Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, a Christian holiday celebrating the revelation of God the Son as a human being in Jesus Christ. It is also the first anniversary of my mother’s death.
There’s not much difference between a bare tree
and a dead tree in winter.
I first read this opening line (above) of a short story 35 years ago and memorized it. I thought that one day I would also write a striking opening line and wanted to remember what inspired it. But the line slipped from my memory. Then a couple of weeks ago while staring at a grove of oak trees I always pass on my daily walk, I wondered if the trees were bare or dead. There wasn’t much difference.
For a year, I’ve been flailing and floundering — my spirit, like my writing, going nowhere. I’ve been struggling to grieve the death of a mother I hardly knew; a mother who died unaware of how little she knew me. To convince myself that I did indeed have an intimate relationship with her, I’ve been poking at various drafts of stories filled with beautiful and charming details about her housekeeping, cooking and cleaning skills. Until other writers pointed it out, however, I never realized that these details were mostly about things, not feelings. One reader called the details “hollow.” “Why are you telling me this story?” asked the reader. “I have no idea how you feel.”
I’ve begun to wonder if my voice died with my mother’s, or if my voice has become my mother’s. I don’t want to hear it, so I take longer and longer walks in silence. I retreat to fallow fields where I can’t see the beginning or the ending of my path. I feel less lost in the middle of nowhere.
Truth is, my heart is all at once red and swollen and crushed and brittle — like the snapping turtle carcass I discovered two months ago and moved from the middle of the road to a nearby wood line. Covering the carcass with a thin shroud of fallen leaves, I thought of the body of my mother that I never saw or touched. I then instinctually judged the comparison hackneyed.
While grappling to write this, I remembered something my youngest sister shared several weeks after my mother died; something I told myself not to forget, but I did until now. She said: “Mom alive. Mom dead. I can’t see the difference.”
There wasn’t much difference.
“When you write, you lay out a line of words,” begins Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. “The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.”
Or you may never know.
(All photos in this post were captured during weekend walks over last two weeks.)
Adrienne gave me an Apple iWatch for Christmas that supports an app called, “SleepWatch” which monitors my sleeping patterns on a horizontal gauge using colors: purple for “restful”; green for “light” and red for “active.” Last night I was “active” twice — and not once as usual. I was “active” between 1:55 and 2:10 a.m. when I went to the restroom (this happens every night). But then I was “active” between 3:10 and 3:16 a.m. I didn’t get out of bed. I just lay there with my eyes open.
Curious, I looked in my diary entry from a year ago today: “ML [youngest sister] called me at 3:16 a.m. “Sharie, Mom is in heaven.” She told me my mother died around 3:10 a.m.”
I remembered the name and writer of the short story, the first line of which begins this post. The name of the short story is “Inexorable Progress” and the writer is Mary Hood. In 1984, Hood was the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Here is the first paragraph of that short story (from a collection called, “How Far She Went”):
“There’s not much difference between a bare tree and a dead tree in winter. Only when the others begin to leaf out the next spring and one is left behind in the general green onrush can the eye tell. By then it is too late for remedy. That’s how it was with Angelina: a tree stripped to the natural bone, soul-naked in the emptying wind. She was good at pretending; she hung color and approximations of seasonal splendor on every limb, and swayed like a bower in the autumn gales around her, but her heart was hollow, and her nests empty. You could tell a little something by her eyes, with their devious candor (like a drunk’s), but her troubles, whatever they were, didn’t start with the bottle, and after a while the bottle wasn’t what stopped them.”
That’s one helluva striking opening paragraph, too. While typing it out, the adjective describing Angelina’s heart — “hollow” — jumped out at me. So did the last sentence of the paragraph.
In my previous comment, I shared the first paragraph of Hood’s short story, “Inexorable Progress.” I found a link to the entire opening of this short story. It’s not much longer, but packs another wallop and captures pretty much how I’ve felt over the last year:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41398507?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Thank you for sharing. I understand what your sister said. This reminds me of my father. He is not deceased, but I wonder if I will feel the same as your sister. I love him and I know he loves me, but in my life, will there really be a difference?
First line makes a strong haiku, too:
not much difference
between bare trees and dead trees
in heart of winter
May your hollow be filled in this new year, my friend.
“I feel less lost in the middle of nowhere.” Talk about a powerful opening sentence! In this sentence you “lay out a line of words,” a line which I believe may very well lead you to a somewhere. Your voice is anything but hollow in this post. Follow it, dear Friend. Follow it. Follow, too, your sister’s insight: “Mom alive. Mom dead. I can’t see the difference.” Maybe you too badly wanted there to be a difference? Just some thoughts.