My friend, Peter Mazar, of blessed memory, told me about a Hungarian Christmas custom. Once the table was set for the feast, with a plate and a chair for each expected guest, another chair was brought to the table. This chair was for all the beloved dead, unseen, and yet present. In one of his last letters, he wrote that the chair grew more crowded every year.
The chair grows more crowded every year.
There is Andrew, the beloved cousin who delighted in our babies as our neighbor and our friend. Our oldest child's first word, beyond "Mama" and "Papa," was "outside," because that's where Andrew and his brothers and sisters were and he wanted to be there, too.
Andrew helped us move one sun struck Texas summer, driving the station wagon filled with restless children all that long way. He lugged boxes in and out with good cheer. He visited us in the little rent house he helped make home. I remember a New Years Eve he spent with us in that house. Our fourth child was due in a few weeks and we were happy to stay in with Andrew. We laughed that night, swapping stories of the scant information our parents had chosen to share of what they would never have called human sexuality. Andrew told us his father's advice once he and his brothers reached adolescence: Don't drink and keep your pants zipped. We laughed, and agreed that, while it might not have offered much in the way of nuance (or basic facts of biology), it was pretty sound.
We stood at Andrew's August funeral and heard stories that echoed our own, of a man who reached out, who fostered and kept friendships, who mentored and guided, who taught and trained, who helped those in need. We met a Haitian-born women who had come to this country decades ago, alone and knowing no one. She told us she remains a member of the church where we gathered to mourn because, she said, "Andrew welcomed me here."
And there are those gone for years now, those whose loss is still felt.
I'm remembering my Uncle R.B., born and raised on the south plains of the Texas panhandle. He was a farmer, and he knew the land. He could read the sky and name all the animals. He could tell you when and why he had planted each tree on the farm. He sowed seed on dry, dry ground and harvested bounty.
I learned the word “windbreak” from him. I learned it standing in a tangle of Russian olive trees he had planted, each one put into the ground by his hands. How fitting that R.B. taught me the word, since a windbreak is what he was for me, and for so many who miss him. In the panhandle, the winds howl. They blow dust in the summer and ice in the winter.
Windbreak trees in the panhandle bear the signs of the wind. Their trunks are bent, as they absorb the force that would otherwise be spent against the house and pens and barns, the people and animals and crops they were planted to protect. In the panhandle, a windbreak is a sign of care, a sign of life.
We know other deaths will come. Some will take us unawares and unprepared, pierced by grief sharper than any knife.
And the chair will grow more crowded every year.
In November, the church bids us stop, and remember. We are told to stop acting as if death has nothing to do with us, as though the right combination of vitamins and exercise and positive thinking will stay death.
The church bids us to stop, and remember. We are told to remember the beloved dead who have gone before us in faith, to recall how made a way for us, in life and in death. We are told to remember how they taught us.
I have travelled some since my mid-century birth in Tulia, Texas. I was grown when I stood before a centuries-old live oak in South Carolina, a tree as big as a house.
Trees do not grow so tall, or so broad, in the Texas panhandle. They do not branch out so much as hunker down. The native cottonwoods cluster around creeks and irrigation ditches where they grow more like bushes than like towering oaks. A windbreak in the country must be made of many small trees. Some farmers plant them all the way from the main road to the house, and then around: a sheltered passage into shelter.
Peter had his Hungarian image. Mine is all Texas. I think of them, hundreds now, and I see them for who they were, and what they remain, a windbreak. They were planted between the killing wind and me. They gave me shade and shelter. They pointed me to water. They showed me the way home.
Sometimes I close my eyes and see them, planted in rows against the cloud-streaked sky. I see them as women, and men, and children, their faces known and dear, their hands upraised in blessing and in welcome. They wear mercy; they bear it on their breasts. They are not the proud and singular, but a grove, seed-sewn close, of the forgiving and the forgiven, of the gathered in and the redeemed.
I hope to take my place there, with them, in the time to come.
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