Homeward Bound
NASHVILLE, 2012
Every time my mother went to visit my sister or my brother, she would leave her brown dachshund with me. And for days afterward, the dog would sit before our back door and wait for her. This was the same door my mother used every night when she and the dog came over for supper, and its full-length window is the only one in our house that reaches low enough for a dachshund to see through. The dog would wait and wait and wait, and three days later—a week at most—my mother always came back to her.
Two weeks after Mom’s funeral, the dog ran away. Dapple-colored, she was both willful and invisible: she had never once come when called, and she could disappear beneath the lowest bushes, behind the smallest fallen branch. Terrified, I turned that yard inside out looking for her. When I finally thought to check at my mother’s house across the street, I found her at the back door, jumping up and scratching to be let in. She had been scratching so urgently, and for so long, that the paint was chipped away from the doorjamb.
What I Saved
NASHVILLE, 2012
I saved only one of your thirty-seven coffee mugs, the white one from the church in Birmingham with the massive pietà hanging behind the altar. I keep it in the back corner of the cupboard, next to the mug emblazoned with a troubling Bible verse that gets used only when all the other mugs are dirty.
I saved the nicest of the towels filling two closets but none of the fabric remnants piled in the guest room, and none of the garish rhinestone brooches from the fifties, and none of the Jane Austen fan fiction, and none of the Southern Living magazines from the eighties, and none of the Hallmark Channel DVDs. The retirement home, the one you almost moved into, was grateful to have the DVDs. The retirement home, you would be glad to know, has finally gotten rid of the bedbugs.
I saved all five giant boxes of OxiClean, and oh my God why did you never tell me about OxiClean? At 156 loads per box, our socks have been white for all the years you’ve been gone.
I saved three lipsticks in a shade of pink I will never wear, but I threw away two dozen more, along with bottle after bottle of expired vitamins, and don’t even get me started on the expired boxes and cans in the pantry. I wish I had known how much you loved blueberry muffins. I wish I had made you blueberry muffins every day of your life.
I saved miles and miles of Christmas ribbon and boxes of note cards. Even after the funeral thank-you notes, there were enough cards left for all my correspondence for years to come. I saved your nice wooden coat hangers, and I wish I’d saved the gorgeous red raincoat that was too big for me when you died but would fit perfectly now.
Naturally I saved the baptismal gown with the handmade lace and the impossibly dainty white-on-white embroidery, half a century old by the time I found it in your sock drawer, and I saved the socks, too, or at least the ones with mates.
I saved all the photos and all the love letters, and the recipe cards that can be dated, like ancient trees, by layers of butter stains. I saved your wedding ring and the pearl pendant with the diamond chip that Dad gave you, promising a lifetime of diamonds and pearls, though there was never any money for diamonds or pearls. I saved what was left of your wedding gown and the gown you wore on your wedding night. I saved Aunt Fidelis’s silver vanity set with mermaids embossed on the Victorian hair receiver. Before I threw away your brush, I saved your snow-white hair, too. The pale, thin strands are almost invisible in the cut-glass jar where the mermaids keep watch.
I saved the empty bird feeders and the empty pots in the garage and even the nearly dead holly fern you dug up from our old yard and carried here in a plastic bag but didn’t live to plant. I filled the feeders with seeds, and I filled the pots with flowers, and I planted the dry roots of the holly fern, and now my yard is filled with birds and blossoms. I saved all these things. But what I couldn’t save weighs on my heart like a stone.
When My Mother Returns to Me in Dreams
NASHVILLE, 2012
I had wanted the story to be a gift, a tribute to the house my mother loved long past the time when love could save it. Mom was still refusing to leave, and I struggled to understand her fondness for a place that was tumbling into ruins around her. But as I was writing the essay, I began to grasp her deep-rooted reasons for staying, and why my arguments carried no weight against them. In trying to fathom my mother’s love for that house, I came around to remembering my love for it, too. That would be my gift to her: understanding. The story was set to appear in a magazine my mother often read, and it would be illustrated with pictures of the house and our family’s life in it—a photo of me in my First Communion gown, a picture of Mom in her wedding dress—and I planned to wrap up a copy for Mother’s Day.
But my brother had his doubts: “It might make her feel bad for strangers to read about how terrible the house looks,” he said. “She might be embarrassed.” So I never said a word.
By the time the essay finally appeared in print, Mom had moved to Nashville, but it was months before she ever saw it. One day she banged open the door of my office and slammed a copy of the magazine down on the desk. “What is this?” she yelled, her face so flushed the scalp showed pink beneath her clean white hair.
I could see how it had happened. She sits down beneath the dryer at the beauty shop to flip through an old magazine. Suddenly she comes to a full-page picture from her own wedding album. There she is, standing with Dad on the church steps, squinting into the Lower Alabama sun, in the dress she’d designed and made by hand.
“Mom, listen,” I started.
“No, you listen. What made you think it was OK to publish my picture in a magazine without even asking me?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” I said. “I was planning to wrap it up for Mother’s Day, but Billy thought it might hurt your feelings to read about how bad the house looks.”
The air whooshed out of her. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She picked up the magazine and looked at the picture again. “Well, that’s OK, then.”
When Mom returns to me in dreams, she’s always heart-breakingly herself, not some otherworldly haint or visible expression of my own grief. Whenever she appears, my first reaction is always relief. Oh, thank God. It was just a misunderstanding. You’re alive. And Mom is always puzzled, always surprised when I grab her and hold her tight, when I say again and again, “You’re here. You’re back. Thank God.”
And when I find her somewhere else, in an unfamiliar dream landscape, it’s always somehow recognizably ordinary—not paradise at all but a cinder-block house with knotty-pine paneling and worn floral curtains. I walked into a strange house once and found Mom sitting with my father and my grandparents, and my father’s godmother, and they all looked up when I opened the door, but they were no gladder to see me than if I had merely stepped outside to check the weather. My dead don’t seem to know they’re dead.
In one dream Mom was annoyed to discover her coat hangers in the closet next to our front door. “But why would you take all my nice wooden hangers?” she said.
“Because you died, Mom,” I said. “You were dead.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s OK, then.”
Carapace
Hush. Be quiet. The long summer day is coming to a close, spooling up its lovely light, but there is nothing to fear from the night. There is nothing to fear from life giving way to death, for that matter, or from any dark thing. Stand in the shadows under the trees for only a moment, for half a moment, and a dozen fallen things will reveal themselves to you.
Last year’s sassafras leaf, clinging still to a bit of its yellow luster, has gone gorgeous in lace, and the cicada, dwelling in the black soil for all those years, has climbed out of its shell and taken to the trees and begun to sing, has become the song of summer evenings, and the sweet-gum ball has lost its spiky armor and released its seeds into the generations, and the acorn, too, has shed its shell and sent roots into the earth, and the dead sycamore at the edge of the quiet lake’s lapping water has leapt
into flame as it does every single evening, and then the red-winged blackbird, the bright badge on his wing a flare of incandescence in the light at the end of the day, settles on a branch and sings the nighttime home.
Resurrection
A dozen monarch caterpillars arrive in the mail, tender, unprotected, but I am ready. I’ve set out an entire flat of native milkweed plants, new additions to a bed I planted earlier but that so far has not attracted a single breeding pair. I’ve enclosed the butterfly garden with a sturdy wire border covered by mosquito netting, to protect the caterpillars from birds and spiders and wasps and parasitic flies and praying mantises and the hundred other predators waiting outside. Even inside the enclosure, all manner of calamity could befall them: various diseases, poorly timed shifts in the weather, hungry animals with claws or beaks too sharp for mosquito netting to repel.
Within a day, sure enough, some other living thing has unfastened the netting from where I’ve pinned it tightly to the soil, pushed past it, and gulped down two of the caterpillars. Monarch larvae subsist entirely on poisonous milkweed leaves and are therefore toxic themselves, but they are not toxic enough to prevent all predation. A hungry bird will devour almost any insect, no matter how distasteful. My husband once plucked a large stinkbug from the driveway and tossed it out of harm’s way. The instant it took to the air, a robin swept out of a tree and caught it mid-flight. This is a predator-friendly yard: I have set up nine feeding stations to welcome birds, and never mind the opossums and the raccoons and the rat snake that winters under the garden shed.
A day later, another two or three or four are gone, though their enclosure appears intact this time. Exactly how many are missing I am no longer sure, for despite their jaunty yellow and black stripes, monarch caterpillars are surprisingly good at hiding and instinctively freeze as soon as they see me approach. Possibly they are somewhere else in the garden altogether, for now I find a flaw in my rigged-together enclosure: the netting is not so tightly fastened to the ground as I had thought. A few old bricks solve that problem, but already I am waiting for the next problem to arise.
Very few caterpillars survive to become butterflies—perhaps as few as 1 percent—and nature responds with profligacy: a female monarch lays around four hundred eggs during her brief reproductive life. Before the widespread use of herbicides, this reproduction rate was enough to keep North America dense with butterflies. Now the monarchs are dying out, and I am invested in trying to save them.
How literally am I invested? I try not to count up the costs for milkweed, fencing, mosquito nets, the caterpillars themselves. But I find myself doing the math each time a caterpillar goes missing, recalculating what I will end up having paid for each monarch that ultimately survives. I know I am fast approaching the butterfly equivalent of what my country friend calls the forty-dollar homegrown tomato.
For a while—an hour, two—all seems well, but when I check again, a caterpillar has crawled onto the net and stopped moving. I’m not worried at first, and I’m only slightly worried a few hours later, but by morning something seems terribly wrong: for at least seventeen hours, this caterpillar has not moved at all, and creatures who eat for twenty-four hours each day should not remain so wholly still.
When I check again, for now I am checking obsessively, a black blob extends from its hind end, a sticky film of some kind, too large to be excrement. I think of the pet rabbit who died in my arms in childhood, how it gave a single kick and then fell limp, filling my lap with urine. Is this the way a monarch caterpillar surrenders its life, hanging upside down and spooling out a thread of thick black tar?
It’s useless to return to my desk—there’s no way I’ll be able to work. I squat and wait. The internet urges monarch stewards to remove diseased caterpillars from their enclosures, but how can I be sure I know life from death in the odd demiworld of this garden, this mesh-enclosed anteway I have fashioned between the mailbox and the sky?
The caterpillar stirs, and finally I see: this is not a death at all but only a pause before another stage of life, splitting the skin it has outgrown and crawling away from what it no longer needs. It is a new creature. Even before it begins again, it begins again.
In Darkness
Early autumn is the heyday of the orb weaver spiders. A spider’s egg sac bursts open in spring, and the infinitesimal hatchlings spend all summer growing and hiding from predators. By fall, they are large enough to emerge from their secret places and spin their marvelous webs. Every night the female makes an intricate trap for flying insects, and every evening she eats up the tatters of last night’s web before starting in again on something new and perfect.
By September, our house always looks as though nature has decorated early for Halloween, but I can’t bring myself to sweep the webs from the windows or out from under the eaves. I know the spiders are there, the few who survived the long, hot summer. They are crouched in corners, waiting for nightfall, when they will again commence to wring a miracle from the world. For beauty, what tidy window ever matched a spider’s web glistening in the lamplight?
One year I watched an orb weaver spider at uncommonly close range. She had set up housekeeping by stringing her web from our basketball backboard to the corner of the house. Just above the eave on that corner is a floodlight that’s triggered by motion. Every night that September I carried my late mother’s lame old dachshund out for her last sniff around, and every night the light blinked on, catching the spider mid-miracle. While the ancient dog did her business, I stood in the shadows just beyond the reach of the light and watched the spider carrying on her urgent work. If I held still enough, she would keep spinning, and I could watch something unfold that normally takes place entirely in the dark. But whenever she saw me studying her, she would rush up the lifeline she’d spun for herself and squat behind the Christmas lights that dangle from the eaves, the ones that wink all day and warn birds who might otherwise crash into the windows when the slant of light changes in autumn.
Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being. In the fairy tale we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift.
What we feel always contains its own truth, but it is not the only truth, and darkness almost always harbors some bit of goodness tucked out of sight, waiting for an unexpected light to shine, to reveal it in its deepest hiding place.
No Exit
NASHVILLE, 2014
“Marry an orphan,” my mother used to say, “and you can always come home for Christmas.” What she should have said: “Marry an orphan, or you’ll have four parents to nurse through every torment life doles out on the long, long path to the grave.” But I married the opposite of an orphan—the son and grandson of people who live deep into old age despite diseases that commonly fell others: cancer, sepsis, heart failure, emphysema, you name it. My husband’s elders get sick, and then they get sicker, but for years they persevere.
My own father died of cancer five days shy of his seventy-fifth birthday. Mom dropped dead of a hemorrhagic stroke at eighty. When I checked on her the night before her death, she was eating a cookie and watching a rerun of JAG. I almost pointed out that eating in bed is a choking hazard, but for once I let it go. She was in good health, but she needed my help in countless annoying ways—annoying to her and annoying to me—and she was heartily sick of being told what to do. I take some comfort now in knowing I skipped that one last chance to boss her around.
There’s an art to helping people without making them feel bad about needing help. It’s an art I was learning but hadn’t wholly mastered with Mom. “I would’ve died if my mother had done this to me when I was your age,” she said when she moved in across the street, but by the time she actually died three years later, we had both adjusted: “I know I can be a bitch sometimes, but you can be a bitch someti
mes too,” she would say. “I figure it all works out in the wash.”
I saw my mother at least twice a day and talked with her more often than that. But as close as we were, I sometimes found myself despairing her long-lived genes. My great-grandmother lived to be ninety-six despite spending the bulk of her life without antibiotics or vaccines. My grandmother lived to be ninety-seven despite being shot in her seventies by a crazed stranger. I knew my kids would one day leave for lives of their own, but Mom’s needs would just keep growing. By the time my nest was truly empty, I thought, there would be precious little left of me.
When she died so suddenly, still issuing hilarious pronouncements and taking our teenagers’ side in generational disputes, I felt as if a madman had blown a hole through my own heart. Unmoored, I could not stop weeping. Caring for elders is like parenting toddlers—there’s a scan running in the background of every thought and every act, a scan that’s tuned to possible trouble. And there’s no way to shut it down when the worst trouble, irrecoverable trouble, comes.
A year later, before we’d even settled the question of where Mom’s keepsakes should go, my husband’s parents moved across several state lines to an assisted-living facility five minutes from our house. Physically frail—he from heart failure, she from Parkinson’s disease—they needed far more help than my mother ever did, but I figured their new living arrangements would surely make up the difference. After cooking for Mom, driving her to appointments, managing her medications, paying her bills, and washing her clothes, I looked forward to having parents nearby who needed only our love and our company.
Late Migrations Page 12