the cassandra pages

A Memorial Day Tour, part 1

We hadn’t thought to buy flowers. Our trip was an impromptu decision, taken at the breakfast table, and here it was, a holiday. So while my father called my Aunt Doris to ask how to find his brother’s grave in the cemetery at Greene, I rummaged through the cupboard where old terracotta pots and gardening tools were stored, and pulled out three plant baskets with plastic liners and blocks of green Oasis foam. I poured water into the containers and left it to soak into the foam, and then went out the front door and cut an armful of branches from the rose-colored honeysuckle bush by the steps. Back on the round oak table, my father and I cut the branches into smaller pieces, filling the baskets with fragrant arching blooms, and added some yellow daisy-like chrysanthemums that he had given me when I arrived.

Dad made his way down the stairs, helped by his cane, and we loaded ourselves and the flowers into the car. It wasn’t yet 9:00 am, warm and dry; the sky a brilliant, cloudless blue.

"Where first?” I asked, putting the key in the ignition.

He thought for a minute. “Afton, I guess. Then we’ll work our way back to Greene and over the hill to
South Otselic.”

“I don’t think Mom would have done this. It wasn’t really her style,” I remarked, as we drove out the lake road past the fire pond where two geese had been incubating their nest.

“No geese,” my father observed, looking out the window. “Maybe not.” He shrugged and turned to look at me. “I’ve never done it before.” 

“Neither have I,” I said. But the truth was that he and I were the ones to do it; we were the ones who were sentimental, and who felt, deep down, an urge to observe certain rituals.

My paternal grandparents retired to the town of Afton, New York, at the southern end of Chenango County, in the late 1950s, and although they eventually left that house and lived for many years in a church retirement home in Binghamton, Afton is where they are buried. My grandfather was a Methodist minister and the family of four children moved every two or three years to the little towns of southern
New York and northern Pennsylvania. A carved sign from that Afton house hangs over my father’s woodworking bench: “Dun Movin’.”

When I was a child, we’d go to Afton to visit them several times a year, and I always got carsick on the winding roads that start when you leave Rt 12 after Oxford and head over the hills to Coventryville. Dad had always been at the wheel. Until today, I’d never driven this way myself, and I’d never seen where my grandparents were buried.

“We got them the house in Afton because it was one town where he’d never been a minister,” my father was explaining, as I searched the hills for something that looked familiar. Nothing did, except that it was all typical Chenango County. We had already driven nearly the whole length of the county. We passed small farms in the open, rolling, beautiful countryside, and many houses, more of them dilapidated than not; it was a long ways here between towns of any significant size. There were a lot of American flags stuck on lawns and porches, and decorating soldiers’ graves in the little rural cemeteries with their wrought-iron or wooden fences, out in the middle of nowhere, but we also passed one ramshackle house with boarded-over windows and a big sign, painted in blue letters on plywood out by the road, that read “End Fascist Rule.” There was an old yellow school bus next to the house, completely covered with spray-painted graffiti about the “fascist pigs” and “US out of Iraq.”

We came down onto a flat, and my father gestured at a white ranch house on the right. "Charlie Wayman," he said, singing the name the way he always had. Charlie had been a good salesman for my father and grandfather's real estate agency, covering this part of the county. I looked at the house; now this did feel familiar. "Mom and I waited a lot of hours for you in that driveway," I said. "And every Christmas, he and his wife used to give me homemade popcorn balls wrapped in colored cellophane."

"Really?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said as we drove past. "It's the kind of thing a kid would remember."

The road to the cemetery was on the outskirts of Afton. I had wanted to go by my grandparents’ old house first, but when we started to pull into town, we saw cars parked sideways, blocking traffic, and flagmen in jeans and short-sleeved shirts standing next to them. “Oh-oh,” I said. “It looks like they’re getting ready for a parade.”

“Well, we don’t want to get caught in that.Turn around,” said my father, who hates waiting in lines of any kind.

The cemetery, at the end of a road lined with old trees, was well-kept and full of cedars and clear pink, wild azaleas - “pinxters” - in full bloom, more lovely than any cultivated variety. “Where should I go?” I asked my father. There were several roads in the cemetery; we were at the entrance, near a white shed where a man in a blue shirt and red suspenders was washing his pick-up truck.

“Damned if I know,” my father said. “I haven’t been here for, I don’t know, ten or fifteen years. Maybe this guy can tell us.” I got out while my father rolled down the window and said, “Rev. Charles and Mabel Adams.”

The man wiped his hands and straightened up to look at us. I had gotten out of the car and walked over to where he was. He consulted a map that was hanging on the wall of the shed. “No Adams here,” he said. “I’ll look in my book.” 

He retrieved a three-ring binder from the side of the building, and ran his finger down a list. “Ok,” he said, “Rev Charles? 

“Yes.”

“It says here No. 51.” He led me back to the map in the shed. No 51 showed the name “Ayles.” I relayed the information to my father. He was already nodding. “It’s up there, in the second row,” he said, pointing, “I remember now. They’re on the back side of the stone, or some damn thing; somebody probably gave them a free plot so their names aren’t on the front.”

I thanked the custodian and got back in the care and drove slowly until we came to “Ayles;” we parked and my father slowly got out of the car. “Here they are,” I said, reading the other side of the stone with difficulty; the letters weren’t deeply cut. I went back to the car, opened the trunk and took out one basket of flowers. In the ground near the bottom of the stone was a metal cross incised with the words “United Methodist minister”; beside it was a freshly-planted red geranium seedling with one bloom. “Aunt Doris has been here,” I said to my father, pointing. He nodded, and walked from one side of the grave to the other. I put the basket of flowers on the other side of the cross from the geranium; I took a picture. “Well,” my father said, tapping the ground with his cane, “they were good parents.” We got back in the car.

This is part one of several parts.

Don't Try This at Home

Yes, I know I was going to write about Memorial Day in central New York, and I will, but first I have to report on one of the biggest kitchen messes I've ever made in my life.

Rice, asparagus, and grilled chicken, cooked under the broiler - what could be simpler? I started the rice and washed and trimmed the asparagus, got out the package of chicken and the broiler pan, and looked in the refrigerator to see what I had for basting sauce ingredients. A jar of minced ginger, some soy sauce, mustard...now something sweet...ah, a small round plastic container with a quarter-inch of remaining maple syrup. A great time to use it up!

I took the container out and opened it. There was some liquid syrup, which I poured into a small bowl, but in the bottom the remaining syrup had crystallized. OK, I thought, I'll pop it into the microwave for a few seconds. Which I did. Most of the sugar melted, and I stirred it around with a spoon. Still a little too granular. "A few more seconds," I decided, and put it back into the microwave and turned to the stove to check the rice.

Suddenly I smelled the unmistakable, nose-tingling odor of burning sugar. I spun around, and opened the microwave to release billowing steam and smoke. I grabbed the container, which was blackened at the bottom, and pulled it out -- and that's when the bottom of the container opened up, completely melted-through, and the contents spilled out in a lovely arc onto the off-white kitchen floor, forming a black-brown Jackson Pollack splatter painting that stretched from the sink to the stove.

This was followed by a torrent of very nice Anglo-Saxon words that brought J. into the kitchen.

He stood looking at the floor as I reached for a sponge and hot water. "It looks like it's cooking the floor," he remarked. I didn't reply, but got down on my hands and knees and squeezed water onto some of the still-hot drops; a lighter brown, sticky fluid spread over a much larger portion of the floor. I got up and reached for a stiff metal spatula. "No!" he cried, "don't do that, you'll ruin the floor." He looked at me sympathetically; my head was starting to ache. "Come on," he said, "I'm going to do a couple of errands, do you want to come with me and get a pizza? We can deal with this later."

"No," I said, "I'll clean it up." He left, and I tried the metal blade on a couple of spots that clung to a cabinet door. The hardened sugar lflipped off immediately, but I was pretty sure he was right about the resilient flooring; it would end up getting scratched. So I heated some water, got out a scrubbie-sponge, and set to work.

It only took about half an hour to clean everything up. The burnt sugar dissolved slowly, like candy in a warm mouth, but it did dissolve, and as I usually discover when performing such tasks, I rather liked the methodical process of applying the warm water, rubbing and rubbing, removing the dark water, starting over until each spot diminished and then finally disappeared under the circular movements of my hand. I washed the floor with a final bowl of clean water, straightened up, and then mixed the basting sauce again. There's now a platter of delicious-smelling chicken with a dark glaze, awaiting J.'s return. It looks a lot better on the chicken than the floor.

Memorial Day in the Heartland

Marking veterans' graves, Sangerfield, New York, May 21, 2007

I'm back in Vermont after a week with my father in central New York after his knee surgery. It was a long drive today. I'm sorry I've been so scare here but that will change; look for some posts in the days to come about our journey through Chenango County on Memorial Day, looking for the family graves, and various other experiences and impressions from my visit there, which, like always, felt like a time-warp in which my past and present selves interpenetrated and blurred, and now will slowly separate and come into focus again, but with my sense of myself slightly altered.

Remembering in Chinese

Two Letters

Dear Beth，

It is a long time didn’t get any message from you. I think of you often. It is Mom’s memorial ceremony today. I miss her and all of you. I kept her letters this years written to me in my documents and read them again, as if she still lives with me. In these letters, she talks with me about to be a woman, a mother, child’s education, reading, knitting, and beautiful feelings among your family. I miss her so much... Not knowing in the heaven if she knew I still talk with her. But she must know, she's never in solitude, she has many friend with her, Y. is among them.

Dear Beth, please instead of me to say Y. miss Mom when you have the ceremony. Much love, Y.

Dearest Y.,

I have been thinking of you often and especially as Mom's anniversary grew nearer. I wonder if there has been some problem with our email. I wrote to you and heard nothing back for months... I thought maybe something was wrong, or you had been unable to write...it means so much to me that you were thinking of us and of my mother today, and sharing our memories.

I am with my father at my parent's home. Dad just came home from the hospital today - he had his second knee replacement surgery on Monday. He's doing very well. Mom asked us both to promise that he would have his knees fixed, and so today we were able to tell her, "OK, we did it!" On the way home from the hospital we went to the cemetery and spent some time there. There is a lovely small apple tree that my father planted near her grave, and it is covered with blossoms. Later we will make a small garden there for some other flowers, with the tree on one side. I have planned to put some yellow chrysanthemums in the garden for you...

In Vermont it has finally become sunny and warm, and I have enjoyed being in the garden and back yard. There are lots and lots of birds there, and so I decided to buy some bird food and put it in the feeder. Suddenly, so many birds came! They were all in pairs - males and nesting females. And special ones - beautiful yellow goldfinches, red cardinals, black-and-white woodpeckers, grey catbirds, purple finches, mourning doves, sparrows, bluejays, a Northern oriole which is bright orange. And then an indigo bunting - which is a small bird of the brightest blue, and quite rare. I was beginning to laugh - it was crazy, so many beautiful birds, some of which I had never seen in our yard!

On the last day before I came down here to be with my father, I was looking out the kitchen window and saw a streak of bright red - it was a scarlet tanager, one of the most beautiful birds in North America, and I have never seen one in all these years in Vermont. I burst out laughing. It really felt like my mother was sending all these birds to me to show me I should be happy and enjoy nature as she always did. I don’t think that is really true, but a little part of me suspects it could be. Anyway, it DID make me happy and I feel joy for being alive in this remarkable world, full of suffering and full of joy all at the same time.

Please let me know how you are, and all your family. I send my special love to you on this day; we are sisters when we think of Mom.

Beth

(Y. and I have been writing to each other for many years. She lives in Beijing. We have never met in person.)

Gently Opposing Negativity

At Anglicans Really Alive I've written a post and started a discussion about atheism and recent books on that subject, taking off from a recent article, "Atheists with Attitude," in the book section of the New Yorker. That article discusses, for example, the recent book by Christopher Hitchens, "God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything;" speculates about the reasons behind this recent crop of books about atheism, and explores the thinking and motivations of prominent atheists throughout history.

And at Frogs and Ravens, Rana has written an excellent follow-up to some of the discussion here and elsewhere about the phenomenon of small local movements arising in opposition to slow or negative large forces in our world. While you're there, please be sure to click on the link to Paul Hawken's new book. I followed Hawken's thinking for years when he and Stewart Brand were two of the brains behind Whole Earth Review and Co-Evolution Quarterly, but then stopped hearing as much about him; I appreciate how he's continued to find positive energy for moving forward, especially on earth-related issues.

Of Art and Audiences

In the comments on the previous post, Dave mentions the move by musicians to cut out the middlepeople, and connect directly with audiences online; Lorianne responds, "Isn't that what we're doing with blogs and self-publishing?" and Rana wonders if perhaps the trend toward smallness and de-centralization is picking up momentum. I'm thinking about all of these things too. (I see that Dave is writing more about this today too.)

As artists working with words, what are we trying to achieve, and why? For many writers, let's face it: the dream (whether we'd admit it or not) has been to have a best-selling book. The article cited previously shows just how quixotic the publishing industry is, but what it doesn't show clearly is that they're only talking about the books that actually make the cut into publication at all. There are tons of deserving books which are less likely to find a publisher now than ever before because they are too offbeat or too specialized or some other "too" that translates into "too risky" for a traditional publisher to back, at a time when consolidation and mass-marketing make each title more costly to produce and sell.

As Rana mentioned in her comment, you see "big predictability" replacing "small specialness" everywhere in our culture now, from the box stores replacing locally-owned shops to the crates of tasteless tomatoes being trucked thousands of miles - even in the middle of summer - to local markets perfectly capable of growing and supplying all the tomatoes anyone could eat. Mass media tells us what to eat, what to wear, what to watch, what to read; in America today (though not in Quebec) I see young people who seem vastly more accepting of authority and less individualistic than my own generation was, and their goals in life seem to coincide with what the media trumpets. Of course there are exceptions, and of course a lot of people in my generation sold out, too, and went for the bucks bigtime in the 80s and 90s. But I think I'm right about the trend; and books like demographer Michael Adams' American Backlash bear me out.

One thing is certain: these forces are not going to change direction, so it is up to individuals and groups to reclaim control over their own artistic work, just as it is up to local communities to regain some control over the production and distribution of food, or the viability of their downtowns. That's not a new discussion.

My question, as a writer, is what is more valuable for me to do right now: work on a book (say, about my father-in-law) that I could end up being responsible for producing and selling, in the range of perhaps 750-1000 copies, or put my writing energy into my blog where I reach 200-300 people per day? Do I continue to try to do both? What is the value of such a book today? How much of it, I must ask myself, has to do with my own ego, my own attachment to the idea of "book"? With so much writing being produced in the world, how important is it that books exist as physical objects with the potential to last on a library or home shelf? If a person is a poet, how important is a physical collection of poems, in an edition of, say 300-500? I think it is important, both to the writer and to the audience - but we can't think of this effort in terms of money; the profits and audience are simply too small. The motivation, for me, needs to be something deeper than that to justify the effort and sacrifices that writing a book entail.

I think of the example of dance: perhaps the most ephemeral of artforms, and yet one that I seek out and find extremely moving. We have close friends who founded and have managed to maintain a successful dance company  - Pilobolus - over the past thirty years, and we recently heard them discuss what they do, during a weekend celebrating the donation of their archive to Dartmouth College. The immediate question was "What is a dance archive?" Most of Pilobolus's work hasn't been filmed - my husband photographed them in their earliest days and some of those photos are the only record that remains of their early work. The most interesting part of their archive is probably a collection of notes on the creative process.

Dance exists primarily in the moment, and in the memory of the viewer -- not even so much as images of bodies in motion, but as a feeling. In its purest form, this is perhaps what art is: the movement of the human spirit from one state to another, and the memory that movement creates. As artists, we strive for that in our work. Being motivated by the process itself of using all that we are and all that we have, at a given moment, to express the unexpressable -- rather than the seductive goal of fame and profit -- has to stay uppermost as we seek to share our work. I'm still idealistic enough to believe that when we succeed in that, our work touches people, and has lasting value. The numbers are less important than keeping one's eye on the ball.

A Business or a Casino?

According to insiders, the book publishing business is more like the latter:

Most in the industry seem to see consumer taste as a mystery that is inevitable and even appealing, akin to the uncontrollable highs and lows of falling in love or gambling. Publishing employees tend to be liberal arts graduates who enter the field with a starting salary around $30,000. Compensation is not tied to sales performance. “The people who go into it don’t do it for the money, which might explain why it’s such a bad business,” Mr. Strachan said.

Eric Simonoff, a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, said that whenever he discusses the book industry with people in other industries, “they’re stunned because it’s so unpredictable, because the profit margins are so small, the cycles are so incredibly long, and because of the almost total lack of market research.”

Ai-eeee. Read the article and tell me again why you wanted to be a writer?

In the Sunshine

Last Friday we drove to an unfamiliar Montreal neighborhood, in search of a particular Middle Eastern restaurant. At 11;30, on a beautiful sunny day, the cafés were all getting ready: every restaurant had its tables set out, its windows open, the wait-staff ready for lunchtime customers.

We liked the sign in the window of this health-food/natural-products store:

Flower shops and grocery stores had flats and pots of flowering plants on the sidewalk, attracting lots of attention. We found our restaurant and took a table on the terrace, right across from a florist. For the next hour we watched as cars pulled up, people got out, made their purchases, and went back to their cars, or on down the street on foot, carrying armloads of beautiful color.

Our meal was pretty too; here's what it looked like to start with. That's tea, a delicious light red lentil soup, warm pita, and a bowl of olives, hot peppers, and crunchy beet-stained turnip pickles. It continued with grilled kebab for J., and a fattoush salad for me, sprinkled with sumac. Oh, and that highly-prized ingredient: sunshine.

 

Late that afternoon, we came back down to Vermont, and yesterday and today we've been working outside. There's a lot that's wonderful about Vermont, especially the clean air, the greenness, the rural quality which is unfortunately being eroded in this particular area. I've decided that my transition-culture-shock is worst when I have to go to the local mall, where franchises and big box stores are proliferating like mosquitoes in a swamp. I want to shop where "Hippies are Always Welcome" - and I've kind of made a decision that when we're here, I'm going to go to the places that retain the true Vermont character: like the local food co-op, and the general store in the next town where the motto on the door is "if we don't have it, you don't need it." I went there yesterday and came home with a rake, suet cakes for the bird feeder, milk, knitting needles, and two pork chops.

This morning we went, in the early morning sunlight, to the best local nursery, where you can lazily browse through a dozen greenhouses full of annuals, perennials, vegetable plants, vines. In my favorite greenhouse, devoted to specialty foliage and flowering plants, we found this oriental carpet of coleus, and a magic fuschia forest.

I came home with plants for a big pot on the back porch: two coleus in shades of apricot, dark purple and green, one with large leaves and the other with very finely divided, almost fernlike ones with pink edges; two sweet potato vines - one chartreuse and one almost black; and some lovely pansies, medium size, in a clear apricot/orange color.

And, because I need hardy things  that will survive during the days I'm gone, I didn't buy the most astounding plant I saw today, something from the tomato family but looking totally alien - "it's  a punk plant!" said the greenhouse owner when I asked him what it was - with stiff olive-green leaves from which protrude inch-long bright orange thorns. It was wild!

Back in my own garden, I planted scarlet runner beans, sunflowers, cosmos and nasturtiums while the cardinal and woodpeckers and purple finches chattered from the trees and the feeder.

Amazement and beauty seem like they're following me everywhere.

Coiffed

This morning we biked down to Maisonneuve to renew our drivers' licenses and health cards. That meant having our pictures taken after filling out the paperwork and paying our fees. I had felt like I looked bad when I left the house, and although the photo wasn't too awful (I do love it that they say, "OK, big smile please!") I was thinking "makeover." After saying goodbye to J. and walking through the huge Berri-Uqam station underground to return some books and CDs to the Bibliothèque Nationale, I passed a salon that didn't look either too fancy - like it would cost $90 for walking in the door - or too basic, and I  decisively stepped up to the counter and asked for an appointment as soon as possible. "11:50?" the girl said. Fifty minutes away. I said fine, told her my name was "Eh-LEE-sa-bet" (which is how the French say it; I've given up saying "EliZZabeTH," and "Beth" is close to impossible) and went and got a cup of coffee, which I drank while sitting out in the sun outside the library.

At the appointed hour I was back at the salon and Veronique, in tight black capris and a black t-shirt, with her own short, streaked, very chic hair, was washing my very much too-long Vermont hippie mane. She massaged and washed and conditioned and then sat me up and we went over to one of the white leatherette swivel chairs; a lot of the other patrons were business men in suits from the office towers above. "Quelle longueur?" she asked, after combing out my hair.

I didn't tell her I hadn't been in a salon for several years; I just said, "Shorter, and maybe some layers, something softer, to give some width to my face." She nodded. I looked at her in the mirror, hovering in back of my shoulder, comb in hand. "My face is similar to yours, actually," I said, mixing in the French words where I knew them. "Oval but thin. And la fringe... way too long, too straight across..." Veronique smiled and agreed. "Trop long! D'accord. I'll cut some layers on the sides, and for the length , peut-etre comme ça?" She held her hands just above my shoulders. "Un peu plus court, si vous voulez," I said. "And I just want to be able to still put my hair up on my head with a clip, especially in the summer." Veronique smiled and said, "Yes, OK, we all want to be able to put it up, we feel better with it off our necks!" and then she set to work with her sharp scissors.

She worked very carefully, with focus. Halfway through I began to relax, and so did she, after I said, "I can already tell -- this is going to be much better." Maybe she realized I had the potential for becoming a regular customer instead of a walk-in, or maybe she just decided to like me; I liked that she didn't chatter at me, but we did exchange some basic details: where we lived, how long we'd both been in the city, that she had kids and I didn't. She could have been my kid herself. My hair was starting to dry a little on its own, and to fluff up; I didn't look quite as old and pin-headed in the black plastic cape as I had when we'd come over from the sink - I think that grim moment is really what keeps me out of salons.

She finished the sides and back, and then cut the bangs, softening them and making them somewhat asymmetrical. Then she said, "OK, now I'll dry it - do you want some mousse?" I told her I was just going to go and put my bike helmet on...but then I thought better of it and said, "OK, do it with mousse and I'll watch you and see how you do it." She blew my hair dry with the same attention she had given to the cut, and then went back and recut all the layers a little. "You can do it like this," she showed me, turning the layers in, and toward my face, "or like this, more fluffy," using a round brush to flip the ends of the layers up a little. "If there's anything you don't like, or if you want me to cut it shorter, just come back in the next week or two and I'll trim it for you." We smiled at each other; I was pleased and she knew it. On top of it the cut wasn't even expensive, and she never tried to sell me any salon products, just gave me her card and thanked me for the tip.

The other night at dinner, in a French bistro, the friend who had invited us looked around at the crowded room and said, ruefully, "No matter what the French are wearing, they manage to look good.  And no matter what the British wear...they don't!" It's not quite that cut-and dried, in my opinion, but pretty close. I've been intimidated by the salons and the hair thing; the French women, no matter their age, have great-looking, confident hair. I may not be a dark Juliette Binoche brunette with henna highlights, but my hair looks like it belongs here tonight. At least until I start wielding the blow-dryer myself!

White

Last weekend, we were clapboarding. My job was to prime 12-foot lengths of pine clapboards, finished on one side and rough on the other, while J. ripped the worst of the old ones off the house in preparation for the painters. That was Friday, and Saturday morning. On Saturday afternoon we started putting them up: a complicated fitting job since they had to be cut into the existing siding. I stood under the ladder and handed things up to J.: an adjustable square, the level, the air-powered nail gun, occasionally the reciprocating saw to cut nail shafts still protruding underneath the edges of old clapboards. On Sunday, as the courses got higher, he set up a scaffold with a plank and ladder-jacks on the extension ladder rungs. By 1:00 pm on Sunday we were finished; an hour later the painters showed up to power-wash the house.

We wore sunscreen, but got tan on our faces anyway in the warm midday sun reflected off the siding. With the help of a little peroxide spray, my hair now has golden highlights and shimmers brightly after the dullness of winter. The prinkly junipers and raspberries and wild roses that I pruned in-between helping-stints scratched up my forearms, but I hardly felt the thorns, it was so glorious being outside.

The cardinals who were trying to nest in the junipers right behind our worksite finally got discouraged and left for a quieter corner of the neighborhood. They weren't the only lovebirds around; it seemed like all the birds were in pairs and cooing and chirping and singing their hearts out, except for a single mockingbird, and the pileated woodpecker who sailed through each afternoon, making a racket. The little red squirrel amused us with his acrobatics in the tops of the maple trees every time we stopped to drink some water. Each night, it seemed, the plants lengthened, extended, unfurled; as I made tea in the mornings and looked down on the garden from the kitchen window there were new shoots emerging, new blooms unfolding, ostrich fern fiddleheads stretching upward.

The sadness I had been feeling about my mother as spring arrived seems to have dissolved over these past few days,a dn been replaced with a kind of calm peacefulness. I can't say that I felt her presence, but I felt her spirit as the sun warmed my back and I noticed and acknowledged the plants and creatures we both loved, raking the leaves from the garden, and feeling the warm earth in my hands. The purple finches and chickadees hopped overhead, singing, and I filled the feeder with niger seed for the goldfinches so I could watch their dipping flight across the garden. I carried water to the birdbath, and transplanted four strong sunflower seedlings that had sprouted underneath its edge. The roses needed food; the hydrangeas and barberries needed pruning; there was plenty of work to be done.

As was true for the children in The Secret Garden, my work of bringing some restorative order to my neglected garden may have done me even more good than the trees and shrubs and flowers, but the plants seemed to appreciate it too. On Monday before we left, the two clumps of trillium - both springtime gifts from my mother, one hand-carried to Vermont, one packed carefully and mailed - were turning their pure white, three-cornered faces to the sun, making me smile.

If this, then -- the shared appreciation, the ongoing conversation, the finding of the departed other in the midst of life -- is the extent of immortality (as she sometimes suspected and I more often doubt), it is still not a small thing.