I laid on my back on top of the crinkly white paper-covered table. With my feet flat, planted a little wider than my hips, my knees were drawn up at a gentle angle, leaning into each other, resting.
While the tattoo artist buzzed away at my left forearm, he asked, “So, does your husband have any tattoos?”
“Nope,” I answered casually, breathing deeply, realizing this wasn’t a bad feeling. Not at all. Actually, I kind of liked the little prickles, the tiny cat scratches. (Is this how people wind up with a body covered in tattoos? Art that hurts so good? Maybe.) (Also: Oooh – art that hurts so good? Are tattoos the embodiment of the authentic artistic experience? Also maybe.)
“Ah, gotcha,” he replied, continuing his work. “How does he feel about you getting a tattoo?”
I laughed a little, imagining having a husband who would disapprove of me getting a tattoo.
Then I laughed some more, remembering that I’m a white suburban mom of four, who recently celebrated her 20 year high school reunion, showing up at 1:00 in the afternoon with a bob haircut and a Barbie-pink t-shirt to get her very first tattoo.
Ok, fine. Fair question.1
*****
After my brother died, this essay from The Rabbit Room, which I had read about a year prior and thought was really lovely, became extra meaningful to me. In it, Hannah Hubin describes the California Redwoods:
“Most redwoods grow to about three hundred feet high and weigh nearly two million pounds. Their roots range from five- to twenty-feet deep and spread out over an acre of land, claiming 90,000 cubic feet of soil. Yet the burden of their own lives is simply too much for them to hold themselves up, and the only way for them to bear their own weight is to intertwine their roots with those of the other sequoias in their grove. So they grow and fuse together, forming a mass of roots and soil that keeps them all standing.”
There are precarious conditions for such massive creatures living along the northern California coast. The groves of startling beauty exist amidst winds and flooding, forest fires and fault lines. Hubin writes, “With wind and rain and fire and moving earth, it is not an easy place to grow. It’s an easy place to fall, actually.” (Isn’t it, though? This world, for all its beauty, can sometimes feel like such an inescapably easy place to fall down.)
These words – burden, bear, weight, intertwine, grow, fuse – I understood their meaning in a new way after Luke’s death, deep in my bones, from a hundred different angles. And the grandiosity of the Redwoods, their larger-than-life quality, their power, their precariousness – in them, I sensed my brother.
We don’t know exactly whether it was fire or flood or wind or rain that stopped Luke’s heart that day and, over time, that has mattered less and less to me.
What has mattered more and more is that when a tree in the Redwood forest falls – when it dies – its roots stay intertwined with its grove. In its death, it continues to support the community in which it found support during its life. And that, of course, gives strength and resilience to the rest of the trees still standing, allowing them to keep offering support to the other trees in the grove, and so on and so forth, in perpetuity, etcetera, times infinity, forever and ever. Not a root is wasted, it seems.
Mother Nature stands by, patiently proving true what humans eventually learn when our own fault lines start to shift and tremble and we begin to understand that our roots alone won’t suffice.
*****
So I laid in my pink t-shirt, chit-chatting with the tattoo artist while he ornamented me with six Redwood trees: they represent my two parents, my three brothers, and me; they represent my one husband, our four kids, and me; they represent you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and me.
Worth It
A couple of pieces of random goodness that have been worth my time and energy recently…
Speaking of Barbie: it’s a little late in the game to recommend the movie (although I do!…saw it twice in the theater!), but I’ve been listening to this song from it a ton. The original Indigo Girls version is iconic, of course, but I love Brandi Carlisle’s slowed down, acoustic take from the soundtrack!
I spent some time this summer digging back into Enneagram reading and really appreciated this book by Suzanne Stabile. If you already know your number and are pretty familiar with the Enneagram and want to be challenged by the charming, straight-talking ‘Enneagram Godmother’ while she reads you like a book, this is a good one.
A couple of days ago Campbell turned 10 (why?! how?!?) and we had fun looking through his picture books. I always use this company to make photo books (I’ve made over a dozen as gifts!); they print beautiful finished products and I love their customization options. If Christmas inching closer has you thinking about making a picture book to gift, here’s my best tip: create it early, let it sit on your digital bookshelf, and wait a week or two to purchase til the company emails you a 30-40% off coupon to get you to hurry up and check out already!
Actually, very fair question. A few hours after finishing this draft, I remembered that I also brought him a really cute little half pint mason jar of homemade raspberry jam as a gift that day.
I love this so much
🌳
Beautiful words artfully written that touch my heart...again. Thank you for sharing, Molly! Can’t wait to see it in person! 😘