An Afternoon

The back door slams and you call ‘sorry’ over your shoulder, running across the cold old grass of a backyard behind a brown farmhouse standing crouched with age in the lee of the hill. A hill covered with trees in shades of autumn, maples flaming orange and yellow in the dull of an overcast November day. You run fast enough that you cannot be expected to hear anyone calling you back for the never-ending list of chores. Today, pail in hand, is the right day for this task in the late ancient part of the year.

The air has a sharp tang of end of season, enough bite to make your nose run.  A complex toasted scent of leaves rises from the fallen layers underfoot. The sun peeps past an edge of cloud, then a thick gray draws in again. A flurry of crows rise calling against the sky. Passing warm and cold currents of air trade turns pushing against you as you mount the hill into the orchard and head down the long slope between the harvested apple trees, each naked tree twisted and shaped by its individual history of spring rains and summer drought, squirrels and the voices of the men come to pick in early fall telling stories over sandwiches.

A bit over two miles from the farmhouse a forest waits, its edge of beech trees and conifers, old maples clustered with the patchy leaf hues of yellow and orange bright against dark green clumps of pine and juniper. A path, nearly invisible, leads between ponderous trunks, and a squirrel knocks twigs as he flees, scolding. You can see how the faint signs of foot wear run alongside then over the tumbled granite boulders of a wall some other long ago farm grew. A mile more, perhaps, though it always feels a longer distance through trees on a ragged path, before you turn down, following the descent of the tree-thronged land. Before you now the forest changes, opening to the sky and standing gray; most of the leaves in this area have fallen and there’s only a scatter of swamp maple red and pink, echoing the lower cast sprinkle of bright blueberry leaves.

            The ground is no longer dead leaves and earth, but confused bare brush and twigs catching your feet. This is where you leave the path, you must pick your way through and around the gray trunked maples, which as you progress, grow thin. Few branches reach overhead now. The brush seems more like deep lichen, and your feet sink, the footing becoming more awkward as though its softness pulls. Here in the autumn bog, trees are few and those around you seem young, as though something in this place forbade any of them growing past a certain age.

 The very light feels different, pale, the colors alien and lavender hazed. Yet looking around, you are in the open, so why does this secret place feel so very magically strange? Watching you, as though it has been waiting for someone to come.

You see the first dark red gleaming, kneel down and gently tug the first cranberry into your grasp. You squint, peering around. Then in a flicker, the cranberries seem suddenly numerous as though that first sighting gifted you with the trick of seeing them. All shades of pink and cream and dark dried-blood vermillion. This is why you have come, and as you kneel and gather, tugging the round firm berries from their filamentous moorings, the wet of the bog hidden under all the ages of layered moss slowly seeps through your stout jeans. The very birds seem silenced, and there is only a low murmur of wind, and the rattle of the berries gathering in your metal pail.

Your great uncle brought you here ten years ago, to gather Thanksgiving cranberries. It was a secret, he said. This was our own bog, not enough to harvest for sale, but enough for a family. Inside the purple-gray bowl of sphagnum, a man stays hidden from the rest of the world, even from a hunter out for his family’s deer. The moss underfoot and under knee, might be hundreds of years old, or thousands. Perhaps the Indians of this area, the Abanaki, had come here as you do. Likely enough, he said, nodding.

He died years ago, but you remember the way. It’s a slow pick, to gather enough cranberries for a sauce, but when you pause and feel the November air on your face, and feel the deep dank chill of the bog on your legs and hands, it could take forever and would still seem right. This place with its mysteries could enfold a person and hold them away from the world. How would you know that minutes changed and moved while you stood here?

You whisper, because this is a place for whispers. Gray whispers that might move not only through the air but through time itself, and bring one of those rare smiles to his furrowed face.

“Uncle Ben. I came. Happy Thanksgiving.”

I’d like to see you if you’re in town…

I remember watching our child start to walk and being impressed that the effort was only a barely controlled fall. Is that significant and profound? Possibly both. I suspect we think that everyone except ourselves and our loved ones has a steady beat to their steps, all purposes clear and the whole coordination of walking, in the bag. And I think that’s a fallacy– we are all in a controlled or not so controlled fall. It is good for our humility to remember that, but all it really takes is one stumble, or one patch of ice or an unperceived branch, and we are brought to the literally hard realization that no… what we are doing is not carefully planned, but an approximation.

Speaking of stumbles and surprises, I had a weird day, culminating in receiving a bill for Emergency Room services. The local hospital says my mother incurred these charges, but that the insurance didn’t go through. The bill is due. The charge isn’t so very terrible, about $450. My husband and I started immediately to make jests about how it was my mother teasing us by returning, not simply from hospice for the fifth time, (because yes, she walked right out of hospice four times before the final one…) but actually returning from the dead. I am awaiting her knock on the door. 

I’ll have tea ready and some applesauce cake.

But yes, we realize that this may indicate that someone who knew where she used to live is trying to use her name to cover their ER visit. Or, of course it could be a clerical error. After poring through the not very clear pages of the bill I came to the realization that they think she was at the ER on December 21st, 2023. If so, she really does owe us a visit! After all, my mother moved from here in fall, 2007, to live near my sister in Washington state, and died there in 2016. That’s a bit of a while ago. So the uneasy part of this is who knew enough but not too much, that they tried to scam the hospital using her name and address, and what new thing will come next? Yes, I’ll be on the phone to the hospital tomorrow.

The part of my mind that loves the fantastic makes me wonder if she’ll want us to apologize for keeping her ashes (or at least some of them,) in the house with us. But I know better. She’ll only call me silly and pinch my cheek just a little too hard, as she liked to do when there was an edge to her comment.

First day

I find it profoundly moving that this day is the anniversary of Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation. I hope each of you has had the experience of seeing the fictionalized but profoundly satisfying movie ‘Lincoln’ which gives a certain narrative structure to an event that I believe had cohesion in Lincoln’s own mind long before its realization, even while the chaos and disruptions of the wartime and all its currents of political contention obscured this purpose. Yet it came to pass, and he inked his name upon the document, and if he were remembered for little else but what has been called this “bill of lading”, it is a worthy thing!

It is another cold silent night, and I hope for better sleep than last night, when I came awake inopportunely for several hours, unaccompanied by the usual call of owls. There is an interesting sense to those nights, no anxiety, though in small waves comes an impatience concerning the waste of good potential sleep time, a sense of suspension and an opportunity to think deeply. Do I? Think deeply? Hardly. I figure out what I want to eat for the next day’s dinner, and I wonder if it is worthwhile mending a sock. How I wish such nights brought insight into the nature of mankind, or even the answer to what is the ultimate ice cream sundae!

I remember a fellow freshman at college saying with her signature curling sly smile, that ice cream was good for the soul. A bad exam? Ice cream. Didn’t get the class you wanted? Ice cream with caramel sauce and whipped cream. I looked her up on line yesterday and found out that she followed her heart’s desire and got a Masters in Fine Arts and she’s now at one of the great museums on the East Coast. She is doing just fine, and I am heartened to know it.

So who are we, between Lincoln and my friend? None of the above or below, doing piece by piece what we can, making the creation of a life day by day. Strong shadows and bright curves of light, and the strange muddling in between. I am thinking so much these days as I try to imagine the next show of paintings which do not yet exist, a show which will be upon me all too soon, and I want to say something. What, you ask, what would you want to say in your work, and I can only blurt “An ice cream sundae, with caramel sauce and fudge and whipped cream.” If that is the best we can do– well, I know of worse.

Off I go to dream, perhaps of sundaes and socks, and maybe an echo of Lincoln talking half to himself, as he wanders the shadowy corridors of the old White House, his tatty shawl drawn up over his shoulders and his bowed unbrushed head heavy with thoughts that will not let him sleep. We are more fortunate than him, but I follow him in dreams some nights, and I wonder if there might be a leftover drift of strong minds leaving currents in our air– this air that we assume is only worth our breathing, and no more.