March has brought triumph, a scary moment, and change.

First of all, the triumph: I got accepted into grad school. In the fall, I’ll be pursuing my Masters in Social Work.

The scary moment happened a couple weeks ago when  my housemate and I got rear ended on our way to work. Our actions were rather primal. I instantly burst into tears and my housemate called 911 and put on the hazard lights. A few minutes later, it was reversed. I was calm and her tears were coming. I’ve been in so few situations in which such an involuntary, primal reaction was provoked that I felt like my body had betrayed me.

The response  to our calamity was pure sympathy, which I partially expected. I did not expect, however, the cake and the bread delivered to our door nor the concerned emails from people I hadn’t told about the accident. Even though I’ve lived in the community for seven months now, a community which frequently donates pounds of food to us, I’ve forgotten how generous and thoughtful it is.

Two weeks later, I still look back at the accident and my breath is taken away by how lucky we were. My car was totaled, but we were okay besides aches and pains that have faded away. I know full well that if I hadn’t straightened out the car from the skid it had gone in to, we could have been broad sided and our injuries would have been significantly more severe. While both of us would have preferred to have not been in that accident, we were lucky to have each other to lean on each other in the few minutes before the police arrived and in the next few days and weeks.

March hasn’t brought a whole lot of tangible changes except I have a new, undamaged car. Rather, it has acted as a herald to probable changes in my life, such as receiving student loans for the first time and starting my MSW program. I’m sure that there a lot more to come.

Last weekend, we joined another branch of the Episcopal Service Corps in Maryland for part of their retreat. The retreat, which centered on racism, took place on a refurbished plantation/farm. The conversation about racism was just starting to brush the bottom of the surface when we stopped for lunch and then took a walk down to the slave graveyard down the hill.

All around us were fallow fields. Whether they are being used in the present day we didn’t know, but it wasn’t hard to imagine slaves working crops that used to be there. It wasn’t hard to imagine how different our walk down there as privileged white people would have looked different when it was a working farm and when people owned other people.

The graveyard itself was in ruins. The only markers were a cross and a big rock where a male slave was buried. A nearby sign says that one of the families was buried in the plot as well as 25 other slaves. The plot doesn’t tell us a lot; neither does the land really. It does not say how these slaves were treated. It doesn’t say if any of them ran away to Harrisburg, a major stop on the underground railroad a days walk away. All that I know is what my education told me and what I’ve read on my own.

Before this, the civil war era felt like a distant past to me. I did not grow up next to battlefields or old plantations to remind me of that history. Instead, I grew up in Colorado closer to old mining towns, Sand Creek, and Mesa Verde and its mysteries. Slave narratives were powerful and emotionally raw, but they were not real to me. It wasn’t until I stood on top of those who gone before me and suffered in ways I will never know and felt the chilly wind that they endured with most likely less protection than me, that it felt real, tangible, closer.

We did not dance on the slave graveyard like the title suggests. We discussed what we saw and what might have happened. But we didn’t know what to do with the thoughts and information in our head, so we headed back, huddled against the wind. We chatted and laughed and sang and then drove an hour and a half back home where we had to prepare for an event. We did not dance on the slave graveyard, but we might as well have. My question is: how do we get from dancing to understanding? From understanding to doing?

Here’s a link about the history of the retreat center. I wish it was more in depth. https://www.claggettcenter.org/history