A KINDRED SPIRIT:
BARBARA TATHAM JOHNSON

By Laurie Meunier Graves

When I was a child, one of my favorite books was Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. In it, a young orphan named Anne Shirley comes to Green Gables to live with an elderly sister and brother, the starchy Marilla and the quiet but good-hearted Matthew. Before Green Gables, Anne had been shunted from home to home, living more as an indentured servant than as part of a family, and what she longs for is connection, for “kindred spirits,” people who are in accord with her emotionally and spiritually. Although the way is not easy for Anne, she does indeed find kindred spirits, some young and some old, male and female. One of the lovely lessons of the book is that kindred spirits come in many varieties, transcending gender, age, and class.

My own life has been blessed by many kindred spirits, and like Anne’s, they have varied in age and gender. However, one of the kindred spirits who touched my life the longest and the most completely was Barbara Tatham Johnson, who died in April. For over fifteen years, we had a friendship that combined mind and heart, the intellect as well as the emotions, and her death is a tremendous loss that still seems faintly unreal, even though I was with her when she died. Just the other day, I found myself flipping through a book catalog and looking for books that Barbara might like. Then I remembered, and I threw the catalog away.

Are we really ever ready to lose someone we care about? Of course not. When my father died after a fairly long illness, I was not ready, and the same was true for Barbara. Always, you want more time—two years, six months, four weeks, even a few days. Anything. Her illness progressed rapidly, five weeks from diagnosis to death, which makes coping even harder. A week or so before Barbara discovered she had leukemia, my husband, my daughter, and I were at her house for dinner, and the memory of what we had is completely gone. Instead, what stays with me is the event itself, sitting around her long table and talking about politics, art, movies, and family with her and her husband.

I met Barbara in a writing group sponsored by my town’s adult education program. Right from the start, we recognized the connection we had with each other, even though she wrote about nature and I was writing children’s fantasy stories. Despite our differences in style, we found that we both had an affinity for the natural world as well as a passion for archetypes and myths, for the fey and the magical, for fairies, witches, goblins, hobbits, wizards, and dragons.

From there, it was on to our shared love of reading, to Robertson Davies, the late, great Canadian writer whom we both adored; to Ellis Peters, writer of the Brother Cadfael stories; to J. R. R. Tolkien, whom we loved, though it barely seems possible, even more than Robertson Davies. And, to Shakespeare, the greatest of them all.

We got together for tea, went out to lunch, visited art museums, and we were always talking, talking, talking, roving from subject to subject. I am a twitchy conversationalist, frequently impatient with what other people like to talk about—mainly themselves in what often seems like excruciating detail. It’s not that I am uninterested in the personal details of life. It’s just that I want those details leavened by other topics—preferably book talk, but art and politics will do as well. With Barbara, I was never twitchy, and when I went over to her house for tea, I was constantly watching the clock to be sure that I didn’t stay longer than I should. Of course, I always did. Just fifteen more minutes, I would tell myself, then fifteen more, until finally I couldn’t stretch it out any longer.

Politically, we were in complete agreement, two unrepentant liberal Democrats, bucking and lamenting the conservative direction of this country. Barbara believed in social services, women’s rights, the separation of church and state, and environmental laws. She understood the need for regulation of businesses and how the rights of individuals must be balanced against the common good of the community. She was appalled by the results of the last election, so much so that she didn’t want to talk about it for a long time. I knew exactly how she felt.

When I decided to start Wolf Moon Press Journal, I of course asked Barbara if she would like to write for the magazine, to be a regular contributor, and I was delighted when she agreed. Over the years, she had continued writing nature essays, honing her style until it became elegant yet concise, moving freely between whimsy and fact without ever sacrificing one for the other. For example, in her piece “The Spell of Nature,” she describes the twirl of salamanders in vernal pools and how they lead her to “recall Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies and… [to] imagine Tom and his companions at play.” She continues “Our lives are fuller when we can distinguish the real from the imagined yet are willing to allow a blurring of the edges every now and then. Joy is seeking an answer to something we observe and in the search glimpsing what is beyond explanation.”

Not surprisingly, Barbara had what Buddhists refer to as “beginner’s mind.” That is, the ability to see things over and over and still be delighted by them, as though seeing them for the first time. Once, we were going somewhere—I don’t remember where—and I was driving. Suddenly she cried, “Stop! Stop!” On the side of the road was a huge snapping turtle laying eggs. How many times had Barbara seen this happen? Too many to count. Yet as soon as I stopped the car, she dashed out and, exclaiming with pleasure, hovered over the turtle.

Oh, we had our differences. Barbara was a Lapsang souchong drinker, a tea so strong and vile that it makes me shudder just to smell it. On the other hand, she didn’t like Earl Grey, one of my favorites, with its flavor of bergamot. I hated the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, which we saw together, and she chortled through the whole darned thing. In addition, she preferred cats to dogs, an opinion I respected but certainly never agreed with.

We did have one other major disagreement. It was over a passage from Tolkien’s The Return of the King. “And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance…And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

It seemed to me that Frodo was journeying into the afterlife, a sort of Valhalla, or heaven, if you will. This, of course, meant that he died, and Barbara never liked my interpretation. Instead, she liked to think Frodo was going to some pleasant land, say, England. However, even though neither of us would be swayed from our positions, we did agree that the passage was moving, a fitting end to Frodo’s hard journey.

Valhalla, heaven, or England, may Barbara find her own “white shores” and a “far green country under a swift sunrise.” 

 

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