Memorial Day

 It's going to rain...the forecast for the next few days.  My hard ground and the plants struggling in it will be happy, and I will be happy for them.  In celebration of Memorial Day, I've asked a few friends in on Monday, rain or no.   I've got plenty of the first summer's foods ready to be fixed into watermelon salad with mint, roasted potato salad with thyme, baked corn (or cornbread...haven't decided yet) with cayenne and green onion tops, chicken tikka, shrimp the same. (Mary Ellen has her desserts in progress already).

I always enjoy fixing holidays, but frankly this time it's given me something to do to lift my spirits.  As if it knows a different definition of Memorial than this weekend honors, memory has been assaulting me lately.  I am, as we all are, missing Aunt Sadie, and with her passing the passing of all others come to light.  Our griefs, as Hopkins reminds, are our own reflection in the mirror of mortality.  I know that, but it seems these past two years have riven us of more than death's share.

The assaults come from strange places.  Mostly I sleep pretty soundly at night, start to finish, but last night I woke from the clock in the other room striking 3, and wondered.  I must have been dreaming, but the visions there seemed real.  Waking, they continued, one after another...ancient ones from childhood, silly ones, foolish ones from the years since, dangerous, heart-breaking ones, too.  It occurred to me, before I drifted back to sleep again (the same films running in my head), that they must be trying to tell me something, solve some problem I may or may not have known needed solving.  

During the day, a walk down the hall to my workroom stops me short.  A collection of old photos I am meaning to sort and reorder, I give up on after a few vain attempts.  Memories on walls and in boxes, or floating invisible in the air, shake my resolve, even for simple tasks.

What they're after I haven't figured out yet, though at this age I had better accept the challenge.  This morning, darkening, cooling, moistening into the weather to come, portent with change, may bring some enlightenment.

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Meanwhile (here's a switch and change), in an hour, Joseph and I are going to pick up a small settee I found yesterday at ReStore, the Habitat for Humanity thrift place I troll for finds. A few weeks ago, my favorite chair I'd had since the late '70's collapsed on one weakened leg.   I'd already sent it out to Dan, the chair fixer, but the emptiness of the corner by the window where I'd spent countless hours in its comfort seemed to be needier than that chair occupied.  

My living area isn't big; nonetheless, as is my wont, I have crowded it with sitting and dining furniture (there's a visiting piano, too) until there is not much room left to walk.  So relaxing space is at premium.  I began searching for something that, though small, would at least add an extra place to sit.

I meant to go down to Pittsboro, where their ReStore has a whole building full of good furniture, but I thought I'd try the nearby one first.  When I walked in the door, the very piece I could have imagined was facing me, looking new and bright, calling my name from that persimmon color I have on my walls and the small white dots that spelled cheer. I pulled out my measuring tape, checking the size, dismissed the 8 inches extra I'd assumed, and went to the counter to buy it.  It's going to fit, I insisted to myself.  At home, measuring again, the space appeared, nicely, to accommodate it.

 I think that there is a twist to that purchase which entwines memory and change.  My old chair, which I loved and still do, its leg dangling precariously from the worn fabric, might be the end of something bigger than itself.  It's fixable, the chair, at some not insignificant expense, and I might still want to try.  But if it comes back to me repaired, it will be enwrapped in a different sort of affection, the kind one can shift off to the side, usable still but with its mortality tried.  Like mine, with that rush of memory, culling the past to make possible the future.

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N.B.  Nothing goes simply when anticipation is in the mix.  We left for ReStore in light rain, so I'd brought a tarp...but it was the wrong one I pulled hastily out of the shed, the one you may have seen earlier in the season under all that mulch I was shoveling.  A once-perfectly-clean couch rode home dry, but lightly dusted in shredded hardwood.

Still, it vacuumed off, as Joseph said it would, and sits in place now, where I am about to settle for a while.

For settling I need.  Fortunately, on such a day, it's easy to do.

Generations

 My Aunt Sadie passed away last evening.  I know I should say our Aunt Sadie; she was first of all Barbara's mother and Nancy's mother...I should say that, too.  If you will forgive me, though, this remembrance is about what her life and passing has meant to me.

Yesterday, I spoke a few words to her over the phone, and heard the sound of her voice...harsh, short sounds...if she intended words, they were indistinct.  After all, she was hard at work trying to die.  A few weeks ago, she and I talked:  she'd gotten a cough and her chest hurt...likely, she said, it was pollen, especially thick in her area (as in ours) this year.

Another phone call:  she'd been to the doctor, and was given more medicine to take.  "I don't think I should take any more medicine," she told me firmly.  "I'm ready to go." 

 Something she had said to me times before.  She was 100 years and 8 months old, after all.

Did I respond the right way?  I don't remember.  I hope I was sympathetic, not dismissive (even if fondly dismissive).  I hope I said,  "I know."

Anyway, it turned out her symptoms were more complicated than that.  Her heart was failing, she whose heart was as wide open as the ocean, which she loved.

  It took her a long time to finally leave us...over a week, while she was so intensely  willing herself to go. 

"Those sisters!"  My sister Ann said.  "Their bodies are so strong."  She was thinking of my mother, Gilda, the first of the three to go...healthy for 93 years, until she lay two weeks in hospice after strokes, unable to talk or to take sustenance, listening to us sing, talk, pray our way around her.  (What could she have been thinking the meanwhile?)

And their middle sister, Vi, who fell one day here, and, though at 98 she'd been living with heart diseases and blindness, finally succumbed...weeks later, fighting death all the way.

Strong, yes.  Loving, yes, each in her way, all through our lives.  Resilience born of strength and care (care of all kinds).

Now they are all gone, that whole generation.  

While Aunt Sadie was with us, we could still be the younger ones we'd always been.  Now, what?

Here comes the selfish part of this reflection:   even while the sorrow of my aunt's death washes over me, I think to myself:  

I am the eldest of the young...or was.  Now I'm just the elder.

And I wonder:  have they managed, in their passing, to pass to me that strength, that care, that resilience that keeps going?  (All those years, I could be so resistent!) Can I even in a small part, live up to what they were?  Can I?