Through the Cracks

The Bi-lo witch lived between cracks of root, black concrete, and soil below a massive dying oak. Towering over a large hill leading up to a three store shopping plaza, which served the town of 500 people I lived in, the Oak never sprouted. The plaza had a small grocery store called the “Bi-Lo”, a local pharmacy, and a pizza shop, complete with a Pac-Man arcade game in the corner of the red and white checker-tiled room. In the Spring and Summer the hill next to the shops would be lush with Kentucky Blue, Rye, and Zoysia grass, barely browning before the snow covered it in December. On the opposite side of the Oak was a tiny creek that flowed year-round and iced enough in the Winter to sled over when speeding down the hill. All of this green shadowed by the imposing decay of the Oak. Though there appeared to be countless branches extending from the immense girth and height of the trunk, they were bare, scaly, and gray. If the tree were alive at any passing season, it would have flourished with growth, the likes of which would have been impossible to rake.

Even at 4yrs old I knew that tree should not have been standing. Something, or someone, was keeping it rooted to the Earth. It’s rot stretching under the dirt of the neighborhood, coiling around other roots, crawling up other trunks, leaving scabs, then scars of its presence. As it snaked its way from tree to tree, permeating its somber plight, the contamination took hold. Soon more trees stopped budding, branches began forming a drab crust, which flaked off layers of bark when touched. The adults began to whisper, then hold meetings, putting forth this reasoning, or that. “It’s a bacteria.” “It’s leaf spot. I read it in an encyclopedia.” Adults know a lot of things, but this was something they could not know.

We kids knew. We heard it stir when we rode our bikes to the pharmacy to get candy. We smelled its rancid stench when we passed it on the other side of the creek. We saw its glowing eyes and gnarled fingers when it reached for us through the crack in the trunk, when we dared get too close to catch a glimpse of the bats that hung on the branches, waiting to hear a field mouse scurry in the muggy heat of the summer nights. We knew the disease, the death of the trees was it, was her, was the Bi-Lo witch.

An ancient malady as old as the Oak. She lived under that Oak 300 years ago. In a shack. Brewed potions. Cast spells. Wandered a forest that was cut down for progress, collecting herbs, plants, mushrooms, and animal bones to make tinctures and balms. Somewhere along the way she was wronged. Cast out. Banished. One of her brews poisoned an unsuspecting local, they say. She was branded a witch. Before they could burn her, she cut a gash in the Oak, drank a potion of pine cone oil, rat blood, and dirt, and transformed into a gray mist that floated into the crack. Now she haunted that Oak and every living thing surrounding it. Her anger entrenched in the soil, killing anything that got too close.

At least that’s the story.

The adults got medicine and spread it around the trunks of the sick trees and eventually those trees got better. They didn’t even attempt to give medicine to the Oak. I wondered why? Perhaps that is what the witch was trying to do - get medicine. Get help. Heal. Perhaps she was trying to get the attention of everyone. She was lonely. She wanted to feel connected. To other trees. To other people. To life. It wasn’t her choice not to heal. Maybe it was. Maybe she was so hurt and sad, that she just wanted the trees to die along with her. I wouldn’t blame her. For wanting others to know what she feels. For wanting to heal. For not knowing how to ask for help. For feeling betrayed, as if her being sick and her wanting to heal were both equally reviled. I was scared of the Bi-Lo witch when I was 4yrs old.

Perhaps now I’m scared that I can empathize with her more than I feared her. That I too want the connection of others who are sick and I also want to heal. I hold these truths. I live them. I know what the sickness teaches me - to pay attention, to listen, to be vulnerable, human, unashamed of that difference, to live slow, to take time, to wonder, to discover, to hope, to love unapologetically, to create. Would healing do the same? I don’t know. Like the Oak and the witch, I don’t think that's my choice.

How do you reconcile what chronic illness has exposed in you with wanting to be healed? Are the connections and lessons you are learning from being sick worth the pain and uncertainty? Do you feel guilty for wanting to be better?