The Sad Seasons Are Still Seasons

Some women hold the whole table together.

I owe you some blog posts.

I know they were coming. I know some of you have been watching for them — the Salt Brigade, the orange groves of Fantville, the water and the soil and all the things I promised to tell you. They're still there. They're still coming.

But something happened on February 17th, and I haven't been able to get back to the writing desk since.

My mother fractured her back. And she has frontal temporal dementia. And those two sentences together are more than most people can hold in one thought, so I won't ask you to hold them long. I just want you to know where I've been.

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It's Easter weekend.

Moma loves spring.

We didn't make it to the annual azalea sale this year. That probably sounds small, and I understand if it does. But to me it's enormous — the kind of thing that tells you what season you're in, not just in the calendar, but in your life. We go every year. We went last year. We didn't go this year.

I have what I think is seasonal affective disorder — or maybe it's just that I am a person who lives very close to the earth, and the earth's moods become my moods. Winter costs me something. The brown, the bare, the waiting. And then the green comes back. The oaks bloom that particular gold-dusty way they do here in north Florida. The world turns and something in me turns with it.

I believe deeply in restoration. In renewal. In resurrection — in the truest, oldest sense of that word. The seed that looks dead. The field that looks finished. The soil that looks like nothing could ever grow from it.

Something always comes back.

I would love to believe that in the traditional, miraculous sense for my mother — that she would simply get up and walk again, be herself again, come back to me in the way I knew her. That is not going to happen. Frontal temporal dementia does not work that way. The person I knew is still in there in glimpses, in the way she knows my face when I walk in the room, in the way she feels — I believe she feels — how much I love her.

That is enough. I am choosing to let that be enough.

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There's a thread I keep pulling on in this blog, in this work, in the Fantville Papers I've been slowly writing.

Valentine Fant — the man this land is named for — surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, with 108 men left in his regiment. Then he walked home. Hundreds of miles. Through a country that had been torn apart at the seams. No guarantee of what was waiting. No map for what came next. He did the very hard thing,

He walked into a sad season.

And then he built a cotton gin. A grist mill. A post office. A community.

I think about that walk a lot lately. I think about how he couldn't have known, on day one or day thirty, whether the road would lead somewhere worth going. He just kept walking because there was nothing else to do. Because the land was waiting. Because people were waiting. Because he had faith.

I'm in a sad season. I think some of you are too. I know I'm not the only one caring for a parent who is slowly becoming someone different. I know I'm not the only one building something with one hand while the other hand is just trying to hold everything together.

But the oaks are blooming. The azaleas are doing their annual extravagant thing all over north Florida without my permission and without my attendance. The soil is waking up. My mother is still here, and when I walk in the room, she knows it's me.

And even though the season is sad — the renewal keeps happening. The restoration keeps happening. The resurrection keeps happening. Regeneration, return, rebirth. All those RE words I love so much — like a poem unfolding in front of me whether I'm ready or not. The earth doesn't wait for our grief to finish before it turns green again. It just keeps going. And somehow, that is the most comforting thing I know.

The sad seasons are still seasons.

And I'm still walking.

The blog posts are coming. The Fantville Papers will resume. The soil science and the trommel stories and all of it — it's waiting where I left it, the way good things wait.

Thank you for being patient with a farmer who is also a daughter.

— Ellie