Sometime during the summer of 2020, the girls and I were enjoying a juicy meta-conversation about our creatureliness (how we are like animals) after reading a few chapters of Gary Paulsen’s The Hatchet. I had been trying to develop a readaloud habit that I like for years, but it had felt like torture. I, the literature teacher, found it infuriating to read aloud when they would squirm and crawl all over me, interrupt. Then, there was the unbearably slow pace of reading each sentence aloud, with expression. It took weeks to finish a book! That summer finally things began to change. Things which used to annoy me were becoming water off a duck’s back, and I fell again into the dreamy pace of my 6th grade self, head on desk, while my teacher Mrs. Dunn would read the Redwall series to us after lunch. Smelling of the outdoors, lights dimmed in the classroom, all the loudmouths mysteriously quieted, I never wanted that time to end.
Decades later, on the occasion of this summer’s eve conversation about the creatureliness of humans with our three children, I asked them why none of the animals Brian (the young protagonist in Hatchet) encounters in the woods think about the future, or weave baskets to catch fish, or make fire like he does. And we wondered what the breath and image of God really mean, in a person. And then we started naming all the bones we knew, since Gwyn was worried about a sprained wrist which hadn’t yet healed. She had an appointment with the orthopedist, and faced getting a cast on her left arm. Already and quietly, a lethal brain tumor was also growing in her thalamus. She would have about two years left to live, though no one knew this.
Without the poignancy of foreknowledge, I was still somehow prepared for the sacred nature of the moment. The girls always know something’s important to me when it sounds like I might cry, and so with tears catching in my throat, I told them whales have many of the same bones we do, even though we use them differently, and to some scientists it looks like we may even be related somehow. And I said something about God making the whole world with a breath and a word (who knows precisely how, in the minute details?). And Lorraine said, “You realize that’s kind of hard to believe, Mom?” And then she said she wished she could have seen it happen for herself, and we all agreed.
Pondering for a moment, Lorraine intimated that she’d heard God’s voice in a dream once, in a wooded meadow, and she knew it was His because it was like thunder. And Gwyn said it can also be a whisper. Marian nodded perfunctorily, attentive to all this overt sincerity going on. And then I said, “the whole earth is full of His glory… even your faces. And it scares me sometimes, because I think I might damage the glory I see, with my mistakes.” And Lorraine pulled me in toward her face, level with mine as she stood and I sat. She put on her kindest eyes, and said, “You’re not doing that at all, Mom.” And I thought, What. In. The. World? How can she say that, with all my mistakes?! And then I breathed, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty, the whole earth is full of his glory…” and I could catch a glimpse of what she might be seeing.