“Nothing Is Ever Lost”

I thought it was lost, my autographed copy of Kathleen Norris’s The Middle of the World, a collection of her poetry I bought in December 1982 at a reading. But I found it last week as I was sorting through books to donate to a charity event at work. It’s in rough shape; one of the dogs my ex and I owned chewed off the upper bound side. But it’s still readable.

The first poem I reread was my favorite: “A Place on Grand River,” about a friend taking Norris to the place he’d grown up, a place the family had sold and left,  a place rich with things like tools, china plates, and other items the friend could have used, some things he took during the visit, such as a cast-iron griddle and a whetstone.

It’s funny, the way things strike you differently at different times of your life. When I heard Norris read the poem back in 1982 through the last time I’d read it, probably 2003 or 2004, the part that jumped out at me was: “Jim, we were lucky/Other ways, on childhood’s holy ground. You got/Animal timing, I got a way of saying things.” And that is beautiful, for surely Norris, the author of Amazing Grace, The Cloister Walk, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, and more, has “a way of saying things.”

But reading “A Place on Grand River” now, twenty-nine years on, it’s the final line that strikes me:

Nothing is ever lost.

And it isn’t, is it? I think of things I wish I’d said (or not said), mementos and relics and notes and pictures and books lost along the way or tossed in anger or in resolve, places and people I’ve left or who’ve left me who aren’t the same now as when I last saw them. But somehow, the gift or lesson each of them brought is still with me. I am formed, better or worse, for the past. It informs who I am and who I am trying to become.

Norris had it right: Nothing is ever lost.