A Grandmother's Burrow

...in a “time of war and pestilence / and the loss of common sense”

December 3, 2023

Let me explain. This piece came out in third person.  I’m not sure why, but I could only find this grandmother’s voice by stepping back and observing her. 

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What is the mind of an almost 80-year-old grandmother, recently resolved to pay attention to her relationship to Mother Earth, to make of the disturbances in her throat, the pain in her head, the weight on her body that rises out of the news of this week?

The truce has ended, Israel has resumed its bombing of Gaza. The host of COP28, the United Arab Emirates, has been negotiating carbon fuel deals on the sidelines and there isn’t much optimism that this Conference of the Parties will result in significant carbon reductions. Despite inflation, consumers are spending this holiday season like kids in a candy store, flush with cash and no parent watching.  Stormwater runoff from heavy rains and increasing water temperatures are drastically altering the bioregion which sustains life where she lives. “The changes are coming too fast now. Nature can’t keep up. We aren’t keeping up. A way of life is vanishing,” said Baykeeper Ivy Frignola of Friends of Casco Bay.

And, oh, the frail state of that institution she can no longer take for granted: democracy.

How will she find her way, what will she use to make sense of this time when darkness comes so early to the woods where she lives on her own little Walden Pond, far from flashing headlights, from anything built or lit, but, like Thoreau, close enough to walk down the dirt road and have a meal at her daughter’s home. 

“Ground yourself in this earth, like the woodchuck, like Grandmother Woodchuck,” she thinks to herself.  A woodchuck lives inside the earth, burrows herself there and rests, warms herself among the roots and the beetles and the spiders.  In the serendipity that creates small miracles like gifts from the spirit world, her son, knowing her interest in the Wabanaki story about Grandmother Woodchuck, sends her a poem by Robert Frost called, “A Drumlin Woodchuck.”

She’d never heard of that poem before, so she looks it up. “Burrow,” said the author of this article about the poem, “rhymes with Thoreau,” and Frost is alluding in the poem to Thoreau’s retreat, to the little cabin he dug into the earth in an attempt to transcend the alienating forces of industrialization. 

(The poem is written in the voice of the woodchuck and a drumlin is a little hill or mound.)

A Drumlin Woodchuck
by Robert Frost

One thing has a shelving bank,
Another a rotting plank,
To give it cozier skies
And make up for its lack of size.

My own strategic retreat
Is where two rocks almost meet,
And still more secure and snug,
A two-door burrow I dug.

With those in mind at my back
I can sit forth exposed to attack
As one who shrewdly pretends
That he and the world are friends.

All we who prefer to live
Have a little whistle we give,
And flash, at the least alarm
We dive down under the farm.

We allow some time for guile
And don't come out for a while
Either to eat or drink.
We take occasion to think.

And if after the hunt goes past
And the double-barreled blast
(Like war and pestilence
And the loss of common sense),

If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,
Or even another year,
I will be there for you, my dear,

It will be because, though small
As measured against the All,
I have been so instinctively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.

My crevice and my burrow.  And don’t come out for a while.

After she reads this poem, she sits for a while inside this burrow, quiet and alone.  The mosses she sees from the door of the burrow have lost some of their summer-green smile and are wearing yellow.  The earth is wet from last night’s rain. All the leaves have fallen and only the winter birds skitter about. It’s warm, too warm for this time of year.  Another winter ahead, eerily warm, like Baltimore, she fears. She rubs her feet on the earth, mostly clay here, blue-gray marine clay left behind when the glaciers melted 17,000 years ago. Time melts, the eternity of earth and stars envelops her.  She feels more whole, more ready to open the door and go back out.

But before going back out she stops to think some more. There’s something else she needs to add to her life to give meaning and joy to this “Holiday Season,” now marked by so much consuming. What is it? A Christmas concert, a holiday party, a trip to the Botanical Gardens light show with the grandchildren? Sweet things but none of them answer a deeper longing. 

Remembering a passage she’d read recently, she opens the book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview, by Wahinkpe Topa and Darcia Narvaez, PhD. She thumbs to the chapter on ceremony, “Ceremony as Life Sustaining.”

Dreams, visions, songs are access points to the sacred.  Ceremony is our form of communicating back, requiring a feeling of reverence and attention to respectful relationships with the other-than-human, and the merging of self with All in an intimate kinship.

She starts to cry when she reads this.  She realizes how hungry she is for a ceremony of connection with the wood drake, the great heron, still water and the day-blind stars. As a child she was spell-bound by Christmas Eve Mass, by the idea of a divine being born in a stable, by the stars that radiated from the hands of the saints and Silent Night sung from the choir in the balcony above her, as if it were coming from heaven itself.  But the Catholic Church is no place for her now.

She begins to imagine what this ceremony could look like. She dreams a circle of friends, outside around the fire pit in the field; it is night, someone plays a drum, someone else a flute, they sing, read poems to the Earth, thank her, hold hands and dance. “Hmm,” she thinks, “a solstice ceremony of sorts, a little less crazy than hugging a tree!!” 

She’s better now.  She’s made sense of this time and her place in it. She will have this ceremony. She hopes her husband will think it is a good idea. But, dear man, he is used to this dreamer of dreams, and it is likely he will. 

If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,
Or even another year,
I will be there for you, my dear,

It will be because, though small
As measured against the All,
I have been so instinctively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.

Before she leaves, she has one more thing she wants to tell you.  A little glimmer of light found outside her burrow. 

A few nights ago, she held one end of the Freeport Climate Action Now banner, her husband the other, and walked down Maine street in Freeport as part of the Town’s annual Sparkle parade. Behind her was an electric car draped in lights with a giant (plastic!) ball of Earth atop the car, and the FreeportCAN logo on the side.  And behind that a whole array of bicycle wheels lit with red and green lights and pedaled by a hearty FreeportCAN member riding his own electric bike. She was afraid the experience would be very disturbing, causing her again to want to yell at all the people hell-bent on consuming.

But to her surprise, this parade wasn’t about consuming, it was about celebrating community, about coming together in the dark and cold and cheering on neighbors, though she didn’t recognize one face in the thousands of faces lining Maine Street. Dump trucks and snowplows and lobster boats and fire engines were all decked out in lights and proudly driven down Maine Street. Ahead of her was a flatbed truck carefully carting the girls’ Freeport High School State Champion Field Hockey Team.  Little kids sat on the curb, mesmerized by the lights and the sounds, some looking frightened and some spellbound.  Sadly, rain was forecast so the town’s marching bands couldn’t play. The first drop of rain came just as the floats were rolling off Maine Street and the parade was over. “A blessing,” everyone said, smiling, energized, awake, connected, if not to earth, at least to each other.  And there was not a shopping bag to be seen!!