First in a series about grandparenting...This one was written in 2002 shortly after the birth of my first grandchild.
A storm ripped through my yard over a year ago, complete with resounding
thunder and streaks of angry violent lightening that split the sky,
complete fierce streaks of rain that pounded down unrelenting and dark
clouds that promised destruction. When it was over, the maple I had nursed
from a mere sprout into a fine tall tree had split and leaned threateningly
to one side. We tried to save it, tried to cut away the damaged parts, and
let the rest on the opposite side flourish. But my son's wedding was
planned in my yard, and with so many people about, it simply seemed too
precarious a chance to take. I agreed to allow it to be cut, something I
find difficult to ever do. My grown son was crushed. He could remember
the day the little fragile maple tree first sprung up in a flower bed, too
close to the house, and how it was salvaged by being moved to its own place in the yard. He asked that we leave the trunk. I argued that a bare trunk of a tree in the yard would not be pretty, but he pleaded and promised
later to carve it into something pretty if I would only leave it. And so I
did. Throughout the wedding, all the rest of the summer, it sat there…a
bare ugly stump. Autumn came and all around other maple trees flourished
their reds and their golds, and still it sat…a bare ugly stump. In winter
it was sometimes graced with a garment of sparkling snow, but for the most
part it remained what it had become. And then spring came. And one day I
looked for the bare ugly stump and did not find it. I gasped at what I did
see. The stump looked more like a bush! LIFE was in it! Sprouting all
about from the sides of its bark were tiny fresh green shoots bearing the
beginnings of leaves! Hundreds of them.
I pointed it out to my husband and he said, "Do you want me to get rid of
that stump this year? It can never really be a tree now." And I shook my
head adamantly. "No," I replied. "Anything that wants to live so badly
has spirit in it…let it live, let it be what it can be." And I was amazed
that the tree I thought was surely dead, the tree that for all practical
intents and purposes had given up life to storm and chain saw, was not
dead. Unable to sprout and grow from limbs and trunk rising into the air,
it had simply reached into the soil with its probing roots, reached and
prodded until finally it found the sustenance and nourishment to sprout
again, to send tiny green shoots out to grace our yard again. It was a
reminder. And a promise. And a lesson.
The winds of life came fierce this year, and the last of a family was
gone. Only four of them were left, that family that began in 1910, and
none with living children. I was the daughter of their brother gone many
years before, and so the four sisters were especially precious to me…and me to them. And I traveled constantly to be with them, and we spoke on the
phone virtually every day. As my children had flown the nest, my goal in
life seemed to be to nurture those roots, care for them in their last days,
give back something of what they had given so long to me, and draw from
them as many memories as I could to sustain the rest of my own life. But
within two years they were gone, and the last of them in February of this
year. I was not expecting it to happen so soon or so quickly. I should
have been but I was not.
I felt a fierce storm had passed. And though I have lived long enough to
be well acquainted with inevitable good-byes, to lay it all to rest with
those I know are simply "on loan" to us, I found this time more than
difficult. Perhaps it was because I so identified with this family, and
had for all of my life. Perhaps it was because there were so few of us,
and therefore the ties were infinitely more precious. Perhaps it was
because it was literally the end of a family line, or perhaps it was
because it was almost literally the end of my connection with the homeland
that my family had inhabited for nearly two hundred years. Perhaps it was
because they had become so much the center of my need to nurture and
give. I do not know. But I admit to wondering sometimes what my life was
really to be about now. That is sad, I know, for I have a loving family
left, mother, and children and husband. But I confess this crossed my
mind. And the winter moved on, and I felt I had left some important and
vibrant part of me back in the cold storms of February. I am not sure I
really noticed spring this year, and if I did it was with some semblance of
guilt that I could not point out the flowers to my aunts or speak to them
about the coming spring, and make promises of their returning health that I
could not keep.
And so spring came, and summer began. I smiled and laughed and moved
through the days, but my heart was not in it. And then came July and my
first grandchild, my son's child. Serenity.
My son, realizing what the death of my aunts had been to me, and knowing
how deeply I regretted that our line had come to an abrupt end, with all of
them gone now and me the last to bear the surname, gave Serenity that
surname as a middle name. I was grateful and touched. Perhaps the surname would live on then, not as a surname, but as a name to be passed on, and the stories of a family with it.
I nestled the small body against my own and rocked, grateful to finally be
alone with this little being, to remember the days of my own children's
births. Memories flooded, and I remembered something curious my father had said at the birth of my son, his first grandchild. "I started all this!,"
he bragged proudly. I remember laughing, and thinking, "Typical
grandpa. Yeah, dad, and you had a bit of help." So I was amused at my own
thought as I held this tiny creature with her creamy skin and perfect
features. "I started all this…if it had not been for…" and suddenly a bit
of awe overtook me. I lay that baby down in my lap and gazed at her face,
searching for family resemblances, seeing one of my own children in that
creamy complexion and those fat chubby cheeks. I was relieved not to see
any sign of the "family monument", the nose that gives us away as a certain family line. I checked her hands and sure enough there were the long
slender fingers of my father's family, and there was the dark hair of my
mother's. Of course, I admitted, it could also be of her own mother's
family. I checked the tiny toes, relieved to see those must have come from
another side of the house. I laughed at my own attempts to peg this tiny
being into neat little family pigeon holes, and remembered doing this as a
mother, and now I was a grandmother doing this all over again. And the
thoughts kept coming.
All the time thinking, thinking a hundred myriad thoughts. All the things
new grandparents must feel and think flooded my mind and my heart. I
realized I was literally holding in my hands a child that was here because
of all the people I loved, and all the people her mother's family had
loved, all somehow now in one package. I realized I was holding in my
hands the culmination of all of our roots, our ancestry. Mentally I traced
back all of the grandparents on my side of the house for as far as I could
remember, and realized that because each of those couples had come together in all of those generations…we now had Serenity. Mentally I traced all of the grandparents I knew of on her mother's side of the house, and realized again that because they were…she was…Serenity. And though it seems so perfectly logical, for a moment the awesome realization struck me as the wondrous thing it really is. Our roots were alive and well…and she was the fresh young budding sprout springing from those roots. The stump of the tree that sat there dormant all winter was only waiting a bit for spring,
for summer.
Our family only appeared to have ended, our family line's name had changed, yes. And I the last to bear the line's ancestral name, but the tree was not really gone. Unable to sprout and grow from limbs and trunk rising into the air, it had simply reached into the soil with its probing roots,
reached and prodded until finally it found the sustenance and nourishment
to sprout again, to send tiny budding shoots out to grace our family
again. It was a reminder. And a promise. And a lesson.
I settled back in the rocker with Serenity. And then the other typical
thoughts of grandparents flooded me. I thought of all the things I could
do with this little being I could not do with my own. In another stage of
life now, I had the time and the financial means I did not have when I was
struggling to bring up a family. I was nearing retirement. I could bake
cookies any day! I could sit and build block castles and play dress-up at
any time of day…or night! I could take spur of the moment field trips, and
I could nap until noon in order to have a slumber party at night! I could…
and so I became a grandmother.
I sat and rocked, as I do most every day now, with Serenity laying against
my heart, and serenity warming the inside of it. I rock now…with Serenity.
