My Lost Continent May 2020 John Calvi
I was born in a time and a place that is gone now. It was an enclave where the road became dirt and my family owned the land tamed for farming. All the surrounding land was forest, miles of it. There were no houses close together and the houses only held family. I remember some weddings of aunts and uncles very early in my life and people leaving the house.
Everything sprang from the farmhouse. My grandfather built that house and a barn. Then a son had a house along the brook to the south and a daughter had a house to the north. Others left, but not far, and two stayed home. They stayed with grandmother, who, so far as I could see, ran the world and did so very well. She left in her early 70’s and it became a different world.
Then Uncle John and Auntie Wishie ran the house and farm. I carried firewood each winter afternoon while in grade school, then electric heating came into the house. He was the oldest brother and she was the youngest sister. He was old fashioned and courteous to women. She had a youth that never left her demeanor. Together their focus was hospitality for a large family gathering each weekend, especially in summer.
I knew very little of the world outside that farm. There was no travel, no vacations away, nothing else to see really. There was playing with many cousins. There was amazing food made on the farm – bread, butter, cheese, meats, vegetables, jams and jellies, and tomatoes for spaghetti sauce. There was a big pond for swimming in summer and skating in winter. There was the dangerous second floor of the barn where children weren’t allowed, but it could be accessed by climbing up the manure pile when Uncle John wasn’t looking. There were cows in the upper pasture and horses in a lower pasture and chickens in the coop near the back door and always dogs. There were apple and cherry trees, a pear tree on the hill where acres of hay were brought in twice a year.
And now, this place, this continent where I strode and stumbled until leaving home, it’s begun to sink on the horizon. That’s because that aunt who made the place home has begun to leave, to leave her last breaths to us. The new virus test was positive last week and now breathing, well, it’s mostly not happening. Dementia and morphine make will make this a sleepy departure. There won’t be pain or much awareness. By family tradition, we know Grandmother and Uncle John await her and will make her passage smooth and welcoming. I imagine there will be great rejoicing there as we here, trapped on Earth, will have a mix of sadness for our own selfish loss of this wonderful woman so important in our young and early lives, plus some sense of mercy because she wasn’t really living in the facility, just holding on, dozing.
The farm is still there and dozens of cousins too. And the stories of people growing up there, leaving, coming back will be told over and over. But the warm home that beckoned one in from the roads of the unknown and into the familiar, the laughing, the well-fed, the welcome of generations of hospitality, that is less now. Less because of busy lives and shifting realities, and the farm does not quite live as the center of Italian immigrants so happy to have land at the beginning of their lives, the beginning of making eleven babies, and turning land into a living for almost 100 years.
Growing up there in the early 1950’s was a paradise of land to wander and extended family. I was very lucky to have this at my beginning. And it’s been a pattern for my life – beautiful landscapes to wander and hospitality to be made in one way or another. Making people feel welcome is the first part of my healing work. Staying in the country and away from density is how I keep my balance and know my roots, my forebearers.
I lit candles tonight for love, for safe passage, for the memory of my childhood and the goodness I was shown.
