3-16-18 MY AUNT BECKY part 7

We took Old Clairton Road all the way out through Jefferson Township,PA,chugging along in our big blue Pontiac station wagon. Back in the day, when gas was 36 cents a gallon and we had to count on finding a stray quarter in Dad’s easy chair cushion to even afford gas, Mom used to put the gear in neutral at the top of each hill and only switch to drive if it didn’t make it up the next hill on its own. We kids would thrust our upper bodies forward on the count of three, trying to help it along. All this effort was to get ourselves out to Bry and Ann Nelson’s house.

Bry and Ann had a palace of a place, with air conditioning, and plenty of yard and toys and kids to play with. I thought it was paradise. But I recall the grownups talking as they stood on the back porch, their eyes scanning the landscape behind the house. The lush, thick, sweetly scented hillside just past their upscale neighborhood was being scraped clean. Strip mining had, almost in one deep breath, torn the top layer off the face of the earth and left the under-layer raw and flat and exposed. I remember looking out over the scarred earth, where cicadas once gathered for their nightly chorus, where deer had nestled in beds of green, and whole flocks of birds once nested without being seen. I remember, even in my mindless youth, feeling a pang of loneliness when I first really noticed this stunned piece of newly exposed earth. I felt sorry for the loss.

Last night, driving home from a day full of teaching, I pondered what my cousins might have been doing that day. I imagined them gathered from their distant homes; Alaska, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee; reunited in the place where they had been raised. They have been brought together in love and grief around their mother, my Aunt Becky. I imagined them dressing her well-spent body in sacred robes, smoothing her hair, kissing her forehead; touching her with the strength required of one trying to shift a lifeless body and the tenderness borne of love and loss. Few things compel grown children to return in such a united way.

I thought, too, about myself, and my siblings, and the other cousins of our generation. We have lost our top layer. With the passing of our Aunt Becky the last of the familiar scene of our sheltered lives is gone. We are now the top layer. The comforting carpet of those who were the protectors of our childhood has been scraped away and we find ourselves exposed.  I realized that the next series of passing’s will be us. We position ourselves, like it or not, like the layer of earth back East where they stip-mined for coal behind Ann and Bry Nelson’s house.

I think it fitting, don’t you, that Rebecca Parrish Miskin was the last to go? She, whose name is pressed into the side of powerful farm implements: Miskin Scrapers. Earth movers.

Even more fitting, because she, and all those who shared her home and her blood in that generation, really did “move the earth” for us.

The original Miskin Scraper

Tomorrow we will move the earth for her, there in the familiar Idaho soil. Once she is soundly tucked in, it will forever thereafter be hallowed ground.

If you want to know a little more about her, click on this:  Becky Miskin's Obituary