The season of hospitality is upon us, with all its pleasures and burdens. Known in the Christian tradition as Advent, it focuses on the need for preparation, both for the very intimate event of a baby’s birth and for the cosmic birth of a new order. One of my favorite images for the season, if I’m remembering rightly, comes from a series of woodcuts made by a northern Renaissance nun. In it, she imagines herself as a housewife, preparing for the coming company of the Child and the Judge by cleaning the house of her heart: dusting, sweeping, washing, polishing. The images refuse any pretensions to profound theology or high art; they are reassuringly earth-bound and homey. If you pay attention, you can almost smell the baking bread.

“Hospitality” is one of those words whose meaning has changed over the years. In our current culture, it often refers to an industry directed toward travelers or those in need who are expected to pay for its services. If hospitality isn’t a primarily economic exchange, it usually refers to the opening of home and hearth to friends, family, and associates.

In ancient times (or in places that still hew to ancient ways), hospitality wasn’t a service or an option; it was a necessity and a moral imperative. Before the development of institutional hospitality (hospitals, hospices, hostels), vulnerable individuals outside of the normal network of social relations—travelers, refugees, the sick, pilgrims, orphans, widows—were able to rely, at least for a while, on a code of hospitality that brought shame to those who were able and refused to engage it. Christine Pohl, professor of Christian social ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary, writes: “In a number of ancient civilizations, hospitality was viewed as a pillar on which all other morality rested: it encompassed ‘the good.’”

Curiously, the words “host” and “guest” are closely related etymologically, if they don’t actually come from the same source. Even more interestingly, “guest” shares an etymological bed with “enemy,” rooted in the notion of “stranger.” The idea that any of us might move from providing hospitality to needing it—to and from strangers—gives the word a kind of trinitarian energy that caroms from the poles of host to guest to stranger/enemy until the parts are indistinguishable from the whole. I don’t usually feel that charge when I check into a motel, but I think the hospitable artist nun knew that she was a part of that energy, as hostess opening her heart to the Child; as guest and sojourner on the earth; as stranger before the greatest mystery.

One of the reasons I’m thinking about hospitality, aside from the advent of Advent, is that today we’ll welcome seven guests, whom we have never met, to Madroño for the weekend. They’ll be attending “Deer School,” the brainchild of Jesse Griffiths, chef, butcher, and proprietor (with his wife Tamara Mayfield) of the Dai Due supper club and butcher shop. Deer School will include several guided hunts followed by instructions on how to field-dress and use the animal from nose to tail, followed by some really fine eating.

While I’ve been thinking recently about what it means to be a good host (new sheets and shower curtains), I’m also thinking about my role as guest, sojourner, stranger, enemy; after all, they are intimately connected. In last week’s Thanksgiving post, Martin wrote about the hospitable nature of the feast: “On Thanksgiving the acts of preparing, serving, and eating become consciously sacramental; the cook(s) giving, the guest(s) receiving, in a spirit of gratitude that can, sadly, be all too rare at other times of the year….” As one of the cooks this year, I was less attuned to what I was giving than to what had been given to me: the gorgeous vegetables from local farms, the fresh turkey from our over-subscribed friends Jim and Kay Richardson, and the freshly shot and skinned half-hog that unceremoniously appeared on the kitchen counter (and then spent eight hours roasting in a pit) after my brother, his son, our son, and Robert, the redoubtable ranch manager, went hunting early Thursday morning. The astonishing abundance and hospitality of the land was quite literally overwhelming: half a 150-plus-pound sow is a lot of meat.

I’m blundering onto mushy and possibly treacherous literary territory here, I know: Mother Earth nourishing her offspring, big hugs all around. But I’m increasingly grateful for the bounty of the place and hope the same for those who come here seeking community, solitude, rest, refreshment, and, yes, fresh deer meat. We call Madroño Ranch ours by some weird cosmic accident; the more we know it, the more we know that it belongs to itself or to something even broader, wider, more generous. What we hope now is to avoid being the nightmare guest/enemy, the one who comes and overstays his or her welcome within twenty minutes, who demands foods you don’t have, strews clothes all over the house, leaves trash and dirty dishes in the guest room, noisily stays up late, assumes you’ll do all the laundry, and never says please or thank you. Who seems to think he or she owns the place.

We all know places where that’s exactly what has happened; for me, one such place is the stretch of Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin, which Martin and I drove last Sunday morning, and which is almost completely lined with outlet malls, chain stores, fast-food franchises, and other such marks of our collective thoughtlessness. Somehow, we’ve managed to promote the idea, especially in the American West and particularly in Texas, that among the rights accruing to property owners is the right to destroy or devalue their property in the name of short-term economic gain. In fact, destroying property may be seen as the ultimate proof of ownership.

I struggled in an earlier post with the idea of land ownership, and I struggle with it still. All land came as a gift at some point. Not literally to its current owner, perhaps, but the land still bears the trace of its giftedness somewhere on that deed. In this season when we prepare for the arrival of guests, giving the gift of hospitality, or head somewhere hoping to be good guests, bringing gifts of thanks, it can be easy to forget that we are also always empty-handed strangers, constantly looking for a wider hospitality than we are ever able to offer or sometimes even to know that we need. We’re only a week past Thanksgiving; this is as good a time as any to thank the land that sustains us. Without it, we can never fill a house with the smells of baking bread and roasting meat—or any of the other things that sustain us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (still)
Martin: Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

On our very brief trip to Massachusetts last weekend, Martin and I drove straight from Boston’s Logan Airport to Concord in hopes of glimpsing one of the hotbeds of American utopian thinking before the winter sun set. Driving through snowy woods and by quaint (and probably drafty) colonial homes, it was clear that we were a loooong way from Texas.

On the plane, Martin was reading a compilation of Henry David Thoreau’s writings. Martin reading is not an unusual sight. Noteworthy was the fact that he was underlining in the book, something I have never seen him do in nearly thirty years of pretty continuous association. (Our ongoing “discussion” over the propriety of marking up books could well be the subject of another blog.) For the first time, he just couldn’t help himself; Thoreau’s aphoristic and slyly funny prose begged for some kind of physical interaction. In the same vein, he required me to listen or read for myself what so tickled him. Thoreau’s spirit, utterly inaccessible to Martin (and me) when Walden was assigned reading in high school, was suddenly uncontainable and had to be shared.

I found this slightly annoying. The snippets I heard and read clashed with what I was reading on the plane, Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, a somewhat dystopian novel about post-9/11 life in a Midwestern university town, narrated by a woman student raised on a nearby farm by early organic-minded parents. Thoreau’s mid-nineteenth-century voice felt arch and artificial in comparison and the contrast was grating, like walking from a quiet, dim study into the brightly lit noise of a teenager’s room. But the shock of seeing Martin underline in a book stunned me into keeping, just barely, a receptive ear.

We conquered the tangle of highways to Concord with only a few wrong turns. Walking into Orchard House, the Alcott home (Louisa May, Bronson, et al.), at 2:58 and knowing that it closed at 3 (that’s me approaching the front door in the photo above), we played the we’ve-traveled-so-far card and won a wonderful private tour with a sympathetic and knowledgeable docent. Although Little Women may have a sentimental ring to twenty-first-century ears, it resonates with the profoundly utopian thinking—and physically taxing reality—of the world Louisa May Alcott lived in. Orchard House showed signs of both worlds: charming eccentricities (Louisa’s sister May’s sweet pre-Raphaelite pencil drawings on her bedroom walls) and structural frailties (buckling floors, chilly drafts).

Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father, was a visionary of the first order, rarely concerning himself with such practicalities as earning enough money to feed and shelter his family, and thereby propelling Louisa into the unusual role of supporting her family financially with her writing. As a teacher, Alcott developed a race- and gender-neutral child-centered pedagogy that most people found scandalous, even immoral, and that most Americans today take for granted. He helped establish a commune, Fruitlands, an early back-to-nature effort, which failed quickly but interested many other questing spirits of the time, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them. He was a frequent contributor to the Transcendentalist journal The Dial and was often mocked for his opaque prose, and yet the influence of American Transcendentalism, especially in the environmental movement, is still alive and kicking today. It was a tour worth taking and a house worth visiting.

From the Alcott home we drove to Walden Pond in the waning light. I’ve heard many people express the same dismay on seeing Walden Pond they do when they see the Alamo (“it’s so small!”), but it’s several times the size of the “lake” at Madroño Ranch, so I wasn’t at all disappointed. We crunched through the snow along the edge, noting the space between the pond’s ice and the shore while watching two men out on the ice doing something indecipherable with unidentifiable equipment. As the heatless sun began to sink behind the trees, we came to the spot where Thoreau built his cabin, now marked only by low concrete posts (see photo above), although his words remain carved on a nearby wooden sign: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” As I stood there beating my hands together and stamping my frozen feet, I wondered if on a monochromatic winter afternoon like this Thoreau would have high-tailed it to Emerson’s house for a little warm food and company, as apparently he was wont to do.

Later, as we sat in a blessedly warm house in Wellesley, I began reading Martin’s volume of Thoreau and found myself beguiled, first by the slightly fustian voice of Joseph Wood Krutch, who wrote the introduction, and then by Thoreau’s own words, until Martin rather selfishly reclaimed his book. I went back to my literary farm girl, reading about the role of her father’s farm in her recovery from multiple heartbreaks.

This week, while waddling around Austin’s Lady Bird Lake (a body of water as beloved to me as Walden Pond was to Thoreau), I found myself thinking about Martin’s spontaneous overflow of powerful underlining and the odd stability of words, their capacity to be sturdy dwelling places despite their formless origins in the tohu-bohu of the human spirit. (Isn’t “tohu-bohu” a word you can live in? I do, actually, since it means chaos.) Martin’s invitation on the plane for me to join him in Thoreau’s house was a kind of evangelism, the best kind: a delighted discovery that clamors to be shared. Even though I was seated happily in Lorrie Moore’s house (which, with its love of place, is built on top of Thoreau’s) with all the doors closed and blinds drawn, Martin convinced me that the house Thoreau built was so splendid that I had to go in—which I did, grudgingly at first, but with increasing pleasure.

Hospitality from so many quarters: from the kind docent at Orchard House; between the walls of books; from my tickled husband; from the friend of a friend who opened her house to us; even in the cold empty space in Walden Woods marked off by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. Thoreau reached out from the past and invited us into its tohu-bohu, asking for our response and drawing from us a tiny new creation. Not bad for a crusty, allegedly misanthropic Yankee.

What we’re reading
Heather: Billy Collins (ed.), Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds
Martin: Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America