Renewal

Shedding the Old

“From the beginning,
the key to renewal has been
the casting off of old skin.” Mark Nepo

I lived for three years in the woods of Shelby County, AL. When my family and I decided to move to ‘the country’ we had in mind the place where my husband had grown up, in the sand hills of North Carolina. Those fifty acres were beautiful and hospitable. We loved to take our young kids and clomp around them, finding arrow heads, fields of creeping cedar and coveys of quail. The NC property had a three-acre fishing lake stocked with bass and brim. It was truly idyllic for growing boys.

We found a piece of property twenty-five miles out of Birmingham, complete with pond and surrounded by hardwood forest. The dirt and gravel road leading to the house was almost a mile long and the only neighbors lived out of sight, at the other end. We moved in when Ian was two years old and Jake was nine. It turned out to be nothing like the Chapel Hill experience. There were four kinds of poisonous snakes, and a multitude of other ground and water snakes. The scariest were the cotton-mouth moccasins that inhabited the pond and would swim up to us, mouths wide and menacing. We stupidly started killing snakes, as though we could rid our property of them and send a message to their kin not to come there. Like a man discovering his inner caveman, my husband shot them, skinned them and nailed the skins onto boards. Before long he had a grizzly collection of trophies. It seemed, however, that for every one he killed, four more popped up to take its place. After three years of fighting that hostile environment, we gave up and moved back to town.

When, several years later, my husband moved out of our home, he took his snake trophies with him. For me, it felt like shedding an old skin, as snakes do, in order to grow a new one. During that shedding, the snake is vulnerable and blind, as I was, but gradually their new skin toughens and their eyes become clear. Shedding old skin is work, and it doesn’t happen quickly. Once shed, the renewal complete, the old skin is left behind. Older and wiser, one is free to grow until the new becomes the old and must be shed. Shedding is necessary; growth is possible, renewal is a beginning.

In the spirit,
Jane