Openings Above, Below, and Otherwise
My late husband Mike showed me how to walk in the dark. Year-round caretakers at a rustic YMCA family camp, we walked wooded trails between cabins at all hours. Belfry, our small cabin didn’t include a bathroom so we shared an outhouse with a couple other cabins. Mike said, “Look up. Even a trail through dense woods will show an opening in the canopy.”
Life after he died often felt like walking in the dark. Openings showed themselves when I remembered to look up from grief and disappointment, from habit and expectations.
True, a few of those openings led to dead ends. Friends showed me different paths when I was lost. And I tumbled through a few openings by accident.
One was an actual trapdoor.
More than thirty years after we worked with a log builder constructing our house and twelve years after Mike died, I was still in our log home. Early one spring day, I lifted a heavy trap door off the opening into the crawlspace. The sump pump wasn’t working. The natural-stone floor just below the trapdoor was a little more than five feet, but there was a deeper corner where melt-water pooled. That spring the drain hole got plugged and the pump stopped working so the crawlspace flooded. Gingerly wading around in my knee-high rubber boots, I managed to clear the drain and set up a new pump. I was proud of myself when water started gushing out a tube stuck through a small window. Leaving it running, I climbed onto the small stepstool below the opening and then with a hop and press of my arms, rolled out onto the floor of the entry way. I left the trapdoor leaning against the back screen door so no one would step through the door and fall into the hole.
A little later, I made plans with my friend and neighbor, Joe, to go to town. I ran around taking pictures of a few windows I wanted to replace. Holding my phone up, I snapped a picture of the small window in the entry way and took a step back. Right into the hole. On my way down, my shoulder struck the floor. Points of divine intervention (or luck): I hit my shoulder instead of the back of my head, Mike had laid several inches of pea gravel just below the opening, and my phone fell in the hole with me. Also, the water had receded so that my phone and I landed on damp gravel rather than into icy water.
I knew without looking that my shoulder joint was displaced. Wow, it hurt. Fighting nausea and panic, I picked up my phone with my left hand, dialed 911, and answered the dispatcher’s questions. I also told her I was down in a crawlspace and was concerned about how they were going to get me out. Then I hung up to call Joe. I said, “Change of plans. I’m not going to town with you. I’m probably going in an ambulance. If they can get me out of here.”
Joe grabbed a few straps he thought might be useful for getting me out and jumped into his car, Ruby. Ruby had belonged to my dad, so Joe talked to both my feisty angel Dad and to the car. “We gotta go help Becca!”
Meanwhile, I looked up at sunlight falling through a little window I’d opened to help things dry out. Even over the hum of the pump and streaming water, I could hear chickadees making their spring calls. Somehow, the light and sounds brought a realization to me: dear as this land and home were, they were too much for me to take care of by myself. My daughter and her husband lived a forty-minute drive away and both worked full time. That distance made me reluctant to ask for help. Also, my daughter was newly pregnant. She wanted me to move closer to them, retire, and provide Grandma Daycare. Waiting for help, I squatted in intense pain, hugging my arm to my side, my rubber boots cutting into the backs of my knees, for probably less than fifteen minutes although it felt much longer. The sunlight and gentle spring sounds along with my sudden willingness to let go of this home, brought comfort and a sense of peace.
And then, a young man was speaking to me through the screen door. He called me by name. He told me he had my neighbor Matt with him. They caught the trapdoor as it fell toward them when they opened the screen door. It wasn’t until he dropped down in front of me that I realized the young man was my son-in-law, Sean.
Sean was about four miles away when he heard the 911 page for a woman in her sixties, fallen through a trapdoor. Sean thought, ‘Becca doesn’t have a trapdoor’ but the address landed on a familiar point in his mapping program. (I kept a rug over the trap door—and hadn’t ever asked for help with my sump pump issues.) He called his friend Matt who is an EMT and they beat even Joe who was only a mile down the road.
Matt stabilized my arm and shoulder. Sean righted the step stool and kipped himself out of the hole. Matt asked if I could make it up the few steps on the stool. Then he could lift me up to where Sean could pull me out without jostling my injury. I groaned and shook my head, but then they started talking about strapping me to a backboard and lifting me out. Suddenly taking those few steps up seemed do-able. The two of them worked me, still wearing heavy rubber boots, out of the hole without Joe’s straps or the backboard. And I didn’t throw up.
By then, the yard was full of first responders and an ambulance. The ambulance crew gave me something for the pain and off we went. One of my daughter’s friends was an ER nurse. She stayed with me until my daughter, Celin, could get there. Celin still laughs about my reactions to being high on painkillers. The ER had more emergent cases when I got there so I had to wait for them to reset my shoulder. She says I rated my pain as a 15 on a scale of one to ten. Also, I told them to just cut my arm off.
I credit yoga and Physical Therapy for a complete recovery despite a radical displacement. And I credit those few moments at the bottom of that trapdoor with my willingness to pass through other openings. Just a month or so later, at work, I mentioned that I was considering selling my place. Ten minutes later, Nancy appeared at my desk. She was marrying Timo and they had been looking for a home in the woods. Although she’s much younger, I’ve admired Nancy and her quiet but adventurous spirit for a long time. And Timo’s energy reminds me a lot of Mike’s. An outgoing storyteller, lover of history and land. Knowing Rendre (my name for our land: French meaning ‘to return home’) would be in their hands and hearts made it so much easier for me to let go.
And when we let go, we find other opportunities open before us. Since then, I’ve retired, become a Grandma twice over, and avoided being shut alone in my house during the COVID shutdown because I had the best job ever, providing daycare for my granddaughters.
During the pandemic, my daughter found a wee little opening for me. One Friday, I said to Celin, “I miss the water. I’ve been thinking my inheritance from Mom and some of the money from selling Rendre would help me buy a lake place.” My thought was to spend a few years looking, mulling (and agonizing) over choices.
She jumped online and soon had me scrolling through opportunities, too. The first places we found were too expensive and pretty far away. But the next day, she discovered a small seasonal cabin just a mile and a half down the road from their house. With her encouragement, I texted our friend and realtor, Trish. Despite it being a Sunday, she responded quickly. The local COVID realty market was heating up. She warned me to be prepared to make an offer quickly if we saw something I liked. The cabin we’d marked as our favorite had been listed all summer but someone else planned to make an offer that Monday.
My next text: “Is it rude to go look at it anyway?”
On Monday, we toured a cabin that resembled Belfry, the honeymoon cabin Mike and I lived in. By Tuesday afternoon, the owners had accepted my offer (which wasn’t much over the asking price) over the other one. My daughter’s reaction: “Yes! Yay, yay, yay!” My reaction: “Oh no, what have I done?”
What I’d done was come full circle, landing in a small cabin with an outhouse. This outhouse is up sixteen uneven cement steps rather than a woodchip-cushioned path so I often use a headlamp to get to it. But before traipsing back down to my snug cabin, I turn off my light and let my eyes adjust. I look up and find myself standing in an opening. The break in the canopy of birches and pines creates a frame for that Moment’s night sky. I might find moonlight illuminating lumpy clouds; or the pour of star cream that is the Milky Way; or the light from the rising moon quieting more distant stars, letting the Big Dipper gleam brighter.
Openings in a forest create ripple effects. Sunlight hitting the forest floor where there was shade before allows sun-loving species like white pine, jack pine, and balsam fir to sink roots. They get a jump on shade-tolerant plants like bunchberry and moccasin flowers. The change isn’t necessarily a good thing. How it’s valued depends on the perspective of each changeling. And a longer view might change that perspective.
Letting go of Rendre, I wound up with a small seasonal cabin among birches. In front of the cabin is a lake new to me with a view of islands in the distance. In my kayak, the opening is so large, I have trouble choosing which direction to take.
Today I’m grateful for Openings in my life. And hoping I won’t need another fall through a trapdoor to notice the next one. What’s on your Love With Roots gratitude list that starts with O?
Images from author’s collection
