Beginnings
This spring, I bought a new house and I’m still in the process of moving in.
The house comes with much light, and a lot of big ideas about how to reinvent itself into a home for two women coming together in the later years of their life.
The three of us – me, my partner and the house – will live together at the end of a cul de sac with a dear friend across the road, a strong river to the east and a pond of our own in the back yard.
We all arrive here well worn; the house is the youngest of the three and it’s the only one of us that has had just one family.
Endings
In order to come to this place, I had to start and finish graduate school and leave a home where I flourished and healed from the bumps and bruises of nearly sixty years of living. My partner ended a relationship, lost her mother, watched her children leave home, and then sold the house where this all took place. To complete the package, the house we bought had been home to an entire family from start to finish. The pencil marks on the laundry room wall stand as testament to a wife and husband, two children and later two grandchildren who grew up in the house that was built for exactly that purpose. The husband has since died, the children moved on and the wife bought a condo nearby that will hold her until she cannot live on her own.
None of us – me, my partner, the widow, the kids, the grandkids, the house – know where it goes from here, except in some ultimate sort of way.
There’s a case to be made for death being both the toil and the spice of our time here on earth. We know what eventually happens to each of us but we can’t predict what it’s going to be like along the way or how it’s going to be when we get there. We work out formulas to live with this and so, like the backyard pond, there’s a seasonality to our activities, a “time to reap time to sow” rhythm that we can get in cahoots with.
It’s how we manage.
Endings as beginnings
This morning, I was mucking out the pond, raking dead leaves and milfoil and generally stinky stuff up onto the embankment with the intention of hauling it to the compost bin. I smiled at the rhythm of the whole thing as I envisioned the months to come, using the compost to plant new gardens around the pond. It seemed, in that moment, as though this could go on forever: muck to compost to flower bed to flower to pond to muck.
As I heaved on the rake, a fat frog bounced out from the muck, plopping itself back into the pond and then it swam away. It scared me and then struck me as incredibly sad; the vision of that frog being ripped away from its eggs hit me. I dropped the rake in the sludge pile and slumped down, crying into the wet spring grass. It was as though all of the endings hit me, all of the losses; the wives and husbands and girlfriends and mothers and kids and homes, I felt them all. The way this moves aside and that takes its place and we, as both participant and spectator, mourn the loss to make room for what comes next. It was all too much to bear right then and I could not do anything else but cry about it.
After a while, I gathered up my rakes and shovels, put them back in the garage and walked across the road to the river. The river is tidal, being not far upstream from Merrymeeting Bay and the bay being just off the Atlantic Ocean in mid-coast Maine. As such, the river has both a cycle of ebbing and flowing and a constancy in that it ultimately moves from east to west. Standing on its bank in the morning sun, I watched the vortices form and disperse, the steadiness of the water and the swirling of the swirls, me just being there for no reason other than another thing that comes and goes.
There was nothing to be done but feel what I felt and watch it go by. Making room for what comes next.
