The place I was born is very beautiful, and, in spite of the occasional noisy flock of geese or pack of snowmobiles in a field, very quiet. The people seem to get poorer, the farming more tenuous, the downtowns emptier -- but the land doesn't change much at all.
We drove there early Thursday morning, leaving Montreal about 5:30 am in snow and slushy ice, and passing through rain, snow flurries, and fog on our way down the Northway along the eastern side of the Adirondacks. By the time we got to Saratoga and started cutting diagonally toward central New York, the weather was clearing and the November fields shone chartreuse against the backdrop of greyish, blueish hills topped by bare trees. There was a light dusting of snow on the northern edges of meadows bordered by woods, and crab apples still clung to the trees, their rosy cheeks echoing the crimson of the occasional alder-bush in a swamp. I love this starkness, and the way the flocks of geese or a bounding deer move across it like animation on top of a still photograph. It feels like you could watch it forever: melancholy and calming at the same time.
We had a good visit there: thanksgiving dinner with my extended family, and then a couple of days spent with my father, who can walk as fast as I can now on his new knees. On Friday we went to see my dear old friends H. and A. at their house and caught up on the last half-year's worth of news (yes, it's true, I have close friends with whom I actually don't correspond very much by email -- and it's kind of lovely.) That evening, after dinner, while J. studied French verbs, Dad and I unzipped the table tennis bats from their vinyl cases where they've been since he had to give up playing -- he was a tournament-class player -- then cleared off and washed the table, and hit balls for half an hour. I can't tell you how happy I was to see that old, familiar smirk on his face the first time he wound up for a slam and it landed and zipped neatly past me. The second one pissed me off, but the first was great!
It's very strange still, being there without my mother, though of course I feel her presence everywhere. And I still don't feel able to write about it. I'm proud of my father for adjusting as well as he has, and for enduring so much pain this past, very difficult year; I'm very thankful he's so definitely on the mend and beginning to regain parts of his life that he had to set aside. It would be easier if we lived closer, but -- we don't -- so we're having to find new ways to stay in touch, new patterns of travel, new ways of helping each other. Change isn't easy after so many years, but it's possible. Which reminds me, suddenly, of the flocks flying across the still photograph, toward ungrazed fields and open water.
"melancholy and calming at the same time".....I really enjoyed this post!
Posted by: Fred Garber | November 27, 2007 at 10:24 AM
Thinking about you Beth, and sending you love.
Posted by: ruth | November 27, 2007 at 11:44 AM
Thanks, Fred - I know you know what I'm talking about!
Lovely to hear from you, Ruth! Thank you.
Posted by: beth | November 27, 2007 at 03:14 PM
Yes, lovely. Great photo, too. Wishing you the best this holiday season. I can't even think about my mother these days much less write. Or actually maybe I can write, especially about past things, but can't think about her.
Posted by: leslee | November 27, 2007 at 07:09 PM
Hi Beth. I have come to this post straight from an early morning session with Charles Frazier's 'Thirteen Moons' & its undertow of a sense of loss & survival against an epic landscape resonates the stronger. Someday, somehow I must make my third & longest visit to a piece of the world that has been deeply embedded in my imagination since early childhood.
Posted by: Dick | November 28, 2007 at 01:15 AM
Good morning, Dick. Thank you. I haven't yet read "Thirteen Moons," and just went to the publisher's site to see where the book was set - in the American West, I gather - the iconic epic landscape. I haven't thought of upstate New York as epic, but actually it is: the land is gentler and more pastoral than out West, for sure, but grittiness and a long history underlie that, and there is a sense of being inheritors of that history that people seem to hold as the better part of their existence. (I also liked this comment about Frazier's protagonist: "And he will come to know the truth behind his belief that 'only desire trumps time.'”)
I hope you will make it over here pretty soon.
Posted by: beth | November 28, 2007 at 08:17 AM