Intersections 2

Five wooded acres with a creek running through them. More than an hour's drive from any major city. For sale.

My grandfather gave me that land as a wedding gift. His transparent hope: that my husband and I would build a house next door to his and my grandmother's and raise our children there. An unlikely scenario, given our two-career dilemma at the time and the fact that, while I occasionally entertained Atticus Finch fantasies, our connections to my tiny hometown were simply too tenuous for us to establish ourselves there. But my grandfather was an optimistic man.

He was also a completely secular man. I know of only three religious legends about him. And the first of them doesn't even really concern him but, rather, his mother. A WCTU matron, she apparently sallied forth from her home every Monday to visit the rectory and advise the Methodist minister on the ways in which his sermon of the previous morning might have been improved. I'm sure his enthusiasm upon seeing her must have been somewhat restrained.

The second story isn't really about my grandfather either. My grandmother had an uncle who was a Methodist bishop, "the most tedious man on the planet," according to my grandfather's description. He extended that tidbit of commentary one day by adding, "Marrying and burying ~ that's all they're good for."

The only story with any religious bent that directly portrays my grandfather himself came from a friend who is a nun. My family was in the grain business and the nuns, whose convent lies twenty minutes from town, have a farm, so my grandfather frequently spent time with them, discussing beans and corn and equipment and weather. As the decades passed, my grandparents and the sisters discovered mutual interests in music, art, politics, and nature, and became fast friends. The story in question probably comes from about 1970; my grandfather would have been about sixty-five years old and Sister A about forty. She told me some time ago that they were visiting together one afternoon and he mentioned that he would like to go into the sanctuary.

"So we did," she said. "And I genuflected, and moved into the pew, and knelt down to pray. Your grandfather followed me and sat down on the bench. After a few moments, he said, "You really believe in all this, don't you?"

Bemused, she responded, "Yes, H. I do."

"Sometimes," he said, "I wish I could."

Sister A was the first person I consulted about selling my land to help pay for seminary. Although there had never been the tiniest thread of obligation attached to the gift, I still felt uneasy. Certainly my grandfather's intention could not have been less related to the reality unfolding before me, and to sell under these circumstances and in this market is hardly a savvy economic move of which he would approve, regardless of purpose.

"Your grandfather," said Sister A, "would have wanted you to exercise complete freedom of choice in this situation, and he would be thrilled to have been able to help." And then her eyes began to dance and she began to chuckle. "If only he were alive so that I could see the look on his face at this turn of events!"

Last week-end I was down in the southern part of the state visiting family. I walked the creek , which at the moment is a dry bed of rocks, not a run in any way, shape, or form. I flipped over the fossilized remains of brachiopods and coral, hoping for a trilobite. (We have never found even one in that creekbed, although a massive trove of them lies on a remote farm a few miles away, but I am optimistic, too.) I listened to the chickadees and a distant catbird, and looked over the building site above the creek, a perfect foundation for a thatched-roof cottage designed for hobbits. I hope that someone who will love the land purchases it, but I have relinquished control over all potentialities in that regard.

And then I stopped by the convent to see Sister A, who greeted me with open arms and the words, "So here comes the future minister!"

Yes, my life is brimming with intersections. Devout Catholic nun friends colluding with a grandfather whose own deeply reflective life of the spirit precluded allegiance to organized religion. Land marked by the creatures of the Paleozoic, and by the descendants of the Puritans of the seventeenth century and the German immigrants of the nineteenth who married each other and farmed there for generations. Ancestral people and places whose message echoes down the creek and through the woods and across the fields: Go! We all made you who you are, but you cannot stay rooted to this land and be the woman whom you are called to be. Gather what we have offered you, put it to use, and go.

Five wooded acres with a creek that usually runs through them. For sale.