At Home
This is the kind of December morning no other month can touch: the ocean tinted in watercolor pastels of low clouds, partial sun, a gentle wind, 53 degrees, and fog softened. An offshore breeze hums through Monterey Pines.
Like most people everywhere, food is the mainstay of my December holiday traditions. The colors of my favorite foods, tawney yellow, slate-blue corn, purple-brown and black beans, bright-green fresh chilies, and the deep brick-red of dried chilies, keep me anchored close to the earth, and reaching for simple pleasures. Soups, stews and chili, hot, spicy and downright sincere, served with warm tortillas.
Tomorrow I’m making posole, a rustic stew made with dried hominy that has been soaked overnight. New Mexico red chili, fresh oregano, cumin, and lean boneless pork, will be simmered together on the back of the stove for 2—3 hours. And, next week I’ve been invited to a friend’s home to assist with making my all-time favorite—homemade tamales. Heaven help me. I eat them like nobody’s business.
Gathering with new friends outdoors, eating tamales, provides a category of cheer I have especially missed since Covid began. And the good news is I’ve begun to root into my new community, and have made a few new (vaccinated and boosted) friendships.
Yesterday, I pulled out my small box of holiday decorations. This year instead of a traditional tree, I rearranged a corner table and made space to hold a four-foot (artificial) birch, with branches bare and strung with white lights, and I placed a pair of red flowers on the table, to increase the energy of health and vitality.
A potted tree-shaped rosemary graces the kitchen counter. Green, fragrant and handy. I can snip off sprigs for cooking, and when the season ends, I will plant the rosemary bush in the our family garden on the mountain.
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. —Annie Dillard
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood 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 every ending 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.
University of Nebraska Press | Barns & Noble| Bookshop & IndieBound | Amazon
“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence
"Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
