For the Haney sisters, Mary Branch and Betty Webb

I am shoveling snow and thinking about rain. My mother would tell us an inch of rain would be a foot of snow, so, I am not shoveling a foot and a half of snow but only an inch and a half of rain, rain transformed into countless unique crystalline forms, layered one by one, covering this place and much of the nation. Slow and steady I work the shovel, building ice walls beside the paths, losing myself in repetitions.

I was nearly 50 years old before I learned my mother was terrified of rain. We were driving to Baton Rouge to see her sister. My father was dead, and I was in his place, driving back to Louisiana. My aunt would only live another year or two so this would be the last time for these two sisters. The trunk was full of tiling tools so I could remodel my aunt’s bathroom. Mile posts passed by like rosary beads:  Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, joyful bluegrass, sorrowful mountains, glorious rivers, leading south and west. I will snap the chalk lines to square the room and set the tiles one by one, filling the grid, repetitions, looking down on an ivory sky with pink clouds– maybe white grout?

As we neared the Gulf Coast and crossed over from Protestant Mississippi to Catholic Louisiana the rain came not like Ohio rain but blinding rain, water displacing air until it’s hard to breath rain, monsoon rain. My mother beside me became a terrified girl lost in New Orleans childhood summers. What ancient trauma? 1927?  Dynamiting the levies? I got off the road and talked her down. Slowly she came back to the relative present, twenty-some years ago, back before Katrina… When my mother died, she left instructions: In lieu of flowers, please donate to Louisiana flood relief.

We drove South again a few years later for Aunt Betty’s funeral. I read a poem I can’t remember, but what stays with me was the way this old woman, Betty’s friend, lead the rosary in a voice so musical and pure. I grew up with perfunctory rosaries. My uncle was a no-nonsense parish priest in Cleveland Ohio who punched out the rosary like a boxer working the speed bag. Father John was an athlete, handball champion of Cleveland several years running. He had played smashmouth football when helmets were leather and faceguards not invented yet. His rosaries got you there in time for breakfast. But this woman took her time, saying, Hay-all Mare-eh full of grace, the Lawd is with thee… and it wasn’t just the sweetness of that voice but her body language too, her shoulders relaxed into perfect submission, not to patriarchy, but to life and death and rain, a submission no storm could ever vanquish.

I am one tiny human shoveling snow from a storm system affecting millions of people– crippling the south, icing over the nation.  I am shoveling snow and thinking about the Great Red Spot, that storm on the planet Jupiter that has been raging for hundreds of years, a storm that could swallow our earth and not skip a beat. It rotates like Katrina, but bigger and faster, counterclockwise, once every 14 Jovian days. What strange repeating prayers come up from so vast a funnel? Are they joyful, luminous, sorrowful, or glorious mysteries? Is there an eye to the storm, deep down near the surface of this gas giant?  

I am shoveling snow and thinking about rain, slowly and gently burying the dried stems of fennel at the end of the driveway, family Apiaceae, the carrots, parsleys, and poison hemlocks. A glance at the dried flower parts reveals the old name for this family, Umbelliferae, with umbel inflorescence, flower clusters with stalks springing from a common center to form a flat or curved surface, like a parasol or umbrella. These humble spent flowers stand above the snow and I remember them covered with bees a few months back.

Maybe deep in the Jovian funnel cloud is a still place with a standing dry flower, perfectly submissive to unimaginable gravity. The thought lightens the load on my shovel. I scoop the snow like my uncle leading the rosary, but I lay it down around the dried fennel like my aunt’s friend, praying from woman to woman, from sister to sister, a snow so light, rain expanded to fullness. Full of grace, full of grace, repeat and repeat, beyond time and space, the expanding fullness of grace.