Ivy Green and Me

Ivy Green is a place that is as stuffed with irony as a calzone is stuffed with cheese. It was the place where her life began. The early days of her life there were filled with discovery that only sight and sound can bring. She studied the features of her parents faces, listened to the chirps of the birds, and drank from each new day like she was at Starbucks---but all the drinks were free.

At the tender age of 19 her world was plunged into silence and darkness. No,not 19 years; her life was still being measured in months. At 19 months Helen Keller's life changed. What a difference a day makes! Yesterday she knew her name and could hear it. Just yesterday she could waddle around Ivy Green in search of her Mother---and find her. But not today. She knew her name still to be sure, but couldn't hear it. She remembered her Mother's face. Yes, she remembered her Mother's face but...but why couldn't she see it?

It didn't even exist anymore, Ivy Green. For the moment, Ivy Green had disappeared. Everything she had heard with her own ears and witnessed with her own eyes had vanished into a world of darkness and silence. What is a 19 month old to do? How can such a young inexperienced, untested life translate and delineate the meaning of such tragedy? These are questions that even her parents would struggle to answer.

They needed a miracle. So did Helen. But medical miracles in post war reconstruction-- in Alabama-- were about as scarce as prosperity and Southern pride. But a miracle is what they got; not in the form of instant divine intervention on scale and proportion of an Elijah or a Daniel. No, this miracle was late and lowkey. "Who brought this delinquent miracle?" you ask. If you said, "Anne Sullivan" you are only partly right. For anyone who knows of the work this woman accomplished in the life of a young girl (who was doomed to be trapped in a world where ones thoughts are never known to another) Anne Sullivan brought a miracle into Helen's life: communication. Anyone who can do that for a girl whose life was trapped in a hopeless vortex of silence and darkness deserves that her full name be known: Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Read it slowly and don't ever forget it. She deserves to be remembered.

We all start life in Ivy Green. It is filled with all the hopes and promises, sights and sounds, adventures in learning and the joy of discovery that only new and untarnished beginnings can deliver.

But life takes plunges. And when it does silence and darkness follow. Who has excaped this? We are destined to this as certainly as "sparks fly upward." The certainty of it is fixed...but not the creativity. Life can be incredibly creative as to the shape and size of those sparks!

But life gives us a well. For Helen the "well" was a real place. It was located at her life's ground-zero: Ivy Green. It was the place of her birth. With Anne by her side (at the well) life handed them both a miracle. The miracle didn't change some things about her world. It was still silent; it was still filled with darkness. But the miracle at the well did fill her life with something: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. 625 words filled her world in six months.

"Words? Words as Miracles?" you ask. I know what you might be thinking and I thought the same thing: "how ironic." Something so simple. So common. So ordinary...so...so daily? And yet it was the simple discovery of how to communicate that helped one person lead another out of darkness into the illumination that only words bring.

As filled with irony as it might be, Helen found her life in the very place she thought she had lost it: Ivy Green. I wonder what miracle is waiting for me (or you) by the well in Ivy Green? Why not go down by the well?

When life takes a plunge a disturbs the tranquility of your world, go sit by the well. You might just find that life begins at Ivy Green.