On the evening of Mother’s Day, I stood gazing proudly at my sixty-four square feet of raised garden.
I love each plant: the green leafy broccolini, the heart-leafed French radishes, the purple-veined Russian kale, the climbing sweet peas, the glossy spinach and butterhead lettuce, the flowering yellow blossoms of the slender mustard greens, the clustered tender beet shoots, the open palms of the purple cabbage. Every afternoon, after I battle teenagers and bureaucracy all day, I greet my wife and my daughter and then slip out into the backyard to tend these vegetables, some of which I planted in mid-March. Every afternoon, I water each square by hand; I examine each leaf. Meredith teases me that most of the time, when she glances out the window, I’m just standing back there and staring at the garden, not doing anything. It’s true. I’m successful here, in this perfect 4 x 16 rectangle of sixty-four squares. I plant seeds in perfect soil (one-third peat moss, one-third compost, one-third vermiculite); I water; I watch the plants emerge and grow. It’s quite different from teaching, where I have no control over the soil and cannot always provide the right kind of water or sunlight. In the garden, my labor has direct, predictable results. Not so in my classroom. All day at work, I clench my teeth, but in the afternoon, I begin to relax. I touch the sun-warmed soil, and I breathe.
I watch the plants emerge and grow. It’s quite different from teaching, where I have no control over the soil and cannot always provide the right kind of water or sunlight. In the garden, my labor has direct, predictable results. Not so in my classroom.
But then, at noon on the day after Mother’s Day, I half-listened to student presentations in my classroom as thunder boomed in a black sky. The students, trying to remain polite, looked nervously out the windows, probably thinking of their exposed cars in the parking lot. This time of year, Colorado thunderstorms usually bring hail, and sometimes that hail is frighteningly destructive. At the front of the room, Stephanie was talking about advances in medical technology, and we all nodded encouragingly, but the students thought about their cars—and I worried about my beloved plants.
The weather person had warned me on the radio that morning when I was halfway to school: thunderstorms this afternoon, with possible hail. I considered turning around. In ten minutes, I could have rushed to the garden shed, grabbed the PVC pipe and the floating covers, protected those tender shoots. Or I could have grabbed mixing bowls and large plastic pots and set them upside down over as many plants as possible. I considered, nearly veering onto the next exit off of I-25, but the twenty-four papers waiting on my desk to be graded pulled me north. My plants would be fine. The chances that they would be hurt by hail were slim. After all, they had survived a few heavy snows, many nights of frost, a hungry baby rabbit, seed-searching Northern Flickers, and spring winds. A little hail couldn’t defeat them now.
I didn’t even think to worry again until Meredith texted me about the “crazy” hailstorm that day that had backed up traffic and caused accidents and actually forced the city to pull the snowplows out of the garages. She was glad to be home, she said. I couldn’t ask about the plants. Instead, I endured my seventh-period class, twenty-nine seniors as burned out with school as eighteen-year-olds can be, irritated that I am still making them do work this close to graduation day.
The hail that day came unannounced, in a wild rush of freezing wind and black sky, while the two of us ate dinner at our little table. “Oh, no, Mommy! The little plants!” Mitike cried.
On the drive home, I remembered my first spring in Colorado, when Mitike was four. It was the first week of June, we had just fled Alaska, and I was desperate to find some tangible joy. I loaded Mitike into our new used Subaru, and we drove to the nearest greenhouse, where we bought the sweetest profusion of pansies and herbs and vegetables. All afternoon, we worked with our spades (Mitike’s was purple) to turn and amend and plant the raised boxes and the large garden in our new Fort Collins backyard. Finished, we stood back and admired the little green leaves waving in the breeze, transplanted like the two of us, ready to thrive.
The hail that day came unannounced, in a wild rush of freezing wind and black sky, while the two of us ate dinner at our little table. “Oh, no, Mommy! The little plants!” Mitike cried, and we ran to the back door just in time to watch marble-sized ice balls rip our transplants to tiny shreds and then flatten the pieces cruelly into the cultivated soil. Both of us stood and sobbed, our noses pressed against the back door’s cold glass window.
That was almost exactly seven years ago. Now, driving home in sunshine (Colorado’s weather changes that quickly) after the booming noontime storm, I told myself such hail destruction couldn’t possibly happen twice to the same gardener.
Meredith met me on the porch of our house and gestured toward the irises and black-eyed susans and coneflowers in the front bed. “They’re fine, aren’t they? They’ll bounce back.” I kissed her and surveyed the torn leaves, the battered look of the plants as if some large creature had laid down on them. These were plants native to Colorado, hardy enough to survive hail. They would be fine.
That evening seven years ago, I said we were both sobbing, but that’s not true. I was sobbing about what (and whom) we’d left behind in Alaska, and she, only four, burst into tears because her mommy did not know what to do with all the grief.
Together, Meredith and I walked through the house to the backyard, to the vegetable garden, Mitike and Fable close behind.
At the edge of the box, we stopped and gaped.
The damage was horrific, far worse than the hailstorm seven years ago. The plants I had been nurturing for two months had been flattened, beaten, stripped, broken—decimated. The hail, apparently the size of the peas I had so lovingly planted two months before, had pounded most of the leaf and stem fragments into the soil. A pea vine clung to its orange twine lead like some gruesome execution. The bared broccolini stalks pointed accusingly at the sky. No plant had escaped damage. The feathery tendrils of the asparagus lay listless beside a flattened and uprooted tomato plant. The sunflower shoots were ripped and torn, pieces hanging like severed limbs.
Meredith and Mitike watched me warily. The source of my calm destroyed, I could dissolve, or panic, or rage. They had seen all three. Mitike leaned toward the nearest broken, teetering red cabbage plant and murmured, “You’re okay. You’ll be okay! Just be strong.” Of course she was actually talking to me. That evening seven years ago, I said we were both sobbing, but that’s not true. I was sobbing about what (and whom) we’d left behind in Alaska, and she, only four, burst into tears because her mommy did not know what to do with all the grief. I’ve tried to be strong for her most of the time, but sometimes the hail damage has just been too egregious.
On this day, though, in the sunshine, a wiser Sarah than the one seven years ago, I felt not grief but acceptance. This happens. Hail. Wind. Death. Heartbreak.
On this day, though, in the sunshine, a wiser Sarah than the one seven years ago, I felt not grief but acceptance. This happens. Hail. Wind. Death. Heartbreak. In the garden, the fragments of lettuce leaf and broccolini bud become compost for the next seeds. Maybe the beets will revive themselves from this flattened state, and maybe the pea shoots will climb out of this, or maybe not. In a week, I’ll pull out browning stems and replant. In three weeks, I’ll have a lush garden again, just in time for another hailstorm. And then I’ll replant again. I can be as stubborn as I am tender.
Later that night, I retrieved my scissors from the garden shed and began to chop away at the battered lettuce heads, the torn spinach, the shredded kale. They might grow new leaves, and pruning gives them the energy to try.
If only I could learn to approach a failed lesson plan or a rejected manuscript in the same way. Start over, start over. There are many more days of sun than hail.
The other day, as my wife and I drove north on Interstate 25 in our Mazda CX5 with our eleven-year-old daughter, Mitike, and our dog, Fable, in the backseat, I thought, “Why not get rid of all these safety features in our car?”
I mean, really, our car would have been so much cheaper without all these gratuitous extras—without the blindspot monitoring, without the brake assist or the traction control, without the air bags or the rearview mirrors or the windshield wipers or the daytime running lights. And if Mazda hadn’t been mandated to install seatbelts or spend its resources on IIHS or NHTSA safety tests, this car would be far more fun to drive.
I glanced in the unnecessary rearview mirror at Mitike, who bent over a book. What kind of world are we promising future drivers like her? All these regulations! These superfluous rules, like properly registering a vehicle, or paying for insurance on it, or passing vision and knowledge tests to get a license to drive. Fettered by decades of rules, we cannot enjoy driving. Someday, the government will probably just take away this right all together, and we will all be forced to take the public bus system.
“Um, Mom?”
“Yes, Mitike?”
“What are you writing?”
“I’m tired. Another school shooting, and no one’s going to do anything. I’m resorting to sarcasm.”
“But you’re not writing about guns.”
“Yes, I am. If guns could be regulated like cars are, we’d have far fewer deaths. Did you know that when states started requiring people to get driver’s licenses in the 1930s, they dramatically reduced accidents on the roads? And that after most states started requiring seatbelts in the 1990s, people’s injuries in car accidents decreased by half? And that when car companies started putting in air bags in the late 1990s, they reduced the mortality rate by 63 percent? A few rules, and we’re safer. I’m trying to argue that—”
“Mom, let me try.”
“What?”
“Let me write your column this month.”
“Would you mind?”
Stop This NOW! A Guest Column by Mitike Iris Campbell, Age Eleven
Why do you keep letting this happen? You grown-ups are exasperating sometimes. You would not hesitate to protect your children and your family, but you hesitate at this, at choosing the safety of your family over your precious guns? The Second Amendment reads, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This does not mean that everyone just has the right to bear arms. It means we have the right to bear them in a well-regulated way. Technology like guns is always advancing, so laws must always be made and changed to protect us. Children are losing lives they have only just begun. Our future is being destroyed by your inaction here and now. Decide. Unregulated guns or continued tragedy? Danger or safety? Violence or peace? Injustice or justice? Death or life? Hatred or love? Please remember that the choices you make will affect the future as well as the present.
—MIC
A question-and-answer session with the guest columnist, Mitike, who is in fifth grade and loves reading fantasy novels, considering fashion styles, playing volleyball, and relaxing with her family.
SHC: So, Mitike, why do you think school shootings are happening?
MIC: Because of guns.
SHC: Does hearing about a tragedy like the one in Florida make you feel afraid?
MIC: Yes, it does when I think about it, but most of the time I’m so focused on my work, I don’t think about it.
SHC: What does your school do to prepare for emergencies?
MIC: We do lock-downs, lock-outs. In art class, we do a lock-down drill in the kiln room. And we do have talks about this kind of thing a lot. They talk about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate to bring to school, and how you should report it if you see anyone with anything unsafe.
SHC: What’s an example of something that is inappropriate to bring to school?
MIC: Guns, knives, swords. I don’t know if swords really exist, but, you know. Daggers, bombs, but they don’t really talk about those. That’s mostly it.
SHC: What would you say to someone who says that if we allow the government to regulate guns more, the government will take them all away?
MIC: Well, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if they do. If that’s the only way they see fit to keep us safe, then it’s probably a good choice.
SHC: Like what Australia did?
MIC: Yes, I think that’s great. They’re having a fine time down there—except they do have lots of poisonous animals threatening their population, instead.
SHC: What do you think of the idea of requiring licenses for everyone who owns a gun, as a place to start?
MIC: I think that is a good idea because if we had that, then we’d be able to trust that we lived in a little bit safer country, and a little bit safer schools. Kids should not have to worry that we’re going to die.
SHC: What are some other things you worry about?
MIC: Well … I hate snakes, komodo dragons, snakes in a pit, snakes chasing me on top of a cart that wants to run me over, finding out my house is on fire in the middle of the night and not being able to run away, losing my dog. I’m worried my cousins will get me in trouble. I worry that my cousin Ryland will break his head open because he’s not being careful. I worry about doing terribly on tests. I worry that I’m not getting enough information from the books my teacher wants me to read. I worry about forgetting my homework.
SHC: Wow, that’s a lot of worries. What would a peaceful life look like for you, then?
MIC: It would be a life where I would only worry about little things I have no control over, not about my life being threatened. Not in school, anyway, where I’m trying to learn.
NOTE: Call your senators now. Tell them to support the assault weapon ban and to push legislation that requires strict licensing and regulation of guns. Donate to and join Moms Demand Action. Please. Let’s allow our kids to worry about poisonous snakes, instead.
Stacks of research papers teeter on my desk; my colleagues and I slog through hours and hours of standardized testing proctoring; the students are irritable and restless, and so am I. Every April, my mind hums with the same old question: What else could I be? What else am I qualified to do? I search the internet for job postings, but drift toward all the ones that sound quite a bit like teaching. Could I get paid to garden? Would someone employ me to hike mountains? Is it possible to work as a professional reader of books?
Yes, I could be a writer. Since I was nine, when I wrote rambling stories about a girl named Zoe who lived on a farm oddly like mine, I have yearned to be a writer. Not just someone who writes every once in a while, not just someone who writes in the precious early hour before work, but someone who, for a living, writes. My secret love has always been words and sentences and paragraphs. Stories.
Every April, my mind hums with the same old question: What else could I be? What else am I qualified to do?
But at twenty-six, drifting through Central America with a piece of paper that proclaimed me a college graduate and trumpeted the profoundly useful double major in English and religion (majors to which I had switched my sophomore year, romanced away from chemistry and math), I sighed, and became a teacher. The old adage mocked me: Those who can’t do, teach. I pulled the first stack of student essays toward me and began to read.
“Teacher” is the identity with which I am most uncomfortable. For fifteen years, I have viewed it as temporary. Someday, I say to whomever is listening, I’ll quit this job and write full time. I try to wake early to keep my writing discipline. I try to attend writing workshops, where a surprising number of people seem to have hours each day to write. I try to learn from others: at a “local author” book signing for Grief Map recently, I talked to two other local authors and grilled them on how they have made the jump into a full-time writing life. One woman told me: You just do it. You just jump. Right. Except jumping requires the confidence that the stories I’m trying to tell will translate to a living wage somehow, that we’ll be able to continue to do all the other things I love and value: travel, buy plants for my garden, eat out at restaurants, save for Mitike’s college education. Better to keep teaching.
This job, teaching, is cyclical. As soon as I sink to my nadir, in the first weeks of April, the end of the school year begins to shimmer in the near distance. At home, my plants begin to sprout in the garden.
A colleague told me recently, in response to my “Someday, I’ll be a writer full-time,” that someday I’ll admit that I’m actually a teacher at my core, and I bristled. He laughed. We stood in the echoing hallway, both of us holding armloads of papers to grade. Too often, I feel like a character in a Stephen King or a Kent Haruf novel—the jaded English teacher, correcting papers late at night, staring back at disengaged students by day, her own half-finished novel in a drawer because she has to plan lessons for this week and attend professional development and call the parents of every student who is failing and beg the district to give me adequate health care.
On PSAT testing day this April, I walked in circles around and around a room full of sophomores. In my monotone voice, I read the script: “You will only receive credit for answers recorded on your answer sheet . . . If you have any questions about testing procedures, please ask them now. I cannot answer questions during the timed sections of the test. . . .” I looked up. The sophomores held their number two pencils politely, but they were hearing nothing I was saying. They had heard all of these instructions before. Outside, a tree blossomed white, and the robins and chickadees announced spring. I thought, We are all trapped here. I told the students to just begin the test.
“Teacher” is the identity with which I am most uncomfortable. For fifteen years, I have viewed it as temporary. Someday, I say to whomever is listening, I’ll quit this job and write full time.
There are days when my job feels like one of the best possible jobs in the world. After all, I am free to plan my own time, to teach whatever texts I deem relevant, to engage roomfuls of teenagers in meaningful conversations about their lives. And every year, I reach a few students who needed to be reached.
This job, teaching, is cyclical. As soon as I sink to my nadir, in the first weeks of April, the end of the school year begins to shimmer in the near distance. At home, my plants begin to sprout in the garden: the peas and kale and broccolini and radishes I planted on St. Patrick’s Day, the perennial native flowers I planted three years ago. I store the skis and the winter coats; I spend an entire weekend digging in the dirt, carefully pushing mulch around greening plants. The delicate soft green leaves of the sage plant reminds me to have more empathy for my students, who are trying to thrive in soil and air that is not their native habitat. The delicate butter lettuce leaves tell me I need to bring those students more water, more peat moss and compost. On a Monday after gardening, I am always a better, more devoted teacher.
Every morning I make myself write is a little more amendment to the soil; someday, the writing life I imagine will thrive here.
But I still don’t believe I will be a teacher forever. It’s a stop along my way, no matter what anyone says. On the first weekend of April, as I sank my fingers into the newly friable soil I had created for my new herb garden, I made a mental to-do list of the writing projects I intend to finish this summer, while these plants are growing: the Anna Dickinson manuscript (finished, but needing major editing), the Colorado women place names project, the new collection of hybrid essays I want to begin on the wilderness and nature, the short story about the lockdown. Someday, someday, someday. The word is the rhythm of my spade in the Colorado clay. Every morning I make myself write is a little more amendment to the soil; someday, the writing life I imagine will thrive here.
For now, I’ll drive to work at a huge Denver high school, where I’ll grade two more papers before the bell rings, and then I’ll stand in front of thirty teenagers and tell them, “Okay, let’s start by writing a little.” It’s always about that, about beginning. And then, as the morning sun streams through the tall windows onto thirty heads bent earnestly over notebooks, pens scratching, then, for a moment—just before I take attendance—this is the perfect job for me, after all.
The day after my wife, our daughter, and I returned from Scandinavia, we squeezed through the entrance gate to the Denver Pride Festival.
Repeat: the day after my family and I returned from taking a trip only a small percentage of Americans are privileged enough to afford, we sat on a hillside and waved a rainbow flag because my wife and I are still not privileged enough to trust our marriage will always be legal.
The Scandinavian countries we visited — Finland, Sweden, and Norway — approved same-sex partnerships in the mid-1990s and legalized gay marriage in 2009, six years before the U.S.; that knowledge faded the colors in the rainbow flags all around us at Denver’s Pride Festival. But in Scandinavia, Meredith and I never knew where it was safe to hold hands or kiss in public; at the Denver Pride Festival, we kissed long in the midst of hundreds of people, our arms wrapped around each other, our daughter exclaiming, “EWWW!”
A black man working at a gas station in Sweden in 1927 was such an anomaly of difference in that country at that time that people drove for miles just to glimpse him. In 2017, we walked through a more diverse Scandinavia, but most of the people of color we saw were in service positions, and everyone of every color turned their heads, curious, to see Mitike between me and Meredith. It was a relief to walk unremarked through the Denver Pride Festival.
In Americanah, which I started reading on IcelandAir on our flight home, Chimamanda Adichie asks me again and again to hold my privilege up to the light and examine it carefully like an Icelandic sunstone. Her sharp voice is tinged with humor, but it cuts. Who are you, American white woman, to travel so freely through this world? No one looks askance at you. In the Copenhagen airport, a man conducting a survey on an iPad speaks to you in Danish because your height, your skin color, your hair and eye color (every gene that you inherited from ancestors who farmed only two hundred miles southwest of there in Schleswig-Holstein) tell him you are Danish. Do you imagine it will ever be this easy for your Ethiopian daughter? You make her a world traveler, teaching her how to easily flash her blue U.S. passport; you teach her to try cold-smoked salmon, to whisper inside the medieval stave church, to revel in the sea spray in the Norwegian fjords, but you cannot teach her to glide through the world the way you do, because her skin color, hair, and eye color (the genes she inherited from her ancestors seven thousand miles southeast of Copenhagen) will be barriers. Customs officials will often ask how long she has been a U.S. citizen; they will speak slowly in clearly enunciated English, though English has been her primary language since she was eighteen months old. They will carefully scrutinize her visa. And you will be staying in our country for how long? And you plan to do what? Back home, at the Denver Pride Festival, people grin at our family of three because we are diverse; we are the dream so many LGBTQ people dream. Their eyes linger on Mitike’s face. She is the daughter they want. She is so beautiful, so exotic. They say to us, You must be very proud of her. She has such lovely features, not African at all.
In Stockholm and Oslo, but also in the Norwegian port city of Bergen, we walked past immigrants who have resettled in Scandinavia. I guessed at their stories, based on what I have heard from my refugee students. I imagined the Somali woman and her children who strode past us in Oslo had first spent years in a refugee camp in Uganda. I imagined the Syrian men who stood talking at a bus stop in Stockholm had paid a boatman to take them on the risky crossing of the Mediterranean. I imagined the Afghani man and woman talking in the Bergen fish market had escaped their village and the Taliban, as one of my students did, on horseback. The world knows that the Scandinavian countries are welcoming to immigrants, and that my country — historically the most welcoming of all — is abruptly not, as Trump works to halve the number of refugees we accept. And how odd, that Trump’s supporters are mostly descendants of immigrants who came from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy. How quickly we forget. At the Denver Pride Fest, I waved my flag in gratitude, as usual, that my country’s highest court has insisted that my marriage to my wife is legal, but I also thought of the times in these past few months that I have stood in this same spot in front of the Colorado Capitol Building, holding up signs that plead for openness to immigrants. What kind of nation do we want to be in the world, anyway?
We went to Scandinavia because I wanted to travel somewhere where we would be safe, and all the guidebooks promised that nowhere is more open and more tolerant. In city after city, we stayed in hotels that cheerfully gave me and Meredith a double bed, glanced at our common last name, welcomed us with a bright nod and (always) breakfast the next morning. I imagined living in one of those cities, never returning to the U.S., happily enrolling Mitike in one of those reputable Finnish schools or dropping her at camp in the Norwegian mountains as Meredith and I prepared for a holiday in some quaint village. To be born American and to be liberal is to be always embarrassed abroad, ashamed of the president (in 2003, Bush invaded Iraq just as I rode a bus into Nicaragua — now, in 2017, there is Trump), ashamed of fellow Americans who are too loud and too certain they deserve preferential treatment, ashamed of a history that has included slavery and Native American massacres and now continues into modern times with acquitting Philando Castille’s killer and withdrawing from the Paris deal on the climate and refusing to provide health care to all its citizens. Traveling, Meredith and I taught Mitike to speak quietly, attempt words in other languages, show extra gratitude. Maybe they’ll assume we’re Canadian. It jolted us to walk into the cheerful fray of the Pride Fest in Denver, where scantily clad people shouted and waved rainbow fans, flags, underwear, boas, posters, pinwheels. We were quiet, too European. We sat on a grassy hill and observed, and fit in nowhere.
We walked into Oslo’s Vikingskipshuset, the Viking Museum, and gazed in awe at the grandly renovated Oseberg, a Viking ship from 834 CE that was discovered and dug up on a farm in 1903. Two women had been buried in the ship, in state, along with horses and dogs and cows, armor, kitchenware, clothes, tents, a wagon and a sled. The Vikings honored their chiefs in this way, since they believed that they would be able to use all of these objects in the afterlife, in Valhalla. I loved the mystery of who these honored women had been. Days later, at the Denver Pride Fest, I wondered what might remain of us one thousand years from now. Mitike’s plastic beads, maybe, some of our metal tooth fillings, the matching rings Meredith and I wear — the hard diamonds still sparkling. In this era that overdocuments everything, will any document remain? Something will have replaced the Internet, rendering it as inaccessible as floppy disks and VHS tapes are now, or all of humanity will have been catapulted backward by climate change trauma to survival — campfires, carved wooden tools, pictures painted on stone walls again. And someone will find some fragment of evidence from 2017, one thousand years before, and wonder about our lives, how we lived them, who we were.
An older acquaintance hears we traveled to Scandinavia and exclaims, “You took Mitike there? To the most racist countries in the world?” I was speechless for a moment. Racist? The 2017 UN report includes all of the Scandinavian countries through which we passed in the top ten happiest countries in the world. Norway is first. Maybe Sweden is only tenth because it has struggled with race relations as Sweden invites more and more immigrants across its borders, but our family’s experience in all of Scandinavia was positive, or at least no different from our experience in the U.S. Women of color did a double-take to see Mitike with us; they often studied her hair (perfectly done in neat microbraids and beads, scalp oiled, thank you). Small children stared. But the mostly blonde and blue-eyed residents of Scandinavia were unfailingly friendly to all three of us. What I wish I’d said to my acquaintance: Being white doesn’t mean you’re racist. What I did say: Have you been to Oslo? It’s quite diverse. A true but weak answer. The Denver Pride Fest was whiter than Karl Johans Street in Oslo. The summer camp in Keystone where I just dropped off Mitike is the whitest place I’ve seen in a long time. It’s all more complex than what we see.
My wife and I stood in a green mossy forest of tall spruce trees (are they called Norway Spruce in Norway?) and watched our daughter search in half-serious earnest for fairies in the shadows of the clover leaves. And then, one day later, we stood in Denver’s blue-sky sunshine with our arms around each other’s waists, our daughter close. Oh, yes. I know to be grateful for this life.
For my fortieth birthday, I wanted to travel somewhere I had never been before. On the way home, on IcelandAir, Mitike leaned her head against my shoulder and murmured, “We’re lucky to be able to travel to places like Scandinavia, aren’t we?” I nodded. Unbelievably lucky. Guilt nagged at me. Look at us with our blue passports and our resources, hopping on planes and trains and boats, wandering cobblestone streets, posing for pictures in front of medieval towers. Look at us and our comfort, our ability to leave our secure little house in south Denver and peer into others’ windows. Even at Pride back in Denver, I continued to feel this mix of luck and guilt. Yes, we are a minority, and yes, maybe my wife is right to be cautious in certain neighborhoods and certain situations about how out we are, but after this parade ends, we’ll walk back to our car and drive home to our dog, who will greet us with his curly wagging tail, and we’ll make dinner in our kitchen together and hold hands before we eat, the little circle we make a protective shield for our family. We’re lucky to be together in this complicated world, right now, no matter where we are wandering.
In 2010, my father and his siblings discovered Ancestry.com, that website that allows a person to search birth, marriage, military, census, and death records to construct a family tree.
And because an Ancestry.com tree becomes more accurate as users add more relationships to it, my father and my uncle and my aunts sent me, my sister, and my cousins email invitations to add our own families to the growing tree.
I opened the tree and studied it with growing resentment. According to Ancestry.com, I was a divorced single mother of one daughter, but that did not describe my actual life at all. My daughter was adopted from Ethiopia, with a family tree all her own, difficult (or impossible) to trace because her biological parents’ births had not been recorded in any official way. And I was not technically a single mother, since I lived with Ali, my partner of three years, and her two children.
I opened the tree and studied it with growing resentment.
With a few swift clicks, I added Ali to the tree as my spouse, though same-sex marriage was not legal in Alaska at the time, and Ali had never been interested in marriage, anyway. Another click: I added Ali’s two biological children. With my divorce branching off in one direction and Ali branching off in another, I tangled the neat lines of the Hahn family tree.
When Ali died a year later, I did not have the heart to update the Ancestry.com tree. I barely had the heart to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Then, this past June, the Vikings led me back to Ancestry.com. In June, I learned at the Oslo Viking Ship Museum that one of the Vikings’ major trading settlements, Hedeby, was located in today’s Schleswig-Holstein, a state in northern Germany from which half of my ancestors (all of my father’s side) emigrated in the mid-1800s. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know why the sight of the Oseberg ship jolted some familiarity in me (is that why I’m so drawn to spirals?). When I started asking these questions, my uncle Jim, our family archivist, sent me a DNA kit from Ancestry.com, and, out of curiosity, I logged in to the website again.
A family tree hides as much as it reveals. I “cleaned up” my part of the Hahn family tree by deleting the fake marriage to Ali and adding the real, legal marriage to Meredith. I added Mitike’s legal adoption by me in 2008 and her adoption by Meredith last December, and I added the names of Mitike’s birth parents. I traced Meredith’s family awhile, out of curiosity, discovering that one ancestral line zigzags all the way back to the 1500s in Alsace, France. Then I studied our section of the tree, noticing how our marriage is an end to our two lines in our families, how the appearance of Mitike as the daughter of two mothers could confuse someone who failed to notice the adoption records. How disconcerting, the reduction of entire human lives to small rectangles that contain only a first, middle, and last name, a birthdate, and a death date.
How disconcerting, the reduction of entire human lives to small rectangles that contain only a first, middle, and last name, a birthdate, and a death date.
What does that branching tree explain about me, about Meredith, about Mitike? What does it reveal about Rachel Banta, my grandmother’s great-great grandmother, who was born in 1780 in Pennsylvania? What does it hide about my wife’s grandmother’s great-great grandmother Charity Brewer, who was born in 1805 in North Carolina? How much does it refuse to explain about Mitike’s ancestors, who weathered a struggle between Muslim settlers and Ethiopian Christians in the early 1800s, and who witnessed battles between feudal kings?I am still dissatisfied with the story Ancestry.com tells, but I appreciate now that it is one place to begin.
Lesbian historians like Lillian Faderman (especially in Surpassing the Love of Men, 1981; and To Believe in Women, 1999) have argued that lesbians must discover and build their own sense of heritage. That means that Patience and Sarah, that wonderful straightforward 1969 book by Alma Routsong about a lesbian pioneer couple, is as much a description of my ancestry as my genetic map is. That means that discerning the truth of historical relationships — Susan B. and Anna D., Virginia and Vita, Eleanor and Lorena — is as crucial to understanding who I am as the 1847 passenger list of the ship that carried my ancestors Wulff and Gretje from Hamburg to New Orleans.
Lesbian historians like Lillian Faderman… have argued that lesbians must discover and build their own sense of heritage. That means that Patience and Sarah, that wonderful straightforward 1969 book by Alma Routsong about a lesbian pioneer couple, is as much a description of my ancestry as my genetic map is.
On Ancestry.com, the self is the first rectangle. Click the green plus sign, add a relationship. Connect. Add another relationship. Intertwine. The lines seem to tangle, but they barely whisper the outlines of deeply complex stories.
This summer, I began creating a new book — part trail guide, part history — on the 60+ Colorado peaks and lakes named after women. I’m calling it “Remember More Than Their Names,” and I’m blogging about my hiking and research discoveries at http://remembermorethantheirnames.blogspot.com/. I think of these historical women as my ancestors, too, though we only have our gender and Colorado in common. Determining the identity of each woman has been surprisingly difficult, since maps have traditionally used only the first name of a woman honored. Again and again, it has been Ancestry.com that has given me the outline of the story. Then it is up to me, the storyteller, to fill in the rest. For example, Ancestry.com told me that Helen Rich of Breckenridge, the namesake for Mount Helen, died a single woman with no children, but local records and her own papers reveal that she lived for decades with the poet Belle Turnbull. In Turnbull’s poetry, I found reference to forbidden passion, to domestic bliss. And the two women are buried together. Another piece of the heritage told.
I know the danger of looking backwards too long. I know that it is as important that I live my life now, in 2017 Colorado, as it is for me to discover and tell the stories of these women who lived in the past. But I believe I can learn to make of my life something deeper if I can pull these stories from the shadows. This other way of tracing and building heritage matters as much as the genetic map of my bloodline.
This other way of tracing and building heritage matters as much as the genetic map of my bloodline.
When I stood gazing at the Oseberg ship in Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum in June, my blood thrummed with the familiarity of the curves of the ship, the intricate carvings, the spiral on the prow. I touched the silver spiral I wear at the base of my neck, and I leaned closer to my wife and my daughter. What did I recognize? Maybe Ancestry.com would deny a genetic connection between me and the two women — one 25–30, one 50–55 — who were buried together, in state, in the Oseberg ship in 834 CE, but I am certain they are part of my heritage, too, if only because they were women. Maybe the elder was a queen (some have suggested she was Queen Åsa of the sagas) and the younger was a sacrifice. Maybe the elder was a völva, a seer, a holy woman, and the younger was her lover or her apprentice or both.
We will never know. But with each fragment we find, we discover ourselves more deeply. The mystery is my heritage. The seeking is what I want to trace.
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