Mother is an Environment

The lakes and boreal forests of north-east Minnesota above the ridge from Lake Superior were recently designated a dark sky sanctuary; uncontaminated by the artificial light of civilization, it is one of the darkest places on earth. I grew up there. On clear nights the view of the sky produces a vision that obliterates all sense of scale and time. You feel as if the planet has vanished, reduced to a dreamy ribbon of forest wandering the chasm of the universe as it spills above and through the still mirroring pools of the glacial lakes. A ten-thousand-year world, shreds of protected wilderness remain a pristine ecosystem, nearly unchanged since the last ice age. Of course it is endangered by man and progress; all of the moose are dying; mining interests threaten to poison the water and kill the habitat. My mother, dragged into the woods along with the rest of us by the paranoid adventure fantasies of my dad, made the best of what she could and the enchanted boreal environment became one contiguous envelope with the smaller environment she attempted to maintain in the home: reading to me the Lord of the Rings, classical MPR on the radio, baking bread, growing plants, teaching us to read, letting us get lost in the woods. Winnicott describes mother as an environment. In this primary illusion the child encounters a magic world bounded by the maternal remit; forest, mother and home fold over one another without end. Now and again I will have vivid recall of the frogs singing in the beaver pond in the long haunted dusk of midsummer like a memory from an alien planet; one that I can never return to.