Making Hospitals

Anabelle. Today’s stranger at the door. Photo by Nikita Sveshnikov.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

The road to the conference traces the curving shorelines of frozen mountain lakes, the rise of ancient crustal up-thrust and the slow fall of weather-etch and stream-carve. A river cuts a valley by just a micron or two each season. The road to the conference takes us through the wild heart of the Adirondacks, the mispronunciation of a name once cast upon the people who traveled those lake shores on foot. Corn-growing people from the lowlands referred to the humans who made home in the wild woods as porcupines, or ‘bark eaters.’ Scrappy people who scraped out an existence in the cold, rocky hollows—at least that’s how it gets told now-a-days. Clad in a fresh coating of twig-clinging snow, the woods we traverse by car cause us to pause our conversation every few minutes to exclaim their wild beauty.

The organic farming conference was to be held at a state ag university not far from a town where my neighbor’s family lives. I’ve stayed with his parents before, but when I called them a few weeks back I had a larger request: hospitality for two caravans comprised of four humans and three dogs. They would be glad to have us, they said, but their house was going to be full already with visiting family. There was no room at that inn. My neighbor’s uncle, who I’ve not met, kindly offered us beds, but then called two days before the trip to report that he’d come down with walking pneumonia.

Between the four of us we could have come up with dollars for a motel room, but given the topic we would be speaking on, it seemed more appropriate to continue our search for non-market hospitality. The word hospitality shares a root with hospital, but also hostage and hostility. Culturally speaking, the point of meeting with the stranger has always been the moment where things can go one of two ways. The health of a culture might be measured by its people’s capacity to prevent hostility through the artful expression of hospitality. On this inauguration eve it, might be helpful for Americans of all stripes to remember that it becomes more difficult to attack someone after they have quenched your thirst, sated your hunger and shown you the mattress laid out for you. Paying for hospitality changes the cultural function of the encounter.

I called my co-presenter Petra to let her know that our lodging had fallen through. Without skipping a beat, she looked through her seed-sales records for the names of former customers living nearby. Her plan sounded courageous to me; she would make cold-call requests for lodging for the four of us and our dogs. By the time my neighbor called me to say he’d worked out a room for us at his sister’s friend’s house, Petra had already accepted one of the four yesses she received within hours of beginning her search.

We would be staying with Lydia and her husband, whose name Petra couldn’t quite remember when I called her to say that Sam and I had arrived, half an hour ahead of them. What was I going to say if the husband answered the door? “Hi, I am Adam, a friend of a woman you’ve never met who called your wife two days ago asking for lodging on our behalf. If I have the address correct, Sam, Maizey and I are going to be staying with you for the next two nights. What’s your name?”

As it turned out, no one was home, so Sam and I left the car parked and took Maizey for a walk in the snow. A few hours later, as we stand packed in around the kitchen island in her warm house, Lydia goes off to collect her neighbor Rachel, who needs help walking between the two houses. Lydia would like us to meet Rachel, a remarkable poet with Parkinson’s disease. Lydia works as a nurse in an elder care home; when her neighbor’s health began to decline, Lydia offered to help her pay bills and organize medicines. From what I can tell, they quickly became fast friends. Husband David invites the whole noisy crowd to Sunday brunch before we leave. Rachel will be joining them, as she does every week.

Two days later, seven recent strangers pull in around a small dining-room table. David brings out his famous egg and veggie scramble. Petra reads a poem from Naomi Shihab-Nye describing an old desert practice of feeding the stranger at the door for three days before asking them their name or where they come from. “No, I was not busy when you came!” the poem reminds. The tremor in Petra’s voice tells me her tears are close. Rachel says that being with us takes her back to the sixties. She reads a gorgeous poem from one of her three published collections and then signs gift copies for each of us. David puts on a fresh pot of coffee so that Sam and I can fill our thermos for the road.

During our workshop sessions the day before we attempted to describe the difference between food that is for sale and food that passes from hand to hand as a gift. Going out into the modern world and telling such stories can feel a bit like trying to sing to the trees over the din of chainsaw engines. Writing this newsletter can elicit a similar feeling, especially on the eve of a day that threatens to clear-cut our remaining capacity to see ourselves as members of one living forest, touching snow-covered branch tips across class-, color- and species-divides.

I am grateful this morning, firstly for my friend Petra, who summoned the worthiness to ask a stranger for hospitality on my behalf. I am grateful for whatever amount of courage it took Lydia to say yes. I am grateful to have been invited to compost my fear that our gift caravan carried a load of inconvenience and burden. I don’t usually welcome being called a hippy, but receiving that observation from an aging poet while gathered around such a kindly-laid table made me swell with pride.

If the culture is sick, perhaps we must make hospitals by unlocking our doors to the possibility that only the strangest strangers carry the most potent medicines. If the culture is dying, that means now is the time we must create the stories that the ones who come after us will tell, while gathered ‘round the table with neighbors and strangers—the stories they will lean on when the going gets rough.

With love,
Adam