Cosmic Heart, part two
In the country and the sky
Cosmic Heart is a book I’m writing here, on Substack. This chapter is free to read. You can read the previous chapter here
My mother did not want to live in the country, fifteen minutes from town on a state road in a newly developing subdivision surrounded by farms. The house wasn’t finished, for one thing, and still had particle board subfloor in the bathroom. She considered her country living days over, for another, having been raised in the country and having gotten out.
The day we moved in, my dad killed a copperhead in the drainage ditch at the base of the driveway. He brought me and my bother out to see what it looked like. He told us to pay attention. Copperheads, he said, smelled like cucumber and the babies were more venomous than the adults.
To live in the country is not necessarily to live in harmony with nature and farming is not necessarily a life lived in nature’s rhythms. It is not natural or harmonious to care for animals, engender their trust, then load them onto trucks for slaughter. It is not harmonious to overwork land, pollute waterways, and spray fields with pesticides. It is not humane or natural to hunt for sport. No one in my family hunted, but the boys in my rural neighborhood killed animals with glee, frog gigging in the creek at night, and I was privy to this. I saw and heard and felt it all.
Rural living, however, provides and intimacy with nature that I’m grateful to have experienced in my early life - an understanding of what the air feels like before a storm, how to discern harmless insects from the ones that sting, the taste of a clover petal on the back of your tongue.
Our house was five miles from my grandparent’s farm. At one time, the farm had been lost from my grandfather’s family. He bought it back at auction and designed the small farmhouse where he and my grandmother, and my mother when she was a teenager, lived.
My grandparents farmed cattle and tobacco, but they weren’t full-time farmers. My grandfather ran the garage for the county school bus system, which was across the street from the Westinghouse factory where my grandmother worked on a light bulb assembly line. They had a tenant farmer who lived on the property with his wife and children, and they were family, too. We were all related, through our connection to the farm.
During the years when my father was a college professor and my mother a graduate student, someone would pick me and my brother up after school and drop us off at the bus garage where we would wait for my grandmother’s shift to be over. When she got off work, she drove us to the farm where she changed clothes and started feeding animals.
Dogs and cats seemed to know about my grandparent's farm. Strays just came walking up the long gravel driveway, knowing they’d reached safe haven. There were indoor and outdoor pets on the farm, a row of wooden houses along the fence filled with hay for dogs named “Scruffy” and “Tuffy,” muscular little cats named “Shorty” because they only had a stubs for tails, and a sweet long-haired “mama cat,” as my grandmother would say, who brought a mouse to the bedroom window every morning as an offering.
My grandfather had a beloved golden haired dog named Fluffy who was always at his side, on the sofa or in the truck. He lost her to the cruelties of living in the country just as I lost my beloved dog Georgie. We never spoke of it, but we shared this deep and silent suffering.
The dogs, both indoor and outdoor, ran to meet us when we arrived and my grandmother made hamburgers for them. Some afternoons, I went with her out to the garden where she dug up potatoes and carrots and broke corn off the stalk. She made dinner every night - vegetables, meat, bread, gravy, dessert, and when my grandfather and my parents were done with work, we’d all gather around the table in the kitchen bay window and eat.
Even though my grandfather liked to tease me about being a city slicker, I took to heart everything he taught me about navigating the farm. Steer clear of the hogs, for instance, especially if they have babies. Be aware that there are snakes in the corn crib. Be sure to always close and latch every gate behind you. The kittens will come out from beneath the smokehouse when they want to, getting down on the ground and begging them to come out will only push them further into the dark.
I loved the farm and I loved to go on walks. Four or five dogs always went with me. They veered off to go for a swim when we passed by the the pond, then ran back to meet me on the walking trail, shaking the pond water from their fur.
I liked to walk past the pond with its tall cattails, up the hill and left across a ridge that overlooked the section known as the “cow graveyard.” This, I assumed, was where the bodies of the cattle who died of natural causes were buried. Sometimes this is where I turned around and headed back toward the house. When I was in the mood for a longer walk, I kept going all the way across this ridge and turned down into the backside of the farm where I had once seen cattle gathering underneath a large willow tree during a rain shower.
I was around 10 or 11 years old when I was on such a walk. As I headed across the ridge, I looked up and over the cow graveyard I saw a face in the sky. I don't mean that the clouds looked like the shape of a face, I mean that in an instant I saw a flash of a face in the sky. It was brief but in that brief moment when I saw the face I understood some things about it. I understood that I was not seeing something symbolic. I was seeing something real. I knew this face was a protector of the land.
There was nothing about this experience that was frightening, but I chose not to speak of it to anyone. It was simply a thing that happened. I saw face in the sky the same way I might have seen a tree or a dog or an especially interesting rock.
It was not an unfamiliar concept to me, to search the sky for meaning. My brother and I often stood out in our driveway at night with our father and watched the stars. I remember him smoking his pipe and scanning the sky for unusual movement, sharing with us his ideas about aliens and UFOs. This was something we discussed in my household, along with cryptids and mythology. We talked about the possible origins of spacecraft and life on other planets. It was not an idea that ever felt far-fetched to me. Quite the opposite. It seemed ridiculously unlikely that in all of the cosmos, Earthlings would be the only life.
One night, driving back from the farm, all of us in the car, my dad pulled over on the side of the road and told us to lock the doors. At that time, car doors had little silver knobs that you pushed down and pulled up in order to lock and unlock your door, so my brother and I reached over and pushed down the little silver knobs. My father pointed toward the sky and we all saw it - a carousel of lights, hovering above us, slowly turning. We were stunned and excited, but we weren’t afraid. In my house, there was a theology of aliens. If they are so technologically advanced that they can travel here, my dad would say, they will have evolved out of violence. They will be peaceful.
Years later, when my brother and I were in our twenties, he and my mother and I were in a car traveling on the interstate late at night. We were coming through Pennsylvania when suddenly an enormous triangle of lights appeared low in the sky on the right side of the car. It seemed to hover there for a moment, then the lights went out one by one. My brother, who was driving, pulled into a rest stop. He went in to ask if anyone else had seen it, but no one had.
I am aware that my memories, both of the farm and the UFO sightings, offer me a romantacized version of life. When I remember spending the night at the farm, I remember the softness of the feather bed and the windows open to the cool night air, waking to the sound of a rooster crowing outside and bacon frying downstairs.
I can still remember the smell of the Dove soap in the upstairs bathroom and the woven rag rug beneath my bare feet. My childhood feet were often bare, on dirt and gravel and grass.
I loved the farm and if I ever became a billionaire, the first thing I would do would be to buy it back, but remember my grandfather’s joke, that I was a city slicker. As a child, I didn’t think about my grandparent’s mortality and I never imagined they wouldn’t live in that house on that land. It would always be there, I thought, to welcome me home with it’s blue Christmas lights and abundant fruit trees and dogs running circles in the yard.
What I wanted, when I was a child, was to live in town. I wanted to be able to walk to the by-pass and buy lipgloss at the Big K or eat at Taco Tico without adult accompaniment. I wanted to live in a house with a staircase, one where I wouldn’t hear animals with claws scratching inside the walls at night.
I loved the tree in my backyard and the grapevine swing and the vast blue sky, but I thought that real life was happening in town, where there were street lights and movie theaters and teenagers driving in slow loops around fast food parking lots with their radios turned up loud.
As a child, I felt isolated in the country, but now I long for it. I long to live in the country again, surrounded by trees and moss, where I could take long walks and watch the sunset, but I would do so now with the understanding that human beings long ago separated ourselves from nature. The Neolithic Revolution lead us down a path of disconnection, and we find ourselves now unwilling to accept that we are, in fact Earthlings, a part of this planet’s natural world.
My mind goes sometimes to Charles Darwin and how he sat with his notebook sketching and one day wrote, “I think it’s like this…” I wonder about my evolutionary foremothers, living lives so unlike mine. One day, will a hybrid robot human look back and wonder about me this way?
I think about the face in the sky. Was it a sentient being attempting to communicate with me, or was it just there, a part of the landscape, the fabric of life? Was the vision simply a moment when my perception expanded and I saw all of what was there to be seen, the same way my family saw the carousel of lights in the sky above our car. “We’re here,” the lights seemed to be saying. “All of us. We’re all here.”
I was living in suburban New York attending graduate school when the Hale-Bopp Comet made its appearance. The poet Stanley Kunitz visited our campus and read his poem Halley’s Comet. I’d not been so moved by anything in my life. When I read the poem to my then-boyfriend and he said he didn’t get it, I wondered how we’d ever even been remotely attracted to one another.
I was walking one evening from the train station to my apartment. I was on a footbridge that crossed over a highway when I looked up and saw it. I saw the comet and its tail. It stopped me. It knocked the air out of my lungs. I started to cry, stunned by the absolute beauty of the cosmos, this world we get to live in.
I was aware of what some people were saying, that there was an unidentified object trailing behind Hale-Bopp. It was surely a spacecraft, some believed. I didn’t know. It probably wasn’t, maybe it was. But then, the Heaven’s Gate suicides happened. I watched the video footage on the news, the black jogging suits and tennis shoes, bodies shed like vehicles, no longer needed. It was a tragedy, but it was treated like a joke. There was such contempt for the members of the cult, as if they hadn’t been human beings led to their deaths by persuasive doctrine, as if they hadn’t died searching for meaning, believing in something larger than themselves.