A scar is not the worst thing in the world.

On being reminded who we are

I’m waiting for the mountains to turn green again.

For the leaves to come back, now that the turning of the seasons has passed. A friend of mine is worried; she says that when the leaves return, we’ll see the scars in the earth where the land slid away, where the wind and rain ripped roots from the ground and hurled the trees down the valley.

I know something about scars. There is a faded purple one on my body where, six years ago, the deft hand of a surgeon opened my side to take out something sinister, leaving me bruised but cured. I catch sight of it when I am dripping from the shower, when I have gone days or weeks forgetting. I won’t say it’s always a good memory, being cured; sometimes it’s a gut-punch, my mind slamming back to the morning I woke up after hearing a diagnosis I had feared, and wishing - more than I have ever wished for anything - that it had all been a terrible dream.

But here is the thing: I wouldn’t go back. Not to the woman I was before the knife marked my body.

“Despair…is the only cure for illusion. Without despair, we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality - it’s a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.” - Philip Slater, Earthwalk

Since the storm, my neighbours all speak to each other with a new tenderness. We text when a tree is leaning, precarious; when a spouse or parent is sick; when there is a job interview or a house coming up for sale or a birthday or extra brownies, hot from the oven. These are already kind people, but something about the way we have been scarred has made us softer, more open. It’s bound us together in a way nothing other than despair can do. Even buying coffee or paying for a burger from a stranger, there’s something in the way we smile at each other, in the way we wait more patiently, in the wad of dollar bills we stuff into tip jars.

I’m certain that, as time passes and the scars fade, we’ll forget sometimes. We’ll cut each other off in traffic again, we’ll huff when someone skips the line. But I hope that takes a long time, and I hope that our memories never fade completely.

When the mountains are green again, and the view from my front porch is obscured by new foliage, I’ll still be able to see the carcasses of oaks lying at the end of my dead-end road, where some men who said they’d come back tomorrow must have forgotten, and left them there.

A scar is not the worst thing in the world; it reminds us who we were before, reminds us what we’ve survived, helps us remember how to be who we’ve become.

xx

Faith