Hope

Prologue

For as far back into my childhood as I can remember, every June my father, mother, brother and I would go strawberry picking at Three Rivers Farm in Canby, OR. Although as an adult with a drivers license and a feeling that the world is not quite as large as I used to think it, Canby in my youth seemed a distant town, a quaint farm village far from my urban home. In reality, I think it not more than a thirty or forty minute drive from the elm studded streets of the upper middle class neighborhood in Portland where I grew up. As a child my street, NE 32nd Court, was one of the last streets in the area that was yet to be covered in asphalt and thick irregular strips of tar stretched across the way here and there as far as my eyes could see. In the summertime if we weren't chasing the ice cream man through the neighborhood on our bikes or at the swimming pool a few blocks away, you could likely find me and assortment of the other twenty or so odd children that called this street home squatted down  next to the strips of tar with freckled knees in the air looking for thick black bubbles to pop. We learned early on that it was best to use a stick to do the job as if you used your finger it wouldn't come off too easily and when you went home for dinner, your mother would be less than pleased.

In any event, on the weekends, when my father was off from work and my brother and I didn't have a swim meet, we would all pile into our Volkswagen bus or later our Nissan Minivan and head south to the town of Canby in search of the strawberry fields. Three Rivers Farm was a small endeavor with a large white colonial house and a big red barn on the top of a hill overlooking the acres of pasture and it was here we retuned at the onset of each summer to pick berries from which my mother and I would later make jam to last until the next June. Three Rivers was run by a squat raven haired woman named Martha who always wore overalls and seemed to me to be somewhere around the same age as my mother. I don't know if Martha was married or not, I never saw a man at Three Rivers Farm, but she had what seemed dozens of mismatched children of varying age who looked to me like they had come from all corners of the globe. They helped her weigh berries and tend to the animals and every year she would appoint one of them to show my brother and I the chicken coop where we were allowed to pick out one or two warm brown eggs of our very own. In front of barn, between it and the house, stood a giant willow tree older than any human I knew which cast a cool shadow over the dusty ground and seemed to make more bearable the hot summer heat. After egg picking and animal greeting and small talk with Martha, my family would trek down a dirt road to the strawberry patch where for a few hours we would remain hunched over in mostly silence staining one pluck after another our fingertips pink. Sometimes your fingers would sink right into the side of the berry and you would know you had found a rotten one, sometimes it looked a little green at the top still and you would turn it in your hand, examining if it was ripe enough to be picked. When we would leave the farm I always felt so content in this tradition and knew that although there would be many changes in season before I would be back again, I would for certain be back. The berries would be stacked in flats in the back of the van and I would sit in the back row, eating the sweet fruit all the way home. My mother all tanned and frizzy haired used to holler a warning at me from the front seat every year like clockwork that if I ate too many berries I would get sick but I always ate more than everyone else put together and I never ever did get sick from them. To this day strawberry shortcake remains my favorite dessert and I have a sneaking suspicion it is not just the taste that I like. Or maybe it is exactly the taste that brings me back to a time and place when my life was still innocent and good, when possibility and hope reigned supreme. Hope in fact at the time, wasn't even a thought. I had no need for it, life was already perfect as it should be and I never doubted growing up that it would ever be any different.

These years were the first chapter of my first life, the second chapter was much briefer than the first and began with the divorce of my parents at seventeen. And those two parts composed the entirety of my first existence in this world. My second life began when my mother was killed at fifty in car accident when I was twenty three years old, newly graduated from college and looking for my place in the world. I'm shocked to be sitting here today to tell you that in the past few years, a third life has miraculously begun. One I like to think of my rebirth and resurrection. It seemed for years upon years after losing my mother so suddenly and unexpectedly, that my life would forever be divided into two halves; the whole half, and the empty half. And at twenty three and beyond I was now facing what looked to be before me and empty and pointless existence. How could I go on living and participating in the world when it all just might end tragically and unfairly someday against my will? What was the point of this thing we call life? And how was I to carry on when the person I loved and who loved me most in the world was gone? How was I to get up each day and put one foot in front of the other when the rest of the people I love might just keep getting yanked from the world and from my heart in ugly and unjust ways when I hadn't finished loving them yet?

Mine is a story of unspeakable loss, of endless grief and then, many years and much work later, one of redemption. This is not a tale I ever thought I would tell; the part about the loss of one's mother or about the startling realizations about life that going through this has brought. Mine is also a story that really is not all that unique. I have suffered as too have you and most of the people in the world in one way or another. It is one of the things that unites us and creates the human experience. It is a story of how when my life in one instant crumbled into a million tiny broken pieces, I was able to slowly turn it over and over in my hand and study this thing called and look for the ripe spots and let the raw ones grow just as we did while we picked berries so many years ago. This is the story of how after many years of struggle, I have one wound and heartache at a time, patched many of my hearts broken pieces together. The tar is still there zig zagged across my heart just like it was on NE 32nd court, taping the experiences of my existence together but it is keeping those old wounds from gaping wide open to the elements on most of my days. I don't tell my story because I am unique in my suffering and in my loss but rather to share the forgiveness, love and faith that has come out of my experiences. I met a woman at church the other day who told me she teaches classes in another state about the falcity of two. When I said I didn't understand she took my hand in hers and looked me in the eye and said, "You and I, we are one." It was a deep, moving, and real moment. And it encapsulates everything I wish to say tot he world. Through the loss of my mother and the suffering it has caused in my life, I have discovered my connection and oneness with the rest of humanity, wells of compassion deeper than I could ever have imagined possessing, and a faith that defies definition.

I have always known in the back of my mind somewhere just as most people do that ones parents are supposed to die before you do... I just never imagined it would happen to one of mine while I was still a young woman. This is the story of my life and my mother's life and death woven together, the story of my own spiritual death and rebirth, the story of finding in the midst of my sorrow and grief, an astounding faith in myself and the human experience. This is a story that maybe above all else, really should be titled Hope.