With a temperature drop forecast for overnight, this evening found all four residents of 706 Howell in our boulevard with mixing bowls and bread baskets, pulling in the last of the garden. Tonight, the counter is elbow deep in romas and early girls. I think out of sheer necessity of finding the coffee pot, I'll be putting up tomatoes in the next few days. I clipped the rest of the basil, that massive green tumbleweed in the kitchen corner. We found several toddler-sized zucchini hiding under broad leaves. These are now hiding in our neighbors' cars. Corin and Tim were delighted with unloading these on our unsuspecting friends and I'm happy to have my load lessened by two. There are already enough green monsters lounging on the counter.
Bowl of Greens
Boys and Beets
Not one...
But two.
Tonight, we turned on our heat for the first time this season. Around the kitchen, this year's mouse keeps scurrying in and out of view, but never toward the trap (which has caught only Seth so far). When the clouds lifted this afternoon, I could see snow up Pattee Canyon. It seems, all the seasonal markers are in place. Autumn I salute you.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Let me just say there are days when what I need is this:
What am I supposed to be seeing? you might be asking. Nothing. Just unbroken, unpunctuated, roll of grass on a hillside, a simple tawny arc against blue sky. Some days this is what I set off to the hills looking for. For me, the uncluttered view seems to reduce life to its elemental components: earth, sky. And still these are more than can be taken in.
When I was fifteen my Grandmother Joss died. She died with all her family standing around, singing the hymns my sister plinked out on the upright. The cancer took her quickly at the end. She was bedridden for just a few days, and we sat vigil only the last night. At least, this is the way I remember it, if memories from half a life away can be trusted. These days I am reminded of my Grandma Joss because my friend Ruth, with whom my grandma shared a birthday, is seemingly nearing her end after more than 100 years of living. In the past few weeks, Ruth has lost her limited mobility and taken irretrievably to her bed. She is visited now by visions of her parents and her siblings, all of whom have passed on. She reaches for things only she can see. Tonight, while I sat with her, she stretched out her arm and motioned toward something in the air. "Has anyone fed John and Fred?" she asked. I leaned closer to her. "Who's that?" I asked. "They weren't taken," Ruth added and, though she said it weakly, whatever she could see seemed to give her some satisfaction.
While Ruth slept, I perused the literature the hospice agency had left on her kitchen table. "Vision-like experiences are real to your loved one and are common in the transition from life to death. Most often these visions are comforting." I do not remember Grandma Joss reaching for unseeable things, but watching Ruth do so is stirring and not, as I would have expected, unsettling. Something seems very close, very real, to her. She reaches toward it, grasping. Perhaps she is seeing through a crack in that final door.
Before leaving Ruth this evening, I sang her a lullaby, sitting on her bed and patting her head as I do my boys' at night when they cannot sleep. When I had slipped from her house, the screen door swinging behind me, I cycled home, grateful for the feel of my legs pumping the pedals, loving the smell of the river as I took the bridge across, aware suddenly of the life I have in my body, the gift of it. When I returned home I hied to my bookshelf and traced my finger through the poetry section looking for a very dog-eared copy of Jane Kenyon's Otherwise. I riffled through the pages looking for her poem Reading Aloud to My Father, knowing there was something in it I needed to read. Finding it, I read as follows:
I chose the book haphazard from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first sentence I knew it wasn't the thing to read to a dying man: The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
The words disturbed both of us immediately, and I stopped. With music it was the same -- Chopin's Piano Concerto -- he asked me to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank little, while the tumors briskly appropriated what was left of him.
But to return to the cradle rocking. I think Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss. That's why babies howl at birth, and why the dying so often reach for something only they can apprehend.
At the end they don't want their hands to be under the covers, and if you should put your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free; and you must honor that desire, and let them pull it free.
Ruth is pulling free, just as all those years ago, I witnessed my grandma do while we stood around her bed singing "It is Well with My Soul." When my grandma finally passed, I went out to her drive and lay down to watch the bright and silent procession of stars overhead. Something I had seen that night, words could not reach and the house seemed too small and crowded to contain. I needed the limitless Above at that moment. Now, being with Ruth as she sits upon the threshold and catches glimpses from that great elsewhere, I feel I am again bearing witness to that uncontainable and limitless something that happens at the outside limit, the flush margin, of this precious and passing life.
Last week our neighbor from Arlee passed on. For six years we lived next door to her, our houses sitting on opposite sides of the long dusty drive we shared. Many an evening Tim and I sat at her kitchen table swapping stories and parrying jokes with her husband. Once, she beaded me two slim barrettes - sky blue with red triangles. She wrapped them in brown paper and slipped them quietly in my hand. Christine, quiet and giving, cared for people in a way that was almost sly it was so unobtrusive and modest. On Friday evening, as I left the community center in Arlee where Christine lay with an eagle feather fan in her hands, a full moon was rising over the mountains. The night was purple. The moon was white. I thought of this valley that Christine had loved her whole life and how the moon slid above it, hanging just so over the mountains. And I thought what a perfect tribute to her: it rose as she did - quietly, unobtrusively, and so bright.
