My Trip to Bountiful

I’m reflecting on the play A Trip to Bountiful, in which an elderly lady escapes the slammer of her son’s big-city apartment to revisit the rural home of her youth.  Tom Wolfe, who wrote You Can’t Go Home Again, published after his death, might have forewarned her to expect a ramshackle building rather than the childhood home in her memory.  Tom says it all changes, leaving only a remnant in each of us.

A woman named Jill and I lived together more than forty years ago.  We never intended to marry, though I think Jill would have preferred that.  Jill now lives by herself in Harbor, Oregon, formerly Brookings.  I suppose the name change to ‘Harbor” means that Brookings will gradually join, in the mist of fairy tale memory, the village of Brigadoon, a hamlet in the highlands of Scotland which appears only once every hundred years.

Recently Jill was tabled for back surgery, recovered in her daughter’s house for a year, and is now nailed to her own home by a titanium pin in her back, living in a forest of trees, memories, and love.

I send Jill a little money every month to supplement her meager social security.  She asked me recently if I minded her using part of her wealth to buy a walker for a friend, or donate to the local food bank. Unlike her back, Jill’s love is not stuck either to her home or to her past. Jill’s love for everyone is profound, pervasive, and unrestricted by time, loss, or fear.  Jill’s open heart is why I love her.

I brought with me my father, my wife, and Jill’s daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law who live four hundred miles, a heartbeat, away in San Diego.  We brought lunch, a Gnome for Jill’s garden, and a small lightshow box which responds to music.  Jill gifted to me her electric back stimulator, saying “maybe it will help you, it doesn’t help the pin in my back.”  She gave to my wife a beautiful sweater. And she gave to both of us a photo of my son Craig, taken on a camping trip back in 1972, when all of us were children.

Our afternoon passed, as the best times do, in a single breath or two.  While Jill and the others chatted away in the kitchen I enjoyed a passionate conversation with her son-in-law.  My father slept in a cozy chair as Jill’s nine-year-old granddaughter played in the garden, in the laundry room, on the computer – everywhere she moved.  Beneath the canopy of the trees we shared a time of comradery, laughter, reminiscence, a party that began when we were born, or when we first met, or when we fell in love.

Soon it was time to leave.  Jill and I hugged goodbye–a long goodbye with the full body contact, intimacy, and tenderness of two human beings who once shared their lives and, in the more important ways, still do.  I might agree with Tom Wolfe that you can’t return to your home of memory, but you can revisit the home inside yourself, your loves who will remain, your treasured and treacherous remembrances.

What is Bountiful?  The companionship and encouragement of family, of strangers, of friends.

Where is Bountiful?  In the nurturing earth, the forest shade, and in your pulsing spirit.

You do not have to travel far to visit Bountiful, for Bountiful, just as the fairy-tale village of Brigadoon, exists for you, and for me, in our hearts, always and forever, anywhere and everywhere we are.

Alan