Emily, my youngest, who lives in D.C., is coming for the weekend. I need to vacuum and plan menus, change the sheets in the loft, scrub the guest bathroom, and yet, I have a manuscript to edit, a workshop to teach, and a column to write. It’s so hard to demonstrate love and write about love at the same time.

On the stair landing, I pause, suddenly arrested by a framed essay in which I not only anticipated this dilemma but chose it. It is a decision I made many years ago and make again in small ways every day.

***

They tell me to breathe, to ride the contraction like an ocean swell, cresting it in rhythmic control. But I barely hear them, diving deep beneath the pain. There is less movement in the depths, less distance to the shore. 

“She’s crowning,” they call out. “Push harder! Again!” I comply just to please them. This child intends to never be born. 

“It’s a girl,” the doctor proclaims, and the pain suddenly stops. I hear a cry, but I am briefly detached. For nine months, we have enjoyed the mystery of this child’s identity. Not knowing whether it was a boy or a girl, the baby became both in our minds. The nursery was decorated a non-committal yellow, and with the choosing of names, “baby” became Adam/Emily. In the last months of pregnancy, I imagined myself holding and dressing newborn Adam one moment, infant Emily the next, and both seemed real. 

Now, the wondering is over, and as delighted as we are to greet Emily, a faint loss accompanies the revelation. Because there is an Emily, there will never be an Adam. The memory of this fantasy child fades as Emily claims her place in reality. 

Peace floods my body at last. It is deep, complete, thorough. A nurse covers me with a warm blanket, and I sleep.

Someone is shaking my arm. I awake in a dimly lit room on the maternity ward where I have been moved. A curtain partially shields from view another bed, where my roommate, whose child is only a few hours older than my own, is also rousing from a few precious hours of stolen sleep.

“It’s 1 a.m.,” the nurse tells us, “And the babies will be brought from the nursery for feeding in a few minutes. Wake up. You must be alert before you handle the infants.”

We struggle to sit upright for the first time since giving birth, sharing a few tentative words in the dimness. During our brief stay, this waking will become a nightly ritual. We will hear the squeaking wheels of the hospital bassinettes as they are rolled one by one down the hall, bringing each infant to its mother. Each night a nurse will herald the coming procession, calling softly into the darkened rooms, “The babies are coming! The babies are coming!” Years later, I will still remember the hushed breathlessness that filled the ward as we waited. 

I brush my hair, hold a cold, wet cloth to my face for a moment, and prepare for the arrival of my tiny daughter. She is rolled in, lying on her side, tightly swaddled. Only her face is visible in the folds of a white blanket, her eyes bright with hunger. 

I pick her up, and she stares directly at me. She looks intelligent, demanding. The nurse retreats, and I feed her, relieved when she surrenders her fierce concentration to the comfort of my arms and closes her eyes. I am temporarily released from her stoic scrutiny. 

In a little while, the nurse returns, and the tiny bundle is put back in her bassinet for the return trip to the nursery. Although I cannot see her as the door closes behind them, I picture her staring in regal intensity at her attendant as she rides down the hall—a tiny Cleopatra on her barge, sweeping down the Nile.

We are home and she has smiled at me. She has also smiled at the blank, quilted side of her crib bumpers and some memory in her dreams. But it’s too late for me. I stay within the orbit of her cradle hoping to glimpse another smile, though they are as predictable as shooting stars. 

She is not my first child. She is my last. Every touch, every moment with this child is more precious, more intense, because I will not pass this way again. 

I had meant to begin work on a novel this spring—to have a real schedule, to live the life of which book jacket bios are made: “Ms. Oliver is a critically acclaimed novelist who lives in Annapolis, Maryland.” But you can’t write about life without participating in it. 

Emily, her brother, and sister, all the people I love and those I’ve lost, are the richest colors, the teachers and tenderizers for the substance of my work, my life.

I will always long for uninterrupted afternoons of creative concentration. There will never be enough mornings spent at my desk in which to harvest these years. But even now, as I seek the heart of an essay I must set aside (Emily is coming! Emily is coming!), I remember a friend saying, “Consider the interruptions holy.”

And so I have. And so I do. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

This was harder than you might think. A few years ago, National Public Radio ran a series called “This I Believe.” Listeners were to submit 500-word essays sharing beliefs they held to be unequivocally true—anything from “I believe in ghosts” to “I believe in democracy.” The only rule was to include the phrase, “This I believe.” 

The response was overwhelming. I submitted one myself. It was about my daughter’s choice to join her high school cross-country team because students were required to have an athletic activity, and she was not an athlete. Cross Country was a no-fail sport. You competed only with yourself, a situation a lot like life, I imagine.

So, my submission was about learning to cheer for everyone—always. We are all attempting to at least place in the same event: a life of consequence lived with kindness. This I believe. 

The topic of what I believe has been on my mind since last week’s class in “Near Death Experiences,” in which we learned about the concept of the Life Review. People who have been resuscitated after being declared clinically dead report remarkably similar experiences across cultures.

I’m not talking about encountering a religious figure or a tunnel of light. I am talking about being greeted by a love of inexpressible depth. I’m talking about the near- universal first words of those revived being, “Why did you bring me back?” And another important commonality: no one dies alone. This I believe.

In my mother’s journals, some of which I read after she died, I found a sketch she’d drawn 50 years ago titled “Image of Death.” A prone stick figure reached up toward three stick figures hovering overhead——their arms extended in invitation. Dotted lines between the figures below and those above indicated an energy flowing between them. A rudimentary sun shone in the sky, one tree, flowers, and grass. 

All my life, I had tried to include my mother in every meaningful moment—every holiday, birthday, vacation, graduation, and school program- often at the expense of my own family. Because she had been alone since the age of 42, I was determined being alone should not mean feeling alone, but death is an outlier. 

It was the week after Christmas; I was working and had a house full of family, guests, meals to make, and a kitchen to clean. I was at my desk trying to finish a manuscript when my mother’s assisted living facility called to say it was time to bring in hospice. Having just visited with Mom up, dressed, and talking days earlier, I was taken by surprise. I thought this meant she might die within 3 months, and I was overwhelmed at the very word. Hospice. I suddenly couldn’t speak. 

But Mom didn’t die within three months. She died within 3 days. 

On what would be her last day, I spent the afternoon in her room, just the two of us. Her bed had been lowered nearly to the floor, so I sat on the carpet next to her. She was unconscious, the room dimly lit, with soft classical music playing. I picked up a book of her published poetry titled A Fine Thin Thread. Since she once wrote, “My poetry is me, inside out,” I thought I’d read to her. 

As I read, I realized I was recalling in exquisite imagery, every relationship, hope, loss, longing, and love she had ever had. I was, in essence, reading a life review.  

That’s another commonality of near-death experiences. You are able to review your life with a compassionate understanding and lack of judgment we are incapable of here. 

After a few hours, I became anxious about the holiday company I’d left sitting at home. My youngest was visiting with a new boyfriend. I’d need to help get dinner started. I’d need not be a big drag. So, I texted home, asked if I should stop at the grocery store for coffee and more eggs, then told Mom, “I’ll see you tomorrow” because, in my inexperience, I fully believed I would. 

At the threshold, I suddenly stopped and turned back, intuitively unwilling to part quite so casually. I went back in, kissed her, and told her something much different. Something about how there would never be a day in my life I didn’t want her to stay and about what I imagined was waiting for her if she chose to go. Hospice was scheduled to come explain their program to us the following week. 

Just before midnight, the night nurse called to say, ‘Come as fast as you can! Your mother is actively dying.” I was the only local daughter, the only one whose name and number they had used countless times over the last decade for every emergency, but inexplicably, when every second counted, they had not called me first. They had called my sister–the only daughter of three who lives out of state. The only one who could not possibly get there in time, which delayed telling me.  

I’d just gotten in bed—so I threw on jeans and a sweater, and we drove back as fast as possible. Christmas lights and stoplights lit the darkness. Within 15 minutes, we were at the facility, but it was nearly midnight, and the doors were locked. We beat on them, rang the bell, and called on cell phones as time dragged on until finally, a lackadaisical security guard came strolling through the lobby and let us in. 

I raced up to the second floor—on the mission of a lifetime—to not let my mother die alone—only to be greeted by a staff member ten feet outside her door, framed by fake tinsel and a string of lights. “She’s gone,” she said. “Your mother died a few minutes ago.” I was stunned. She didn’t say ‘oops’ or ‘my bad,’ but might as well have. 

Had a trio of angels arrived? I’d spent my entire life making sure Mom wasn’t alone for important occasions—once even leaving a New Year’s Eve party with my new boyfriend unkissed at midnight to race the clock home—and here I’d missed the biggest transition to something new any of us ever encounter. 

I went into the quiet room I’d left only hours earlier. My mother was lying on the bed just as I’d left her. But she wasn’t there. 

I have since told myself she knew we were coming and chose to die with the same independence with which she had lived. But it’s hard to forgive myself for being so clueless. For not understanding the significance of what was happening that afternoon. For honoring the wrong priorities. 

I anticipate having a hard time explaining this in my own life review, so I’m telling you. 

But sometimes, I think the indifferent security guard was part of a plan. And the nurse who waited too long and then called the out-of-state daughter was part of a plan. And maybe three angels hovering overhead heard my footsteps on the stairs and whispered, the love that’s approaching can’t compare to the love that is waiting. And with joyous anticipation, she just let go.

A belief is not, by definition, a truth. It’s just a thought you’ve had for a long time. So, although I can’t be sure, and this theory cannot be verified, this I choose to believe.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here. 

 

 

 

Traffic is light on the bridge this afternoon as I head to Washington College, my alma mater, to sit in Smith Hall for the first time in decades. Having felt that my soul existed long before I was born and that I will continue to exist (as me, not stardust or memory) when this life ends, I’m exploring this idea in a class titled “Near Death Experiences and the Nature of Consciousness.” 

This feeling began when at the age of about 5, I ran up to the house from the river one June afternoon– breathless, barefoot– pausing beneath the shade of the redbud tree before heading inside to change out of my swimsuit. 

For just a moment, I lay girl-belly down in the early summer grass—the blades making crosshatched indentations on my arms where they were flung wide–as if I were hugging the earth because I already loved it, or hanging on as she carried me around her star for the only the 5th time, when I experienced a sudden shift in perception. 

The white-shingled house, my dad’s gray Volkswagen Beetle in the lane, the pine trees in the woods, abruptly appeared fake, insubstantial, like shimmering composites, and I thought, “Don’t close your eyes, or it will all disappear! The house, the VW, the pines, are no more real than Monopoly tokens.” I tried not to blink, not to lose the world I loved, then went in to tell my mother the news. 

“It’s not real,” I said. “The world; it’s not real.” She smiled and asked if I’d fed Kimmie, the cat. The transitory nature of matter, she already knew. 

On this perfect fall day, the cornfields along 213 North are partially harvested with lone regiments of dried stalks still standing here and there, and I’m reminded that Thanksgiving is approaching. As I pass a tree where green walnuts as big as apples have fallen to the ground, and gabled farmhouses stand shouldered by forests, a Methodist hymn from my youth comes to mind. 

Come, ye thankful people, come,
Raise the song of harvest home;
All is safely gathered in,
Ere the winter storms begin.

Religion is not required for reverence. And reverence is a spiritual practice of its own.

I pull into the lot closest to Smith Hall. The season of summer, of giving birth, of raising children has come and gone in my life. I run up to my classroom on the third floor. What’s next?

Most seats are taken even though I’m on time, and everyone seems to know someone else. I sat in this exact room as a sophomore in American Lit. My professor, who profoundly affected my life, recently died. I feel very alone, like I’m both here and not here. Real and not real. 

Don’t blink!

The instructor welcomes us—he’s wearing a long-sleeved checked shirt, he’s warm, self-effacing, and immediately explains he’s someone like us, who has been interested in where we have come from and where we are going for a long time.

We learn about the researchers who have accumulated the most data on this subject in recent decades—Raymond Moody, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, Ian Stevenson, Bruce Greyson. Each is a physician, a Ph.D., or both, and I think how much like religion this is. 

When something defies scientific proof and is difficult to test or measure, you can study the ideology, the values, and the anecdotal evidence, but you become a believer based on experience—and you can’t give your experience to someone else—you can only tell about it. 

Years ago, living alone in a big house, children launched, husband in Europe for extended periods, I kept things very orderly—neat, clean—everything put away, especially before bed at night. It helped me sleep to have my outer world highly organized.

A friend had introduced me to an intuitive, a medium, and I had gone to see her out of curiosity earlier in the week. Sitting in her office, this woman, unaware of even my name, suddenly said, “Your father is here. He’s making my heart hurt.” She pressed her palm to her chest. “I don’t know what he did, but he is sorry, sorry you didn’t have his love and attention. He has gone to school, so to speak, on the other side, and he understands now what he cost you.” 

I didn’t know what to make of this, but I was impressed because it was at least in part true. My father’s absence since the age of 9 had affected me profoundly. But going to school on the other side of life? Aren’t we forgiven and accepted as is? It seems to be the number one commonality in accounts of Near-Death Experiences—an overwhelming love and unconditional acceptance. A God who loves me as me, without a requirement that a new, improved version be in development. But. What if?

That night, I programmed the coffeemaker to come on at 6:30 the next morning, scooped in the ground beans, turned out the light on the stove, and started upstairs for bed when suddenly I remembered I had not added the water. I went back, filled the coffeemaker with water, and went to bed. 

When I came downstairs the next morning, I was startled to see a note lying on the rug at the bottom of the steps. It had been perfectly placed, centered and lined up so that I could not possibly miss it, the writing facing in my direction. I’d never seen it before, and it certainly was not there when I had gone to bed. I picked it up and read in what appeared to be a handwritten script. “There is a surprise waiting for you.”

Bizarre, I thought. I walked into the kitchen, and the coffeemaker was humming on the counter, without coffee. It had turned itself on but made nothing at all. The counter was dry, with no leaks, spills, condensation, or water. Everything I had carefully added the night before had disappeared. 

Two things I knew about my dad–he was very creative and loved practical jokes.  

That afternoon, I researched the postcard in my office and discovered it had been part of a Talbots promotional campaign about a year earlier. I’d never seen it, but clearly, it had been somewhere in the house. “So that’s how you did it,” I thought, and the light on my desk flashed off, then on again. “No way!” I said aloud, smiling, and the light clicked off, then came on again. 

I can imagine my dad laughing as he got my attention. But had he really been learning since he died? Becoming kinder? I can only tell you what happened. But. What if? 

I’ve always thought that life-as-school was a very human paradigm, a Christian work ethic laid over a divine reality that did not require it. Now I’m not so sure. I see evidence of my father often. I’ll ask for help when I’m scared, and I’ll get it. Then, a gray Volkswagen beetle will appear in front of me at a stoplight and lead me all the way home. So maybe it’s true. There’s an opportunity to keep learning on the other side if you choose to. Is it the nature of love to continue to grow? What do you think? Maybe my father can love me better now than he was able to then. 

Whether or not that is the case, there was indeed a surprise waiting for me. The surprise was the evidence that life does not end, learning does not end, love does not end. 

I think my father was saying, it’s not that nothing is real; it’s that everything is.

 Blink.  

Neither I nor the world will disappear. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

At last summer’s Renaissance Festival, an appealing young man talked me into taking off my shoe after asking me to sit with him on a fragrant bed of pine needles near the Shakespeare stage. He seemed to be one of the actors or artisans who worked there. He gazed deeply into my eyes and said he wanted to read my sole. That was his thing, apparently, like fortune tellers read palms. Only I heard “soul,” and off came the shoe.

There was nothing like this at yesterday’s fall festival, but there were other attractions. We rode in a hay wagon dodging honeybees, ate funnel cake, and listened to an informed and entertaining reptile expert’s presentation on cobras, anacondas, milk snakes and alligators—all of which he held in his hands to the squeamish delight of rapt spectators.

Did you know that only venomous snakes have fangs? The others just have tiny teeth—he claims they feel like kittens when they bite. He says when a snake’s tongue strikes you, it tickles. He weaves slowly back and forth like a snake himself as he speaks. He’s about 60 with a dark beard and receding hairline. He’s wearing cargo shorts that are a little too short, clunky boots, and a collared shirt with a navy sweater. A little like an American Steve Irwin. With loving tenderness, he pushes up his sleeves and allows various reptiles to coil around his arms. We watch from a safe distance on haybales.

His snakes have names. And relationships. The brilliantly orange-and-yellow-banded milk snake is “Lipstick.” She is remarkably beautiful. Twelve-inch coral bands are separated by yellow and black bands about two inches wide. Her offspring is “Mini Lipstick,” and her tiny granddaughter is “Chapstick.” 

Chapstick was so small when she was born, she could curl in a bottlecap. Apparently, that was not appalling. He recounts watching an anaconda eat a goat. The crowd leans in, horrified and attracted in spite of themselves, like involuntarily slowing at the scene of an accident. He’s a fan of all things reptile and eager to share the love.

So. I’ll just say it. 

I’ve killed an inordinate number of snakes in my life, and now I feel bad about it.

When my sisters and I were little, we routinely killed water snakes as they swam out of the marsh for the river. Mindlessly. Just because they were snakes. Our means of destruction? Oars. Our parents probably didn’t know about it, but our father told us that if one of us was bitten by a snake, her companion should cut the bite with a knife and suck out the venom. 

Prepare to die, I thought, looking at my sister’s leg.

I feel terrible about this senselessness now, not just because of the snake man. These days, I open windows in January to let spiders out, carry centipedes out of the basement, ferry flies down three flights of stairs to the front door, never ever kill a bee. 

The reptile man tests his audience. “What am I going to do if I see a snake?” he asks the children in the crowd. I’m thinking, “kill it” is not the answer Lipstick’s dad is looking for. The enlightened little soul next to me yells, “Walk away!” 

Our expert continues educating us. He says rattlesnakes don’t make nests, but I’m here to tell you there are snakes that do, and that there is a good reason that a collection of snakes, like a “herd” of cows,” is called a “slither.” 

I was home alone with my 18-month-old daughter Emily, preparing some spring garden beds while she staggered around the yard as toddlers do, picking up interesting things to put in her mouth. 

We had had a dead wild cherry tree taken out the year before, and the landscaper had left an enormous mulch pile between the shed, built in the far back corner of the yard, and the fence enclosing it. The mulch mountain created a wall that only an intrepid toddler would climb over to become trapped in the ten feet between the shed’s back wall and the boundary fence. 

Emily, pink cheeks and jacket, bulky diaper under a knit dress, was squatting on the far side of the pile, examining something in it when the mulch started to undulate. Startled, I grabbed my shovel to investigate and unearthed a snake about a foot long that had been warming itself in there. My baby was feet away and ignoring instructions not to move. So, I instinctively killed it. 

But before I could climb the pile and grab Emily, another snake poked its flat triangular head out. Then another, and another. For the next half hour, locked in place, I intercepted snakes as they slithered out of the mulch. Every time I thought it was safe to grab the baby, another snake was sidewinding towards her or the back porch. It was as if a switch had flipped, and I was on mother autopilot, acting without reasoning. By the time I could cross the mulch pile to sweep up Emily, I was crying for all of us.

We left the reptile man’s presentation when the cobra he was unveiling fanned its hood and took several strikes at him. There was a band playing “Brown Eyed Girl” over by the corn maze. We drifted over there.

Over the years, I’ve ended the life of a lot of creatures, but (hand up, please call on me) I’ve saved a lot as well. Daddy Longlegs I found in my pajama top on a camping trip. Wasps where I could just release the screen. A flying squirrel. A baby robin. 

If my soul is ever read, which I imagine is inevitable (and I worry wonder about), I hope the record shows that I’m really sorry. One optimistic friend says they’re in a better place. They’ve “gone into the light.” I’d like to think we all are going into the light, but I doubt any of us want to be dispensed there. 

What does it take to exchange fear for empathy? A snake named Lipstick is a start. But I think the empathy I’ve been unable to evoke is for myself. It’s just really hard to forgive myself for hurting the innocent. 

I suspect this is bigger than snakes. 

I take my regret and offer it up—Sorry, snakes. Sorry bugs. Sorry friends, sorry my kids, my relatives.  

Let the record show I did the best I could with who I was, and if I could be 8 years old again, playing in the stream at dusk when the water snakes made a run for the river, I’d bless them all and let them go. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

When I was a girl, legend had it that in the early 18th century, the pirate Blackbeard sailed up the Magothy River, attacked colonists living along Black Hole Creek, and in the midst of the fighting, rowed to shore with his first mate, carried a treasure chest 15 minutes inland, and buried it.

…In the pasture behind my house? There were signs of previous landholders and visitors at Barnstead—arrowheads, mounds of oyster shells, and once, a tiny glowing orb in the night–but where to dig for Blackbeard’s treasure was a mystery. At six, I tried to calculate how far a person could walk in 15 minutes. Mom said one mile. When I was seven, it occurred to me I’d have to adjust the distance to how far a person could walk carrying a load of rubies and gold coins.

By the time I was eight, my sister and I were making fake treasure maps in the hope of duping the neighbor kids into searching. 

Fire was our go-to method for imitating “old.” Maybe it was the opening credits of the TV show Bonanza, where flames sear a hole in a map of the Ponderosa and the Cartwrights ride through it on horseback. For the record, Mom was going to marry the handsome patriarch, Ben Cartwright. Sharon, my oldest sister, would get the oldest Cartwright brother, the taciturn Adam. Andee, as prettiest sister, would get Little Joe, also prettiest.

That left me with the middle brother. 

Hoss.

We don’t have to talk about this anymore. 

All of this is to say that we would draw our fake map, crumple the paper, burn the edges, then hide and fake-find it for the neighbor kids to marvel at. X always marked the spot.

This weekend, however, I went on another kind of treasure hunt. I joined a team of volunteers at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center for an excavation project located on the organization’s 2650-acre property on the Rhode River. We were digging at Java Ruins, a mansion built on the property during the Golden Age of Maryland planters. Previous research indicated an additional structure might have stood there centuries ago, and we hoped to unearth evidence. If this excavation produced nothing, that was okay. We’d simply try again. 

As I approached the guard gate, I said a quick prayer for those who might have used,  made, or broken whatever we might find—the request being that we somehow honor these people by finding evidence of their previous presence in the world. I offered a wish for the well-being of their spirits as well, aware that this plantation was built and maintained with slave labor. The romance of the past is always mitigated by the evidence that humanity is as unevolved today as it was before language, which is particularly disheartening when, in exchange for Eden, we were asked nothing more than to love one another. 

Jim, the principal investigator, was a very handsome man with a white beard and ponytail in a denim-blue ballcap. The morning team had dug out a site about 12 inches deep and 10-foot square, a red string delineating the perimeter. My first task was cleaning up the sides with a flat shovel. Three standing tables with sieves on rollers surrounded the hole. We lifted out loose dirt, dumped it in buckets, and then poured the contents onto the sieve screens to be shaken, much like sifting flour. We then smoothed out the remaining clumps with our gloved hands, searching for any mysterious objects.

I immediately found a shell about which I was absurdly excited. Jim! Stop the presses! This is huge! I found an oyster! 

They are white, easy to spot in the black soil, “low hanging fruit,” as one of my colleagues dryly observed with a smile. An hour later, Jim noted that Number One Digger had become pretty jaded, as I was now tossing shells in the discard pile as real treasure emerged. 

I unearthed a piece of pottery from 1780, probably part of a dinner plate, with a green edge and fluting. We found pieces of Delft China, creamware, a beautiful snow-white button, and a doll’s leg. All of which we tossed into buckets to be washed and identified later in the lab.

My fellow volunteers were as much of a discovery as those we were exposing with our hands. As conversation bubbled around me, we shared pieces of our lives with each other as we worked. 

A winsome satellite architect with salt-and-pepper hair had brought his 10-year-old son, and for the record, the kid dug more than any of us. I wanted to get to know better, an engaging woman about my age. We didn’t exchange names until I was leaving. Hers was long and biblical, and now I can’t remember it. 

Rachel, who runs the volunteer program, is an appealing ‘bird nerd’ who shared tips on finding Baltimore Orioles. (Look high!) A father had brought along his two dark-eyed, high-school-age daughters. The sisters and I smoothed the wet soil over the screen, uncertain as to what was too small to save. Our conclusion? Nothing. 

A lovely young mother with creamy skin and large glasses had brought her two little girls—about 8 and 10. The older sister had dyed her hair an intense, electric blue like she was wearing the sky on a cloudless day. I would never have let my daughters do this. I was charmed by the maturity of this woman’s mother-love and a bit wistful. I wish I could take the person I am now back in time to pay more attention to what matters. 

Less work, more play. Less judgment, more acceptance.

Less black-and-white, more blue. 

At home, I am still excited about what we found and trying to wrap my brain around the fact that I had hiked over that patch of land without a clue that a little girl, centuries gone, played with her doll there. Just as I may have played Swinging Statues with Blackbeard’s treasure just feet beneath the dry grass of my front yard or on the slope down to the river. Maybe it’s still there. Or never was. 

We made treasure maps for something we would never find because finding doesn’t matter. 

The joy is in the search. The willingness to dig deeper, look longer, love better, and try again.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

My grandfather was an amateur astronomer and a paleontologist. Interests I inherited. As evidence of these passions, Granddad built a six-foot-long, rotating telescope and amassed a coin collection so extensive he housed it in a secret closet with a fake door to fool burglars. But the most fascinating thing Granddad possessed was a 275-million-year-old fossilized tree fern pod. This smooth oval rock was the size of your hands pressed palm to palm. The stones were often found en masse, but only some contained fossils. This one had been split in two to reveal the convex fern preserved on one half, its delicately veined concave impression on the other—like a nut in a shell.

In an effort to find my own fossils, I’ve come to Calvert Cliffs, south of Annapolis, where the water is rich in 10-to-20-million-year-old remnants of a prehistoric Chesapeake. 

To get to the beach, you have to hike about a mile and a half through deciduous woods over babbling brooks and along estuaries covered in acres of lily pads. Hiking toward the bay yesterday, a snake as green and supple as a new spring leaf slipped across the path in front of me and mushrooms, glistening white and as big as hats, stood among the leaves. I overheard snatches of random conversations as we encountered other fossil hunters walking the trail to the beach.

“Why don’t we look into a program at NASA? They have openings for children,” a young mother suggested to her son.

“I’m sure they have spirits, sweetie,” a dad reassured his little girl.

And a stranger in a ballcap who had loved and lost a dog after 13 years together apologized for his young Labrador’s rambunctiousness even as he blatantly aimed it at passersby and let the lead out, clearly hoping to socialize “Duke” with the help of the public on the narrow path. We happily obliged.

So many lives intersected in just seconds–windows of intimacy that opened and closed in the space of ten steps. Like time capsules, like fireflies. Opened! Closed. Here! Gone. But what is not gone is the evidence that the world has teemed with life for millions of years, and that’s what we’ve come here to search for.

The first fossilized dinosaur bones were only found in 1815 and were not really common knowledge until 1850. Which means King George didn’t know. Jesus didn’t know. Thomas Jefferson didn’t know. Your own great-great grandparents likely didn’t know dinosaurs roamed the planet for 175 million years. 

We begin to hear the waves, then glimpse the white strip of beach through the trees. As we break out onto the shoreline, children in shorts and hoodies use sieves to search the shallows for Miocene treasure. Across a barrier of yellow caution tape, 100-foot-high cliffs that once floored the sea, shoulder the bay, and a sign informs us that the cliffs are dangerous and off limits to the public. Mr. Oliver, who is with me, says, “And that means you,” then begins intently digging a hole in the wet sand (precisely following park ranger instructions), while I am drawn down the slope of sand into the water. I look innocently across the yellow tape cordoning off the cliffs. How dangerous could they be?

Adjacent to the cliffs, the water is so clear that the time-worn shell fragments are quite visible where they lay like a ribbon along the shore. Strewn among them, on rare occasions, one can find sharks’ teeth and other ancient creatures. 

I look down and see a fleur-de-lis shape against the shards, which I scoop up before it is luffed away. It’s a 17-million-year-old fossilized shark’s tooth. I hold it up and wave to Mr. Oliver, who is digging his hole to China and coming up empty-handed. A moment later, I spot a 20-million-year-old scallop shell imprinted in a chunk of mug iron beneath the waves like I was born to do this.

A ranger strolling the beach explains to a mother and child what to look for in terms of shape. He mentions that he finds it very relaxing to just wade along looking at the shards. And it is. I could do this all day.

I don’t know why I find this so fascinating—the evidence of geologic time. That the earth has thrived for billions of years. That all our problems are so fleeting in the grand scheme of things. 

Pattern recognition is a right-brain function. The right brain hemisphere is the seat of humor, metaphor, of intuitively accepting as true what doesn’t make sense logically. As is so often the case with love. 

The left brain hemisphere, the seat of linear thinking, can’t understand metaphor, for instance, literally interpreting “out of sight, out of mind” as “blind and crazy.” Yet the right brain understands perfectly that, if necessary, we can more easily relinquish what we give ourselves space to forget. Except, of course, the memories we hold on to. Those we turn into stone. 

I think about this a lot. Giving myself space to forget. Permission to let the past go. I remember things I should release as if I am required to be the record keeper, the precise preserver of all experiences, even negative ones that serve no one, just because those things happened. Is it fair to be me without a tally sheet of how I got here?

I’m constantly telling writers that the hardest thing about giving an account of your life story is knowing what to leave out. 

The breeze is sweet, and the sun dazzles the waves. It dazzles me. I drop my fossils and everything that has come before now and walk back up the slope to sit in the sand. 

I think about my grandfather selectively picking up stones, trying to guess which ones held the story of a life inside and which did not. 

Today, I will be that rock upon which nothing is yet written. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

I chose a college where freshmen could substitute a science course for the math requirement. It seemed like the lesser challenge. 

The first day of Biology 101, a diminutive elderly woman with white hair walked into the classroom and, without a word to any of us seated in the tiered amphitheater, wrote on the blackboard:

“All things near or far, hiddenly, to each other linked are. That thou canst not touch a flower without troubling a star.” –Francis Thompson

I took a quick glance around. Was anyone else in love? Not with Biology 101. But with Dr. Katie Yaw? Clearly, our science professor possessed a poet’s soul. Later, I would learn she had omitted three words. The actual quote is, “All things by immortal power, near or far, hiddenly to each other linked are.” A poet’s soul but a scientist at heart. 

Cue the pigs. I’d been in an accelerated zoology class in high school, so the year before I had arrived on campus, we had dissected a sheep’s brain, an ox eye, and a fetal pig. Fun. So fun…

End-of-the-year relief had the remains of specimens trussed up in friends’ lockers, left on chair seats in typing with anonymous notes, and I thought that with high school graduation, I was done with dissection, but no. 

At our next class in Dunning Hall, Dr. Yaw presented each of us with our own personal pig in a plastic bag of formaldehyde. And after working on our pigs in class (tiny blue veins, little red arteries, still an incomprehensible map the second time around), we were told there was no space to store the critters in the lab, and we were to keep them in our dorm rooms. I put mine under my bed where the bag leaked, and the formaldehyde trickled across the floor to my roommate, April Kravetz’s bed. We were freshmen on our own, no parents to order us around. I don’t remember opting to scrub the floor or double bag, but I do remember making cups of Swiss Miss and watching April spray the trail with Right Guard.

This past Friday night, I found myself driving back to Washington College for a reception arranged for students and teachers in the school’s WC ALL program to mingle with others in these special interest classes. I admit I had dressed with care—wanting to feel confident and comfortable in my own skin meeting strangers. 

It was windy. A hurricane offshore. Rain coming. I had to stop for gas. Then, because I was a little late, I had to park at the far end of a huge gravel lot and tip-toe over the rocks while the wind off the Chester whipped about me so that I was pretty sure there’d been some wild redistribution of hair and clothes when I finally pulled open the door to the Environmental Center.

Approximately 50 people stood in clusters, deeply engaged in conversation. Well, I thought, feeling very much on my own, these must be my fellow students. I can’t wait to meet them!

 Where’s the bar?

I secured a glass of wine, off-loaded my purse in a nearby conference room, and found myself gazing out the huge glass wall of windows at the water, gearing up for the awkward approach to partygoers in closed circuits of conversation—the lingering in their orbit– the silent eye contact, waiting for someone to acknowledge the satellite, the exoplanet, when a man with a friendly smile came up and asked, “Excuse me, is your name Laura?” 

As it turned out, Jeff and I had gone to college together for two of our 4 years, and although we had not crossed paths then, he reads this column. “I recognized you,” he said. I was incredulous but charmed, flattered even. We talked about professors who had changed our lives, one in common, and then Jeff told me that another favorite English professor was at the reception as well.

To my delight, Jeff pointed out Dr. Gillin, whom I swear, after decades and decades (and okay, decades), had barely changed. Still remarkably handsome. His thick hair had turned a sophisticated white, but everything else was the same. I stuck out my hand and said, laughing, “Dr. Gillin! You were my professor, like, half a century ago, and it’s so nice to see you!” and without missing a beat, Professor Gillin replied, “Yes, of course, I remember you.”

The wine had kicked in, and this struck me as hilarious. Instantaneously gallant, instinctively kind, and surely not true. I decided to adopt this response myself to students I wish I remembered but don’t. We were chatting when a woman touched me on the arm and said, “Excuse me, are you Laura Oliver?” And I thought, Why yes, I am, and it’s starting to feel good to be me! Apparently, two strangers have recognized me, and my professor from sophomore year, otherwise known as the Jurassic Period, remembers me. 

This lovely woman turned out to be a current writing client of mine whom I’ve never met in person, not even on Zoom, so it was a revelation to associate her face with her name.

 

I headed home not long after this, having had a wonderful time. Why? Because some of those college years had been lonely and sad. I’d felt uncool among the cool, uptight among the hip, tightly wound and wounded when I should have been dancing, staying up all night, driving to Florida with rowdy girlfriends on spring break (and let’s face it, a little weed might have improved my attitude immensely). Instead, I wrote sonnets and villanelles.  

Pulling out of the gravel lot, I was charmed by the gift of this life, and I want you to be as well. This school has grown exponentially. The whole time I’ve been out in the world trying to nurture young lives, grow a calling, the school has been, too. And until I got to the Chester River Bridge, I could believe Dr. Gillin actually remembered me, and maybe, maybe he does. And I couldn’t stop smiling that Jeff and I both had had the world of poetry cracked open for us by the same professor—a professor who came to my wedding, I told Jeff, and a professor who encouraged me to move back here, Jeff said.  

We live in this utterly unique era—it will not come again. We know enough to recognize the expansion of the universe is accelerating; 60,000 stars a second disappear from the sky, and we will never catch them. Someday, were our species to survive the nova of our sun, perhaps on a planet in the Trappist System, we will see only our own galaxy. The background microwave radiation will have hushed, and looking up at the heavens, future astronomers will find no evidence that other worlds ever existed. They will have flown beyond our horizon. Beyond memory, beyond knowing. 

But not yet.

As the soybean fields roll by on Route 213, I feel the uniqueness of this time and I’m grateful. Born earlier and we would not have been able to track down people from our youth—to recover with the touch of a computer keyboard, the kids with whom we built forts in the woods, the MIA’s from high school conversational French, our first jobs, college—the friends who disappeared over the event horizon. We would not have the joy of reconnecting with the people who stood near us on the launch pad of our lives to find out we are still in the same orbit.

I can’t stop smiling—something never really lost has been found. All things near or far, hiddenly to each other, linked are. 

That thou canst not touch a flower without troubling a star. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.