Night in this World – A Journey, Part 1
In the summer of 2014, lightning struck the large old apple behind the house and split the tree in two. We had just purchased this property: two couples and one elderly parent pooling resources and risk, negotiating a five-person mortgage on a former farm in Nova Scotia. All of us were urban apartment dwellers, most new to the real estate process, and what’s more, my husband Kevin and I lived in another province. Suffice it to say that this trip was an off-road experience from the start. Yet the circumstances that pulled us in this direction will be familiar to many: the longing to live more slowly, in greater tune with the natural world; the desire to practice more self-sufficiency; reckoning with affordability and the accelerated costs of living as we aged, and so on.
Even when we began viewing places for sale, though, I didn’t expect what happened to happen. There’s talking about doing something like this—changing our lives totally—and then there’s doing it. Maybe it wouldn’t work out. Maybe we were deluded. But we came out here, to this place, and we got claimed.
A little house set far back from the road, embraced by rolling acres of woods, meadows and hayfields. A creek tumbling into the Shubenacadie River, which moves like a great muscle and runs down to mud twice a day. We wandered like hatchlings. Was it like coming home? Not exactly: the land was too unfamiliar, too overwhelming. It felt, rather, that we’d met a great being who had been waiting for us. Just behind the house rose the apple tree. There are many other apples on the property, but this tree is clearly the eldest among them and rose gracefully over lawn and roof. Clusters of spring blossoms still dotted its crown.
Between the time we put in a bid and the sale closed, we didn’t return to the property. The owners were an elderly couple with roots in this area and they’d sold reluctantly, because they could no longer manage. Through the realtor we asked to come out and chat with them before they moved, but were told no; they were finding the whole process hard. Indeed the house, the day we toured it, had felt tight with sadness.
Lightning struck the apple sometime between our one visit and closure a month later. The bolt hit the tree near the base, sheared off half of its trunk and limbs. We arrived with keys in hand to find the tree askew and a blackened hole where life had been.
Amid the excitement, this was a sobering moment. We were reminded of the forces at work in our lives beyond our grasp—like the synchronicities that aligned for us to find this place, and the way that loss and gain go together, one couple’s grief at separation making possible our joy. We marveled at the tree: zapped in two, yet still standing. Taking a hit that could have wrecked the house.
*
After the purchase Kevin and I continued to live in Toronto, 1700 kilometers or a 20-hour drive away. We didn’t know how much longer we’d be there. He was fronting several musical projects and recording two CDs, while I was writing (and rewriting) my first novel, Night in the World. We juggled contract jobs, living paycheque to paycheque and just managing to meet our responsibilities to the house, yet it needed major modifications to accommodate five people. As my father entered a prolonged illness, the idea of leaving Ontario seemed even more extreme. All our histories, connections, family and friends were rooted there. When I thought of moving to our land, my heart would flip between desperate yearning and doubt, guilt, fear. Our co-owner friends, meanwhile, had moved into the house and struggled with the challenges of home ownership and rural life. We faced stress as a group: agreeing on expenditures, communicating across time and distance. We couldn’t visit often or for long, and when we did, Kevin labored doggedly on repairs and improvements throughout his ‘vacation.’
Looming over these personal anxieties was the enormous, intensifying tension of an entire civilization in crisis: human and ecological catastrophes, wars, political and social upheavals, the arrival of Corona virus. Feeling the urgency to change our lives in personal, practical and spiritual ways had driven us to purchase the land to begin with. Still, starting construction to turn the house into a duplex, in 2020 no less, amplified our sense of teetering on the brink of disaster in often frantic ways.
In the Wildwood tarot deck there’s a card called The Blasted Oak. A card of stark truth. On it a great oak tree is being hit by lightning on a stormy night. A severed limb and a man who’d been bound to the tree are both hurtling to the ground. The card signifies “curative destruction”: things have reached the point where only radical change can cut the bonds of an outgrown situation. There is no softening what’s to come. It’ll hurt like hell when he hits the ground.
*
At some point over the years, I started calling the injured elder apple tree Grandmother. Often, in the first moments of waking, I’d wonder how she was doing in that land so far away. Her strike wound, cauterized by the fiery blast, had healed into a dry hollow. The lop-sided weight of her branches pulled on her roots and in the wind they creaked like straining ropes. Yet every spring she’d blossomed again beautifully. She even gifted small gnarled apples to the birds and deer.
I also often thought about the layers of love that had brought us together as a group, including the land’s hold on our hearts. Once, crippled by doubts about our plans (or maybe just myself), I sought out the Wildwood tarot deck and asked what this land most wanted from me, how I could best serve it. I fanned the cards facedown, hovered my hand, chose one. It was the Ten of Stones, a card called Home. The inner and outer community that sustains and supports the individual, not necessarily blood ties but trusted friends, comrades and lovers who offer security and protection. The illustration shows a house with a thatched roof, and rising through its centre, a mighty apple tree.
Last year Kevin and I left Toronto and came home out here. Our living space was still in a skeletal state; for the past 12 months, deconstructing one life has mingled with constructing another, from living out of boxes to nailing in floorboards. In Night in the World, I wanted to show how each character must face down the obstacles that keep them trapped in limiting or destructive patterns when change is urgently needed. Most of these inhibitions come from assumptions about what success looks like, or strength, from fear of the lightning blast and what will follow.
We’ve moved in now, though are still rooting. Grandmother Apple rises outside my study window, her bark needled by woodpeckers. Leaves have become sparse at the crown, while young suckers surround her trunk.
August 1, 2022
This post begins a series of reflections and experiences connected to the land here. Posts will appear every six weeks for the next year. Sign up if you’d like to receive the posts as they appear – and feel free to share.