I Never Loved Her More

Snow came the night we reached Shenandoah in late December of 1968 after driving night and day from Southern California to make it while there was still time.

Two birds and holly.GIFIt lay shining on the fields in the light of a full moon, glistening on the trees, and falling softly before the headlights, whipped into small furies by the air displaced as we passed.

Uncle Charles and Aunt Ola were as excited as children that the first good snow arrived to greet us. Good luck, they said. It was late, nearly midnight when we arrived. My little sister Ellen was asleep in the back seat, sprawled out like a cat, limbs akimbo and face hidden in a bramble of long hair.

My father picked her up. Half awake, she put her arms around him and he carried her up the steps and across the wood slat porch. At the front door Uncle Charles reached out and took her into his own arms. She woke and hugged him tight while he cried, burying his face in her hair.

Ma lay in a hospital bed that dominated the living room from the middle like a hub, furniture pushed back to the walls and facing the bed as though on spokes. Her tiny body was shrouded by a thin white sheet and protected, in case she rolled over, by high rails on the bed’s sides. She hadn’t rolled over. She hadn’t even moved a finger.

Uncle Charles, my mother’s brother, had the ancient wood stove stoked up and pouring out heat so stifling that I could hardly breathe. Aunt Ola, mother’s sister, was general of the operation. She fussed over us, took our coats and pointed us to seats, all in the name of love, both of us and of order.

My mother had stood back until then, letting her siblings huddle around us first, embracing each of us in turn to erase the years of absence that had stood between us. That is her nature, to quietly observe and to talk only when there is something worth saying. Now she came to us, arms outstretched and smile wide. Winter birds.GIFShe had flown back several months before to be with her mother, the two of them caring for each other, the elderly mother and the daughter who had been recently ill. They had those few wonderful months together, taking walks as far as Naked Creek, sharing quiet meals, working side-by-side in the garden, before Ma had her stroke.

I don’t know if Ma knew we were there or not. She had the stroke a week before our arrival, had held out till then, but just couldn’t hold it off those final few days until we arrived. The stroke took her from us and put her in a coma. I gazed at her smooth face, pale and lineless, her white hair swept back and tucked behind her head.

She had worn a sun bonnet all her life, one of those pioneer woman types with full gathered cap, massive quilted brim, and short “skirt” in the back, all held on by a wide bow tied under her chin. That and a sun parasol kept her skin like a girl’s her whole life. She was so still now that I could not detect even her breathing. I leaned in and kissed her cheek. Uncle Charles put his hand on my arm; I turned and his thin arms encircled me next. We were not yet done with the greetings.Winter birds2.GIF

That night I slept above the living room, right about where I imagined my mother’s childhood bed had sat. The heat up there was just as unbearable as below, and I opened the window, pulling my light bed as close as I could to the cool air outside. Ellen and I watched a gentle snow fall, the fields sparkling in the moonlight. I breathed in the crisp night, so unlike the salt and dust I could taste in the air at home, near the Pacific Ocean in Southern California.

Sometime during the night lightning struck a nearby tree with a deafening roar. I bolted awake, my hair standing on end, the room shimmering with electricity. Ellen and I looked at each other with wide eyes. “Wow!,” we both said, California style, and crept to the window for some lightening gazing. There’s nothing like that in Southern California, and it was as good as a Disneyland ride.

The next day we explored the farm, my father, sister and I. We sifted through the old barn, gathering up the scythe and sickle, hay fork and cross-saw; examined the old worn wood, found a large draft horse harness with fat leather collar. In the house we marveled at the wood stove my grandmother still cooked on in 1969, and the flat iron she still heated on the stove to iron clothes. Bird cottage winter.GIFNot to mention the well-worn water pump that sat just outside the kitchen door, the outhouse just beyond the garden, the bedpans and washing basins that were still a part of daily life there.

My grandmother was never lured by the modern, never longed for the newest model washing machine or toaster. The only time I ever heard she wanted anything at all was after the first ride she took in an automobile. It belonged to Shenandoah’s physician, Dr. Shuler, who offered her a ride home from town one day. She came into the house grinning widely and said, “I’m going to get us one of those.”

Uncle Charles and Aunt Tessie, his wife, lived next door. Tessie loaned me magazines to read that winter, but my mother made me take them back when she saw that they were Hollywood gossip rags, Confidential, Screenland, Uncensored. I had never seen anything like them, much racier than the fan magazines you see today, full of lust and murder. Charles and Tessie lived in one of those upright old Virginia country houses whose only luxury was electricity, but theirs was furnished with the most salacious reading material of the day. The irony was not lost on me.Swifts.GIF

We settled into my grandmother’s house, my mother cooking on the wood stove, my father tidying up the farm, reading his newspapers and mumbling about the Vietnam War. He was a proud American and patriotic World War II vet, but was wholly outraged by this war. “Sending those boys to their deaths, and for what?”

Every day there were visitors, either neighbors bringing homey casseroles or family members coming to visit us and pay their respects to Ma. I loved every minute of it, wished we had kindly neighbors in California, wished we had more family there.

Ma and Pop, my grandparents, Florence and Tom Merica, were worried when their fourth daughter announced she was moving with her husband and baby to California. People didn’t leave Shenandoah, or not many did. Ma was especially worried. She and Ruth, my mother, had a special relationship. More than her other daughters, Ruth loved spending time with her mother, helping her in the kitchen or garden, going along when Ma went “a’visitin’.” Ma knew it would be many years before she saw her daughter again, and I know she grieved. Sure, we visited now and then. But not enough.Bird in snow.GIF

Now here we were and Ma didn’t even know. Or if she did, she could not communicate it. Occasionally I crept near and sat by her side, holding her hand. I was too self-conscious to talk to her, as Uncle Charles did, and did not feel intimate enough to stroke her hair and cheek, as my mother did.

I simply sat, awkwardly, until a closeness overcame me, a love for my grandmother who I barely knew, a longing for her to wake and turn to me with arms open to envelop me, making up for all those years away from her. After sitting with these feelings for a while, I could get up again and move on.

Ma’s brother, my Great Uncle Charlie, had a farm up at Number Two Furnace, just up the rise from Jollett Hollow. We drove over to his place one snowy afternoon to cut a nice Christmas tree, and were all delighted when he pulled out a full-sized sleigh and harnessed the big old work horse to it. A real sleigh, just like Santa had, even with bells around the horse’s collar. So there we went, dashing through the snow in our one-horse open sleigh, into the woods to find the perfect tree. Not Douglas fir, like we always got at home, but cedar, the traditional Christmas tree of Virginia.

The next few days were busy, what with Christmas around the corner. We shopped in Harrisonburg, and I spent a few days with my uncle Jesse’s family in Waynesboro. My Aunt Emily and I sat at her kitchen table and talked. I told her about the piglets at Great Uncle Charlie’s farm and she told me she would love to Bird with apples.GIFhave a lap pig, “They’re so cute. And smart.”

We went shopping and she gave me $5 to buy anything I wanted. I chose a yellow dress for Ellen. One afternoon, sitting in the kitchen, their son Tom came in with a friend. He looked to be a few years older than my 16. After introductions Tom nodded silently to me, then he and his friend disappeared into the back. “Well!,” I thought, “I came a long way to be here, I deserve better than that!” Years later we would be close friends.

When I returned my grandmother was yet there, quiet and still, breathing steadily, her face peaceful. My mother, Uncle Charles, and Aunt Ola took turns sitting by her side so Ma was never alone, though none knew if she was aware of the doting children who sat vigil. My mother took the evenings, pulling in a small bed to sleep beside her. That evening we gathered after dinner in the living room. Uncle Charles walked home, which was next door, just across the field. He stoked the fire again before leaving, as always.

Ola was gone, it was just the five of us. I pushed my chair near the thin-paned window to draw some of its chill, trying to offset the blasting heat. My father was on the couch reading a newspaper, my little sister on the floor playing. I looked up from my book and saw my mother standing over Ma’s bed, stroking her hair with tenderness.

Birds in holly.GIFShe spent her adult life in California, arriving with my father and their first baby, then a toddler, just after the end of World War II. We did not travel back to see her Shenandoah family as often as we would have liked. There were four children to raise, and cross-country travel was far more difficult then. My grandmother never learned to read or write, so intimate letters between the two were impossible. As for the phone, I don’t know why they did not talk more often, except that both tended to quietness.

And now my mother was like an angel at my grandmother’s bedside, her face as serene as Ma’s, radiating something so essential and chaste that it felt like an essence distilled to its truest form, that bond between child and mother, or spirit and body. Her hand lightly caressed Ma’s brow, slowly stroking her fine white hair back and to the side. It was the most simple expression of pure love I had ever seen, and I could not take my eyes from her. The room was quiet, only the occasional snap of sparks in the fire or rustle of paper. Robin in dogwood.GIFMa was as small as a girl, her form beneath the sheet barely more than a bas relief in cloth against the bed.

Mother brushed back a strand of Ma’s hair, tucking it behind her ear. She touched her brow, ran the back of her hand across her cheek. Then, her soft words, “She’s gone.” At that moment I had never loved my mother more.

The Winter Solstice and Christmas: From Sun to Son

Imagine yourself as fresh to the world as Adam or Eve. What a wondrous place you inhabit, full of beauty and mystery. Like a child, you wander free, examining every thing, curious about every leaf and insect, rock and rivulet. But the insect bites you, and it hurts. You want to know why it did that, and lacking any other explanation, you decide it must be angry. Then it rains, and you are drenched and cold. Jupiter god of weatherYou don’t know why that happened, and so decide the skies must be angry.

And then the leaves begin to fall off the trees, and they keep falling, day by day, until none are left. Your world is becoming colder, darker. The sun sinks lower into the horizon every day. Whatever or whoever is behind this, you think, must be in a very bad mood. Nothing else could explain it.

As the light fades a little faster each day, you become afraid. What if the sun goes away altogether, leaving you in darkness? Will the sun come back? How can you make the sun come back? Please come back!

For those who lived before astronomy, mathematics, and physics came to explain nature’s secrets, the world was beguiling, unpredictable, and often frightening. There were no scientific explanations for the movements of the sun or the turning of the seasons. Weather patterns that change day to day often seemed fickle, without pattern or reason. And so the people ascribed those acts to gods who had human-like moods and tempers. Nothing else could explain nature’s behavior.

What we take for granted about the natural world today was not yet known. That the earth, for instance, circles the sun, held in orbit by powerful gravity. Apollo sun godOr that the seasons are determined by the sun’s position relative to earth. The sun, we know, grows weaker in the winter and stronger in the summer for those of us in the northern hemisphere because of the tilt of the earth’s axis.

But early cultures did not know these things. They lived at the mercy of nature. And so they created religions that sought to erase the unknown and give their followers a sense of control over their world by creating gods that ruled these otherwise inexplicable natural phenomena.

Lacking scientific reasons to inform them why the sun comes up and goes down each day, or why the rains suddenly cease and the lands dry up, the people decided that gods were behind these acts of nature. When gods were happy nature cooperated with the needs of man. When the gods were angry people might starve.

Zeus, supreme god of the Greeks, threw thunder bolts when angry. He changed the seasons and shaped the weather according to his temper.Gefjun The Germanic Goddess Gefjun plowed the land and brought abundance and prosperity. Apollo, god of sun and light, drew his chariot across the sky by a team of celestial horses, driving the sun in its course.

These beliefs created order in the people’s worlds, if not always predictability. They could create more predictability, they thought, and better design nature to their needs, if they pleased the gods. And so they prayed and created elaborate rituals and festivals to honor the gods.

Across nearly every culture one of the most important deities was the god of light and sun. The sun ruled their worlds, and so the people took effort to worship and placate their sun gods. The winter solstice was perhaps the most important celebration, the time when the sun no longer sank into a lower arch every day and instead began to rise again, winter’s light no longer growing shorter every day, but lengthening into spring and then summer. Only then did they know their gods were happy and that the days would not continue to shorten until there was only darkness.

But they could not trust that the solstice would always return. They knew their gods were fickle. And so when the days of fall shortened into winter, after the harvests were in and the leaves fallen from the trees, when the cold crept into living spaces and clouds obscured the sun, people of ancient times called up their gods and spirits to ensure spring’s safe return. The sheer power of their rituals, they believed, could miraculously transform gathering dark into lengthening light. Sol invictus

The day of their rituals, the day when the sun started its rise up the horizon once more, fell and still falls, depending on positions of the planets, between December 20 and 23 every year in the Northern Hemisphere. On that day, the winter solstice, people from the North — ancient Rome, Scandinavia, Persia, Germany, China, North America — celebrated the sun’s new path higher into the sky.

On the solstice the sun halts its southward journey, pauses for a moment, and then starts moving northward. The Scandinavian and British people gave the name Yuletide to their winter solstice celebrations. “Yule” means “wheel” or “whole,” and “tide” means “time.” Yuletide, then, is the time of wholeness, or holiness. Germanic people called the solstice “weihnachten,” which means “the holy nights.” For them, and for the earth, it was a time of deep rest. A time of peace and reverence. The old year ends, its journey complete, its duties fulfilled. Now the sun can begin its journey up the sky again, bringing new birth, new life.

In some cultures it was a day of of feasting, merrymaking, and exchanging gifts. In others it was a day for quiet and reflection. In Scandinavia the people lit giant bonfires that symbolized the birth of the light of life, afterwards bringing into their great halls the yule log to burn during the twelve days of holy time. They brought “trees of life” into their homes and placed a star at the top to represent the light of life.

SaturnaliaIn Rome master and servant switched roles, the master serving the servant. The Romans lit candles and brought evergreens into their homes. Their festival, called Saturnalia, led right into Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, which was celebrated with a solemn festival of lights on December 25.

How easy it was for Christianity to assume that date to celebrate Christ’s birth, exchanging worship of the sun for worship of the Son! Many, maybe most Christian scholars believe this theory to be true. Indeed, no less than the Catholic Encyclopedia flat out says: “The true birth date of Christ is unknown.” And Catholic World states clearly,

No one supposes or has ever supposed that [December 25] was His actual birthday.”

As for the origin of December 25 as the day of celebrating Christ’s birth, Catholic Encyclopeida goes on to say,

“The same instinct which set Natalis Invicti at the winter solstice will have sufficed, apart from deliberate adaptation or curious calculation, to set the Christian feast there too.”

Which means that both worshipers of the sun and worshipers of Christ believed the winter solstice, and particularly the sun’s birth day, was a fitting time to worship and celebrate, in once case the Sun, in the other, the Son.rohden_franz_von_gerburt_christi_2

The Bible does not mention the date of Christ’s birth, and gives few clues. What clues there are tend to point against December 25 as the date of the blessed event. What’s more, since celebration of birthdays was considered a pagan practice by early Christians, no mention at all is made in early Christian texts of celebrations honoring the birth of Christ. One early scholar even mocks Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, calling them pagan practices.

It wasn’t until more than three hundred years after the birth of Christ that the first Christmas celebration was recorded, in a text written by an Egyptian teacher far from Judea. It was the time of Constantine, Emperor of the Roman Empire.

Constantine had been a worshiper of the sun god Apollo, but on the day before a key battle he had a vision of a bright cross inscribed with the words, “hoc signo vince,” meaning, “in this sign conquer.” Jesus appeared to him in a dream that night telling Constantine to use the cross on his war flag.

Thus began the reign of the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire, which spread under his rule from western Asia to Britain, Constantine and crossencompassing cultures that had been in battle with each other for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

To maintain his grip on the Empire Constantine needed to ensure peace among these former enemies. He would do it, he decided, through Christianity, and so began his crusade to spread the Gospel far and wide.

That included issuing an edict granting everyone in the empire the freedom to practice their religion, followed by a second edict proclaiming Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. He did this not out of piety, but out of political ambition, wishing to spread peace throughout his empire through the word of the Gospel, and to expand his empire through Christianity’s growth. In fact, Constantine was something less than pious, even having his wife and son murdered because he feared their treachery, and persuading his people to adopt Christianity under threat of death.

Priests, too, had their roles, one of which was to convert the masses of pagan idolaters to Christianity. One tactic they used was to superimpose Christianity over existing pagan holidays, including the festival of the winter solstice, Saturnalia, and the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or birthday of the unconquerable sun. In Northern Europe the twelve days of Yuletide were reinterpreted as Christian.

The priests made the ceremonies quieter, more solemn, by holding a mass on the feast day, called “Christ’s mass.” They also reimagined the Saturnalian practice of giving gifts to symbolize the gifts given to Christ by the three wise men.Sun Christ

All across Europe and Western Asia Christianity slowly absorbed the ancient traditions, made them its own. The old gods disappeared, replaced by the one holy God and His Son.

The holy day — holiday — celebrations remained, wrapped now in the shining Light of Christ and all that is whole and holy. There is peace, joy, renewal in that Light of Lights; remembrance, reverence, and the reminder that we are all, whatever our beliefs or creed, of this earth, together. The new sun is born. The new Son is born. Ancient, pure, life-giving, forgiving, embracing, beloved.