Anchor-hold
It has taken a year and a half of new motherhood, of lockdown and a pandemic, of spotty income and living without a car. It has taken this long to recognise and accept that motherhood for me is like being a monk.
The routines, the ritual, the solitude, the physical labor and the isolation. Mothers inhabit a different sort of time, a different sort of life. I can only rail against it for so long.
Now I choose, what? To accept it. To accept the constraints, to embrace them.
Like monks do.
What do monks even do all day? Pray, garden, make things. Rest. Read.
Read. I revisit the opening chapter of Tinker Creek and I am presented with an image that strikes like flint on steel. An anchor-hold: a squat shelter for an anchorite to pray and meditate, attached to the side of a hermitage, typically somewhere remote.
It seems obvious now that Carter Mountain is my hermitage. Though it is more of a cathedral, a mass of waiting and microscopic, incremental change. It looms every morning when I wake to jot down notes. It hides the sun and sometimes reveals it.
Carter Mountain. STACY KNIGHTON/CHARLOTTESVILLE ALBEMARLE CONVENTION & VISITORS BUREAU
Yes, despite its size Carter Mountain is my hermitage. And the apartment, my anchor-hold. Shored up against the mountain, small, untouched by many visitors. In it, I am removed from the conveniences of town. I am resigned to what is on offer in the immediate surroundings, which don’t look like much.
But looks of course can be deceiving.
This morning on Carter Mountain the trees are beaming with summer freshness. The copper roof is a flash of warm fire. I make coffee and as I do the strips of light come shyly through the blinds and land in lines on the floor. My daughter tiptoes across them in her own sort of game. She claws her fingers and points and makes odd shapes on the wall with her shadows. She is delighted by how she can trick the sun into playing along.
Not long after breakfast we leave for our daily walk. It is unusually temperate. The humidity seems to have vanished completely. Once we cross into the woods around the lake my legs are downright cool. The water is murky as a stew, slops of weird scuzz around the banks and dead bugs floating belly up near the grass.
By contrast the woods are itching with life. We take a few steps and a moth lies down on the mud to reveal its winning hand: a full house of tea-coloured specks and lemon eyes. My daughter doesn’t see the moth; instead she’s beckoning from my back toward the playing fields and crying out to see a ball.
There’s no one at the school today. The school year has ended. So, we walk on.
I’m not excited about being here this morning. I’ve done it too many times. I’d rather be off somewhere in a car. Even somewhere uninteresting, like a coffee shop or a library. The reality of our sort of monastic confinement permeates all the quotidian decisions of mothering.
No car, no extra cash, no coffee.
Still I tell my husband before leaving that I will try to holdfast, to lean in, again, to what is before me, what is on hand right here.
Stay put. Anchor down.
When I was a kid, ten or so, my father took us fishing on the Long Island Sound. The sky was that childhood blue, serene and unflinching. We took the boat to a known spot for flounder and dropped our lines.
I didn’t expect much. I usually didn’t have great success fishing with my father.
But my rod took a jolt and began to bend, bend like mad, the way it does when you have a monster on the line. I reeled and reeled and reeled, rooting down on the deck in my tennis shoes and trying desperately not to slip in the splash of saltwater slopping around my feet.
My father laughed as he held a can of Miller Lite. Reel her in, he kept saying.
When the hook finally surfaced it wasn’t a fish at all. We were all shocked: it was an anchor, a loose anchor from someone else’s boat, covered in kelp and plastic shreds.
Who knows how long it had been abandoned in the slimy depths?
An anchor is not supposed to move, I said to my father. Isn’t it supposed to stay at bottom?
He was still laughing.
That’s the idea, he said. But you dragged this one up. Why don’t you keep it?
I was humiliated. I didn’t want to keep the anchor. We tossed it back.
Perhaps I never trusted anchors after that. They ought to stay where they are. What good are they are if they don’t?
But maybe no one and nothing wants to stay in the same place forever.
Yet here I am on this walk again. It takes a minute or so before I warm up to the idea.
The trail beckons with a hushed invitation. If I look straight ahead and ignore the nearby traffic, I could be deep in the Blue Ridge. Or, somewhere even more exotic.
I am thinking this when a bunny flashes across the path in front of us. The toddler is ecstatic, wriggling and bouncing on my back, babbling in her own tongue.
We’ve never seen a bunny before. Its movements are frantic and full of alarm. It dithers below fallen trees, then around a clump of twisted roots. It is spooked by us, I think, and is gone before we can even say hello.
I cannot help but think of the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland leading the way into peril. Or, the tortoise and the hare, the hare anxious to win at all costs.
The tortoise is of course happy just to mosey on, trusting its body and the steadiness of time.
Here, living things appear content to yield to time as well. Most of the creatures we see are at ease. Turtles sunbathe on dry logs. Lily pads sleep on the surface of the pond under the silent dance of dragonflies. A cardinal yawns a song to the hills.
No one is bothered by much of anything.
Further down the path we spy a scattering of berries. I look for the source. Something tells me up, up here, so I crane my neck. It turns out we are below a high, layered canopy of leaves. Some are waxy, some dulled in the heat, and some are a liquid green. In clusters dotted between thin branches are mulberries.
They are lovely but inaccessible, so far up we can only admire them from a distance.
We walk on. At the alcove of the lake we discover a dozen or so geese. The signets from the spring are grown and squawking. The adults fight and dive for food. My daughter loves them. She is mad for geese. She calls out: ga, ga, ga! Then waves and blows kisses as they splash and ignore her. She asks about the ‘ba ba ga-ga’ (baby goose) and I say no, no sweet one, the baby has grown. Big ga ga now.
She doesn’t quite understand. And she is disappointed when I tell her we must go. Thankfully she welcomes the distraction of a fistful of white wildflowers.
It is next to the wildflowers that we strike gold.
Beside them, under the shade of a large oak tree, are blackberry brambles. And on each vine are dozens and dozens of berries.
Today, this morning, because of a long endurance in this place, the blackberries are that precise, plump, purple blend of black.
Their ripeness is the literal fruit of stillness. And of patience, a patience that stirs me and wants to tell me something that I don’t know.
I could of course continue to object to the process of yielding, of being still and knowing. Or, I could step back, observe.
The blackberries are perfect. Absolutely perfect. They are not just for observation.
They are for picking and for tasting.
I begin. They are everywhere, stretching along the path for the length of the school grounds. There are so many blackberries that I can’t hold them in just one hand. I have to stop because I’ll need one free hand to open the front door.
I march us home quickly, beaming with pride, cradling the berries in my palm like a baby robin.
There is so much richness in what I carry. Almost too much. The juices ooze and stain my hands, stains the colour of blood. Blood that comes from a brush with the thorn of winter, the cost of cold and waiting and hardness.
But who can think of such things carrying these treasures?
I put these thoughts out of my mind.
Instead I make designs on these berries, promise that when I return to my anchor-hold I will make cobbler in the evening. I tell myself and I tell my daughter.
And I tell a blue-jay that skates above us as we round the bend toward home.
