Museum of the Heart

In memory of Milton Newton Hopkins, 1926-2007

Hi, I’m Janisse.

I write about loving life, especially wild things, and I teach people how to do it. This week I offer you a deeply personal essay about a man I love(d) dearly. I don’t usually introduce what I write, but this piece is different. It’s magic realism, a style of writing in which fantastical elements are infused in an otherwise realistic story. I didn’t want you to get confused. I’m so glad you’re here.

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Museum of the Heart

I WAS FOLLOWING directions to a place I’d never been. I had no way of knowing where I going and how vastly it would change me. To this day, the memory of it clings to me.

On the phone the man had said the road would go through Ocilla, Georgia, which had not changed in fifty years, and it would cross four bridges, and after the fourth bridge I should turn left.

The day was hot and getting hotter. At the edge of Ocilla I saw a heavy woman in a navy blue suit and a large hat coming out of a church. Outside town, the road stretched out straight and dull gray, heat shimmering above. I counted bridges. Two had no signs, and the other two were rivers, Willacoochee and Satilla. After that I turned. I drove miles through fields so big they could only be worked by large machinery.

I reached a little ghost town, a line of fallen-down buildings next to a railroad track. The man had called that Osierfield. I followed his directions more intently and slowly now, through a field, through a pine forest, past a little pond, and into a compound. A large water oak gave off a pool of shade, and I crept under it.

The house was a railroad depot. It was painted barn-red and crowded with shrubbery and trees, like a botanical garden. Large bones hung were strung like prayer bones on ropes between some of the trees, and a few large peacocks strutted about. A yellow dog came out from somewhere and started barking.

The red door opened and a man—older than my father, but not so old as my grandfather, had my grandfather been alive—came out. He was wearing glasses like Gandhi and smiling.

He floated toward me down a sidewalk through two hedges of boxwood. I rolled down my window.

Mr. Hopkins?

Just Milton. Get down and see where you’ve got.

I’m the person who called on the phone.

I suspected that. Get down. Back off, Champ, he said to the dog.

This is a beautiful place, I said. The yellow dog sniffed my tires while I followed the man up the walk. One of the peacocks fanned its tail out, long blue-and-green feathers topped by shimmering, iridescent eyes, shaking among the bones.

Every limb of every tree was the tail-feather of a peacock, jitterbugging in the wind, and I was walking toward a depot beneath a forest of feathers, clouds of blue eyes.

~*~

MILTON OPENED THE door. Welcome to the station, he said. That first time, when I passed inside, something strange happened. I took the biggest tumble of my life, because there beyond that door was the man’s heart. He opened the door and I fell head-first into the biggest heart in the world, big enough to contain a friendship even death could not end.

The nice man with the Ghandi glasses and the big smile helped me pick myself up. I looked around.

This looks like the chambers of a heart, I said. Blood was pumping all over.

The man smiled. That would be interesting, he said.

And like a museum, I said.

People tell me that.

The man’s heart looked like a natural history museum. In every direction I turned were feathers and nests and rocks and shells and wood and fossils and points and nuts and seeds and skins and bones and teeth. Almost every inch of the walls were covered with paintings and photographs of plants and animals and wild places, forests and beaches and mountains. Some of the wild places had people standing in them, smiling.

I’m from south Georgia too, I said.

I heard that.

That’s why I wanted to meet you.

And I you.

I hope you don’t think I’m gawking, I said.

No. Gawk all you want.

I love these things. Now I was looking at a bird’s nest with eggs in it. What kind?

Those are meadowlark. These are robin. Here are hummingbird. Ruby-throated.

Tiny, I said. Such a pure ivory color.

Yes. He kept beaming.

I felt good in that wild station of the heart. I felt as if I could find a home there among the artifacts of a place. The man wanted to eat a lunch he had made, soup, and we walked into the next room, which had been the room that looks off down the railroad track, and it was full of windows. It was full of old bottles and canning jars and antique dishes and iron skillets.

Every one of them was full of some kind of sweetness.

Milton made this Ecology Box. Although he tucked moth balls inside, they lost their effectiveness over the decades. The powder you see bottom center is what’s left after the weevils eat what they want. Some shells have come unglued, and the small red seeds are coral bean, a native wildflower loved by hummingbirds.

~*~

YOU WANT TO see the farm? he asked after lunch.

I’d love to.

In my dreams, now, the man has cranked the funeral car and backed it out from under the pole barn. Though the car is dusty, cobwebby inside, we are driving it around the fields. We are stopping and getting out to gather things. We collect abandoned bird eggs and the feathers of golden eagles. We take leaves and flowers. We take pictures that the man will frame and hang in the few empty places on the walls. We pick the small ripe fruits of Chickasaw plums.

Once I saw a red-belled woodpecker with a Chickasaw plum in its mouth, the man said.

I hope I live long enough to see things like that, I said.

We were traveling an old two-path road across a dam, looking for egrets and herons at the edge of the pond.

We were traveling above water.

We were traveling above everything, the old funeral car driving itself along as if a ghost were at the wheel.

~*~

I GUESS YOU could say the first time I met Milton, he and I got lost. We started rambling across a field and entered a wood. I remember along the way a marsh. Just when we’d think it was time to turn back, into the people we had been, we’d see a new curiosity ahead. It would be a wild olive, or an extravagant wood duck, which would delight us for a while. There would be many visits to come, and plenty of doors to open. Every door opened to amazements and wonders—coral and lava, ancient tools and trilobites, cochineals and nutmegs. Dried flowers. We would trip through many sunrises and many sunsets, across rivers, until there was no return and all we could do was emerge from the woods at some new place, a place we had never known, and start getting lost all over again.

In many ways being lost is really being found, the same as outside is really inside. We found ourselves inside the world, inside its house of branches, and inside something else.

Among all the things we found, there was one truly amazing thing—a multi-colored rarity made of moss and stories. It looked like a hummingbird nest made of lichen, glued together with spider webs. We both saw it at the same time, waiting on a little hump of ground, and we cried out, Look! and ran to it.

Gosh, Milton said.

Wow, I said.

I wasn’t expecting this.

It’s extraordinary.       

Very special.

It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I had other friendships. Milton had friendships. But this was something beyond that.

Julie Neel, Frankie Snow, me, Milton Hopkins, Eloise Gholson, Angus Gholson. Photo by Leon Neel.

~*~

FROM THE START a third party was involved in my friendship with Milton, although I didn’t know it at the time.

When he and I explored, mostly it was just the two of us. Sometimes our friend Frankie would come along, and sometimes my little boy Silas, and later my husband, Raven. All in all, however, Milton and I were two atoms in a nucleus.

Except one electron was never far away.

I should have looked out now and then. I should have spotted it. I should have seen it when Milton went to buy a coffin from the Mennonites. But they had gone back to Kentucky and he came home without a coffin and maybe it was just as well. My dad says that if you have an empty thing hanging around, it wants to be filled.

Milton lived a long time. Not long enough.

Forever would not be long enough.

For a few years I lived in Vermont. I didn’t see enough of Milton except in letters. One never got mailed.

The day he died I didn’t find out. I was 1,500 miles away. I found out the next morning on the computer.

I ran screaming through the house. I finally caught up with myself down in the basement, huddled on the floor, weeping. From that moment I became hesitant to open computer messages.

He had been burning the woods. He had fallen, a rupture in the aorta, a fire-break. He was 80. I was 45.

After Milton was gone, I understood something. Had I understood it sooner, and had I known that perhaps another friend of this caliber would never emerge from the wilds of my life, I would have proceeded differently.

The years alive without someone you love are long and lonely years.

Sure glad you came by to visit. Sure had a good time with you. I’ve been trying to eat up the last of the soup, but without you here it’s just not as good. I guess it’ll wind up going to Champ. Sure hope you come back this way soon. MNH

Dear MNH, I’m still trying to figure out where we entered the woods and where we came out. I’m so glad we met. J

The green book on the altar is IN ONE PLACE: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF A GEORGIA FARMER, written by Milton and published by Saltmarsh Press.

~*~

WHAT MILTON TAUGHT me was the story of my place. Not the histories of settlement nor records of genealogy, but what the land had been. He taught me the names of plants and birds and mollusks. He showed me how things fit together, and how, because these relationships were so ancient and so perfect, they were divine and miraculous. Like ours was.

Everywhere we went, tablets dropped from the sky and on them were written marvels.

Another way of looking at it is to say that for Milton and me, the forest was huge, we two lifelike action figures, one a woman with big feet and long dark hair, and the other a gray-haired man with horn glasses. The trees were impossibly tall, the pitcher plants gigantic. One aster we could barely lift. To cut a bouquet of them we would need a chainsaw. We were tiny and insignificant among it all. It was bigger than we could ever be.

Yet there was less and less of it. As it became scarce, as the years passed, we got more single-minded about seeing it, finding it, documenting it, naming it. All around us in our place, the south of Georgia, was constant cutting, log trucks on the highways, piles of branches burning. The old forests were being taken down and replanted in rows. The new trees were not more than five and ten years old, twenty, twenty-five. They did not have long to live, and they knew it, with cruisers roaming the roads, with the country devouring paper.

Milton and I had to go deeper and deeper to find what we were looking for.

~*~

ONE DAY MILTON wanted to show me some woods along Seventeen Mile Creek. I remember a dead-end clay road, a locked gate, an eroded path across somebody else’s land.

Different woods have different greens and browns. The older they are, the purer the green and the deeper the brown. These woods were purely green and deeply brown.

There are lots of things to see in a forest. There are leaves that twist oddly, and strange contortions of branches and trunks. There are nests, birds, mushrooms, and fungi. Solitary wildflowers, banks of blooms. The list could go for a long time of possible things to see in the woods along Seventeen Mile Creek.

We walked far enough I didn’t know where we were. I couldn’t have gotten out had I wanted to.

Milton was the one who suggested we mark a tree. Neither of us were tree-markers. He chose a magnolia. He took out his penknife and began to carve. I took out my knife and helped, first our initials, small, MH and JR.

It’s indisputable now, I said.

What’s that?

This thing.

As long as this tree’s alive, and that could be for 500 years.

So we put a heart around our initials. Then a pair of birds. Then some leaves and flowers, until as far as we could reach the tree was carved with spirals and scrolls, arteries and veins, moths and butterflies.

We’d better stop before we kill it, he said.

Let’s stop.

Yes.

This is five hundred years, anyway. That’s a start.

Of course, later, after Milton was dead, I wanted to go back and find the tree. But I can’t get to the right creek, or the right road, or the right property. I could search for years. I hope the magnolia is living, deep in the woods.

May it live forever.

The day I watched Milton catch an indigo snake, the only one I’ve ever seen in the wild.

~*~

THAT FIRST TIME I got in my little truck to leave the place I found Milton’s heart, I could barely squeeze in all the gifts. He gave me shapely bottles of cane syrup and bags of peanuts in the hull and jars of mayhaw jelly and bags of corn meal and of grits.

In my life he gave me kumquats and pomegranates, blueberries and strawberries, oranges and lemons. He gave books and postcards, old coins and stamps. He gave bird houses and wind vanes. He made me a walking stick. He gave me long, draping, brilliant peacock feathers and yellow-shafted flicker feathers. He gave hams and fruitcakes and chocolate-covered cherries.

When a body gives so much away, the natural tendency of the world is to refill their vessel. So his heart kept pumping blood until it didn’t.

You come back anytime, he said, and touched his chest.

You bet, I said.

When?

Not long.

But really, I never left. Who would, once you find a heart like that?

Milton is buried on his beloved farm.

If you knew Milton or even if you didn’t, I love to hear from you.