You Can. You Can.

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Recently I spoke to a group of organ transplant patients via Zoom. I was quite moved by their stories and coached them to share and write them. Afterwards, Taia, quiet during our Zoom, wrote to me privately. “I wanted you to know my story. I had my first transplant at age 18. Now at age twenty-six I need another kidney. It is devastating. I don’t know if I can do this again. Do you understand?”

In truth, I was not sure I could understand. At that moment I was consumed by my husband’s situation. Steve had a hernia operation on September 10. Routine. Since he was healthy and fit, we believed he would bounce right back, but twelve days later he could hardly eat or walk. During COVID we had been hesitant to go to ER, but after his physician called with results of a blood test, we knew we were possibly in a fight for his life. We went.

In ER Steve was poked and prodded and almost immediately an IV and a catheter were inserted into his swollen body. Chuck, who ran the imaging machine, joked with the attending physician, Dr. Chuck, about which “Chuck” was more important in the hospital. We batted jokes around until Dr. Chuck, who kept wiping his hands on his white medical coat, looked at the scans and squinted his eyes in the dim light before announcing, “This is kidney failure.” Like a wind tunnel these words sucked the levity out of the room. After a long pause, the doctor added, “We can reverse it, and we are going to do all we can to make that happen.” He wiped his hands down the sides of his white coat again. “You may need dialysis and possibly dialysis for life, but I think you can make it.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “You can overcome this. You can.” My words seemed to reverberate through the room. I steeled myself inside. I knew this man. I had lived with him for four decades. He was strong and even now with his body completely compromised, he joked that he was relieved that we now had a problem to solve.

As the chaplain escorted me to ICU, I repeated my new mantra to myself over and over. “You can. You can!” I used to scrawl those words all over essays when students were struggling to find their voice. Nike says, Just do it. I say, “You can.” In my heart I added, “Steve. Believe. You can.”

That night in ICU was a blur of doctor visits, blood draws, IV bags, and beeps and buzzers.  At one point I reached down in my book bag and pulled out my journal. I wanted to write, but I was weary. Instead I reread what I had written that day.

My writers had been toying with a prompt I assigned, “What possibilities do you need to create?” Disappointed by our canceled beach trip last summer, I had scrawled a sketch and written about the possibility of an upcoming trip. I visualized half-built sandcastles, hotdogs dripping in mustard, kites whipping through the breeze. A beach. I saw us walking on the sand and the image lulled me to sleep. A buzzer jolted me awake, and a flurry of people in the room were switching out IV bags and talking hurriedly in hushed tones. “His sodium is going up too fast,” a doctor explained. I prayed and mumbled my mantra, but I was too exhausted to stir.

By 7 am his numbers were headed in the right direction. There was no dialysis that day. In fact, there was no dialysis at all. Once Steve’s fluids could leave his body, his kidneys kicked in and began working on their own. No infection. Recovery would take time, but he could do this.

A couple of days after ICU I faced an avalanche of ignored emails. When I saw Taia’s, I reread it carefully.  She wrote, “I had my first transplant at age 18. Now at age twenty-six I need another kidney. It is devastating. I don’t know if I can do this again. Do you understand?”

I wrote a long email back and at the end, I answered her. “I think I understand. It is hard, but I believe in you. You can do this.” I skipped a couple of lines and at the bottom I scrawled the words just as I used to do on student papers, “You can. You can.”

A Bookcation!

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Madeleine L ’Engle said, “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” She is right. Books for children carry untold nuggets of wisdom. Certainly, my third-grade teacher knew this. Mrs. Vawter read to us every day after lunch. Her gift: she impersonated book characters. She was George Washington shouting orders to the troops when we read his biography. She was Jody Baxter with a backwoods accent when she read The Yearling, a heartbreaking tale of a boy shooting his own pet. In that classroom I often hid behind the book bins after school to read. It is there I learned to love books.

Bump forward a few decades. There is a pandemic. Initially my granddaughter Macy and I loved the novelty of staying home and doing lessons together in a Zoom room, but when we had to cancel a beach trip and the dog days of summer slapped us with three-digit heat, Macy’s enthusiasm waned. Her sapphire eyes lacked their shine. Her voice lingered sadly on words and lacked her trademark joy. Together we decided to go on our own journey. Through books. As Dr. Seuss said, “Oh the places you’ll go!” Even amid a pandemic.

And so began our reading trek down to Mexico where at age twelve Esperanza (Esperanza Rising) lived a fairy-tale existence on a sprawling ranch. As her family’s laborers harvested the grapes for market, Esperanza and her family prepared for the annual fiesta and her thirteenth birthday. But there would be no celebration. A sudden tragedy shatters her perfect world, and Mama and Esperanza are forced to flee to a migrant work camp in California where the Great Depression complicates their lives. Mama falls ill, and Esperanza undertakes hard labor to keep them fed.

Next our reading journey led us from the Great Depression to the deserts of Sudan where we trekked with the teenage Salva (The Long Walk) across his war-torn country in search of the family he had lost. From the rebellion in Sudan, we journeyed to Saigon (Inside Out and Back Again). A young poet Ha wrote poems to share the beauty of her life with friends and her beloved papaya tree before the Vietnam War drove Ha and her family to flee aboard a crowded ship headed toward hope. Headed to America—a country that baffled Ha with its strange food and confusing, mixed messages for immigrants. We read more poems that captured the anguish of a similar prejudice. Poet Jacueline Woodson taught us what it was like to be a brown girl struggling to find her place as she grew up in the South (Brown Girl Dreaming). Along with the stray dog she adopted, Opal (Because of Winn Dixie) taught us how to befriend those in need and how to thread together a truly disconnected little town. “Opal is a hero,” Macy explained to me.

By early August we had read ten books. We celebrated with cake. These books wrapped our brains around endless lessons. We had learned that war is all too common on our planet. That events like a depression or a pandemic have been recurring throughout our history. We learned that all of us must go on our own hero journey—and that there will be losses, pain, and growth.

One of the most memorable moments came from a silverback gorilla, Ivan (The One and Only Ivan). Witty Ivan made us laugh at the follies of humans. Using all his resources, Ivan saved a baby elephant from being whipped into submission in a show and hatched a plan to get her safely to a zoo. Ivan was brave, kind, patient, funny—and we grew to love him. One afternoon as we read, cheering for his success, I saw Macy eyes shining brightly on the Zoom screen and then I heard it–Macy’s hiccup laced laughter had returned.

Long after the pandemic, long after Macy is grown, I will still revel in this experience—and how it brought back the wisdom and joy that can come of reading.

Wisdom from My Tree

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Yesterday I hung out to the end of the newscast for the “the good news” clip. It was worth it to see Greta Thunberg smile. The seventeen-year-old climate activist had just won the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity and pledged the million-Euro prize to help with projects that will fight climate change and increase sustainable living. I love her fight. I love her connection to our Earth. I learned while teaching high school that seventeen-year-olds often carry the wisdom of the ages.

During COVID my backyard has become my refuge. I love the quiet. The fountains. The gaura blooms. The hummingbird feeder and the “ta ta” of the hummingbird who has marked it as his. I love to sit alone on the patio and eat salads that seem noncaloric but that I smother with chipotle ranch. I love the cactus wren who often joins me, perching on the nearby wall to sunbathe. Last night the sky was so dark I could see traces of the Milky Way and was filled with wonder.

This morning I arose to walk by the canal but even at dayspring the sun beams cut a harsh path across my trail. When I returned, Siri announced that morning temperatures had slipped into triple digits. Sweat trickling down my back, I unlatched the gate to water and to check on my Tipu. Her leaves are returning, and I think I see a bubble of yellow blooms. I am relieved.

I planted this Tipu twenty-two years ago when the yard was young, freshly carved from the Dobson farms, odd-sized chunks of land because the owner did not want track homes dotting his former fields. The Tipu was not the first tree in the back corner of my trapezoid lot. There was a Blue Palo Verde who nursed the seven Golden Barrel cacti who grew from the size of coffee cans to the size of wheelbarrows. Each spring the Blue Palo reined as queen of the yard when she burst forth with dazzling yellow blooms, danced in the sunlight with grace, and spread her yellow magic dust to every corner of the backyard. But the Palo’s roots were weak, and she was felled after six seasons by a wicked monsoon storm that spun through the yard and split her open before ripping her roots from the ground. Each spring I still miss the yellow coating of her dust across the yard and the perfumed smell

The Tipu tree, little more than a twelve-foot twig, arrived shortly after the Palo’s limbs were hauled away. The nurseryman promised me “strong roots.” The Tipu was a modest tree, not showy like the Palo. She hid at the back of the yard. Discreet. I watered her and she grew tall and lanky. While I buried my nose in student stories and memoirs, the Tipu made friends with a Ficus on the other side of the fence and together their arms would touch as if dancing. Many evenings I saw their branches swaying together as if to a waltz or jazz melody.

I became busy with a book. With travel. With workshops. Much ado, and I forgot about the Tipu. For years. But when events cascaded off my calendar last March, I took solace in the quiet of my yard. There I rediscovered how to be in the moment with the cactus wren, the hummingbirds, and the gaura—and as I transitioned into this new life, I noticed the Tipu.

At the age of twenty-two, she looked like an old, old woman who was hunched over and burdened by the sun. A huge deep gash, a scar of nature was sliced up her side four feet long and two or three inches deep. I placed my hands in the gash. The skin of her bark was covered with shards. Sharp pointed splinters. I touched them gingerly for these wooden needles were brittle and ready to snap.

Over the years the Tipu and the neighboring Ficus had reached across the fence and embraced each other with many branches entwined. Together they had grown into a beloved sanctuary for birds filled with early morning song. While I had been out-of-town for a book event, the city had tacked a notice on my mailbox that the Tipu and Ficus trees could not hang over the fence into the alley. I was promised a hefty fine if I didn’t comply. My well-meaning neighbor texted me, “I called tree-trimming Travis!” I replied with a thumbs up.

When I returned home, I peered up the Tipu’s trunk and it stopped me short. Her backside had been ravaged. Pillaged. Dozens of branches on her back and fence-side had been hacked and chopped heedlessly. There was no back. No fence-side. The Ficus had met with a similar fate. The two trees no longer touched. No longer danced together. They were eerily devoid of birds and songs. At the sight of it I felt nauseous.

Later that afternoon I climbed the ladder in the shed, teetered for a moment, regained my balance, and successfully tugged the hose from the highest shelf. I was formulating a plan to save my tree, but all the while I muttered words that I swear I never say. The anger simmered within in me that afternoon and well into the next day. Not rage with my well-meaning neighbor or with tree-trimming Travis, and certainly not with the tree. I was angry with me. Angry that I had ignored my trees. Fearful I had been self-absorbed and not attentive to what matters. My trees, my yard, and this Earth are my home. They are our home. They reach out to us when we need to listen—and we need to listen.

In the coming weeks I watered, pruned, fertilized, weeded, and attempted repairs to my sprinklers. Even in the heat. Early in the morning I learned to talk to my tree and share a litany of gratitude when I entered my yard.

The Tipu has returned. She even has a baby sprouting in her shadow. I realize both my tree and Greta Thunberg have become my best COVID teachers. We all need to pause and work to honor this Earth. Amid this pandemic, this may be one of the most important gifts I carry forward. I hope you will join me.