Pop 89: Discovering Grace
By Madonna Hamel
Just before crossing the border into Michigan, we pass a billboard promising “Discoveries That Matter.” What matters to us is an encounter years in the planning, the convergence of trillions of cicadas in the Southern Illinois countryside. My pal Avril zeroed in on the “best” location for the convergence of two broods of the luminous song-bugs who live for seventeen years underground, emerge overnight, fly to the tree tops, mate and die in a matter of days. Such a dramatic display of short-and-sweet will not occur again for another 248 years, so to be an eye and ear-witness is no small privilege, a discovery that truly matters.
The border guard gives us a sweet, if slightly befuddled, smile and hands back our passports. Apparently, one woman’s creepy crawly is another woman’s thrill of the decade. The cicada looms in my memory as a Memphis staple. It has a long history of being the soundtrack of Southern writing because of its soft, soothing buzz, which comes from the males tapping on their tambourine bellies. The cicada is, to some, a cliche. I had a prof who forbade mention of cicadas in our poems. Cicadas are benign; they glitter and eat no one, not even leaves. What’s not to love? And yet, folks look at us as oddballs for driving all this way to be near them.
We do our best to leave the interstates behind and drive only country roads. Billowing storm clouds haunt us, corn crops span the horizon, and tractors replace transport trucks as we leave Michigan for Indiana. After a pleasant wander away from interstate freeway to state highway to county road, we roll down our windows and waves of cicada songs fill the air. At 90 decibels, the sound is wild, inescapable and overpowering evidence of nature’s potency. When, after 12 hours of driving, I pull into the forested roadway of our rental cottage, Avril is half-way out the car, squealing with delight.
Early the next morning, we head to Vermillion River, where broods 13 and 19 seem to be converging, singing two songs in two pitches. Together, they sound like a combination of thousands of rattlesnakes shaking their rattles and a field of arcing sprinklers. After a couple of hours, a thunderstorm forces us back to the car. We sit for an hour telling each other stories about childhood discoveries while lightning flashes and thunder cracks. We return to Owl’s Nest. It rains for hours and hours.
It’s Memorial Day weekend and in every town on every lamp post is a name of a soldier and the dates of his birth and death - lives sadly cut short by war. American flags cover lawns and porches and stars and stripes hunting decorate front porches.
On Sunday, we attend the service at The Methodist Church in Potomac, where pastor Desmond, in American flag-festooned sneakers, reads from the first chapter of Isaiah. The Lord asks: who will I send into the world? And Isaiah says: Send me! “So,” says the pastor, conflating the prophet with the soldier, “Let us pray for those who said: Send me. And, if they make it out alive, let us welcome them home. I know many who served in Viet Nam, who hid when they returned, who were never thanked for risking their lives for the rest of us.” It doesn’t matter what we think about what was going on over there; what matters is they went with the desire to protect their loved ones.
An older veteran stands at the crossroads on the outside of town holding out a baseball cap. He asks for a dollar to go toward the ceremony at the Legion. We tell him we’re Canadian but drop a 20 in the hat. “That doesn’t matter,” he says. “You need us, too.” Memorial Day in rural America is a discovery that matters.
Signs on lawns in rural America announce their 2024 choice, as well. And it’s not Biden. But their vote does not affect their willingness to make our stay in Illinois any less comfortable. I won’t say they were interested in Canada. The mention of Saskatchewan drew blank looks but no curiosity, reminding me of my days at art college in Memphis at the beginning of the first Gulf War, when to criticize the conflict was to be called “un-American”. Best just to listen.
“Listen,” is the number one piece of advice from Debbie Hensleigh in her self-published book: “Which Old Woman Will You Be?” Debbie was the wife of the owner of our Owl’s Nest cottage retreat. She wrote her book after turning 60 when she realized, like her mother, she could have another 32 years of life left in her- a whole third of life, so what would her third look like? Debbie lived to 68, and she had some sage advice for all of us: “Don’t be bored or boring. Ask great questions, then listen.”
When not cicada-song bathing or walking along the Vermillion River, we sat on our screened-in tree-house porch, sipping coffee or beer, watching the finch couple natter at us from a branch one foot away and awaiting the lightning bugs. And I read from the Benedictine monk Christopher Jamison’s book: “Finding the Language of Grace, Rediscovering Transcendence.” His is a tradition of listening. Jamison says we live in a time of “mistrust and loneliness” and will continue to do so until we revive and re-invigorate “a language of grace to explore and restore trust and love among people.” We start, he says, by “being grateful for what we have.”
Gratitude is rooted in grace, he says. “To be grateful is to trust life; to catastrophize is to mistrust life.” Like Debbie, the monk’s primary rule is to listen. “Listen with the ear of the heart,” practice “conversational grace,” and speak only words that aid understanding and “help in the discovery process.”