Traveling light

Into the light

I have a lot of company on the porch today. Cardinals and warblers—pine and yellow-throated. Carolina wrens and Red-bellied Woodpeckers. Goldfinches and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers. Rasping and rhythmical, tuneful and mellifluous—the companions of my morning coffee have a lot to say this day.

It’s 68° and only expected to climb to 72°. I decide to ease out into the garden for some light weeding and some heavy reminiscing. I’ve spent the last few days on back roads leading to a lovely little hospice facility where my mother’s oldest sister is spending her final days. Her shrunken form lies in a private room, with French doors opening out to a deck with lilac azaleas spilling through the railings and a heavily trafficked bird feeder.

“Look, Auntie Sweet,” I’d cooed as I opened the blinds. “You’ve got a cardinal hen visiting.” If she could hear, she couldn’t respond. She’s far, far away—”traveling” as my papa’s Gullah Geechee kinfolks say. Eyes welded shut, the only signs of life are the rise and fall of her chest and the harsh sound of her breathing as her spirit makes its winding way to its final home.

Auntie Sweet was my favorite aunt, and I visit her, in part, to tell the rosary for her. When she and my mother busted out of the tiny farming hamlet where they’d been born to start new lives in the Lowcountry—I guess that was 60 years ago now—they also broke away from the fire-and-brimstone faith of their fathers.

The Hill girls. At left is Auntie Sweet, the second oldest of seven, and at right my mom in school photos from the 1940s. In the center photo, the older girls pose with three of their younger siblings.

My mother married an Episcopalian and became a happy convert at a Black Episcopal parish in Charleston that dated back to 1847. Auntie Sweet, on the other hand, went full-bore Roman and joined the Catholic faith. For around half a century, she was a pillar of service at a small Black Catholic congregation, St. Ann’s, in Florence.

Of course, she’s three hours distant from the still-surviving friends of her youth now—closer to the rest of the family, but cut off from her church home. So it’s left to me, the lone Episcopalian in a sea of Baptists and Pentecostals, to arrange for a priest to conduct the Last Rites, to make the journey, two and a half hours round trip, to say the prayers that I know would bring her comfort.

..Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death…

Which is, quite literally, now.

Today, I’m giving myself a break to recover from the strain of the last few days—and, oddly, I feel closer to her in the garden than I did in her presence … I guess because she and my grandmother were my first gardening role models?

Auntie Sweet’s garden wasn’t as big as her mama’s—she had many fewer mouths to feed (two versus seven)—but you couldn’t call it small. It covered every bit of a half an acre on an empty lot adjoining her back yard, and it pumped out corn, cabbage, mustards, collards, pole beans and limas, Irish and sweet potatoes, crowder peas, okra, cucumbers, tomatoes and a whole lot more—so much more that everyone in the neighborhood shared in the bounty.

Auntie Sweet would keep me for a few weeks in summer to give my mom a break. And I looooooooved those visits. Auntie Sweet was a career woman with a master’s degree; she child-free, with managing ways. So I functioned as a set of helping hands for her and while I helped I watched, fascinated, the way she moved about the house and garden.

Every meal would be a feast of fresh delights from the garden, vegetables in combinations I’d never imagined, and the much-thumbed pages of her Southern Living magazines ensured not just a variety of flavors but an impeccable presentation as well. Recalling those meals, those beautifully set tables, the cloth napkins and crystal on Sundays, I can only conclude the folks fussing about Meghan Sussex’s lifestyle venture must not have had Southern aunties, or Southern mamas, because the only thing unfamiliar about that ethic of joyful and tasteful and enthusiastic food sharing was the oceanside setting.

Sigh. The doctors gave Aunt Sweet 48 hours to live last Friday. I was in the garden when I got the text and, even though my own faith has been ashes for quite some time, I guess it’s true there are no atheists in foxholes. I immediately went to the jewelry box and reached for my favorite rosary—one I made years ago out of picture jasper and labradorite when I was into the craft. I then u-turned back out into the garden to pray for her soul.

And as I told the decades, I heard a sound I hadn’t heard in, well, a decade…

A white-throated sparrow.

Confused, I looked about. White-throated sparrows were one of the most welcome harbingers of winter when I lived in Virginia. Something about their lovely, lonely, piercing calls has always utterly ravished my heart. Upstate South Carolina is well within the breed’s winter range, but I’ve not heard that call, quite literally, since 2015—the year I left Virginia.

I continued my chant, almost fearing to breathe—it couldn’t be. It’s mid-April; any lingering birds should have left for summer breeding grounds in Canada a while back. But the call sounded out again over the whispered words of the “Ave Maria.” I choked and my eyes filled with tears.

By the time I finished, the singer was long gone and I’d half-convinced myself I’d imagined it. But yesterday, as I stood before the open French door in my aunt’s room, reciting the prayers once again, that pure, high note sang out drowning out the liquid trill of a cardinal and the song stylings of a particularly exuberant mockingbird. And swift as thought, the words came: “It’s Aunt Sweet. She hears me.”

…

Well, Southerners in general and Geechees in particular are always looking for signs and synchronicities. So maybe it was her. I hope she heard me, felt my presence, felt my loved.

At any rate, the call came just a moment ago. Aunt Sweet’s travels are over. She’s gone into the light. And I must go, too—many calls, many decisions to make. Pray for us sinners, Holy Mother… now and at the hour of our death. Amen.