Orange Trees

The trees that line the path to my office have suddenly turned a fierce, fiery orange. It’s disgustingly bleak out; the sky is grey. The skies are blessing us with a cold, icy rain. A chill has set into my bones that indicates winter is coming, fast and furious. All around campus, most of the other trees are shedding the final remnants of this season. They didn’t even really bother being colorful this year. Piles of brownish green leaves cling to the trunks of trees; but these five trees are holding strong to autumn. They aren’t willing to let go of the lusciousness just yet.

This orange is so passionate. So fierce. So defiant. I’m impressed with the courage these trees have to be so bold today.

For the last few weeks, I’ve sensed that the whole world is struggling to survive. All of America seems to be struggling with itself; struggling with the economy, with unemployment, with war. More bad news keeps coming out of Washington and the hope I felt so passionately this time last November has begun to tumble down, slowly. Sometimes right before I fall asleep at night, whatever program I’ve been watching will end and I’ll catch the first twenty minutes of the local news. The news is nightmarish. I know full and well that I live in a city with a high violent crime rate—but sometimes it’s easy to forget. The Baltimore I know and love doesn’t look like that. The Baltimore I call home feels safe and cozy and familiar. The news reminds me of things I’d rather not think about; the dark side of life. But the news creates this sensational message—that we’re all slowly sinking. I turn it off and try to find something light, pure, uplifting before I go to sleep. Something that encourages me to sleep well so that I can wake up the next day, rested, and ready for a new day in the world. But sometimes that message sinks in before I can erase it.

This has been one of those weeks. The message is blinding. I’d even call it disheartening. And I’ve been in a funk about it. I can’t quite pinpoint the source of this bad energy but I know part of it has to do with all the bad things happening around me. There have been several school shootings/stabbings in schools close to my home and my time in the schools this week has been chaotic, disjointed, and frustrating. I’ve spent a lot of time this last few weeks talking about why so many of these kids are slipping through the system—why so many fail. It’s hard to talk like this. It confirms things you don’t want to believe in.

When I first started working with kids in Baltimore, now almost six years ago, I knew I’d stepped into something that was going to be messy and dark and unbelievably challenging for my heart; but I also knew that I was doing something so right. So many things felt so good and fell into place that I ignored the rumblings in my belly. I knew that I had stumbled into work that few have the tolerance for; that I had fallen in love with kids that most people have given up on already. And some days are harder than others. Some days it’s not the kids and the work so much as the rest of the world—the way people respond to my kids.

Sometimes it’s the fear that people have about these kids that gets to me the most. The way most people look at these kids like savages; like criminals. The sideways glance, the disapproving stares—they see something in these kids that I just don’t see. It disturbs me that people have allowed these messages to sink into their cores—to transcend basic logic about the way children work. Every now and then I catch a glimpse of someone I work with or someone I know and see something in them that frightens me—something that sends a chill down my spine. Someone will say something or do something that makes me realize how most of us really do live dualistic lives—we put on a face for work and then we’re this other person when we are at home, in our sweatpants, saying what we really think about other people. These people are why the system is so hard to change. Why we can’t ever seem to make any progress. It’s real easy to say you support these kids—and believe in them—but without action, words are empty.

I never knew how hard it would be to witness this stuff. How difficult it would be to digest systems breaking down. It almost hurts to see how all the pieces move together and don’t always match up—like watching this enormous machine break down. Wheels stop turning, things fall off the conveyer belt, parts malfunction. Smoke billows from a part where moisture has seeped into a seal; something metal goes flying off the sides. It’s messy. And it’s even harder to recognize that the parts we work with aren’t chunks of metal or giant wheels, but people. Small children. Families who get caught in the crossfire. Is it possible that these very systems that are working so hard to save these children are in fact hurting them?

It feels like there are too many people trying to come up with the biggest and the best strategy for urban reform—too many people trying to take credit for fixing it (this illusive thing that involves poverty and race and class and other -isms that no one seems comfortable enough to really define). There is too much ignorance. Some people have the capacity to ignore otheres in a way that dumbfounds me. And it seems there are not enough people paying attention to the people who are being broken as a result of this race to the top—the people jumping to their demise from these gaping cracks. It gets pretty overwhelming; very heavy.

So these trees have some audacity to shine orange today. They’ve got some guts to attempt to remind me of hope, in the middle of all this bleak, grey despair.

Homecoming

Most people seem to get seasonal depression in the winter. The sun stops shining and weeks of dreary, rainy, cold grey dominate all parts of life. Sometimes it snows, but mostly it doesn’t. It’s just cold. Slushy, dirty ice water gathers on the side of the road and cars get covered in white, dusty salt. I’m weird, I guess. I love the winter. I don’t mind the cold. I don’t mind the grey. My worst seasonal depression happens in fall, when I miss home the most. I struggle with myself in the fall. I get wanderlust. I make grand life plans (life plans that I rarely keep). I talk about moving home. Growing up I loved the fall. I loved the way the oak trees that surrounded my house would drop their thick, fat acorns on the cracked stone driveway. The leaves would slowly turn from summer’s fresh green to brilliant shades of red, yellow, and orange. Our local football team would begin their season and my friends and I would spend our evenings in the crisp, fall, mountain air cheering for the home team. I’m not even that huge of a football fan these days, but high school football was a permanent feature of my late adolescence. We loved it. Our lives revolved around it. There was a palpable energy in those stands and a real community in my town that seemed to congregate on Friday nights. Everyone gathered there together. Like the biggest kitchen table you’ve ever seen.

I remember when it changed. When I moved away and I started resenting those days—feeling as though I’d come from the most backward, archaic town in the South. I moved to this small college in Baltimore and met people who, for the most part, came from glamorous northeastern cities and towns with progressive city councils and private school educations. They never had prayer in public school. They’d never heard people use racist slurs. I was in awe of this progression; it was my very own domestic culture shock. As I struggled with who I used to be, and more importantly who I was becoming, I said things I didn’t mean about where I was from. I told stories I shouldn’t have. I shared secrets about my small, beautiful, mountain town that only those of us lucky enough to have grown up there should be allowed to know—things that you just can’t understand unless you’ve been there. Unless you’ve seen it. I guess this is my own cathartic confession: guilt I’ve been holding onto for years. As I’ve gotten older, and struggled for that sense of home in my life that I always had growing up, I’ve started to recognize just how much that small town taught me about how to behave in this world. I feel horrible that I haven’t always loved where I’m from—like I’ve committed the ultimate betrayal to this place that now means so much to me.

Before my own grandmother passed a few weeks ago, my dearest childhood friend, Maggie, grieved for her own grandmother. I went home. This is what you do when you’re from where I’m from. You go home. You sit with people. You kiss cheeks and squeeze hands. You laugh. You cry. You eat. Maggie’s grandmother was a wonderful woman. Her funeral was such an incredible testimony to her life—nothing at all like the quiet, simple service we held for my own grandmother this last weekend. The small Baptist church filled with people who had in some way been involved in her life. This is also what you do when you’re from where I’m from. You go to funerals for people you barely know—because you know that it means a lot to the people who are still alive. The people who are grieving. The definition of family gets wobbly and almost anyone counts. In the middle of the service, a group of six or seven cousins got up and sang old-fashioned mountain music. They sang her favorite hymns. It was so moving I couldn’t help but cry. This thing, this simple, old-fashioned funeral, was all about home. This is what it means to be from a place that is simple and full of grace. This is what it feels like to be around people who believe in the power of prayer and faith. This is what it looks like when family lines are large and undefined; where songs get sung around out-of-tune family pianos. Where stories get shared and stretched over the dinner table. Where simple things are still simple things. This funeral reminded me about what it means to be from this place—how lucky I am. How blessed.

Coming over the mountain into the valley I've called home for my whole life, I always sigh with a deep breath. My cell phone coverage breaks. The radio crackles. I roll all the windows down, hoping I’ll catch a whiff of that unruly honeysuckle bush on the side of the road. I turn on something like Gillian Welch’s Revival and sing all the words as loud as I can sing them. Something in my heart clicks into place. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this over the last twenty-six years. Every time I come home I hold my breath for this part. It’s like when you watch your favorite movie and there is a part you love so much that you can hardly stand to watch it; it feels like you’re too lucky to have that feeling on demand. There is this bend in the road where you start to go back down the mountain and suddenly all you see is this incredible panoramic mountain scene. It’s like my guilty pleasure. Within minutes you’re back in town. It’s done in an instant. But I love it. It means I’m home. And I hate that for so many years I couldn’t see it. I couldn't see anything but what I wanted to see. I only saw the red on the political map. I only saw the pick-up trucks and the trailers and the junk on front porches. I couldn’t see the things that mattered—the real beauty of this place. Not yet, atleast.

There is a distinct feeling I get when I get to a place I call home. There is a settled contentment in the pit of my belly. My body relaxes, my shoulders let loose, and my hips get low and wide. I feel grounded. I feel safe. I feel happy. I can take a deep breath and feel contentment as my lungs fill with air and release, slowly, with satisfaction. Over the years this place called home has become as undefined and wobbly of a word as family at a Baptist Church funeral. I’ve found home is in a lot of places. I’ve fallen in love with people and ideas all around the world. But nothing beats that mountain view. Nothing can compete with what my childhood taught me life was all about. Annie Dillard writes a lot of essays about nature. I’ve always connected to her work. She writes in A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.” This quote has somehow captured all that I feel about where I grew up.

I’ve moved to the creek. My life is complicated and messy and absurd. There is so much stuff in my life. But the mountains are home. They are quiet, and giant, and unshaken by my choices. In the chaos of the last few weeks, I’ve been reminded about what it means to have family. What it means to have faith. What it means to go home. In Ghana, people refer to this symbol Sankofa, a bird resting his head on his back, which symbolizes returning to one’s roots. Every now and then I need to go home. I need to return to my roots.

Today the weather turned cold. The leaves have already begun to fall. They hardly changed color this year and most certainly didn’t shine in brilliant shades of red and yellow. Autumn doesn’t happen here the way it happens in the mountains. I got sad. I missed the mountains. I wanted so desperately to be home. I had to push this desire to the side, recognizing my responsibility to my life in the creek, and simply dreamt about coming over that crest. I pretended I could see the mountains and the thousands of shades of orange the landscape becomes this time of year. I had to be satisfied with what I had in my memory. But deep in my heart, in the tiniest, most secret folds, I knew the truth about where I really wanted to be. And perhaps for now, that’s good enough.