Another Chapter

Where do we go when our words disappear?

I thought that I could lay in this meadow watching the summer sky shift from yellow to blue to grey and my words would return.

Just this morning, I stood in a state of wonder. Monarchs intersected my path toward the garden. My spaniel bounced about chasing bunnies from the clover and digging for toads beneath the woodpile.

Perhaps, I thought, life could be this simple.

I picked golden tomatoes slick with hose water and popped them into my mouth. I felt five years old again. Yes, life could be this simple if only I could find a path out of my head.

Last spring, I sat with Dad on his porch. The tree frogs recently emerged from their pods or chrysalis, or from wherever these harbingers of spring incubate.

All I know is the sound: clear, sharp: heightened pitch, rising clarity.

Dad and I listened to the frogs sing. He was so happy that winter turned to spring, and his furnace was running well. To a ninety-year-old, basic creature comforts mean everything.

Two years ago in December, Dad refused to let us take him to our house for the holidays. He lived in fear that frigid winter weather would freeze the pipes and “he’d have a mess on his hands.”

On Christmas Eve, his furnace broke. Dad spent Christmas running all the spigots in the house so the drains wouldn’t freeze. The gas fireplace provided some warmth, and he ran the portable electric heaters.

I begged him to go our friend’s house and to be careful not to set his own house on fire. Offended, he dismissed me. “I’ve kept you safe all these years, I’m not a helpless old man.”

Helpless, no, I thought, but old, yes.

Laying in the sun on my tattered quilt, writing journal and pen unopened and uncapped, I think how fleeting is time.

Seasons drift, one into the other, and here I lay on my back turning my blue straw hat, over and over, waiting for insight.

I cover my face with the hat to filter the sun from my eyes.

A yoga teacher once taught me that you should keep your eyes open during savasana, the final pose in the practice, so that inner thoughts and fears, distractions and pain will release rather than grow beneath the shield of closed eyelids.

She further explained, that if we are currently at peace, to close our eyes during this final pose to witness the well-deserved rest.

Peace, discord: ever shifting skies.

This wisdom seemed to resonate with me on this day, a year after my father’s death. During the past year, whenever I closed my eyes, I drifted back to his last days, last hours, last minutes.

I went back to that moment when I held the phone to his ear as my children, my cousin, my brother told him that they loved him and will miss him.

“Son, I love you,” Dad told my brother over the phone.

Dad saved his steadiest voice for my brother who was wheelchair ridden and nursing home bound after surviving a stroke that left his right side useless. Dad always tried to be brave and strong for my brother.

Little by little, Dad’s voice weakened.

I continued to hold the phone to his mouth as he told each of my children how he loved them, using the last of his voice for my youngest, my son who hid his pain from his colleagues and took my call alone, in the stairwell at his office.

I choked back my words and muffled my own pain. I needed to be strong for my dad, to let him know that I could also be brave in the face of his suffering.

Finally, I was left alone with Dad. He did not have the strength to look at me or tell me that he loved me, like he did with the others.

I suppose we both just knew, or perhaps neither one of us wanted to say goodbye.

Goodbyes are too final, and our love was out there, floating in the lake, hovering about the lily pads, soaring on the strong wings of the mute swan.

For a few moments, his course breathing, the death rattle they called it, softened. His brown eyes, still framed by dark lashes, melted into calm pools.

Dad looked out at the green pond grasses and saw the cattails sway in the gentle wind. Sunlight crystallized.  A trick of the late June light.

Dad closed his eyes for the last time.

A year has passed, and I thought that my words would return with the shapeshifting clouds that float across my vision.

I never really said goodbye. My words were swallowed with the rain that fell in blinding sheets into the darkness of the lake on the night my father died.

A new sky, pale blue, floats above me as I lift the hat from my face. I decide to close my eyes. Perhaps I will feel the peace that might just lay in the soft part of my memory, in the final calm of my father’s brown eyes.

Memory is a tricky illusion. At times comforting, other times discomforting. Perhaps it is best to stay grounded in the present moment.

I dig my toes further into the sludge of soil. Pulling for tendrils of maiden hair that creep between the clover, purple-heavy with nectar.

I turn my head to the side. I notice a cluster of wild berry brambles bordering the meadow. Tight green knots of unripened blackberries cling to the thin, spiky branches.

Funny, I think, how even in the height of summer, there is always that one purple berry or one red leaf blazing in the brambles or the bush, reminding us that seasons change.

Twilight is approaching and I feel the wind shift as the hair rises on my arms.

It is then that I look to the sky, and I see him, the elder floating in the clouds. His nose is prominent, unmistakable, silhouetted against that June blue.

The sky changes again, and dark clouds pass over the light.

I see the elder one last time. In a final puff of white, he shifts into a swan and rises higher into the dimming light.

I turn to my side and briefly feel a moment’s peace as I curl into the comfort of the fetal position.

Then I rise, stronger, and reach for my pen. Perhaps I am ready to find my words again.