Every Natural Fact - Amy Lou Jenkins

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felt it too,” I said. It was like all of our ancestors and all those who lived before us came for a July reunion.

      When John Muir was ten, a year younger than DJ, he came to live in the wilderness of Wisconsin. Near here, he began his journey to become a wilderness theologian. Years later, he gave parents this advice:

      “Let the children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blended star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.”

      My faith isn’t that strong. Death can be stingless, but it doesn’t always show up as a natural phenomenon of intellectual and spiritual beauty. Having no choice, I make a conditional peace with death but can’t quite commit to a universal embrace of the face of mortality. I’ve seen death many times; I’ve been in the room. I can’t shake this fallacious belief that everyone is owed a long life. I’m angry about terrorists and politicians who kill to demonstrate their power, and I won’t find a way to think of murder and genocide as beautiful. Why are we unable to prevent that kind of pain and suffering? I hope there is not a divine plan that is meant to create a Danteesque tension between life and death. No one need drop a bomb on a village so that I might appreciate the quality and quantity of my life by comparison.

      I can buy Muir’s explanation when the dead and dying are decades older than I am and die a natural death. The idea of life as a cycle, the reuse, the rebirth, and the constant freshness of new life mixed with the seasoned, I see the beauty and sense in this. Maybe DJ will make a more complete peace with the reality of death than I’ve been able to.

      DJ stared at the river. He wasn’t looking at me; he wasn’t looking to me. “Everything dies,” DJ had told me. It wasn’t a question; it was an acknowledgement.

      The phone rang as I put the key in the door lock. DJ ran around me, making a show of speed-wiping his feet on the rug before his successful dash to the phone. He turned his back to me as a signal that the call was for him. I was washing my hands in the bathroom when I heard him yell to the whole house, “Mom, can Michael sleep over?” His voice cracked upward two scattered octaves in the middle of Michael’s name.

      Thank you God, for my son. I turned my head around for a moment to yell toward him, “Sure,” and then smiled at myself in the mirror, pleased in the way that parents delight in the intelligence and innocence of their offspring. I love to watch DJ pursue answers and think about big questions. Pascal, who devoted his life to science and religion, said about God, “You would not seek me had you not found me.”

      My face was flushed, and my curly hair puffed out despite the rubber band holding it back. A black spot fluttered in my tangles—a flying ant. I carefully plucked it out and went to the front porch to release the hitchhiker. The neighbor’s kid drove by in her new used car, at least fifteen miles over the speed limit. She waved to me with a teenage look-at-me-I’m-driving smile. The tall Queen Anne’s lace flowers on the side of the road quivered as if they were an excited crowd, celebrating her privilege of passage.

      Since before the seventh century, Buddhists have celebrated the July communion of the ancestors’ visitation to the living. The origin of this sacred celebration is a mother and son story. While meditating, Mongallana saw his mother suffering in hell and pleaded to Buddha for her release. Buddha explained that the mother was cast to hell for her worldly ways, her most egregious act the placement of her family (especially her children) before all else—even her own spiritual development. Buddha advised this son that through meditation and the practice of compassionate acts and offerings, he could release his mother. Mongallana freed his mother from torment and in his joy danced the Bon, a dance that still surrounds the celebration of the reunion of spirits.

      DJ came out on the porch with me and looked at the nothing-happening-on-the-parkway where I stared. He’s accustomed to my silent focus on birds, trees, water, bugs, and flowers. “Michael will be here at four.” He turned to go back into the house, but first mentioned, “Seems like there’s more of them than last year.”

      “More of what?”

      “More of those white flowers—the ones that start out looking like ferns and then turn lacy this time of year. I can tell you like them.”

      The door shut behind him. A yellow swallowtail butterfly explored the screen.

      I’ve read that some modern Buddhists no longer believe that the spirits of the dead come back in July. New Agers changed the essence of the holiday to a time to honor the dead, and, of course, we should honor the departed. Still, I think ancestors are drawn to visit the living when called, if not throughout the year, certainly in July.

       COUNTY OF ORIGIN

       “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.”

      WENDELL BERRY

      I said the names of those up-north towns as my mother had in the years of hula hoops, eight-track tape players, and unfettered sleeping in the back of our faux-wood station wagon. When we drove US Highway 141 north out of Green Bay to visit family, my mom always said the last hour of the trip passed quickest as we drove the two-lane highway through the Marinette County towns while she recited, as if recalling a well-loved poem, “Coleman, Pound, Beaver, Middle Inlet, Crivitz, Wausaukee, Amberg, Beecher, Pembine, Niagara.” As a child, I’d thought she had us recite the list when we entered each town so we wouldn’t ask any are-we-almost-there questions. Some of these hamlets were so small that by the time we completed the list, we’d passed the tavern, gas station, and church that anchored the settlement to the road, and we again bisected forests and farms.

      Decades later, my son sat beside me on our way to the north woods that had never been my home but had always been where I came from. I’d grown up in Milwaukee, but my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins lived near Wisconsin’s border with upper Michigan. Any sense of having an extended family and immigrant homeland I ever felt touched me when we traveled to the land of forests and to our relatives. I wanted DJ to feel a connection to these people who still lived in the rural setting of our English and German ancestors. I wanted him to love the land and the people that I loved. Because we visited only once or twice a year, I didn’t know if it were possible for him to develop a visceral connection to his rural and agricultural heritage. His older and grown sister, Andrea, missed the connection because I was caught up in graduate school and full-time work and missed several years of family gatherings. The end of her childhood caught me by surprise.

      DJ and I were not traveling on US 141 because we drove in from a Boulder Junction Scout Camp, but my voice repeated the sequence of towns as if the recitation were a requirement to cross into Marinette County. I’d engineered a way to meet all family obligations and to fit in a nature outing as well: Thursday with Mom and her new husband at their Mole Lake cabin, a Friday trip to Boulder Junction to pick up DJ from Scout Camp, a Saturday family reunion at Morgan Park, and on Sunday, DJ and I would have our hikes to a few Marinette waterfalls. By Monday, we’d be back to our Milwaukee suburb in time for DJ to begin football practice.

      I thought I’d never seen any of the falls in the county that calls itself the “Waterfalls Capital of Wisconsin,” but my reunion relatives told me I had seen them as a child. “You’ll remember Long Slide when you see it.” Aunt Lil referred to her dad, my Grandpa Ed. “Daddy used to fish for trout on the Pemebonwon River right below the falls; he probably took you.”

      Cousin Susie recommended Dave’s Falls, just south of Amberg, because a lady at the bank had her wedding pictures taken there. Uncle Kenny overheard our conversation and lumbered over to us, swinging his cane and leaning his body from side to side

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