Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 77th post, Helena recalls her decision to move to her house in the woods nearly 30 years ago. Enjoy!
Tree Fall
The first time I went to the house in the woods myself, I stood on the porch and watched a tree fall. I must have turned my head just in time. The tree, 20 feet into the woods northwest of where I stood, collapsed; the top broke off and slipped to the ground. I heard the sound. A thud and crackles. That was another sign, but of what? If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course that ran through my head, and I said it out loud. I was there to hear it. I was there.
That house and its woods scared me. But when Michael said, “Maybe you’d like to have it,” on my sister’s second Yahrzeit, I saw stars—white points of light moving in a sky inside me. And I heard myself say, “Yes.”
Then Frank Pelligrini, my chairman, retired. I lost my job of 16 years, an adjunct assistant professor in the art department at SUNY Farmingdale. I was struggling to pay the mortgage on the house in Huntington. But I’d heard my own voice say that Yes. Where had that come from but a place deep, deep as the sky is high, those stars moving in that inky black like fireflies? I am not a rational person. I don’t know how to reason life through. I’m a person who trusts mystery. It seems to be the way I am made.
The house was not a beautiful place. I knew there would be taxes on that scrawny, scrabbly chalet three hunters had built for their hunting camp. There was an old trailer and a falling-down out building filled with broken things, tossed there, and the smell of mice. Roughhewn, a euphemism. Trees grew right up to the house, so it was dark inside and smelled of mold. The three guys who had built it used bathroom windows and old appliances, anything they must have scrounged to spend hunting weekends there. Hunters. My sister loathed hunters. She didn’t eat meat or wear leather. The sight of dead deer tied to the tops of trucks so pained my sister, Jo, that one weekend she stuffed Michael’s clothes, like a strawman, and tied it to the top of their car. That’s how she rode back to Queens. Michael took the bus. That became legend, my sister being honked at, yea and nay. Jo was reckless, dramatic and angry. She’d gone to law school to work against the abuse of animals. She had no tolerance for people, unless they were one of us. Animals were the sentients she identified with, the voiceless. Michael must have felt like a target, a man, not an alpha man, but no pushover—a soft, a human man. So it was ironic that they would buy that place.
*
There was an old, crazy, fire hazard of a heating stove I would have hauled away. A squirrel had eaten through the roof into the house, and there was plaster on the plywood floor.
Jo, and Michael lived in their heads. It didn’t matter where they were. They were lawyers. Jo broke the barriers in animal rights law, all pro bono. Michael had become a patent lawyer for Philips Electronics. But that year Jo was working for the Humane Society. They were okay. They’d each gone to law school on the money we all inherited—my parents’ estate. So it felt karmic the place would come to me.
They were happy in that funny house and spent weekends there. They breathed life into it. It matched them. My brother-in-law’s ham radio wires strung everywhere. Legal-brief-writing people, good people, great people, saints. The physical world meant nothing to them. My sister felt at home in Sullivan County where it smelled like camp and the bungalow colony where my family had spent its summers. The house was only a mile from Camp Olympus, the first camp we’d gone to, eight miles from Camp TaGoLa, the last one. Parksville and Sackett Lake, names from childhood. My sister’s nostalgia for those summers was almost the shape of her.
They’d come up on a weekend, seen a realtor in Livingston Manor who led them back over a dirt driveway through 12 acres of trees, Beech, Canada Spruce, Wild Cherry, Birch, and an old logging road that began at the clearing where the shambles of the chalet stood. My sister fell in love. “It needs some work,” said the realtor. They said they’d think it over.
Here’s what my sister told me: Halfway home, they passed a diner. “Michael, pull over!” “Huh? Why?” “I have to call the realtor. We have to say yes!” So her yes was the first, four years before mine.
They bought the chalet and seven acres of trees for themselves—a notched rectangle. They bought the other five acres for me, hoping I’d build—a perfect, long rectangle of woods and a small clearing with a Sullivan County house. If you’ve been here, you’ll know what I mean. Sullivan is a poor county. There are empty houses here.
How I would build a second house, a children’s book writer trying to break into an impossible market, I can’t imagine. For all of the logic in my sister’s brilliant mind, she had a gorgeous, a monumental imagination as grand.
I’d spent a few nights at the place with them. All I can remember is sitting together on its unfinished plywood floor, getting splinters, eating pizza and laughing. Michael was funny; Jo called him one of us, her highest compliment. I was funny too, but Jo beat the band. My sister was the funniest person I’ve ever known. And the three of us together transcended everything—feeling spooked at bedtime, sleeping upstairs alone on an old ticking mattress on a creaky spring bed frame that came from one of the hotels that had closed by that time. We were all still young and full of our dreams.
Then my sister got sick. Two years later, she was gone. Michael went up to the house some weekends. He told me it was lonely. So the place stood empty again. Then Michael met Georgette and they got married. They had two children, sons. Michael was like my brother, and we all visited. Jo was always there, a ghost. The place spooked Georgette.
“But the taxes, Michael,” I said on that second Yartzeit. “I don’t know how I’ll afford them…”
“Don’t worry about that”, he said. Did he mean he would pay them? He might have. Maybe he was just Michael, laidback, believing things take care of themselves. It was reassuring. I was scared, but I’d seen those stars.
Weeks passed, months.
Then I had a luminous dream, a dream you don’t forget. My sister stood before me, lit up in a white gown. I was kneeling, my hair was white. Growing out of that white hair was a taller, perfect circle of hair, set apart by its texture, stiff, straight. I read about that circle of hair later in one of Thomas Merton’s books. A tonsure, the mark of a monk. My sister blessed me, touching both my shoulders. I called Michael that day and told him I was ready to move forward, ready to transfer the title of the house to my name.
Michael was going into the hospital the next day. He was born with a congenital defect in his heart; the surgery had something to do with it. The surgery was serious. I felt he was relieved I’d accepted the house formally. We’d always worried about Michael, wonderful Michael, one of us. One of the people in this crazy world that knew something of its secret. Maybe only that there were things funny enough to laugh the kind of laughter that delivers you. At the center of that laughter was the gravity of the way things are. One of us—what did that really mean? I think all three of us felt like people not quite of this world. We were the strangers in a strange land. It took time for me to understand that.
I put together every penny I had. I stopped submitting manuscripts, rebuilt the house, replaced its windows. I had the old trailer hauled away and the shed taken down. I had trees cut to let in light and kill the mold. At 52, I was strong, starting again. I dug gardens, prying rocks from the clay soil left by the ancient movement of glaciers, gardens that surrounded the house. I planted anything I found at the farmer’s market. Willy nilly gardens, wild and beautiful.
Nearly 30 years later, I still live here in the mystery of this house, wondering what I’m doing here. My hair turned white, white as it was in the dream of my sister. I remember my words now, when I woke up that day, words about the tonsure—I called it a hoary crown.
*
That Buddhist saying? If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? I was there and I heard it. You can be someplace and not be there. So you can’t see and you can’t hear. That day I was scared and excited, full of that fine attention that emblazons the luminous moments of life on a soul. There, an unwilling monk, filled with stars and my sister’s blessing, and the wonder of the gift from my brother, Michael. I had been shown that I bore a perfect tonsure. I heard that tree fall. I was there. If and when I am to leave this place will have to be shown to me. I am not a person who can reason things through.
Have you ever had a strong intuitive feeling about a physical place? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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