“You’ve always been good at finding things,” my daughter said.
I was bent down, searching our hardwood floor for a magnet the size-and-shape of a bead from a ball chain necklace.
I pondered her statement, knowing in my bones it’s true. Why is that.
She’d been examining this at first cool-seeming gift of “1000 round rare-earth magnets.” Each one a tenth of an inch. She was making this mass into a long string when a tiny ball swung loose and went Ting! against the floor.
“Oh no.”
We were worried about Pippa and Tao, our cats.
I got up and held my hand out for the round mass of tiny powder pink magnets. She handed it to me, knowing from the past what I would do. Holding this now clearly dangerous sphere of 999 swallowable magnets, I carefully pulled one out and put it on the floor where I thought the Ting! had sounded. A trick I discovered long ago. If you can put one of what you’re looking for on the floor, you can better imagine what the lost one looks like and where it might have gone.
Every time I do it, I think, There’s a life lesson here about seeking and finding and the deep looking involved.
I’d vacuumed a few days back, but still—because two cats—tiny pieces of this and that muddled the area where the magnet was last heard. In a surprise twist of luck, when I put the small mauve magnet down, immediately I found the lost magnet a foot or so away.
We were all relieved. We didn’t want to imagine a tiny magnet licked up by one of our cats. A warning sticker took shape in my mind: “Households with crawling babies, toddlers, and pets should not buy these.” Turns out, they are banned in the U.S., but come in through Amazon and other online ways.
Thinking on my daughter’s words. “You’ve always been good at finding things,” I sat down, relieved at finding the tiny magnet, adding, “It reminds me of the time I found Earcell’s rings.”
She nodded and smiled. We reminisced.
It happened one sunny blue-sky day. I was in my early 20’s and driving back to my parents’ house outside Canton, Georgia, in rural Macedonia Community, returning from a job interview with a President of a local bank who wanted an assistant. I was feeling disappointed because the vibe was . . . I wouldn’t get the job. The interview had been bleh.
With the gift of hindsight, I’m thankful I didn’t get it. I don’t think I ever even heard back. It would’ve been helpful to get a timely No. Decent-human reminder: Let your applicants know if you’re not hiring them.
I was dressed up in what passed as high fashion then. Pantyhose, check. Business casual skirt, vest, and blazer, all made by my mother, check check check. White long-sleeved button-up shirt gotten on sale at a mall, check.
Almost home, just a few more straights and bends to drive round, I saw smoke rising less than a mile from home. My stomach jolted with worry, Oh no our house is on fire?
As I neared, with each curve rounded, I realized more definitely it was not our house. My first thought of utter relief, Thank god, was immediately followed by another jolt, Oh no it’s a neighbor’s. I couldn’t tell whose.
When I started down the hill on which our red-brick ranch sat off to one side, I saw it was our next-door neighbor’s home on my left. Instead of their white one-story home, all flames. I’d never seen anything like this. It defined conflagration. Only in elementary school when we lived in rural south Georgia, and I was waked in the night by an eerily bright orange and red light, explosions reverberating, had I seen anything close, as the roaring next-door was our elderly neighbors’ barn burning.
Remembering those long-ago squawkings of peacocks fleeing that barn in the dark, I pulled past the in-broad-daylight blaze and into our driveway, horrified by the disconcertingly vivid flames on my left and worried about our neighbors Hoyt and Earcell.
Were they alright, alive?
In panty hose and skirt, I wasn’t dressed for a fire. But I parked, and heels be damned, I ran over awkwardly. Their house was sat back from the road more than ours, and halfway down their gravel driveway I saw Earcell flat on her back on the grass, a cold cloth on her forehead. Someone pressing it to her repeatedly as she rose up and was gently pressed back down.
Delirious, eyes shut, she repeated, “Oh Lord, Oh Lord, I done heard you never put more on us than we can bear . . . but Oh Lord. . . .”
Women from her family and Hoyt’s who all lived nearby and other neighborhood women stood huddled around her, a ring of protection. The volunteer firemen were scrambling around near the walls of flames. People were everywhere, like a hill of ants someone stuck a stick in.
Finally I spotted Hoyt alone, standing right in front of their home, engulfed totally by fire. He was in his usual blue denim bib coveralls. He could have made those himself. He and Earcell worked decades in the Jones-family-owned cotton mill in Canton, a town incorporated in 1834 on unceded territory stolen from the Cherokee Nation.
The sight of denim still makes me think of Hoyt and Earcell. From hearing Hoyt’s stories during my growing-up years, I learned that making denim is hard, loud, skilled, physical, dangerous, and underpaid work.
Once I took Hoyt to see his old cotton mill when it first became apartments. As we walked through, he told me the real story behind the building, not for the first time, but in situ it was more poignant than ever before. This happened here and that happened there. I remember he dressed up in a suit and tie when we went. It was an outing, and he was proud of his work there. Also I could tell he felt a little like Rip Van Winkle. So did I. His stories did not match at all what we were seeing. Everything was so new and different, and he wouldn’t say it but I felt it: Fancy.
The reality of denim manufacturing seemed the activity furthest from that building already gentrified and turned into real-estate speak as “an adaptive re-use development” offering luxury apartments, Trivia Nights, Bourbon Tastings, NFL Football on the Green, Elf on the Shelf Story Time, and Christmas Movie on the Green.
What happens when we forget our history? I remember asking myself.
Standing beside Hoyt that day, all I could think was how Hoyt and Earcell’s hard work that had gone into the purchase of their home was now totally up in flames. It was obvious the firemen were merely keeping the fire from spreading to the chicken houses out back and the barn in the side yard and the neighboring homes, like ours.
The day that Hoyt and Earcell’s house burned slap to the ground, as people would later say, and I found Hoyt standing alone right in front of the flames, his thumbs hitched in his denim bib, I was struck by how he did not look away. I saw him seeing utter destruction and not running. That in itself was a lesson in courage, in acceptance of what is.
When I walked over to stand beside him, I looked at him. He looked at me. He looked back at the orange glow reflecting on us even in the daylight. I put my arm around his waist. He put his arm around my waist. We squeezed tight. Then, arms dropped, returning to just standing beside each other, my arms crossed, his hands back in his denim bib, both of us were silent a beat.
Then Hoyt said, “Well, Carmen, it looks like I’ll be sleeping in the barn with the cows tonight.”
That is a clear snapshot of how Hoyt was always my oasis of sanity in the middle of a violent childhood. I could walk over and sit on his porch, and just be. We would talk about nothing and everything. He was so smart. I was also impressed that at quite a distance he could cleanly hit his brass spittoon with a carefully chewed, caramel-colored glob.
Hoyt had had to leave school to work on his family’s farm, so he didn’t finish elementary school. From Hoyt I saw again how education is not accessible to all. I had already learned that from my straight-A-student mom who graduated high school with honors but couldn’t afford to go further. What an absolute, cruel mess the U.S. system of educational inequities continues to be.
Once the fire was out and the smoke rising from next door, our rural neighborhood in northwest Georgia rallied around Hoyt and Earcell. People took off from work for days, weeks. Someone found a trailer and hauled it in for temporary housing. Some of us went over with Pine-Sol and such and helped clean it. Then the new house building began. People donated their time. Others donated materials.
Before the smell of new lumber and the sound of hammering, one day, when the ashes had at least stopped smoldering, but before they were cleared away, I went over to see how Hoyt and Earcell were. They were standing in what once had been their front yard, and Earcell was deeply upset, I learned then, because she had lost all her rings.
As we talked, we were just standing there looking at the piles of gray, white, and black charcoal and ashes. No porch to sit on. No walls left. No framing. No doors. Nothing upright except a crumbling chimney. No markings of any kind. Just an inhospitable moonscape of ash. Ashes to cold ashes, dust to dust.
Curious, and concerned, because Earcell was so upset, her loss and grief as ripe and tangible as the deep purple blackberries on the vine then, I asked her what at first seemed like an incongruous question. Where were your rings when the boiler exploded? Fortunately, neither Hoyt or Earcell had been home at the time.
She blinked at the hope in my question and cocked her head as if to make sure she’d heard me right. But she immediately told me they’d been on her bedside table in a box. Hearing that and reconfirming where that room was, I said my goodbyes, and in a bit walked on home, planning.
I was wearing cut-off shorts, the kind made from tan pants, with strings hanging down from where you cut them to make shorts. These were not my best shorts. I kept them on and changed into a ratty t-shirt. I also changed into my oldest tennis shoes, the ones with holes in the toes. Grabbing a pair of old work gloves from the basement, I went right back over.
Everyone was surprised when I came back with my father’s little army shovel. It folded, and was lightweight and easy to use. We talked a bit more about location, and I walked out into the ash landscape and began digging slowly. I felt in my soul I would find Earcell’s beloved rings, even as I knew it was statistically impossible.
As I began shoveling carefully, I heard a silence open up behind me, a noiseless gasp from Hoyt and Earcell and from a couple of their relatives who lived nearby, all gathered around. I vaguely realized the sight I must have presented to them. I was the odd oldest child of the neighbors next door. Who kept going to school. The not-married late-20-something UGA graduate student.
As I became more and more covered in soot, shoveling, bending now and again to pick up pieces of their destroyed home, and inspecting these indiscriminate gray-black-and-white ashes, a kind of disbelief settled in behind me. It was palpable. Those gathered around talked about other things among themselves, very politely.
As I dug without success at first, I pictured them thinking my true colors had finally come through. She was always a strange kid. Always reading. But that was my imagination, because what I mainly felt was their solidarity and family love, despite their incredulity.
It was a fool’s errand. Yet I had a weird hope. A near certain feeling I could find Earcell’s rings. Yet I also felt they appreciated my looking, regardless. I kept digging. An hour went by. Then more. I didn’t keep time. I kept shoveling, picking up and sorting, looking at different-yet-the-same gray-black-and-white ashes. Being careful not to reinterrogate the same ones.
“Well, we appreciate you done looked,” Carmen. I heard over my shoulder. Yet no one left.
I kept digging. Time was shovels of gray-black-and-white ashes.
After some time, how much I’m not sure, I came upon some ash-covered and gleaming gold circles. The box they were in was gone.
Earcell was not usually a very demonstrative woman, but I got a hug that has lasted a lifetime that day.
That could itself be the end of a very good story.
And also I ask myself: What in my life made me think I could find Earcell’s rings?
I can think of three reasons.
#1, Hoyt and Earcell were like family to me. That was only beginning to dawn on me then.
Until then, I lived in their love almost unknowingly. That’s how real love works, isn’t it. It’s so much what we all need that often we cannot see it at the time, for how it is our requisite oxygen. Hoyt and Earcell treated me like family always. Even invited me to their Watkins family reunion.
And they had been struck a mortal blow. If I could find the rings, that could restore to them some of their Before.
And it did. When I handed Earcell in my blackened glove her shining-through-the-ash gold rings, I’d never seen her so happy, to tears, wet and running down her sun-and-age-wrinkled cheeks. Dead many years now, Hoyt and Earcell are still family to me. They are my wise ancestors. I still hear how they laughed at how dirty I’d gotten. Face, legs, arms, neck, clothes all gray.
We had to bend over with our hands on our hips to get those laughs out. Somewhere inside my self, I’m still happily covered in acrid soot, pleased to find Earcell’s most prized possessions. I’m thankful my ancestors include these two cotton mill workers, crop farmers, and chicken farmers. Thank you, Hoyt. Thank you, Earcell. Again.
#2, Books made me think I could find Earcell’s rings. Books saved me. Books helped me breathe and dare dare. In books I escaped the largely inescapable war zone of my childhood. Take Pippi Longstocking. The irrepressible, fairly parent-less, and imaginative 9-year-old Pippi Longstocking was my childhood friend, even role model. She lived alone except for her horse and monkey, Mr. Nilsson, and spent her days finding treasures wherever she went.
Once Pippi told her less-adventurous neighbors, the children Tommy and Annika: “I am a Thing-Finder, and when you’re a Thing-Finder you don’t have a minute to spare.”
They asked her what a Thing-Finder is. Pippi responded: “Somebody who hunts for things, naturally. What else could it be? The whole world is full of things, and somebody has to look for them. And that’s just what a Thing-Finder does.”
“What kind of things?” Annika asked.
“Oh, all kinds. Lumps of gold, ostrich feathers, dead rats, candy snapcrackers, little tiny screws, and things like that.”
Pippi helped me go through life with that same attitude of expectant finding. In this way she is one of my ancestors, too, via her creator Astrid Lingren, another one of my good ancestors, who gifted us all with Pippi’s so alive words and radically resilient selfhood.
Pippi’s attitude became my life’s foundation in many ways, especially her advice to Annika and Tommy: “We shall see what we shall see. One always finds something. But we’ve got to get going.”
We’ve got to get going.
I got going. As a child, I always looked into gray dust bunnies under Coke machines or down into their change dispensers for quarters, dimes, nickels, or unicorn 50-cent pieces. Treasures. Pippi Longstocking’s attitude was—You never know what you’ll find. She kindled within me my own grit and helped me give expression to that feeling of You never know what good thing you will find.
I grew to see treasures in the ordinary and also within me.
Pippi’s words still echo in me: “We shall see what we shall see. One always finds something. But we’ve got to get going.”
“We shall see what we shall see.” She encourages me to see life as it is. Just as Hoyt did. Does. Pippi’s perennially wise words also still remind me to find ways to look and see What is.
And “get going.” There’s no time to waste.
To me “get going” also means “get resting.” What I find in resting is indescribable.
#3, My father was always losing things and blaming it on those closest to him. Anyone but himself.
I wrote this piece over a month ago and kept coming back to it, asking myself, Do I include 3.? After much reflection, I decided, Yes. By the Yes of an egret’s feather.
As I started doing research in graduate school at UGA, I began to grasp a hard truth. One of the reasons I’ve been and I am a persevering researcher is that my life used to literally depend on finding where my father put his tape dispenser. Or any other of countless household items.
A good psychiatrist told me once that PTSD is defined as feeling your life is threatened or experiencing your life threatened or having your life threatened. She said, “There’s no doubt that that was your repeated experience.” Then I looked it up in the DSM, where I read, “Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, . . .”
During regularly recurring episodes of losing things, he’d become more enraged and closer to lashing out as he tore through the house, screaming, “Who used my tape? Where’d you motherfuckers put it?” and more. I prefer not to say more here about the physical and emotional violence. As his burning rage wounded my family and me, also over time I somehow gained superpowers of finding. Perhaps a kind of natural and organic compensation.
Of course my researching skills thankfully also grew via countless needed and essential good and healthy experiences, opportunities, and teachers.
Yet also, as the oldest child of four, I felt it my responsibility to protect my family as best I could, even though as a child I could not understand how powerless I was quite, as I’d search for and find the missing tape dispenser, or whatever else (usually) he had misplaced. Little did I know then how little power I really had.
Life remains complex. Even as social media accelerates our risks of reducing that complexity daily into this or that rather than this and that and this and that and. . . . It’s a sad truth and also a healed and healing wound in my life and in my first family’s love for each other that during our decades together my father suffered from an undiagnosed illness. He died almost 5 years ago.
I won’t go deep into that here in this short blog on finding.
I pause briefly to consider how important it is not to automatically conflate mental illness with violence. Most people living with mental illness are not violent. When the two are automatically conflated, as can happen in click-bait news reports, or in some entertainment shows and casual conversations, that does not help us grow well as individuals and as a society. Our collective health depends on complexifying our conversations around mental illness.
I’m thankful mental illness is becoming less stigmatized. Thanks go to the brave, brilliant youth of today, largely. But its destigmatization is not nearly fast enough. Not nearly enough resources are put into it yet on federal and state levels. That’s one reason I have slowly begun to speak out about my own experiences with it. To be reminded that life is wonderfully and mystifyingly complex, and to heal, we can do share our stories and respectfully deeply listen to each other.
Our human tendency is to make to-do physical and mental lists that seemingly benefit from a binary mindset. Did that. Check. Did this. Check. It’s satisfying, you know, to check things off. But the binary can flatten life’s richness and messiness into a simplistic list of choices of either good or bad. Going beyond-the-binary with a self-compassionate, others-compassionate eye turns out to be more realistic, helpful, and healing.
Which returns me to the joy of finding. And to the question of why looking for the good is important. It’s relational. As was my looking for and finding Earcell’s rings in an ash heap once her cozy home. If I hadn’t found them, it was still a win, since I did it because I love/d them. The sheer presence of being with Hoyt and Earcell in tragedy and doing what seemed hopeless was a kind of finding and being found.
I aim to look for the good also because it simply makes my heart sing. Looking for the good seems an activity humans do as naturally as birds sing. It seems innate. Like breathing H2O.
Psychotherapist Peter A. Levine confirms that. Recently reading again his Trauma and Memory on healing trauma, I was reminded what his decades of clinical work discovered as existing in each one of us: “[A] fundamental and universal instinct geared toward overcoming obstacles and restoring one’s inner balance and equilibrium: an instinct to persevere and to heal in the aftermath of overwhelming events and loss” (65). Levine names it our “primal capacity to meet adverse challenges”—an “innate drive for perseverance and triumph.”
So even when or especially when life around us is in so many ways smoldering piles of ashes . . . from a burning planet, war, inequity, and more, I aim to look for the good because such looking is not only essential but also innate. Another part of being made in the image of divinity.
Because I grew up being fed so much unhealthy theology and so many unhelpful ideas, I must pause to add a qualification. Unfortunately as a child I heard preachers preach that abuse is “useful,” several said, for becoming “wise.” Some even said it was “ordained by God.” That is not what I am saying here. Abuse is a harming no one should experience. Just as no one should feel the threat of looking for something out of fear of abuse.
Psychotherapist, author, and contemplative teacher James Finley, my dear friend Jim, shares true wisdom with us about the complexities of life that are also painful and harmful perplexities: “If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love.”
Thank you, Jim.
Thank you, everyone, for staying with me for these 4,000 words on finding, on looking for the good, and on the joy that comes from healthy community and the sustaining nature of true Love.
Searching for the good during hopeless-looking times is also one way to preserve, renew, and grow my own, your own, our own humanity. In the grips of a collective psychosis and forces of unchecked greed that pit human against human in increasingly inhumane ways as we witness humans abused as capitalism’s objects and the earth abused as commodity, not respected and protected as holy gifts of creation in and on which we are all interconnected, our looking for the good is more important than ever.
May we make space for each other to be Thing-Finders together. For there’s not a moment to spare. We’ve got to get going.
One image of Pippi recurs and makes me smile about her spirit while “getting going.” At one point Pippi scrubs her kitchen floor by tying scrub brushes to her feet and skating around. After, she, Annika, and Tommy go on a picnic. That’s the kind of joyful world I keep imagining.
Thank you, Pippi.
Thank you, all. Peace to you. Happy looking. Happy finding.
And thank you for reading.