What we carry home

I sup­pose that’s the fun­ny thing about search­ing for where we come from. Sometimes you trav­el a long way only to dis­cov­er you’ve been stand­ing there all along. 

I went look­ing across an ocean. 

I found holy wells tucked into the green coun­try­side of Ireland. I found sto­ries of Brigid and women who prayed beside springs. I found ancient tra­di­tions that spoke of places where the dis­tance between heav­en and earth seemed to grow thin. 

I found words for things I had felt but nev­er quite known how to name. 

And then I thought about my Great Gran. 

Standing beside that old well in her front yard. 

Lowering a bucket. 

Pulling up water. 

Doing what need­ed to be done. 

She didn’t know she was part of some ancient story. 

She wasn’t try­ing to pre­serve Celtic traditions. 

She wasn’t think­ing about thin places or sacred springs or the women of Scripture. 

She was get­ting water. 

And maybe that’s exact­ly the point. 

We have a ten­den­cy to think that tra­di­tions are pre­served because some­one delib­er­ate­ly decides to pre­serve them. 

Sometimes they are. 

But more often, I think, tra­di­tions sur­vive because some­body sim­ply keeps doing what their moth­er taught them to do. 

A woman teach­es her daugh­ter how to save seeds. 

A grand­moth­er teach­es a child which herbs belong in the garden. 

A moth­er shows her daugh­ter how to knead bis­cuits until the dough feels right beneath her hands. 

Someone learns when the beans are ready to pick. 

Someone learns how to can tomatoes. 

Someone learns which road to take when the creek rises. 

Someone learns how to pray when there aren’t any words left. 

Nobody writes any of it down. 

They just do it. 

And then they teach some­body else. 

That’s how a peo­ple remembers. 

That’s how a cul­ture survives. 

That’s how a grand­moth­er can leave pieces of her­self behind with­out ever know­ing she has done it. 

I think about that now when I look at the well. 

For most of my child­hood, it was sim­ply part of the landscape. 

Like the garden. 

Like the porch. 

Like the clothes­line stretched across the yard. 

I nev­er thought about the fact that some­one had built it. 

Someone had low­ered the first bucket. 

Someone had dis­cov­ered that water lived beneath that par­tic­u­lar patch of Kentucky earth. 

Someone had prob­a­bly stood there before my Great Gran, and some­one else before them. 

Generations of hands had touched that rope. 

Generations of peo­ple had leaned over that stone wall. 

Generations had drunk from that water. 

And now I am one of the peo­ple who remembers. 

Maybe that’s what wells real­ly do. 

They hold what we can­not see. 

Water beneath the earth. 

Memory beneath the years. 

Stories beneath the silence. 

You can cov­er a well. 

You can build a house over it. 

You can run plumb­ing into every room and make the old buck­et unnecessary. 

But the water doesn’t cease to exist sim­ply because you stopped draw­ing it. 

I think mem­o­ry is like that. 

There are things buried deep inside us that remain there, waiting. 

A smell can bring them back. 

A song. 

A pho­to­graph. 

The sound of an old screen door. 

The first toma­to from the garden. 

A cer­tain kind of rain. 

Or the creak of a pulley. 

One lit­tle sound and sud­den­ly you’re five years old again, stand­ing beside your Great Gran while the buck­et dis­ap­pears into the darkness. 

You can almost hear her say, “Don’t get too close.” 

And you find your­self smiling. 

There is anoth­er mem­o­ry I return to often. 

Pap’s frozen jug. 

I can still see those tiny pieces of ice float­ing in the water as we drank beneath the shade of a tree in the hay field. 

At the time, I didn’t know what a gift that was. 

I didn’t under­stand the work that went into it. 

Pap had to draw the water. 

My step-grand­moth­er had to pack the din­ner bucket. 

Someone had to get up before sunrise. 

Someone had to remem­ber the jug. 

Someone had to freeze it overnight. 

Someone had to car­ry it into the field. 

That’s what love often looks like in fam­i­lies like mine. 

It doesn’t announce itself. 

It doesn’t always say, “I love you.” 

Sometimes it freezes a jug of water the night before. 

Sometimes it packs your lunch. 

Sometimes it puts a blan­ket over you when you fall asleep in the liv­ing room. 

Sometimes it stands at the stove long after every­one else has gone to bed. 

Sometimes it draws water. 

Maybe that’s why the women of the wells have stayed with me. 

Because I know those women. 

I know the ones who got up before dawn. 

The ones whose hands were always busy. 

The ones who could feed twelve peo­ple from what looked like an emp­ty pantry. 

The ones who knew how to make some­thing stretch. 

The ones who prayed while they worked. 

The ones who car­ried every­body else’s bur­dens and rarely spoke of their own. 

The ones who didn’t con­sid­er them­selves wise because nobody had ever giv­en them a title that said they were. 

But they were. 

Lord, they were. 

They knew things. 

They knew the land. 

They knew weather. 

They knew child­birth and sick­ness and grief. 

They knew when some­body need­ed food with­out being asked. 

They knew when to speak and when to sit qui­et­ly beside someone. 

They knew how to keep going. 

And they knew that water mattered. 

Maybe that is what I mean when I call them the women of the wells. 

I’m not talk­ing only about the women who appear in the Bible or the women who walked to holy wells in Ireland. 

I’m talk­ing about all of them. 

Rebekah. 

Rachel. 

Zipporah. 

The Samaritan woman. 

Brigid. 

The name­less women who car­ried water across Celtic hills. 

The women who gath­ered at Appalachian springs. 

My Great Gran. 

My moth­er. 

My step-grand­moth­er. 

And all the women whose names have dis­ap­peared from his­to­ry but whose hands are still vis­i­ble in the lives they shaped. 

They are con­nect­ed by some­thing deep­er than geography. 

They knew that life is some­thing we receive. 

Water falls from the sky. 

Springs rise from the earth. 

Seeds push through dirt. 

Babies arrive scream­ing into their moth­ers’ arms. 

Bread ris­es. 

Gardens pro­duce more than we planted. 

And every morn­ing, whether we deserve it or not, the sun comes up over the hills. 

Perhaps that is why water has always car­ried such spir­i­tu­al meaning. 

We can­not make it. 

We can only receive it. 

We can car­ry it. 

We can share it. 

We can waste it. 

We can give thanks for it. 

And when we’re thirsty, we know imme­di­ate­ly that all the oth­er things we’ve been wor­ry­ing about can wait. 

There is some­thing hum­bling about thirst. 

It reminds us that we are depen­dent creatures. 

No mat­ter how mod­ern we become, no mat­ter how many things we invent, we still need the same things our ances­tors needed. 

Water. 

Food. 

Shelter. 

Love. 

Community. 

Hope. 

And maybe a place where we can sit qui­et­ly long enough to remem­ber who we are. 

That’s what I think about when I hear the phrase thin place now. 

I don’t imag­ine some mys­ti­cal door­way open­ing in the sky. 

I think about the places where my atten­tion changes. 

The old well. 

The gar­den after rain. 

The hay field before the heat rises. 

The porch when evening set­tles over the hills. 

The kitchen before every­one wakes up. 

The ceme­tery where peo­ple I love are buried. 

The creek run­ning high after a sum­mer storm. 

The places where mem­o­ry and grat­i­tude meet. 

Maybe a thin place is sim­ply a place that makes us pay attention. 

And per­haps that is what the women of the wells have been teach­ing us for thou­sands of years. 

Pay atten­tion. 

The water is here. 

The earth is here. 

The child is here. 

The old woman beside you is here. 

This morn­ing is here. 

Don’t rush past it. 

I wish I could go back and stand beside my Great Gran one more time. 

I would watch her low­er that bucket. 

I would lis­ten to the rope creak. 

I would wait for that famil­iar splash. 

And this time, I would ask questions. 

I’d ask how long the well had been there. 

I’d ask who drew water from it before her. 

I’d ask whether her moth­er taught her to use it. 

I’d ask what she thought about while she worked. 

I’d ask if she ever stood there before sun­rise and felt that par­tic­u­lar Kentucky morn­ing when the world is still qui­et enough to hear your­self think. 

Most of all, I’d ask her if she knew how much I would miss her. 

But chil­dren don’t know to ask those questions. 

They think there will always be anoth­er summer. 

Another after­noon. 

Another buck­et of water. 

Another chance. 

That’s one of the cru­elest things about grow­ing older. 

You begin to under­stand the val­ue of ordi­nary moments only after you can no longer step back into them. 

But per­haps mem­o­ry gives us anoth­er kind of well. 

We can return. 

Not phys­i­cal­ly. 

But through story. 

We can low­er the bucket. 

We can lis­ten for the splash. 

We can taste the water again. 

And for a moment, the dis­tance between then and now becomes thin. 

Maybe that’s the clos­est thing to a mir­a­cle I know. 

I have spent a life­time believ­ing that wells were places where water came from. 

Now I think they are also places where we return to. 

We return for water. 

We return for memory. 

We return for stories. 

We return for the peo­ple who taught us how to car­ry what we were given. 

And per­haps, if we are lucky, we return to ourselves. 

The well in my Great Gran’s yard is still there. 

It has out­lived some of the peo­ple who drew water from it. 

It has watched chil­dren grow old. 

It has watched fam­i­lies change. 

It has watched sea­sons come and go. 

Spring green. 

Summer heat. 

Autumn leaves. 

Winter snow. 

It has stood qui­et­ly through births and deaths, wed­dings and funer­als, har­vests and hard years. 

It nev­er asked any­one to remem­ber it. 

It sim­ply remained. 

Maybe that’s anoth­er les­son the women of the wells left us. 

Stay. 

Keep show­ing up. 

Give what you have. 

Draw the water. 

Carry it home. 

Share it with who­ev­er is thirsty. 

And when the next gen­er­a­tion comes along, hand them the dipper. 

Let them taste what you have tasted. 

Let them know where it came from. 

Because some­day, if we’re for­tu­nate, they will stand beside that same well and remem­ber us. 

They’ll hear the old rope creak. 

They’ll hear the buck­et splash. 

And they’ll under­stand, per­haps for the first time, that they come from peo­ple who knew how to draw life from the earth and car­ry it home. 

I don’t know if the Celts were right about thin places. 

I don’t know if every holy well was tru­ly a door­way between heav­en and earth. 

I don’t know whether Brigid was god­dess, saint, or some com­pli­cat­ed weav­ing of both. 

But I know what hap­pens when I stand beside my Great Gran’s well. 

The years fall away. 

The world grows quiet. 

And for just a moment, I am a lit­tle girl again, stand­ing beside an old woman who loved me, wait­ing for a buck­et to rise from the darkness. 

The water is cold. 

It is sweet. 

And some­how, after all these years, it is still enough. 

Maybe heav­en does­n’t always come to us with thunder. 

Maybe some­times it sounds like an old pul­ley turning. 

Maybe it feels like a child’s hand wrapped around a met­al dipper. 

Maybe it tastes like cold water on a hot Kentucky afternoon. 

And maybe, some­times, the veil grows thin enough that we can hear the women who came before us whis­per­ing from the oth­er side: 

Draw the water. 

Carry it home. 

And don’t for­get who taught you how.