The stone is the pledge of summers to come

When I lived in Anchorage I thought often about the word anchorage, of being anchored. It led me on all sorts of rabbit holes—the symbolism of anchors in religious tradition and saint stories, the etymology of anchor, the history of anchorites. I wanted to find something that would be a type of grounding to the place I found myself living in for so many years, to find some meaning in it all that soothed. But I kept wondering when it would be time to pull up anchor from a place that had become home, but that was rather hard won.

I loved the home we found and made into our own, where we hosted friends who later moved away, and some who left earth entirely in the years we lived there. A beloved dog who only knew that house with us. A house that we raised our now young adult son in most of his life that he can barely remember any other. But Anchorage is a tough place—like many places in the US, I’m not sure I believe that anyone should be living there who lives the way Americans expect to live. Food barged up from the lower 48 each week, heating costs in a place that range in sub-zero temps in winter, lighting up the dark when the land is tilted so far from the sun. Let alone that it is someone else’s lands who lived there thousands of years by listening and knowing the land’s rhythms, rather than vice versa. It’s a hum of dissonance I could never get used to.

Yet I knew that pulling up anchor would be a tough go after so long. It’s made me think a lot about how we grow attached to the places and things that give shape and meaning to our lives. I often wonder if the birch trees and birds at our home in Anchorage miss us as I miss them.

winter birches with Moon

Living without furniture for two months waiting for the shuffle between houses and the logistics of moving a household out of Alaska, by barge and container and then by truck, has also given me a lot of time to think about the objects we live with. Like so many things, we’re schooled to believe they have no meaning, that objects are just dead matter. And yet reader, I will tell you that seeing our dining room table, where I fed my son when he was little, where we had so many feasts and dinners and conversations return to us here in our temporary rental felt reassuring and meaningful. Grounding even, despite the continued chaos of so many boxes and weeks of move.

It makes me think too of the fires, the homes destroyed by hurricanes, tornados. And how yes, it is not the same as loss of life, but it is a loss of a life lived, known. I’m not sure how many favors we’re doing one another to dismiss objects and homes as something easily moved, or perhaps not easily dismissed but at least…ultimately dismissed.

Maybe objects are the anchors. In an age where we are so little tied to place, where we are like moths being distracted by lights that mimic the sun and moon but instead lure us into spirals of doom we can’t emerge from, maybe it’s the objects we ascribe meaning to, that make us feel some sense of home among the whirr of daily life. And not in a consumerist sense, but in the value of objects that are cared for across generations, some known, some unknown—but still valuable to both the living and the dead.

I’m of course biased because I went into archaeology, specifically because I wanted to time travel, to hold those objects from other times that were once crafted and held by more ancient hands. I collect antique books for the same reason, and am stubborn about moving them and spending on them. I don’t know where they’ll go after I’m gone. But having them with me is a solace like none other sometimes, when I need to be reminded of things that have stood in this world longer than myself. I can open a book by a beloved poet and wonder about the hands that took it up and read it before me, which poems may have also been a favorite. I don’t need to know more than that to feel the value of connection across time, anchored in an object that by chance or by purpose, continues to hold its form.

It feels ironic because I am so weary of the materialist perspective. But these objects aren’t inert material—they are objects that we live alongside, who bear witness to our lives, that hold meanings that are created through them. It’s the lives lived alongside them—including our own—that give them their power. And they do have power—they help us to navigate the routines we create, the work we must do, the living we all hope has meaning beyond what we are told we must produce.

some favorites…

In medieval times, tomorrow would have been plough Monday—the day that workers return to the fields with the plough, to return to the first work of the new year. In Old English, the term for the ploughworker was yrþling—literally earthling, a person that works the earth. I don’t want to romanticize what hard work the ploughing of the fields is, but there is something alluring about an earthling meaning someone who works with the earth. So many of us have been made into workers for other machines of economy, industry, production at all costs.

As earthlings on Plough Monday (which was reckoned as the first Monday after Epiphany or January 6¹), there were practices in some traditions where ploughs and other tools of the field were gathered into a small circle, and in the center, a hole would be left where salt and other herbs or incense would have been placed as a blessing. Sometimes the plough would then be paraded into church for a blessing. Some of these traditions are blurred into the rituals to bless the field before ploughing, where a swath of turf would be cut, blessed with milk and honey, and taken to the church for blessing before being returned to the field as protection and blessing for the crop to come. Another ritual this time of year was in the wassail, to drink to the health of the crops and later, the fruit trees—to pour cider and bread soaked in cider at its roots and in the trees’ branches, while singing the hopes of the harvest to come.

What I love about these traditions is the assurance of hope in the attention paid to objects, trees, field, of ritual becoming a type of object itself, handed down in the community, tradition, generations, the land. And in those rituals a recognition of the return to lengthening days and work, but also the abundance that will hopefully come as a result. A day when earthlings returned to working with the earth, in the company of ritual and objects of meaning.

Detail of a medieval plough (folio 77v) from The Macclesfield Psalter, probably produced at Gorleston, East Anglia circa 1330. Gold & tempera on vellum, 17cm x 10.8cm, © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

At the house we are currently renting there are two apple trees in the back yard—which still feels like magic even though there are currently no apples on their branches. Just the idea of those bare trees producing such fruit in a future late summer feels magical. So I took some bread, soaked it in cider, and made offerings to the trees’ health, in an attempt at wassail for the return to the earth’s work. I don’t know if we’ll be here to collect those apples to come, but it still feels hopeful, anchored in seeking some purpose, meaning. It reminds me of a line Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend who had moved away from their home of Amherst: “We go to sleep with the peach in hand and wake with the stone, but the stone is the pledge of summers to come.”

Sometimes the relationships we hold with what seem inanimate can become those that sustain us for the summers to come, even when we can’t yet see the horizon, or where the anchor will take hold.

1. an epiphany if there ever was one in a very unfortunate way now…but I digress…