The Idyll

Aunt Ruby worked out in the fields — she was a sharecropper all through the Great Depression. Her husband insisted that one of their children was not his. The baby, a little girl, was placed for adoption.

This was the first in a series of losses. The chemicals used to treat the vegetables she picked were harsh. One day, as she rubbed sweat from her brow, the residue from the chemicals dripped into her eyes. She was permanently blinded.

Years and years afterwards, she said, she could still see her daughter’s tiny hand — reaching out, waving goodbye.

Aunt Ruby and my great-grandmother both picked. My great-grandmother used her hands every day, every hour, during harvest season. It’s astounding to think about all of the days that were spent picking in a field, picking until the skin on her fingers was raw. Picking under a cloud-strewn sky.

The more I think about it, a beautiful sky is the same anywhere in the world. Maybe, or maybe not. But just as beautiful landscapes could be different, beautiful skies had many features in common: an openness, a vastness, an endlessness.

To comfort myself, I remembered that the same sky was over everyone. The same sky that hovered over my great-grandmother when she was working in the field — it was the same sky that hovered over her twenty-or-thirty-times great-grandparents, as they traversed the plains of Central Asia, as they moved into Hungary, before moving further west into Western Europe. It was the same sky that hovered over her Scottish great-great grandparents and over her Irish ancestors. It was the same sky that hovered over my great-grandmother’s daughter’s husband — my grandfather — and before him, generations before, over his own many-times-great-grandmother and her family, as they moved from Morocco into Spain. Years later, when their own descendants moved from Spain to Belgium, from Belgium to North Carolina, from there to Kentucky — it was all the same sky. We have all lived under the same sky and the same stars.

The fact that we only knew about these previous generations of people because they were considered important enough to write about — I often thought about that. I thought about them often. I wondered about them — how much their world was the same as mine, how much their world differed.

But the sky was the same. And all the clouds were made of the same material — the same type of material, anyway — and that constancy was comforting. How a sky that looked different each day could have some form of sameness.

And these skies, these beautiful skies, they’ll never know how beautiful they are — because a sky can’t know. But just like a beautiful cat, as my mother would say, it’ll never know how beautiful it is unless God tells it.

Meaning that we can’t make it understand, no matter how many beautiful words we use. We can talk until we’ve exhausted our vocabulary. And maybe the talking is good for us. It’s good for us to say what we want to say. It’s good for us to just let it all out.

My great-grandmother, like Aunt Ruby, had her own problems. Aunt Ruby couldn’t keep her daughter. My great-grandmother couldn’t keep her nieces and her nephew out of trouble.

I don’t blame the nieces or the nephew for what happened to the family. We all have our moments of weakness. And selfishness. Those kids didn’t realize how much they wore on my great-grandmother. I only wonder if it was inevitable for a family to disintegrate that way. For a family to fall apart, when someone worked so hard to fit all of the misshapen pieces together.

I can’t take those misshapen pieces and fit them together any more than I can take the clouds and rearrange them. But, like many people, I have the tendency to look at clouds and try to make sense of the shapes I see.

It’s a house. It’s a car. It’s a baby. It’s a happy family.