Walking amongst giants

We spent the weekend amongst giants in Northern California.

My grandmother, my uncle, my sister, and my two young children drove down from Portland to meet my brother and his girlfriend, who drove up from the Bay Area. This was something my grandmother had always wanted to do, and at 91 years old, we made it happen.

I keep thinking about the gravity of those trees. How tall and wide and strong they are. Gnarled with spongy bark that holds water, helping them withstand forest fires and droughts. And even though humans nearly cut every single one down, there are still some giants that lasted.

Some of the oldest ones have been around for twenty generations of humanity. Two thousand plus years old, standing strong and rooted, continuing to grow and expand through all of it. Generation after generation after generation. Witnessing the rise and fall of so much from one singular vantage point while also being deeply connected through the earth to one another, supporting one another.

These Redwoods are just incredible.

And then to be there with my children and my grandmother at the same time. To watch my kids running through the forest, touching these giant trees, and then to watch my grandmother walking slowly between them, too. So tiny, her four-foot-ten body, head tipped back looking way, way up toward the green canopies, her arms stretching not even one-tenth of the way around the trunks.

At one point, my youngest child was holding her hand, and he looked up at her and asked, “Grandma, why is your hand like this?”

She laughed, looking down at him, and said, “You mean, why do I have so many wrinkles?”

And he said, “Yes, why are there so many lines on your hand?”

To which she replied, “You know, my hand used to look like yours once upon a time.”

His tiny, soft, pink six-year-old hand nestled inside her beautiful and wise and wrinkled ninety-one-year-old hand.

I honestly cannot fully explain how tender that moment felt, or how tender it still feels in my body now in its memory.

Later on, as we were walking through yet another forested path, fog hanging in the air making everything look mysterious and magical, I was now holding my youngest’s hand, helping him walk over the roots without tripping, his desire to move so much faster than his body can take him.

And in front of us was my uncle holding my grandmother’s hand, his mother’s hand, helping her navigate the roots.

There we were:
A grown son holding his mother’s hand.
A mother holding her young child’s hand.

And one day, it may be the other way around. My child holding my hand the way my uncle holds my grandmother’s hand.

We care for one another back and forth. We raise our children up only to hope that, one day, they may hold our hands as we shrink into the endings of our lives.

It’s such a wild thing to be with the gravity and the largeness and the expansiveness and the unfathomableness of it all. That we all begin as small, vulnerable young children running through the forest, and if we are lucky enough to live long enough, someone may hold our hand again at the other end of life helping us to navigate our final pathways.

I just kept looking at them together, my uncle and my grandmother holding hands everywhere they walked, and felt such a tremendous tenderness.

The tenderness of aging.
The tenderness of impermanence.
The tenderness of loving people so deeply and so openly for the entirety of a lifetime.
The tenderness of realizing none of us will be here forever.

My grandmother said quietly at the end of the trip, “I’m very aware that this could be our last trip altogether.”

It feels impossible to reconcile with the fact that one day we will no longer be here together in these bodies.

And yet, it is maybe the only thing we can be certain of.

To watch people change.
To watch the world around us change.
To nurture children into maturity.
To watch our parents become elders.
To become elders ourselves.
To keep holding one another’s hands through all of it.

There is something so simultaneously painful and so beautiful about being alive to all the changes.

Standing among those ancient giant trees, watching my children and my grandmother move through the same forest together, I felt everything all at once.

It’s all just so tender, so incredibly tender.

My grandmother and her son (my uncle).