Four Four Thirty-four

Sitting in my living room at 5:45 a.m. with strong French roast coffee that smells pleasantly skunky. A blank journal page lies waiting on my lap. Early April rain taps cold against the house, wanting to become snow but unwilling to stare down a calendar that says it’s spring. Furtive thoughts wander about like nocturnal animals searching for a dry place to curl into and snooze away the upcoming day.

Mom would be 90 today. Although she left us at 89, I’m not sad that she didn’t make 90. Our time to leave the living world is rarely dictated by decadal marks on the Gregorian calendar. She was born on Four Four Thirty-four. Spoken aloud, the date has a four-beat rhythm and rhyming alliteration. In the years after Dad died, I became the person who scheduled and took Mom to her prodigious medical appointments. “Four Four Thirty-four” became ingrained into my brain like a short chant. Several times I remember being asked for my own birthdate and beginning with “Four Four” before catching myself.

I did not remember Mom’s birthday when I scheduled a work date on the family place with two of my brothers for earlier this week. We had a great time working together. Both of them have appropriate equipment that they deploy with skill that borders on artistry. Tim’s Skid Steer had tracks that churned over the early spring mud and allowed us to quickly pile the Oregon Ash limbs lying broken and scattered by last January’s ice storm. The same machine lifted one end of an 18-foot shipping container high enough so that a flatbed trailer could be backed underneath the edge. This allowed us to push the container from behind and slide it on the rest of the way. Eventually the container will travel to the Johnny Gunter place.

Everything went so well that at noon I picked up Chris, my six-year-old grandson. Chris, Tim, and I took the Skid Steer up the hill, along with chainsaws, chokers, and another large flatbed trailer. Five second-growth Douglas-fir had fallen across the road at the back of the property during the ice storm, and we aimed to salvage them. They could have been trees we planted when I was 12 and Dad was fancying himself a Christmas tree farmer. The following day we hauled 11 extraordinarily straight 25-foot logs to the Johnny Gunter place, where I’ll mill them into lumber later this summer.

It was a great two days. But the story is rarely the real story. A week or so ago I awoke in the middle of the night and stayed that way for a solid three hours. Anger was seeping from every pore. Yes, there were particular triggers. But I recognize that most of the fundamental problem traces back at least 135 years to trauma handed down through the generations like a broken clock that no one wants but can’t seem to abandon. I was even angry for being angry. After working for years to heal this stuff, the angst seemed to boil up from a wound still hot with infection and covered over only by thin new skin. Any notion of progress was ridden with unhelpful adjectives: illusory, transitory, fleeting, ephemeral, even contrived. Anything but permanent.

Here in the early morning darkness of my mother’s birthday, I realize that sometime during that first day of brush piling, chain sawing, choker setting, and log hauling I was feeling a rare joy. This is not to say that my life has been joyless. Recently, Kim and I took a wonderful trip to visit friends in Santa Cruz (and I saw some great salamanders!). Of course I love writing—conjuring words from internal music and converting them into bytes and phosphors for people unseen is sublime. Yet none of these things holds the rock-solid delight that came from spending three days doing ass-busting work with my brothers on the home place. Maybe it was the growl and weight of Dad’s old Husqvarna saw in my hands; the turpentine smell of freshly cut Douglas-fir; cutting one log two feet shorter than it might have been to save a Giant Trillium unfolding with white tripartite purity; watching my gleeful grandson riding in Tim’s lap in the cab of the Skid Steer then jogging up the road like a lanky Labrador after we jokingly asked him to retrieve a chainsaw (there was fleeting disappointment on his face when we called him back).

On Mom’s birthday I finally see that joy is like love. We’re told about the eight forms of love. Or is it seven? Or four? The point is that love is a multifarious thing that permeates our lives in different ways and at different levels. Like love, our joy can take many forms. My joy this week could not be described as glee or exhilaration or ecstasy. Rather, it felt ancient and solid, like the Eocene sandstones layered beneath my heart space in the Coast Range. Like growth rings on those Douglas-firs, their water-bearing cells stitched together into heartwood, slow-growing, tight, and strong. A deeper thinker might even make a case that, at some fundamental level, joy is love.

On my mother’s 90th birthday, I do not have solutions to 135 years of transgenerational distress that surfaces occasionally as anger. I know that it won’t be papered over. I also know that over the past three days the seething has faded to a flicker. This morning I’m happy to contemplate a bedrock of joy, satisfied even for a shift in emphasis. If the vehicle for that shift in consciousness happens to be a grandson in a Skid Steer and chainsaws and pickups with big trailers and brothers who throw in to make progress in the world, no matter how fleeting, then fine. I’ll take it. I’ll take it every time.

Happy Birthday, Mom.