Games

CONNELL SANDERS

The ghost of Mar y Oliver is haunting me

Sarah Connell Sanders

Special to Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK

For a long time, the wallpaper on my phone was an epigraph by Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Every time I went to scroll mindlessly through my social media feed, it was like Mother Nature staring me in the face.

I read a lot of Oliver for my American Nature Writing class at Boston College, preferring her voice to the likes of Emerson and Thoreau. You can keep the condescending prose of an avoidant twenty-something-woodsman, thank you very much. I’ll take a stroll through Provincetown with Oliver any day.

She may have preferred solitary nature walks in life, but in death she seems to follow me everywhere.

My husband gave a reading at his sister’s wedding on the Cape last week, and there she was again: “Slowing down for happiness, making all the right turns, right down the thumping barriers to the sea, the swirling waves, the narrow streets, the houses, the past, the future, the doorway that belongs to you and me.” He delivered this bit of Oliver’s poetry so beautifully that another guest sought him out during dinner to ask what it meant to him. He told me later he had fumbled like a boy who skipped his homework, caught off guard. I wondered if his loss for words was on account of the deep femininity woven into Oliver’s observations of the natural world and woman’s intense communion with the earth.

A few days later, we boarded a ferry to Long Point Lighthouse, the most remote light house on the National Seashore. The captain let my cousins steer our ship. The youngest one was timid at first. We whooped and cheered until she finally took the wheel. Oliver’s words rang in my ears, “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give into it … Joy is not made to be a crumb.” Tangly blonde strands whipped in the wind and the ocean glittered under her gaze.

I had been trying to book a reservation at my favorite Cape Cod restaurant, Ceraldi, every day since our arrival. On a whim, we decided to drive down to the Wellfleet pier after our day on Long Point. We stopped at Ceraldi for one last attempt. The server kindly informed us they were booked out through September. We thanked her anyway and turned to leave when a head popped out from the kitchen. Chef Michael Ceraldi asked, “Unless, you want to eat right now.” We nodded emphatically and slipped inside. Joy is not a crumb, it is a meal at Ceraldi.

He sat us down at the end of the bar. A thunderstorm had passed and the bar’s former occupants elected to sit outside. At my place was a small piece of card stock with a picture of a goddess and a question I recognized: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I think Mary Oliver might have liked to eat at Ceraldi, cherishing her Lucky Lips oysters and a chilly bowl of musk melon soup with her life partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook.

The courses arrived with descriptions that could double as poetry. “Risotto al vino Rosso, beau’s black garlic, garden sage, Chequessett chocolate nibs, tops field tuffet.” We sipped glasses of Sancerre rose, green juice, mushroom tea, and lavender chamomile. Vanilla panda cotta with fresh figs made my eyes grow enormous and complicated like one of Oliver’s grasshoppers. I snapped my wings open and floated away.

We decided to extend our stay with a few days in the woods. Our tent is in the same forest Oliver so famously wandered each day. The story goes that she once went out without a writing utensil and from that point forward, she hid pencils in the Pinewoods. I will spend my last day here looking for them and repeating Oliver’s words to myself, “To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

Long Point Lighthouse is the most remote light house on the National Seashore. SUBMITTED PHOTO