On the Hallowed Eve of All Saints' Day

On the Hallowed Eve of All Saints’ Day

I have just returned from the funeral for one of my neighbors (who I describe in the January 12, 2013, blog article). I want to be a saint like her.

One day, a couple years after we had moved to Scotland, two Glasgow police officers came to our door to ask if we had heard or seen anything connected to the mugging of a person in our street. The person was an elderly neighbor woman; another woman had snatched her handbag and then fled in a car driven by a man.

My neighbor—the one who just died—and I each reached out to the woman who was mugged, and that’s how we met. Soon afterwards my neighbor invited the two of us to tea, and since then I have enjoyed many afternoon visits with my neighbor. She welcomed around her dining room table Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians, and those who don’t practice a faith. She engaged us all—young and old, Scottish and American, traditional and feminist—in hardy discussions about current events, local history, and our personal histories.

Tea just with my neighbor always left me feeling special and upbeat. She was a great conversationalist and would ask after my parents and my church and my life. In my line of work it’s considered professionally appropriate to listen to other people and talk about their stuff rather than my own stuff. Thus I relished having a neighbor who actually wanted to listen to me talk about my stuff, as well as tell me about her stuff.

My neighbor’s front yard was a Garden of Eden. It reflected the seasons of creation, from hibernating bulbs in the winter to crocuses sprouting up in the early spring followed by bright red tulips and potted geraniums and a whole host of colors and textures throughout the summer. Even her weeds were beautiful. In late summer and autumn she and I would exchange fruit from our gardens, and I remember her giving me a flat box lined with a soft cloth filled with carefully-arranged ripe plums, for which she got bags of apples from our tree.

One year, when I stopped to smell the fragrant blossoms of the lilac tree near her front wall, I mentioned to my neighbor that I used to have a lilac bush in my yard in Minneapolis and missed it. That autumn she gave me two cuttings from her lilac tree, one of which took root and is now in our back garden, planted so I can see it from the window of my study—where I am writing this. Even though my tree is still too young to produce blossoms, each year its leaves bud, turn bright green, then change to brown and fall off, just like the mature apple tree near it. It’s only waist high but it’s living life as a tree to the fullest.