable to save his own sons in the influenza epidemics of the teens and early twenties.