Night Sky

My son and I have gotten in the habit of walking together for an hour or so early in the evening; these days when we go the sun has already set, and this week the moon has been rising in time to accompany us, or was, until last night. The reason for going is, ostensibly, to take the dog. Because he's nearly nine, he needs the exercise now more than ever, needs to keep moving so that he will be able to keep moving. But the truth is that I need to go, too, and physical health isn't the half of it. Someone told me that every hour you walk adds another hour to your life. I pass this information along to my son, and in turn we consider whether that might translate as well to the dog's life, and in that case, is it dog hours and dog years they'd be talking about? We don't know. We do know that everyone has more energy as a result of these walks, we're all losing a little weight, we all sleep more soundly at night. It's good for us, good for our bodies and good for our heads, too. And it's good for the two of us to have some time by ourselves: in our household, my older child, a girl, tends to dominate the conversation. I was an eldest child too and never really thought about what it was like for my sister to occupy the seat of youngest child, or didn't think about it until I saw how the dynamic winds itself out between my own two children. These nights are also giving me a more intimate understanding of how the young male mind winds its own self out, me, who grew up in an entirely female universe, no father, no brothers, just one bad-tempered grandfather who did us all the favor of dying on the young side (mercifully so, as his dementia was beginning to get dangerous, or so I thought later, when I was older and could understand what had been going on during those years). Once I watched during a long sweaty August afternoon as he walked slowly back and forth, back and forth, past the two windows of the living room where I sat. Finally he came into the house, wiping his bald head and complaining bitterly about how damned hot it was, trying to mow the lawn just now. But of course, he hadn't been pushing a lawn mower at all, had just been walking back and forth and back again in the blazing summer sun. Later that month, he laid down on the couch in the morning and my grandmother, pausing at the top of the stairs, turned her head for a moment in time to hear the death rattle in his throat.

So, these nights I walk around the back streets of our town for an hour or so with my son, and he talks, and the dog rambles, and while I never hear much about how the day went for him, my son does like to talk about the things that are most heavily on his mind--those things gain their heft, I believe, precisely because he is afraid to talk about them. So he monologues about his belief in ghosts, wants to know whether he's descended from people with unusual psychic abilities, talks about how he's torn between becoming a brain researcher, or becoming a cryptozoologist. I think to myself that he must get that from the distaff side, as they used to say--his father was a pragmatist, a logical guy, really my intellectual opposite-but-equal. I wonder what my son's ideal partner will look like. I do know that right now, the girl who has become his first real crush is also the only student in his accelerated classes who is consistently able to edge him out, grade-wise. So we know he likes smart women. When he talks to me about her at all, which is admittedly very little, what he seems to like about her most is that she's nice to him. I like that too, kids who are nice to my kids.

While we walk and he rambles in his conversation and the dog rambles around with his nose pressed to the ground--the dog so single-minded that last night I watched him walk smack into a tree while he chased, nose down, the trail of some irresistible scent or another--my own thoughts like to escape a little bit as they can, when there's a lull in the conversation, or when my son seems more like he needs to get the words out than that he requires any response from me. The painter Paul Klee said that drawing is like--or that it's only, I can never remember which--taking a line out for a walk. Which is exactly what I think writing is, it's simply taking a thought out for a walk, and the best way to walk it around is to get out there walking yourself. It's what's always worked best for me, anyway, and it's something I discover all over again every time I pick the habit back up. I've walked a lot over the years, and I always wish that I walked even more, even when I'm walking an hour every day the way I have been lately. It really is a peculiar form of worship, I suppose, meditation and magic and conjuring and inner work and outer work, all in one basic and repetitive motion. Last night I noticed that my legs felt so strong, I thought I could probably start to run and not tire out. I wonder if eventually, I might feel so strong beyond that, that I'll think I could probably fly?

In the years before I went to college, my mother, sister and I lived in a house in a quiet neighborhood in a small town a block over from the river, and I walked constantly then. Constantly, and often at night, or very early in the morning. Anyway I spent a good many hours traveling through the dark, and never felt unsafe nor, I'm sure, was I. I do remember my mother telling me that, if I grew up and moved to a city, that was going to be the one thing for sure I'd miss, being able to walk around freely at night. The irony was that in the place I lived for the past decade, I never could walk at night, precisely because it was too rural. There were fisher cats there, and the occasional bear, but most of all there were no streetlights on any of the roads around me, so if the wildlife didn't get you, the careening cars with their night-blind drivers most likely would. I walked a lot in that town, but always in daylight.

And for many years prior to that I worked nights, so wasn't walking then, either, and now that I've started taking night walks again my first thought is always, why did I ever stop doing this, until the second thought comes along and reminds me, that's just the way life has been. But I'm back to it now, and the same night sky is there to walk beneath, the same night air is there to breath. One difference is having a child along for the journey. Once both of my kids were too afraid of the dark to ever want to go outside at night even, for instance, the year we lived in New Hampshire and the comet came. Sometimes they'd look at it through a bedroom window. My daughter is still nervous about the dark; my son is learning to be a little more at ease there. Lately in his Earth Science class they've been studying their astronomy unit, and that helps with his curiosity. At night we go out, and if the moon isn't up yet and the big stadium lights at the sports complex aren't blazing away, we get a good look at the starry field of the autumn sky. He can find Polaris; he can pick out the subtle shape of Cepheus and the winding path that is the constellation Draco. He is always curious about the planets. And last night, because it was just setting, I was able to show him the constellation Sagittarius. He had just been explaining to me the reason we can't see the mad explosion of stars that lies at galactic core. I pointed to Sagittarius and told him there, if you look off in that direction, that's where the center of the galaxy, the one you can't see, lies...

It is no small feat, I think, to be able to orient yourself even in that small way, in the midst of such vast distances.

When we were a few blocks from home last night, on the way back, I looked up to the north and the east and there in the sky hung a star I'd missed before. It shone vividly like Venus shines, although I know right now, Venus is coming at us in the morning; it glittered there so impossibly bright I wondered for a moment how I'd managed to miss it just a few minutes before, when we'd been standing along the corn field on the side of an unlit road. In fact I opened my mouth to say just that, how did I miss pointing this one out to you?--but Wyatt was talking, I wanted to figure out just what it was I was looking at, and in the seconds that elapsed then the bright star suddenly began to fade, as though thin clouds were passing between me and it. But the sky was cloudless last night, the star simply faded back into quiet star commonness, and afterwards, I was left wondering what exactly it was I'd just seen--a variable star? An aircraft of some sort? A trick of the night and my 48-year-old eyes? I want it to have been something rare and lucky, something that is so unusual to see that science can't predict it and you're only likely to have seen it if your gaze just happened to have been wandering across that particular place at just that particular time. I want this to have been something that earned me a new celestial star setinto my earthly crown.

These morning it's still dark when I begin my day, and this is the time of year when the old Celtic method of reckoning a day as the period that occurs between sunset and sunset makes a lot more intuitive sense. Today I put the dog outside early, as I always do, and looked for the moon which is directly overhead in the predawn sky right now. I used to look at the moon a lot, same as I used to walk at night a lot, and I miss having those particular roads unwind ahead of me, as well. Let me describe to you what the moon was doing this morning: directly around her waning gibbous form there was a reflected halo of light, this one tinged, improbably, with purple, with green. Farther out in a big sweep that took up a good third of the visible sky, was a vast and perfectly-formed white circle of light, looking for all the world like an enormous ring of snow was bounding the moon at its center. In fact someone told me that the appearance of such a ring means it's going to snow; I have also heard that if you count the number of stars inside the ring, it is the number of friends who are soon to die. I hope that's not the case, since this morning's count was five or six. I think that the bad omens that come along with these phenomena are more a reflection of the fear we feel when confronted with the moon- and starlit parts of our interior lives. I don't know anyone who isn't at least a little afraid of that, but I do think that once you go there, you start to fear it less. It helps to have someone to travel along with you, too, I think. A companion, and the chance to be by turns chattering, silent, rambling, snuffling, imagining, thinking, learning to locate the center of the galaxy, learning to be at home in your dark corner of it.

She Inspires Me

I am very happy today to be able to take myself out of my own head long enough to tell you about one of my favorite artists in recent memory, and most specifically to mention that she's begun a blog of her own--do check her out. I first learned of Rima and her wonderful world when she posted on a message board on the Sur La Lune fairy tale site (another enchanting place to get lost in when you have some time). When you visit Rima's blog you can find links to her web site, other places you can see her amazing work, and more.

I adore Rima's art, and am fascinated by her inner world. I first encountered her during a difficult period in my own life: widowhood was still new then, and still stung; I'd just moved my family to another state where I knew no one, had no prospects, and had managed, I was convinced at the time, to make a real mess of things. Rima's images reminded me of how magic can still persist, even in the unlikeliest of places; if I had to analyze my response I'd say it has something to do with the way she interprets the mythic, manifests something concrete out of the imagination. But this is an instance when I prefer the pleasures of enjoyment to the work of analysis. This morning, looking at her new work, and at her old work again, I am reminded once more of how it feels to live in the world when you're open to possibility. I bought a few of her prints last year and enjoy them as much today as when they first came into my home. What can I say? I'm a big fan. I hope you'll all become fans, too. Because I know for sure that now, there's nothing I'd rather do on this gloomy and atmospheric autumn day than hole up in my study and let my words make some magic of their own. And I can't think of any higher praise for an artist, than that her work sets you happily off in pursuit of your own.

October

In my Summerland, it is always October. Night is always about to come on; here, a glittering crescent of moon hovers just over the hilltop and beside it, the evening star throws its light down, too. I walk across the plain below, always on the cusp of nightfall. If we get to have an afterlife at all, then this is where I want to spend mine, walking forever through this landscape, a solitary figure on the unpaved road that cuts through the illuminated darkness of near-night. Here, it is the end of a good day--what would constitute a good day in the afterlife?--perhaps I have spent the day walking out and also spent it composing essays, poems, because the passage of time will be of no more consequence to me, and so there has been time to do both, walk endlessly and write endlessly. Perhaps there has been some physical work as well, planting or more likely harvesting of the crops, for there are piles of grain and stacks of corn lining the roadway beside me. Even if there is no more need for nourishment in the Otherworld, still, there will be the need for the cycles I am familiar with from this world, else it would make no sense for October to exist, the waning of the year, the treasure box of things ending that I am so delighted to find myself confronted with opening.

So: it is the end of a good day and I am walking home through the early part of the autumn evening, with the moonlight and the starlight for company, the grain piles proof of the day's labor and I hope maybe a sheaf of writing in my pocket as tangible proof too. In this place, a poem is every bit as useful as food. Perhaps a dog runs out a little ahead of me as I find my way home. It is possible that during some part of my day here I've been in the company of others who might inhabit this place. I think that I am not completely alone here; but the truth is that solitude is the necessary condition for my pursuits, now as I imagine it will be then, and so at the end of every day, at the onset of each night, at these balanced moments of perfection , if I am alone then I know it is indeed a good afterlife I've landed in. I think alone, I write alone, I navigate the landscape alone, or alone save for the quiet company of the dog who pads along with me. In my Summerland, I know that at the far end of the road there is a stone house waiting, and inside it a wooden table. There will be hot soup to eat, and a window to look out of, and all throughout the night the moon will stay suspended, and the evening star along with it, and dreams will form themselves and stay with me as wake and cross back over the threshold and the cycle continues, the sun rising in the Otherworld, generously, if for no other reason than to give the day the opportunity to turn back into the night, and me the opportunity to walk back through it...

25

When I woke up this morning the rain was falling heavily, and I stayed in bed with my eyes closed for a little while, imagining how all that rain was silvering the road outside. I wrote a scene in a children's book about that once, about silver appearing suddenly in the middle of flaming October, appearing on the sheets of rain that always seem to fall mid-month. Twenty-five years ago when I woke up on this day it was the morning of my wedding, and the sky was overcast through the early part of the day, I think maybe a little rain fell, and by early afternoon the sky had cleared again and the rest of the short day was sunny. If my husband had lived we would have been celebrating our 25th anniversary--the silver one--today. Instead he died a few days after we had our 23rd. I tried for awhile this morning to remember scenes from those anniversaries: on our first we sat at the table in our little rented lakeside home and dutifully ate the leftover wedding cake (I don't advise trying to save cake in the freezer for a whole year, I just don't think it was meant for it). On our fifth anniversary we'd been living in Massachusetts for just a few weeks; I spent our sixth by myself because David had checked himself in, two days earlier, to a residential detox hospital in northern Vermont. Cancer killed him anyway but alcohol would have killed him a lot sooner, if he hadn't gotten sober when he did. On our ninth anniversary I was a new mother, and we celebrated our tenth with a one-year-old in tow; on the eleventh I was newly-pregnant again and happier than I'd ever been, because it was autumn, I was in love with my life, and pregnancy, as it turned out, agreed with me. Our seventeenth anniversary, the last good one, we spent apart: it was a Friday, and each of us worked all day and then he went to his usual AA meeting that night, because he was about to receive his 12-years-sober chip. I went out for awhile, that night, with friends. The following year my mother had died; that grimness still was hanging around me, and anyway, by then David was already feeling a little sick: in another two months the tumor on his pancreas would finally show up on the scan. On the morning of our twentieth anniversary we woke up to snow on the ground, and that year, the ground was snow-covered all the way until the following spring. At the time, I chose to interpret it as a sign that we were going to grow into the winter of our lives together. That was a Wednesday morning, and the kids went to school and we went back to bed, made love and afterwards, he slept for awhile and I got up and answered emails. Later, I could never remember for certain if that was the last time we had sex. On the following anniversary he was sick again, although at first, even his oncologist was interpreting the pain as not being cancer-related. When his recurrence was diagnosed, the thinking was that he had another two months. He died two years to the day after that diagnosis. Someone took a photograph of us on the afternoon of our last anniversary together. I think that was the last day he was able to sit upright, after that, he didn't bother to get up again. I saw the picture again about a year later. I looked so bad I didn't even recognize myself, face bloated, hair matted, the stress wiring itself to every neuron so that the whole edifice was about to implode, and you knew it. David looked like he was already dead. He had lost a hundred pounds by then and when you looked at his face, mostly what you saw was skull. I think I destroyed the photograph, thinking that no one needed to know what it looked like, being wed to a corpse husband. The shell-shocked bride, I remember thinking, and the skeleton man, both in free fall after a five-year cancer bender. David would have just shrugged at the photograph, and if he'd lived and I'd died, he might well have gone ahead and kept it.

Today would have been the twenty-fifth anniversary, the silver one, and that was probably the third or fourth thought I had after I woke up this morning. Which means, I think, that I've gotten better, since a year ago it was still all I could do to keep from howling into the empty night about it. I dreamed about Dave last night, too, which was unusual, because I had a dream about him earlier this summer which I thought was really going to be good-bye, because he said it to me: I have to go now. Good-bye. And I nodded and said good-bye, too. Last night I dreamed that David and I were packing for a trip south, because I was going to go visit my new boyfriend and he was coming with me. Which would have been strange in either case, since if David was still alive I most likely wouldn't have a boyfriend and if I did, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be taking my husband along for the rendezvous. But in the dream, Dave was still dead, he was going to travel with me, and it all made perfect sense. I was packing and unpacking a cooler, remembering to bring along some bottles of beer, putting in more ice, frowning at it, taking it out, thinking I ought to pack some cartons of yogurt for the trip, as well. Throughout the dream my old love stood there beside me, watching while I made ready to go meet up with my new love. There is a passage in one of the journal entries I kept during the last weeks of Dave's life, when I was recording the thoughts I was hating myself for having: those nights while Dave drifted in and out, waiting to die on the couch, I was there beside him drowsing on the cot, and wondering what might be coming next for me: thinking about new love, I admit it, as my old love lay dying beside me.

I knew couples who, every year, made an occasion out of their anniversaries: babysitters, dinners out, sometimes booting the kids right out of the house so as to have an entire night of privacy. I know this because on some of those nights, my house was where those kids slept. My husband and I never did any of that, and I'm not sure why, just like I'm not sure why, these couple of years later, I still find myself unable to write about him, about our marriage, the way I want to write about it. A year ago I wrote this in my journal: I've been trying all morning to sit down here and write about Dave, about how last year on our 23rd anniversary, ON the 23rd...we knew it was our last. Don and the kids went out and bought us flowers and cards, and while it was a lovely gesture, it was the wrong gesture. I didn't want any of that, what I wanted--other than for my husband not to be dying--was some time alone with him. But from the night I got the news that he was terminal (straight from the horse's mouth: "We're at the end of the road," is exactly what David said to me) we were never alone again for more than half an hour, tops... I had forgotten about that part of it, about how public the whole end of his life turned out to be. And we weren't exactly public people, having preferred each other's company, and the setting of our own household, to most other company and most other places for most of our married lives. I don't know what we would have done today, had he lived, had we been celebrating our 25th together, instead of me just sitting here thinking about it. Bought something silver? That seems doubtful: neither of us ever paid much attention to those conventions (although the winter after Dave died, I did buy myself two different sets of new dishes, suddenly--and irrationally--furious that I hadn't gotten them on our 20th anniversary, The China Year). Most likely it would have been another day not exactly like the others, but not all that much set apart from it, either: he would have just gotten his 19-year chip, the kids would have spent the day at school and we'd likely have both taken off work again, just like on the 20th, and in the evening, everyone would sit at the dinner table and talk about the day, just like every other night, while outside the trees, a few days past peak now, would be letting their leaves sift to the ground and we'd see the evening coming on a little early, the rain having stopped just before nightfall but the clouds not quite pulling away in time for the late sun to come through.