High Tide in the Redwoods: Memoir, Migration and This Wilderness in My Blood
High Tide in the Redwoods: Memoir, Migration and This Wilderness in My Blood
By Terra Trevor
My bags were packed, boxes stacked, and escrow was closing. We were downsizing, and moving from the city where we lived for the past forty-three years. We didn’t have a new house to move into, not yet. While we searched for another home we would live in a (luxurious) 26-foot travel trailer on land a family member owned in the redwoods in Northern California.
The morning our belongings were loaded onto the moving van, I walked through the empty house thanking the space, saying goodbye to the home that sheltered my family for three decades. And before I got into my car to make the long drive, I checked my email.
The editor at a university press I value sent an email saying she liked the manuscript for my new memoir. The press was interested in publishing, and asked for revisions.
Oh, for joy. Happiness. And crazy-making. Take on the task of revising my book manuscript when I was in the process of uprooting my life?
Time driving alone in the car settled my thoughts.
When I arrived at sunset I was filled with calm, strength, trust.
The trailer was parked by the barn, in a meadow, surrounded by redwoods, near the house where my grandkids, daughter and son-in-law live, with other homes nearby. Still, it was more off grid than I expected.
Multiple times each day I walked uphill to the house, downhill to the car, up again with groceries, drinking water, to do laundry, take a shower at our daughter’s place. We didn’t have trailer hookups and needed to be mindful of gray and black water waste. But we had electricity, internet, plenty of cold well water running from the tap. I gained respect for my privileges and felt positive I would become a better person, and I have.
Every day and most nights are bookended with writing. Writing backed against hiking hills with my grandkids and the dogs, or house hunting. I reached wide to be tender, loving, with my husband, and my family. When I write, I go deep. It’s not easy to move between my mind-world and the outer world.
After a day of writing my daughter’s kitchen is the place to be. Not all of our meals are complicated. Yet the days when we cook from scratch, gives us time to focus on gratitude. The dogs are at our feet, watchful, my grandkids help chop, mix, stir, then dash off, lost in play, then return to the kitchen. We clear the day’s clutter off the table, sit down and savor every bite.
Some people sit and meditate in silence. Others climb Kilimanjaro. Along with my 2-mile morning walk in the redwoods, I hiked to and from the trailer often. When we first arrived, the ground was muddy with rain water. Soon yellow, white and purple flowers dotted the earth and my footsteps formed a path. The flower season was short, the weather warmed. Green foxtails appeared, and quickly dried, sticking in my socks. At first, I grumbled about daily supply hikes in the rain or heat, my arms loaded, and then it became my mediation. I enjoyed the journey, paying attention to the earth, sky. Walking mindfully, stepping carefully.
Eventually we bought a tiny place near the ocean, twenty minutes from the redwoods, and while we waited for escrow to close on our new home, I worked on my memoir.
On my last day writing in the trailer, I opened the window wide. The wind played in the trees and the air was heavy with the scent of mountains and earth. I had the window open to keep me company. I was lonely.
I love being with the people I love, and I am also happy alone, and I am never lonely. Yet for the past week I felt like poor me, I must sit down all alone and write.
Then I started thinking about how the characters in my favorite books are my friends. Relationships I remember long after I finish reading the book. My most loved books leave me feeling the author invited me over for a long chat at her kitchen table. I favor memoirs so intimate I feel myself leaning over the shoulder of the writer, feeling her thoughts and sneaking into her life.
Thinking about the characters in my favorite books opened the window wider for me, and I found the root cause of my loneliness. With revisions nearly completed, already I missed the characters in my memoir.
While writing I had intimate chats, wandering back over time with Marie, Ann, Mary Lou and Irene. Dancing with Irene long after the moon was full, wearing moccasins beaded in colors of sunrise, clouds and blue skies, her buckskin dress swaying. Irene danced the powwow competitions, Women’s Buckskin style, Northern, in the Golden Age category. At seventy-five with her tight jeans, blue-black hair and flirty personality, Irene reminded me so much of my aunt Jo, I had to keep reminding myself that she wasn’t my aunt Josephine.
I missed the flow of these women, the ones with the grandmother faces, walking the seven ways. How they made me laugh, and told me the truth even when it was hard for me to listen.
While writing, I brought them all back, made them come alive again. The women who over three decades, lifted me from grief, instructed me in living, and showed me how to age from youth into beauty.
About the Author
Terra Trevor is a contributor to fifteen books, the author of two memoirs, with essays in numerous publications. She is the granddaughter of sharecroppers, and was raised in a large extended family in a banjo and fiddle tradition, rich with storytelling and music. Her stories are infused and shaped by her mixed-blood identity, and her connection to the landscape. She lives with her family on the northern edge of the Central California coast, based between the ocean and redwoods, but calls the mountains home. Her new memoir, We Who Walk the Seven Ways, will be released from the University of Nebraska Press in May 2023.
Website and Blog
https://www.terratrevorauthor.com/
https://www.facebook.com/terratrevorauthor/
Goodreads
WE WHO WALK THE SEVEN WAYS
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s new memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elder friends embraced and guided Trevor (Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how the end is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
Coming May 2023
Pre-order
https://www.amazon.com/We-Who-Walk-Seven-Ways/dp/1496235185
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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Oh, thank you, Terra, for sharing your feelings so deeply with us, your readers!
Thank you Pat. I’m thankful the editor invited me to write this piece. I had great fun writing this essay and wandering back to my days in the trailer in the redwoods, rewriting and revising my new memoir.