Beyond My Life

The book came to me as a gift when I asked myself only one question. Why me?

The seed of that question began in basement library with the daylight window at Dallastown Elementary. If it was still intact I could walk today across the linoleum floors to the exact shelf where I discovered Harold and The Purple Crayon. The only book I checked out my entire first grade year. The librarian smiled, stamped the due date card with my name repeated line after line. Ka-thunk. Back in class, Mrs. Kessler’s frown made the cat part of her cat eyeglasses more pronounced as she instructed, again, that I practice my letters right handed, even though my left hand already knew the alphabet. My mimeographed sheets wreaked of blue ink and futile efforts.

At home, the moon and its gravity lifted toward my favor. My mother had ceased being sad. And she once again delivered crust-less, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the red bucket lowered from the middle branches of our backyard’s lone Sugar Maple. On those limbs I became Neil Armstrong, or Jeannie, of I Dream Of…magic. “Hey, Mom. Now that you’re not catatonic, maybe you could convince Mrs. Kessler to let me use my left hand,” I never said. But something ceased Mrs. Kessler’s right insistence that hopeful spring. Fifty years after the southpaw stand-off, my mother’s best friend will tell me that what had stopped the tears (that time) was electroconvulsive therapy.

Harold arrived in my life and brought me to a place of possibilities when I had few. I am grateful. But it is not the one book (can there ever be?), and the maple is not the one tree. Books, humans, trees, thrive in community. Harold found his way home to rest by the light of his moon, out his window. But what to do when home is on fire and smoke obscures the sky? We are all we have here. The moon moves a fingernail width away from Earth every year and the vastness expands.

The fictional shepherd, in The Man Who Planted Trees, Elezéard Bouffier knew what to do after he lost his only son and then his wife. His question was not why me, but instead…how can I help? His answer was to plant one hundred trees a day in a barren valley…for thirty years. He planted through two world wars, a pandemic, and a bumbling government forest agency. The meaning of the book, its seeds lied dormant in me for a long time. I no longer believe in a purple crayons’ ability to navigate life. Some days I can barely traverse my mind and heart.

I bring my life to stories in hopes those stories bring me beyond my life.

Fire may burn Elzéards trees, may burn the pages that gave him life, but he did what he could to make the days more gentle, less lonely for all beings in his time and his place.