Heartwood Home: Can Gratitude be Transplanted?
In my gratitude alphabet, H is for Heartwood and Home.
Tears aren’t good for a keyboard.
When Michael and I bought thirteen acres of woods in 1983, I flipped through a French/English dictionary to find a name for our land. My ancestors spoke French-Canadian patois. Voyageur songs of the fur trade were sung on lakes here in northeastern Minnesota. The dictionary said rendre (my mispronunciation: ron-DRAY) meant to return home. Heart words. And for me, Rendre became not just the name of our place, but also the spirit.
Heartwood is the dark central core of a tree. It’s darker because deposits of tannins wind up there. The amount and darkness of the heartwood varies by species and growing conditions. This core is usually stronger than the sapwood and serves as a spine for the tree. When we built our log home of red pine, Len Bielawski, our log builder, used a scribe (an oversized protractor with an attached level) to draw a line on an upper log to match the contours of the log below it. Michael and Len chainsawed a V-shaped trough along the scribed lines. Then we refined the edges with chisels. Len scribed each end of the log to cup down over the logs running perpendicular on the other walls (think Lincoln Logs but tighter fits). I loved working on the notches at the ends—it was like carving a bowl into the log. When we rolled the log over on top of the rounds below, Len checked and re-checked the fit. We might roll a log back three or four times before the fit was snug all along the length both inside and out. Shavings piled up on the chipboard floor like snow drifts of blonde sapwood and brunette heartwood.
Michael and I had been married for just three years when we bought the land. We worked together for the Forest Service the summer Len built the house. Our schedule was eight days in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) then six days off. On our days off, we worked both as Len’s laborers and the homeowners. The tangle of roles added stress and richness to the whole endeavor.
The day we moved in to our log home, I climbed the ladder to the loft and felt a wave of nausea--the first confirmation that I was pregnant. We brought our son, Joe, home to a log cabin without running water during a polar vortex. Our friends, who also served as surrogate grandparents to Joe, insisted we couldn’t bring the baby home until they helped Michael install a ceiling fan to circulate heat from our small woodstove. We hung a wool blanket over the door because it was just one-inch thick. My dad watched me carry infant Joe like a football up the ladder to the loft just once. The next day he and Michael built a staircase. By the time we brought Celin home almost three years later, we’d had running water for three months. Michael built a four-inch-thick, insulated door and installed a storm door. And off-peak electric heaters backed up a larger woodstove.
When we were caretakers at Camp du Nord, I thought that if a couple could get through planning a wedding, they should be able to get through any other stressors together. Laugh out loud. Building a home, raising children, working, planting gardens, even burning a brushpile or doing laundry stretched us in new ways. Rendre harbors the remnants of our maple syruping trail where the kids first learned to ski, a cliff Joe used as a hideout, and the white pines Celin climbed. We relocated Belfry, our newlywed cabin from Camp du Nord, to our land. In our home and on that land, we learned how to wrap our love around each other, embracing the challenging with the sublime.
Michael didn’t die on the land, but we spread his ashes there. In the twelve years after he died, I tried and failed to become a chainsaw mamma. His hard work to maintain our woodlot eroded quickly. Still, I hauled wood and used our woodstove as my main source of heat. Joe came home from Montana only rarely, but when he did, he pitched in on projects. Celin moved back home for six months before buying her own house. They each got married, finished degrees, and so much more. Honestly, some things were easier without Michael. Transitions made him crabby. But we missed his humor, his big laugh, his energy, his woods smarts. We missed him.
Then there was David, who moved between my house and his own cabin. He brought in a barber chair and new challenges. New love. And he encouraged me to move my parents north. Mom, deep in Alzheimer’s, walked the driveway with me one autumn day. Maple trees spilled our favorite colors at our feet. She turned to me and said, “I wish Becky could be here. She would love this place.” I didn’t cry then, but I am now. Dad moved to my house for what turned out to be his last few months. David moved to his cabin down the road. Dad wasn’t able to walk the steep trail down to the lake but he and my old dog Mantis entertained each other while I was at work. Frequently he drove to David’s cabin to suggest going into town for breakfast.
Thirty-five years after we bought the land, I sold my heartwood home during a flurry of transitions. Change tends to happen that way in my life. From May 2018 through May 2019: my daughter became pregnant after two miscarriages; I dislocated my shoulder falling through a trapdoor; my mom (in a memory care home in my hometown) went from ambulatory to wheelchair-bound to hospice; two friends said they were interested in buying my place ten minutes after I said I might want to sell; sold Rendre; looked for and bought a new house; discarded or moved thirty-five-years and five buildings worth of stuff; assisted my daughter and her husband as they tiled and painted an addition to their house; was furloughed for six weeks (federal shutdown); Ailish my first grandchild was born after three days of Celin in labor during a polar vortex with wind chills of 72 degrees below zero; Mom died the day they brought the baby home; work stressors piled up under a system reeling with the consequences of a long furlough; retired after nineteen years with the Forest Service; and began my new career as Grandma Daycare. Snowdrifts of change, light and dark, happy and sad, hard and welcome swirled together inside me.
Taking the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory for that period of time in my life, I get a score of 436. According to that model, 300 points or more equals an 80% chance of a health breakdown in the next two years. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened for me, knock on heartwood. Still, it’s no wonder my reaction for leaving Rendre is so delayed.
I get impatient with myself for crying about leaving. I sold for good reasons—so that I could have a shorter commute as Grandma Daycare for my granddaughter. Also, the big, aging log home and woodlands were too much for me to care for by myself. My new home was nicely renovated by the former owners. It’s in a small town just a forty-minute drive from Rendre. Three groupings of cedars and one of maples (both species are prolific stump sprouters), with a few mountain ash squeezed in between stand at the back of the lot. Birds love the trees. My neighbors are kind, interesting, and tolerant of the new person who hasn’t fully adapted to in-town living.
Heartwood starts as sapwood. Sap filled with nutrients flows through the tree in both directions from roots to leaves and back. Gradually, the growth rings in the center fill with gum, tannin, and tyroles. Tyroles are part of the cellular structure that flop across an opening, helping the organism reserve water during times of drought. Cracks run through the heartwood wherever a knot formed at the base of a limb. Heartwood holds the story of a tree. It’s resilience and traumas, it’s abundant and hard times, both.
Tyroles closed over my feelings about leaving the land for a while. Losing Mom was a larger grief. Watching my daughter and her husband loving their baby, seeing my granddaughter’s soul unfurl, my new job as her daycare provider, kind neighbors, cedars and mountain ash—I had so much to celebrate.
The new owners of Rendre, Nancy and Timo, are generous with her. They’ve given my kids and me an open invitation to visit. The day before their wedding I was offered time to dig up roses and irises from the garden to transplant to my new home. They are good stewards. The house has already been sandblasted, treated for fungus, and re-stained. Flying squirrels have been evicted from the roof. The stand of dead balsam downhill from the house has been cleared. Nancy is quiet, resilient, and radiates compassion. She survived years of work as a wilderness ranger and several seasons in Antarctica. She encourages me to tell stories about our time at Rendre. Timo’s energy reminds me of Michael’s. He absorbs the history of a place as stories to be shared. He’s a talkative firefighter who laughs often. I’m grateful to have Rendre under their care, being loved by their family, welcoming their roots.
Despite my grief, I didn’t cut off my roots. I brought them with me. Like any transplant, I was shocky at first. Not sure if I’d thrive or whither here. Roots need time to tap around in the new soil, see if it’s hospitable. The plant needs extra water, maybe a little sheltering, some adjusting to sunlight and shade. One of my neighbors offered to mow under my cedar trees when he saw that my electric mower just wasn’t up to the task. Last winter, I was gone when two feet of snow fell. Rushed home two days later to find a freshly cleared driveway and even the steps shoveled. For months I didn’t know which neighbor had done it. All of them took on an extra glow of potential kindness.
Rendre’s nodding trillium, basswood trees and the bees that love them, the ledge rock point, tannin-stained water of Chapel Lake, leaves lifting like a flock of birds from the maple limb hanging over the deck, even those dear red pine we fashioned into walls so very long ago were never mine to keep. But I’ve kept them anyway, tucked away in my heartwood under the word Home. Home is a word that can expand and hold contradictions. Both here and there, sorrow and joy, memories and the present. To return home, to turn my heart toward love and gratitude, takes only the stroke of a fingertip across the tannins of our stories.
What starts with H in your love-with-roots gratitude list?
Photo by author: Len scribing the contours of the lower log onto the log above
