Author Jennifer Lauck

A Novel Memoir of Mary

Coming soon!

Let It Be is a novel that attempts to answer the question: who would the Virgin Mary be if she were among us today, as a modern woman? A sensual and earthy fable, this novel also asks timely questions such as: Was the Virgin Mary created as an antidote to Eve in the Garden of Eden? Is divine conception possible, is it a metaphor, or both?

In Let It Be, Jennifer uses a light touch to skillfully creates a magical and yet grounded setting on a filbert orchard in Oregon, coloring in her story with delightful and deliciously complex characters who are tested and challenged on each page.

When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom,
let it be,
let it be
~ Paul McCartney

Part I

"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you eat of it
all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
And you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow,
you will earn your food
until you return to the ground
since from it you were taken
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.

~ Genesis III, the Fall of Man

Preface

Jewell, Oregon

No babies could be born on our land. We were cursed. This curse lifted when Jessie was born to me, at the age of 17. Before Jessie, we lived with a heavy cloud over our heads. According to my grandmother, Jewell, we were both cursed and in exile. She would say, "We are like the first man and woman, thrown out of the garden. We lost our paradise."

Grandma Jewell had a grim way with words!

Of course, I can make jokes because I did not think the way she did. In my view, we lived in a heavenly paradise where Jessie was tossed in my womb by the hand of God, as randomly as filbert pollen is tossed into a waiting filbert flower. Conception. Divine conception.

After this divine conception, all of our curses blew away on the wind and babies came quite easily to us, conceived in the way we understand: a man, a woman and the making of love.

You will shake your head and say, "No, this is not possible!" Alas, your confidence is a luxury I do not have, for I know what I know. Yes, I have had doubt and I have lost confidence in what I experienced in my own body. Yes, I have had moments where I might even agree with you. But then another part of me, perhaps the part that is going mad, argues for my truth. Rather than succumb to these inner arguments, I have agreed to step back and look at the biggest possible picture. The way I do this is by turning to pen and paper and writing the story of our lives from the beginning, when we arrived, exiles in paradise. Perhaps the beginning will lead me to the end; I am not sure yet. I do know that writing our tale is akin to pushing a needle into fabric and pulling it out the other side. I am stitching myself together with thin threads of memory. Without this stitching, I would be completely frayed and tattered and, therefore, useless.

So many questions whisper at me from the stillness of the present and fade, unanswered, into the abyss of the future. They are my undoing. And so, I shall address these questions by not addressing them at all.

Instead, I shall tell you about the filberts. They were the first miracle.

We are farmers. Filbert farmers. Our orchard is nested in a hidden valley at the base of a great mountain range. We have five hundred acres of wild land and live in the center of this land with hundreds of filbert trees.

If you have not eaten a filbert, you do not know what you are missing. It is rich and mellow and unforgettable, leaving you with a longing for more. The flavor of the filbert is love, or perhaps profound love, or even better stated, the taste of profound lovemaking.

Have you ever, in your life, made love for so many hours and days and months you disappear into the center of the universe where there are no names, no edges and no ideas? This kind of lovemaking is caressing the face of God; it is calling Him your lover because there is no other way to explain it to the small brain lodged inside the human skull; it is joining with every living thing, breathing the same breath and knowing, without doubt, that every cell of every being is one.

I have made love like this.

I have had this kind of love made to me.

I have also watched the filberts and this is how they too make love.

Each new year, when the calendar rolls over from December to January, the filbert goes into action as well. The branches push out exotic and sturdy little red flowers, as well as catkins, which are long, dangling things loaded with golden pollen. The flower and the pollen within the catkins are two lovers separated by space; they wait for winter winds to roar over the mountains. When the winds come—and they always do in this part of the world—the pollen is blasted from the catkins and flies into the heart of the sticky red flowers.

Once the wind has done its job, the flower closes her petals around the grains of pollen and the lovers relax together until May.

This is very important, so read these words carefully. Five months of lovemaking go on inside the heart of each filbert flower without a by-product.

You can get out your scalpel and your microscope, you can cut the filbert flower down the center and you can splay open this container of love, but such violence makes no difference to the lovers. No amount of research will net evidence of their union. You will find no formation of a nut. You will find only the circle of vast possibility, which is the essence of love.

As if that is not interesting enough, think about this: The filbert relies only on the filbert. It creates its own flower and its own pollen. Of course, if you want to get scientific, a single tree is not self-pollinating but instead relies on the pollen from another variety, thus the need for an orchard. But the asexual quality of the filbert is a story all its own. No outsider comes in to do the job. No bee is required. The filberts give and take from each other.

As I regard my own family exiled in this paradise, I see we are not so different from the filberts. My grandfather, Costanzo Alberi, used to say we kept to ourselves on our orchard because all we needed existed on the land. To leave the orchard was to take a great risk, one where we might mix with influences that could pollute our purity.

"Think of the pollen," Grandpa liked to say. "Once it is carried beyond the reach of the flower, it becomes useless, nothing, a speck of nothing."

These are dusty words, spoken long ago by my Grandfather, but they are far from useless to me now. I am banking on the belief that a speck of wisdom exists in something as tiny as a speck of nothing. It must! If I am to hold on to my life and the lives of my remaining family, I must believe the minute details of our existence mean something more than can be seen at such a hazy moment, when clarity is shrouded.

Please do not assume that I am being overly dramatic. You will see that is a quality that has never been assigned to me. I am confessing instead to a kind of madness, perhaps a madness that only a woman who waits can know; but it is true I am near-crazed by the disappearance of my son, Jessie and my beloved, Jack. They have been gone for six years now. And these have been six of the longest years of my life.

Before Jessie and Jack left, our years were filled with golden pollen and good fortune. Yes, death came to us—you cannot avoid death. Yes, we endured illness and one terrible attack. But again, I digress. For all of our family's time in this valley, we have been safely contained to our orchard and our routines. But with Jessie and Jack gone, to a place I cannot reach or even know, I am haunted by Grandpa's words. Have my Jessie and my Jack gone so far away that they are now useless, nothing, specks of nothing? How much longer will they be gone? If they return (look how I write this word, if, how I detest my own doubt); if they return will they be different than they were?

And there I go again, undone by my own mind! I must renew my agreement with myself. I shall tell you my story, making you my companion, even in silence. Let me be clear: I am not as good as Grandma at weaving a tale but I will try.

1. Paradise in Exile

Take a globe of the world, slice it open, spread it flat and look between the 40th and 45th parallel. Find Spain, Italy, France, Greece, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkey. Find winds that blow at the right angle and with the right pressure, a sun that shines down its warming light for the perfect amount of time and a climate that isn't too damp or too dry. Here you will find the optimal conditions for cultivating filberts.

The genesis of our orchard began in the fertile and perfect paradise of Tuscany, near Siena. The family name, Alberi, is Italian for trees. Oddly enough, in the beginning, the Alberis grew grapes. That is, Grandpa Costanzo and his brother Joe grew grapes. Their father was a vintner.

This is where Grandma Jewell would have started the story. In her storyteller's voice, rising and falling like the melody of a beautiful song, she would have said: "When he was no more than a slip of a boy, Costanzo had a dream of trees growing in a fertile valley and he dreamed of hovering over these trees, like a bird. It is this dream that sent him off the vineyard and to the filbert."

Unlike now, when dreams are considered less-than-desirable side effects of the night, Grandma called the dream a gem.

"One doesn't cast a gem aside," Grandma liked to say. "She picks it up and puts it into her pocket."

She went on to stress that this particular dream was, to her mind, more than a dream. Flying and colors in a dream, to her, confirmed it was a vision.

"There is a great difference between the two," Grandma would tell me. "A dream is something for you to know now, a tiny bit of light to see yourself more clearly. But a vision tells what the future holds."

Grandpa Costanzo's future with the filberts was determined by his birth order. He was one of the youngest of ten sons and would have no opportunity for inheritance on his father's vineyard. Thus, he was dispensable; in fact, he was more valued as an apprentice. Not long after his birth, he was promised to the filbert farmers who lived near the Ligurian Sea. This was considered a good arrangement: he was one less mouth to feed, he was assured a bride (Grandma) and his family had a place to trade wine for filberts.

Hence, when Grandpa Costanzo was sixteen, he left the orchard and became an apprentice on a filbert farm.

In Italian, the filbert is called nocciola. No-key-o-la.

The nocciola, like a woman, takes time to know intimately. This was according Grandpa Costanzo's future father-in-law. For seven years, Grandpa was his diligent student, learning the intricacies of filbert pollination, pruning and production.

Seven is a sacred number. Creation took place in seven days. There are seven days in the week. Seven is the number of God and wisdom. Seven is also the number of cycles of the moon.

In those seven years, Grandpa also learned the ways of his bride to be, Jewell. When he first arrived in 1871, she was just a child of nine—but immediately he knew she was no ordinary girl. Her family was called Strega. Stregas were women who, through oral tradition, were taught the healing arts. Some called them witches but this was dangerous language. A witch could be exiled by the church or, worse, burned to death. Entire lineages of Stregas were wiped out by this single word "witch." Fortunately, Grandma's family kept a careful silence. They did not talk of their healing powers and sparingly referred to themselves as midwives.

But for love or perhaps pride (Grandma had a good deal of pride), the silence was broken. As a young girl, Grandma would sneak away from the cluster of her aunts and sisters and teach Grandpa Costanzo her Strega secrets. She taught him how to use filbert branches to divine water from the soil. She taught him how to listen to the wind and taste the rain. She taught him the difference between dreams and visions.

Grandpa was captivated by Grandma and kept her secrets well enough. In 1878 they were married. She was 16 and he was 24.

This is where the story should have ended: Grandpa Costanzo marries Grandma Jewell, Grandma inherits the land, passes it over to Grandpa and they make many babies. The End!

But this is where the story truly begins.

Grandpa Costanzo did marry Grandma Jewell but soon he left Italy and traveled to America.

Why?

Did someone find out about her sharing of Strega secrets? Did her family cast her out? Or was it the church? Did they try to persecute her in some way?

All of my life, the only story she handed me was that Grandpa Costanzo came to America for the trees. "He left Italy to follow his vision of hovering over trees as a bird, that is that."

As a child, I would persist in my questioning: "But Grandma, why not stay in Italy, on your papa's land?"

"In Italy, my papa grew filbert bushes," Grandma insisted. "Filbert bushes still grow there today. Stanzo dreamed trees. In America we shaped bushes into trees and this is why America!"

It is true, filberts began as bushes and later, in America, they were shaped into trees. But that modernization came many years later. How was this future cultivation of the filbert the impetus for Grandpa (and later Grandma and Brother Joe) to leave their beautiful Tuscany? Why not just stay in Italy and shape the Italian bushes into trees?

I tried to get answers to these questions but it was never good to question Grandma Jewell. There were things she would tell and things she would not tell. The true answer to my question was one of her long-held secrets. I would eventually extricate this secret but I didn't know the price such an extraction would exact.

But first, Grandpa Costanzo. There he was, crossing the sea and landing in America! When he entered the land of the free, he was named Stan Albert by a harried customs officer who could not understand Italian.

With his new American name and a bundle of filbert bushes wrapped in burlap, Grandpa Stan Albert found the 45th parallel and sailed down rivers, climbed over mountains, hiked into the heart of Indian Territory, and survived a winter that should have killed the bushes and Grandpa too. But he was a man of determination. He kept his feet moving west until he dropped into our valley at the northwestern edge of America. Another few steps and he would have fallen into the sea! Gratefully, this valley was worth his treacherous journey. It was not Tuscany, the manicured Garden of Eden of his childhood, but it was virgin soil and it rose to him like an open hand, palm up, begging to be taken. No one lived in this valley or had staked a claim. Costanzo, Stanzo, Stan, Grandpa—this man of many names—set down his bundle of bushes, took the hand of the valley into both of his, and shook it hard. Before he let it go, he named it Jewell.

* * *

Geographically, Jewell lies on the Nehalem River, which winds down from the Cascade Mountains. The Nehalem is a bit like an unruly thread stitching together a tapestry of towns known as Vernonia, Pittsburg, Birkenfield and Mist. After Mist, the Nehalem drops into the sea at the town of Manzanita.

If one senses Jewell is a destination of any sort, put that out of your mind. Even now it boasts only a grange hall, a church and a schoolhouse. When cars arrived, Jewell didn't get a gas station and we've never had a market. All that transpired in Vernonia, a town created to meet the needs of the lumber trade, which are much more demanding than needs of the filbert.

What you will find in Jewell is our orchard, a great deal of lush green land and another character, the wind. Ours is a valley of movement; our wind is steady, often fierce. It rises off the Pacific, rushes over the mountains and drops restlessly into our valley before moving east.

Grandpa wrote of the wind in his many letters. He also wrote how the valley was a paradise, as he had imagined it, how his filberts grew twice as fast in the rich American soil and how he had claimed five hundred acres without dispute. In his last letter, he wrote:

Dear Otto: Bring my Jewell and as many three-year-old bushes as her father can spare. If you like it here, there is always room for you too. If you are not called to stay, you go home with an adventure story! Your brother, Costanzo

Otto, the number eight in Italian, was the eighth brother in the Alberi line. He was christened Joseph but eventually became Brother Joe, not because he was a monk or a priest, though he never married and was a man of great spiritual devotion. Brother Joe was simply Grandpa's brother, Joe. He had been off the vineyard and at the filbert farm in Italy for five years himself. The story goes that he was up for an adventure and so he brought Grandma Jewell and more bushes, as Grandpa requested. But if you knew Brother Joe, you would know that adventure was not something he would naturally embrace. He would tell me that the journey to and across America was long and difficult and this is why he stayed.

Thus, The Jewell Nut Company was born. Grandpa, Grandma and Brother Joe planted, pruned and prayed without rest and, by the seventh year, collected a harvest. Our books show one hundred and fifty bushes per acre, with forty acres planted. Do the math and you'll see that is 7,500 bushes! Even if you don't understand the many needs of the filbert and how no machines were employed in these early years, the number 7,500 commands respect.

Grandma used to say, "If you are very fortunate, great effort yields great abundance." Such abundance dropped into the bank account of The Jewell Nut Company and with this very good fortune, barns and houses were constructed. The house for Grandpa and Grandma was big and roomy enough for all the children Grandma hoped to have. The cabin for Brother Joe featured just one room since he had no plans for children (or marriage). No, Brother Joe was married to God. It was a union that didn't require ordination as a priest. Joe didn't want to be a priest, but he did want his own church and, one day, perhaps the companionship of a Catholic priest with whom to debate the Word.

So a church was constructed for Joe as well. It was a small white building tucked deep in a stand of whispery pines, just across a county road that cut through the land. It wasn't a public church; it was intended to be a place of personal worship for Brother Joe. But after a few years passed, he left the doors unlocked for anyone who wanted to stop in and be still. He maintained no formal schedule for anyone but himself, making his way to church every morning and again, every night.

Grandma Jewell never visited the church. She said spirit, which she called numa, was everywhere and contained in everything. Grandma had no patience for the idea of spirit being contained in a building or a book. She had one rule: Harm nothing with hate.

How I loved her and we were bound tightly to one another by two of her greatest sorrows. One of them I will keep secret for now, but the other must be told.

Grandma could not bear a child.

When spread over time, certain facts of our life seemed to expand or contract based on the particular story being told. There is no written record, so it is hard to know exactly how many babies Grandma Jewell lost. Sprinkled into the many stories she told, though, I've heard as many as seven and as few as three.

Of course a child came to her; how else would I be here to tell the story? But this child did not come to her while she and Grandpa were at home on the orchard. She conceived my mother while on a trip.

After fourteen years in America, in the fertile paradise that could grow hundreds of hearty filberts, Grandma Jewell and Grandpa Costanzo journeyed to Seattle together to deliver the annual harvest. The trip took more than two months, since travel required horse, wagon and train, and somewhere between Seattle and home, Grandma Jewell had a dream she was pregnant. On the weight of this dream alone, she refused to return to the orchard with Grandpa, believing with her heart that the valley was not a safe place for human gestation. Instead, Grandma stayed at a boarding house in Portland and before the harvest of 1895, she gave birth to a child she named Anne.

Anne is my mother and from the moment she took her first breath, all my grandparents hopes for the future of The Jewell Nut Company took root in her head and heart.

It might seem a burden, this much responsibility, but Grandma Jewell called my mother a serious and focused child. At three she was working the trees with Grandpa.

By six, she could recite the seasonal cycles of the filbert. By twelve, she could translate perfect English from imperfect Italian. By fourteen, she took over all the bookkeeping.

She did not go to formal school, she did not have girlfriends and she did not pine for the world beyond the boundaries of the wild land. By the age of sixteen, my mother put in as many hours as Grandpa, Grandma and Brother Joe, and, if asked, she would say she preferred her own company to that of anyone else. She seemed to thrive in solitude and this made her more like Brother Joe than Grandma and Grandpa, who were loud and boisterous, capable of celebration and argument in equal parts.

When my mother was nineteen, Grandma broke into her silent world. What about marriage? What about children? What about grandchildren?

No, no, no, my mother responded.

But "no" was not an option. The future of the orchard depended on her making a child. It was decided, then, against my mother's loud protests, that Grandma Jewell and Brother Joe would return to Italy, to find a suitable match.

Once home again, Grandma picked through the Alberi cousins and rejected every one. Bad nuts, she said. Next, she turned to her own family tree and was rewarded on the olive orchard of Roma and Geraldi Strega. This family was Strega in name only. They were good Catholics, God-fearing and abundant with their offspring. One of their children was Sole, my father.

Sole's family called him Pazzesco or Paz for short. Sole is sunshine in Italian. Pazzesco means crazy.

When Grandma found him, Sole Strega was leading a lonely life, isolated from his family and his village. He had a habit of talking to the olive trees, the sky, the flowers, the mountains, the river, the rodents and the farm animals. Grandma knew immediately that he was Strega through and through! And a man, no less! She saved him from his lonely life and brought him with her to our valley.

Unfortunately, my mother detested him on sight! She told Grandma, in English, so as not to offend, that she would kill herself before marrying him.

"So dramatic!" Grandma Jewell said. "Get to know him."

"You get to know him," she said. "I am too busy for some nutty who talks to trees."

"I see light in those trees," Grandma argued. "I am not nutty. This is who I am and it is who you are, too."

"That is not who I am," my mother insisted. "I see what I see—the real world! You are as nutty as he is. I want nothing to do with any of this!"

At first, my mother wouldn't even talk to my father and all Grandma could say was: "Sia paziente. Be patient. E giovane. She is young."

Gratefully, my father didn't pay attention to the young American girl and her tantrums. He was free to be who he was and this was enough for him. Instead, he folded himself neatly into the filberts. After all, nuts were not so different than olives.

Grandma was another story. All she did was pay attention to her daughter!

Armed with her mystical filberts, herbs, tinctures and roots, Grandma performed the ritual of fertility, followed by the ritual of love. When these did not soften my mother, she "downscaled" her intentions and performed the ritual of friendship and, when this netted no result, eventually tried her luck by attempting a small ritual for simple conversation.

My mother endured three years of pushing from Grandma and the tension between them became unbearable. Grandma says she was fighting for my life, a life that had yet to be conceived. My mother says she was fighting for her very freedom.

Finally, the two women collided. Screaming at each other, they were in the living room of our big house and did not know my father was in the house, too.

"You are twenty one," Grandma Jewell yelled at my mother. "I've brought you a man, now marry him!"

"I will never marry that crazy Italian," my mother cried, in flawless Italian.

This crescendo of emotion, sending that word "pazzesco" out of my mother's mouth and into the air, drew my father into the middle of the debate.

I can only imagine the scene. The silence that cloaked the room when my father made his presence known to the two woman must have been horrifying. As the story goes, he did not utter one word. Instead, my father marched into the front room, sat at the piano (his only possession, other than his clothing, which had been shipped from Italy), and played music that spoke of his own complex emotions.

Grandma described the sounds he created that day as haunting. "The birds stopped flying," she recalled. "The flowers withered and the earth cried."

In his song, my father performed the miracle Grandma's rituals could not: He woke up the love in my mother's heart. It was such a powerful jolt, she almost fell down.

"This is when I learned the most important lesson there is," Grandma said. "Love is, without doubt, the most powerful force in the universe."

But my father wasn't ready for my mother's love. He was still stung from her scorn.

He finished playing his sorrowful song, closed the piano cover, locked his piano and swallowed the key. Even as my mother followed him upstairs, apologizing in Italian for her rudeness, he packed up the few things he had, walked out the door and went to live with Brother Joe.

Legend says seventeen years went by.

Did my father truly go for seventeen years without a word to my mother?

Did my mother sustain her love for almost two decades, waiting with faith and patience?

Knowing them as I did, this is difficult to imagine, but this is not my story to shape as I please. The math proves that I was born eighteen years after this moment in time.

In 1930, my mother and father broke their silence. She was thirty-eight, he was forty, and they journeyed to McMinnville for the annual meeting of the Western Orchard Society. My mother, who liked to keep her eye trained on the future, believed The Jewell Nut Company should register in the Society and learn the latest pruning and harvest techniques. Grandpa Stanzo agreed she could go to the Society meeting but she was only to listen, not to register the orchard. He sent my father along to keep her honest.

A bit of matchmaking?

Surprisingly, Mother and Father did not set foot in the hall that held the buttoned-up, bow-tied, boot-wearing nut growers. Once off the orchard, untethered from daily routine, the winds blew the two west to the sea.

Perhaps my father finally began to talk to my mother or perhaps she turned her considerable charm on him. I am not sure what happened next but I do know they landed in Neskowin, spending a week of days and nights together. With the sea, the sun, the wind and a great sea rock as witnesses, they made promises about loving each other until the love was gone. And while they passed these vows between themselves, I was quietly cooking in my mother, becoming the next story-teller, the next visionary, the next Alberi-Strega woman ready to come forth and do her good work on the land.