Ten Years Ago

Text from this blog, ten years and a lifetime ago; images from this week in Montreal.

We drove to central New York to visit my parents. Spring is just coming to the fields and farms, and the land was tender and beautiful: the first velvety green on the hayfields, the yellow tresses of the willows in the swampy hollows between hills, the cows slowly walking out from the barnyards, chickens roaming happily behind houses. Tractors plowed wide dark brown swaths across the valleys, and the entire landscape smelled sweetly of manure. Behind one barn, a middle-aged man followed his aged father out to the field, the latter in a cap and dungarees, walking strongly but bent, holding a long green stem of something in his hand.

Crows and geese and blackbirds and hawks were everywhere, and letting you know it; deer grazed - the occasional alert ears raised to face the road - in the edges of fields and turkeys brazenly pecked close to the road. A heron flew low over our house, on its way to some morning hunting of the spring peepers, maybe, who had been so vocal the night before, and just beneath the slightly rippled surface of the lake, four carp swam lazily, their backs to the sunlight. I dug a few worms and fished a little with my mother, in the same sun, and -- other than the jet trails in the blue sky far overhead -- it felt like we could have been in just about any century of the last four or five.

--

My mother died a month later. I've been thinking about her a lot lately: good thoughts, but I'm incredulous that it's been ten years without her.

 

 

Comments

[Marja-Leena]

Stunning photos! Love your description of spring in the east, while here on the Pacific coast it is so different, being green all year with earlier springs.

Thoughts on your mother's passing are very understandable! I often think of both my parents, gone in '88 and '92. Take care....

[Jan Jorgensen]

Beth, I am thinking of you and holding you in my heart as you remember your mother.
Thank you for the beautiful thoughts, for the photos ...
yes, it turns out that years as a measure of time are not what they once meant to us. But any time without access to one's mother is too long.

[Hattie]

And ten years pass so fast, don't they.

[Duchesse]

Ten years without her physical presence but, I will venture, not a day without her in your heart, her voice in your head, the ways she taught you to do things echoed in your own life, and traces of her in your appearance. How indelible our mother is for us, even after many years of her absence.