The house on One Oak Hill. Many attempts have been made to redeem the depths of R.I.P.,
Requiescat in pace, through W. I.P., Work in Progress. Unfortunately most attempts fall far short of Finnegan's Wake. Trench after trench, hole after hole, we dig and dig in defense of our own territory. We dig not to plant new trees, but to keep wake over the graves of our forefathers, in defense of our heathen roots. Let us not run amuck with all the cryptic acronyms and misguided associations founded in the wake of my industrious Irish ancestors, but find the rivulet that runs between their bones, that can cleanse the wombs of our mothers, and us. There is an exodus. Oh if only we, the living, could see the light, while continuing to work and rest in peace. I know that you love me, you have said so - so many times - as I too have done and said.
Once upon a time, there was a house called One Oak Hill, in Sweden. To tell you the truth it’s the only house I’ve ever ”owned”. In fact I’ve never owned much of anything in this world apart from a Borgward (which I gave to a friend who sold it to his brother), a Toyota Starlet with a cracked carburetor, and two old Volkswagens that I bought used and eventually sold to a junkyard.
One Oak Hill was nothing one could own, mind you. It was a living plot of earth (may whatever or whomever is buried in its soil R.I.P.) upon which an historical building was set, alongside a giant oak and a pear tree. On the first day it was a place that I felt I could learn from, and then a place to which I returned weekend after weekend, year after year to cultivate my garden, and to which I sensed that I too gradually belonged. Even though I never felt that I owned One Oak Hill, I felt reverence for what had once been the residence of many Swedish iron miners. I felt responsible for the whitewashed stone house and the living land that had been entrusted to me, if only for a short while, like the lace handkerchief.
It was in this trust that I reroofed all the buildings on the property with my own hands, cut the lawns, planted new bushes and fruit trees. I still have the scars from blistered hands to show for it. I put in a new cast iron stove imported from my own native home - to the extent that I have one - to keep us warm. I sanded floors, replaced old doors, painted walls, wallpapered, scraped windows and sealed panes.
I even drew up plans to build an outhouse where the old one that we shared had burned down, but that was evidently the last straw. Because that's when the Swedish baroness accused me of ”grandiose plans”, when I wanted to build a new outhouse, when I wanted to drill for running water, when I wanted to add a shower and a sauna. "Grandiose plans", said the baroness who immediately proceeded to appoint herself the perennial gatekeeper of paradise by saying: "
please do not come out to Oak Hill, you are not welcome in your house while I am there", which was seldom the case in those days anyway since she lived and worked in my homeland, "because it is so close to mine." Hardly one to practice as she preached, her patent professional regimen for depression and anxiety remained "Send them back wherever they came from".
The global kiss, hypocritical as promiscuous, was on many lips then. At the same time, I was apparently a harbinger of the perils of globalization, an uncultivated seed of knowledge, a would-not-like-to-be terrorist whom her brother the "inventor" accused of howling. I was the one who would eventually have to abandon the tainted soil around Oak Hill, in an effort to keep clean.
Over the years I had gotten to know most everything that grew there on a firstname basis, and felt at peace as I made the rounds each weekend. Like visiting and caring for loved ones, I learned to prune the fruit trees in the winter, delight in the blue and white anemones, the irises, bridal spirea and the lilac hedge in the spingtime. I cut the peonies and the roses for a crystal vase that I placed on the old oak bureau. I printed curtains with white-winged and blue-bodied dragonflies, and planted and cared for my vegetable garden in the summer. The pleasure was great in knowing where the tiny Daphne blossoms could be found on bare branches in early springtime. Likewise the satisfaction in discovering the succulent morels in the late spring and chanterelles in early summer, and being able to fill the cupboards with red and black currant, blueberry, raspberry and lingonberry jam in the late summer... all until I was expelled by the original sin of "native" ancestors who were convinced that this was their plot and who could care less how important it might be for others to cultivate a sense of respect and belonging.
I cried last week when I found an old letter that reminded me of how much this wounded Swede had wanted to be able to love. She wrote about walking out to Chimney Rock at Inverness (in my native territory) to see all the wildflowers, and about having dinner at Vladimir's. She mentioned that C was in Hawaii spending time with his dying grandfather. She thanked me for the elderberry juice that I brought her while she were pregnant. She wrote that she were worried about K feeling imprisoned in their little house, impatient and tired of it all. ”I think she needs more company, another perspective she wrote.” She was, of course, writing of herself?
That was the last I heard from her before she went underground, and yet ten years later I still hadn't lost hope that she was alive despite the silence. And so I returned to speak lovingly of my memories of our travels together, in the Brazilian room for example, which is perhaps as close as we will ever get to her paternal grandfather's final destination. She said she wanted to love, but cut me out, never mentioning the beauty of the many low-growing live oak trees that dot the hillside above her new home overlooking the sea. Those are the Thousand Oaks I love, the ones that offer shade from the resplendent sunlight. Am I what professionals call pathological grief itself - the very mortal sin of omission that is passed on from generation to generation?
Are you enjoying the blossoms and fruits of all the trees I planted on One Oak Hill today? The baroness tells that they were planted after I had gone, but it is not true. As though the tree of knowledge came after the temptation. Much truth is still in my hands. You said you wanted me to cultivate the field in front on your side. You said you hoped one day to ”feel me” as a "benevolent and positive presence in your little red house". You said you realize how easy it is to become territorial, "because the houses are so close…can we be there both do you think?” I'm afraid you took not only more than you needed, but perhaps the wrong things and built a wall to protect the loot. I am guilty of the sin of omission, I shouldn't have let you get away with it. Fortunately no one possesses the dead.
The heritage and hospitality of Gerdie, a woman whom neither she nor your children (her grandchildren) have ever met, is given freely - to cleanse us of any residual, unoriginal sins. She always said that it was good to write, to paint, to dance and sing. May her earthly powers suffice to purge at least some of her great god, adopted and biological children of original sin, for she was meant to enlarge the place of her tent, stretch her tent curtains wide, without holding back. (Is 54:2) I think she always knew - as any true pioneer does without ever having to look back - that her son would return her treasured heirlooms, and he did: a love seat and a rocker.
It is good to write, to paint, to dance and sing. Therein lies the exit. I believe that Gerdie has put me here as the valet of an empirical inn, to point to the exit, to stand up against a wailing wall of silence built up over the years in the shadow of one monstrous oak, the gallows tree where "dat mothex..x.x a dun try ta take de law in 'er own hans." Of late I think that I've been put here to howl and bark at the moon, until your grudge is out, exorcized once and for all. My door remains open to the land of the living. Decades pass. Can you still ”feel me” now?
to be continued...
