It’s almost Thanksgiving. Oh my. At the mention of that word, I start thinking of Christmas, and inevitably wondering if it makes sense to buy gifts for my loved ones that may be a little off the mark and a little more expensive—but that will help people in need.
“Cause marketing,” it’s called. I’m sure you’ve seen the ads. Buy a “compassion scarf,” one urges, and help poor women in India. These kinds of pitches always tug at me, and it’s gotten worse since
One Saturday morning a few weeks ago, Jeff drove to Raleigh to visit with our nephew Spencer, who had recently come north from Mississippi to take a graduate class. Both hungry, they went to a Mediterranean restaurant near Spencer’s dorm.
As they placed their orders at the counter, Jeff noticed the T-shirt worn by the young woman helping them. Bright red, it showed the silhouettes of three young people—not their faces, just their hair. Two of the figures were female. They seemed to be wearing hijabs. The young woman helping them also wore a headscarf. Jeff asked her what the drawing signified.
I need to steel myself to tell you this: the bugs seem to be winning.
Not just the bugs, but also the black rot and fungi—the very plagues for which commercial orchardists spray the chemicals thought to be killing colonies of honey bees.
This time last year, we were wandering among our apple trees, picking a meager but healthy harvest of mostly heritage fruit. It had been a difficult season, but we were hopeful. Our attempts to tend the trees sustainably seemed to be working. We’d even found a good population of beneficial insects eating bad insects our trees.
But let me go back to the very beginning.
Thirty-one years ago Jeff and I moved into a little house on Hatteras Island, here on the North Carolina Outer Banks. Raised in a Delaware suburb, I’d never lived in such a small town. I set about trying to meet our neighbors, who’d seen many outsiders like us come and go. They didn’t pay much heed to us, until it was clear that we were staying.
Bit by bit we were taken into a community of people who were very different from those I’d known before. They fished, ran small stores, repaired houses and cars, and cleaned cottages. They were more open than many of my former suburban neighbors and certainly less pretentious. What you saw was what you got. I loved this about them.
They were also much more conservative than me—which, it turned out, made absolutely no difference at all.
Shortly before my mother died last spring, she made a comment that brought me up short:
“I wish we’d talked about it more,” she said. That was all.
“It” was a defining event in all our lives—the death of my 16-year-old son in a car accident. Concerned about the toll it was taking on her and my dad, my husband and I tried to keep the depths of our pain hidden from them. Even several years after the accident, we didn’t level with them. Our conversations ran along the lines of, “Yeah, it’s really hard, but we’re doing okay.”
That, I see now, was a mistake.
