My friend Tirzah’s father’s name is Jonathan, but sometimes we call him different things. The Tree Whisperer, I think I called him once. The Crocus Keeper. Names given in honour of a lifetime of service to growing things. Entire apple orchards have sprung from his hands, and winding nature paths, and patches of flowers that cover his Hutterite community’s lands in the changing fashions of the seasons.
This will be a short newsletter. Not everything has to be long, as my editors keep reminding me with a gentle but increasing insistence. (“But but but,” I object, every time, “how else are you supposed to tell the whole story?” Part of maturing, surely, is letting go of the delusion that you can ever capture it all. We are lucky if we see even just a few faces of life’s spinning prism. Still, how to let go of the desire to put every fragment of information into its rightful place?)
Right, back to the Tree Whisperer. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. I could tell many stories about him, some obtained secondhand, some first-, all of them delightful. For the purpose of this story, all you really need to know is that he is 80 years old, and he is still planting. In the summers, he rescues orphan saplings that sprout in ditches and gives them a new home on the colony. He is leading an effort to restore an old farming field back to native prairie. The life he has raised up on his little patch of the world will grow for generations, a gift to all who come after him to enjoy.
“That Jonathan,” another community member told me once, and shook his head in a sort of awe. “Now that is a life well lived.”
The last time I saw him was in July, when it looked, for a time, as if this new virus had simply passed over Manitoba. The anxious chill of spring had mostly melted with the sun; the rosy-cheeked afternoons of a prairie summer were blooming. And there was the Tree Whisperer, sitting in the shade of his garden, chatting with one of his sons. I sat down and asked how he was doing. Hutterite life had changed much during COVID-19; I wondered how he was holding up.
He leaned back in his chair and smiled and, with his eyes to the sky, told me about how the flowers were doing, and the bees, and the orchards full of trees, and the giant lady slippers that, had I seen them yet? I had to go see them, right now, before we lost the light, and all the other growing things on the colony’s rolling green acres.
“There’s just so much to be thankful for,” he said, and the lilt of his Hutterisch made music of the English. Then he just beamed and said nothing else, as if that said it all, as if those eight words just summed it right up.
I don’t know what I expected him to say. Something else. Back in the city, everyone I knew was still at least a little tense, or a little alone, or a little afraid. A little tied up in all the things we were losing, or had lost; but the Tree Whisperer, he was fine. In that moment, I realized I’d never admired a person so much. Or, to be honest, been more envious, if only gently, and with a swell of affection.
He’s a real one, that Tree Whisperer. I hope to see him again very soon.
— — —
I didn’t do anything special for Thanksgiving this year, which is fine. It gave me a little time to catch up on some things I wanted to do, and things I wanted to think about, so that is about the most effective use of a day at least nominally set aside for gratitude as one could manage. Now, in the dying hours of the holiday, I thought I’d just write.
For the most part, these newsletters have been salted with sadness. That isn’t too surprising. I am by nature a person who prefers to take their sweet with the bitter; you’ll always find me wherever a story teeters on the border between heartbreaking and hopeful. But I swear, that overall blue mood isn’t all that goes on in my mind. I am also incredibly grateful for the many good things in my life.
Gratitude is an interesting thing. It is, like love, often perceived mostly as an emotion, when in fact it is most powerful when put into action. It can’t just be something you feel, it has to be something you do. Truth be told, I wasn’t always very good at doing gratitude. It’s something I’m still learning. To enact gratitude requires us to show real vulnerability, to be genuine, to drop any pretence of acting cool.
That’s not always an easy thing to do.
In recent years, I’ve tried to practice gratitude more consciously. For example, I try to thank people for everything that is meaningful to me, even if it’s just hanging out for a few hours. Even if it’s just for a nice text that comes out of the blue. This is in honour of friends who once changed my life for the better and never knew it, because at the time I lacked the words or the confidence to show them that part of my heart.
And I do try to hang onto the things which, after all is said and done, make life worth living. There are many of them. On a material level, I am lucky, in all the ways people typically itemize at Thanksgiving. On a narrative one, I am grateful to say that I live with very few regrets. Overall, I have left very few words unsaid. If I have loved and lost, then at least none of those losses ache for one last conversation.
(That’s the only advice I give to anyone now, by the way. Don’t leave anything unsaid, ever. If you love, then tell them in all of a thousand ways. If you hurt, then say that too. Yeah, it can be scary to lay it all on the table, to be that honest, that open; but we should be much more afraid of putting it off until we lose the chance forever.)
More, more, there is more. I am grateful for memories of youth, flawed like discarded diamonds. Memories of misadventures backstage or in basements, where we bands of misfits burned with a ravenous flame. Grateful for nights lying on the grass listening to the lapping of waves. For the scent of incense at old temples, for friendships bound halfway across a planet, or in the embrace of trees much closer to home.
Grateful to the words that come even when I don’t feel worthy of them. For the people who trust me to wield them on their behalf. For the peculiar journey that took a teen girl who knew only that she wanted to write, and gave her chance after chance to carve a niche of her own. And above all, I am grateful for the tenacity of my often illogical faith in things felt but unnamed, in the fact I still find comfort in a conviction that whatever all of this mess of a life is, it’s all going according to plan —
(what plan? don’t ask. that’s where I don’t have the words for an answer.)
and for the stubborn belief that there are kindred souls and hearts
out there to find, or to be found by
and for a chance to try, and keep trying
knowing that even when you have screwed up
or failed or just fallen down so many times
you can still sit here and remember there is just
so much
to be thankful for.