ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
©Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 25
Seasons
We were gifted with a week of Indian summer, just when we believed we were about to descend into rainy fall weather. The ground crunched with dried leaves that sent up earthy fragrances. Urgency filled the air. Spiders burrowed into the dirt and invaded the house, seeming to spin new webs within seconds of brushing away existing webs.
Along the prairie portion of my trail I frequently came across the trails of box turtles making their sluggish way toward the creek. They pushed fallen leaves ahead of them like snow plows and when the piles grew too large to push any farther, they laboriously crawled over the leaves, leaving a long bare swath of ground, followed by a ridge of matted leaves, followed by another long swath of bare ground, and so on.
Louise, invigorated by the unexpected warm weather, decided she wanted to visit her old friend Alice, who had been sending her messages through the Meals on Wheels driver.
I wasted no time, knowing we had to act fast before Louise forgot or balked. I called Alice’s daughter and we made arrangements for their get-together that very afternoon, in an hour. “Mom will be thrilled,” she told me.
Louise acquiesced to my helping her dress “nice” and fix her hair, retaining her excitement and desire to see Alice. “She’s a pretty girl,” she told me, her smile wide. “So slim and sassy. We’ve been friends since school. We’ll have a lot to talk about. Leave me there for three hours.”
In anticipation of Louise’s arrival, Alice’s daughter had set out lemonade and cookies on a cloth-covered table beneath a willow tree. When we drove up, Alice was waiting in a lawn chair beside the table, watching the street. The willow branches swayed above her. Alice's daughter helped her rise and she hobbled toward our car, balancing with her cane, wearing a little blue garden hat, crying. She and Louise hugged and rocked together, as if they’d never let each other go.
“Come back in four hours,” Louise instructed me. “Maybe five. We have to catch up.”
They were happily chattering when I drove off, totally engrossed in each other. I stopped by the library five blocks away to return books and browse the fiction shelves.
The librarian I’d known had retired but I swore the gigantic philodendron and ferns were the same potted plants as when I was nine years old.
Growing up, I’d read with abandon, eccentrically and exhaustively, comics, cereal boxes, every Tarzan book, Trixie Beldon, Victor Hugo, mythology and fairy tales, loving Shakespeare before I learned I was supposed to, the sound and rhythm of his words thrilling me before I understood their literal meaning.
I’d once heard someone say she’d been raised by books. I knew what she meant. My young awareness of the wider world was due, first, to my mother who’d bought and kept hundreds of books on hundreds of subjects, storing them in unused kitchen cupboards and stacking them on the floor along the walls until they gradually decreased the size of the rooms. And second, to the librarian in that small library, who’d let me check out as many books as I wanted from any section of the library: children’s’ or adults. Whether she allowed it by design or neglect, it enriched my young life.
After fifteen minutes of grazing through the library shelves, I checked out two novels, chatting briefly with the enthusiastic new library director, and decided to drive past Alice’s house, just to see how the two friends were faring.
They sat side by side in their lawn chairs beneath the willow, both gazing out at the street. Louise’s hands hovered near her mouth. I pulled into the driveway and Louise immediately rose and approached the car.
“I didn’t think you were ever coming back. Did you forget me?”
She barely said goodbye to Alice, only waving and calling politely back to her, “Thank you for the cookies.”
She sat silently on the ride home, watching out the window, and as we turned into the farm, she shook her head. “Poor Alice,” she murmured. “It seems futile to stay on past our ability to live, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t say so but I was also astonished by how the body fought to stay alive beyond a reasonable life.
1932 Dad had three good cows killed by an electrical storm – it’s terrible. L. called and I told him I didn’t want him to ever call again. I played tennis with Emma for four hours.
A full moon shone brightly, making its own shadows and turning the stars invisible, the night so well-lit I could nearly make out colors. A Man in the Moon laughed down at us, as vividly obvious as I'd ever seen. Mist draped and wafted against the trees from ground level to about sixty feet, the tree tops rising above it. A soft breeze blew. Inside, the white sheer curtains in our bedroom billowed and fell like warm breath.
“Let’s walk your trail,” Kipling suggested.
And so we did, donning sweaters and boldly setting out without flashlights into the silvery light, crossing behind the pewter barn and into the woods. By this time, I could have unerringly walked the trail on the blackest night, with my eyes closed. Its rhythm was impressed on my heart.
We heard the whisper of leaves, the scattering of small feet, and then, a huff. A loud grunt. We both froze. The sound was coming from the right, toward the deeper woods that extended into the national forest.
We took another step and heard the huffing again, this time accompanied by the thumps of stomping feet. It was not a welcoming sound.
“What is it?” I whispered, and the stomping and huffing resumed, louder. “A bear?” The purported bear sightings weren’t quite believed, not yet. Hundreds of acres of abandoned farmland in the county had reverted to forest, enough that people had to admit that the rumored sightings might be a possibility. Bears and snowshoe rabbits.
Kipling put his finger to his lips and pointed through the trees. His eyes were better than mine and it took me several seconds to see a buck deer standing in a small opening, ahead of us and to the right, alert head raised toward us. He shook his head and I saw the tall rack of horns. The buck snorted.
“We’ll walk back to the house now,” Kipling whispered.
“Slowly,” I agreed.
1932 Bill said I was a very snotty girl. Some people deserve it. Martha and Tony stayed overnight. We played cards until 1:30 in the morning.
I didn’t go to church. That’s awful.
For about a week, Mike had a project. As if he too were galvanized by the seasons changing from summer to autumn, he made his shaky way to the old fenced-in area behind the barn, not really observing his route but following an invisible map in his head. Hunched, arms oustretched like a blind man. Years ago, he’d kept a garden in the space but it had lain fallow for several seasons.
With studied assurance, he began pulling tall, browned weeds, moving in a small circle, piling the weeds in the bull's eye of the circular space, roots facing one direction, heads the other.
The circle grew proportionally larger, staying perfectly round as as he lapped the cleared space, pulling more and more weeds. He couldn’t explain what he was doing, but it seemed to satisfy him. We were grateful for his self-designed diversion because he communicated less and less, rarely responding to us, although he still struggled to answer Louise, often in Lithuanian, his first language.
More time was spent just sitting and staring. Saran wrap confused him and he couldn’t puzzle out how to remove a cookie from the glass cookie jar on the table, touching the sides in frustration, able to see the cookies but not reach them.
“He’s failing faster now,” the nurse told us. “It happens that way sometimes when the seasons change, especially from fall to winter.”
Kipling helped Mike dress every day, even slipping shoes on his feet, although Mike still was sporadically able to fight disposable briefs. He no longer recognized the newspaper, abandoning a habit of holding it that had continued long after he’d lost the ability to read. When Louise was herself she hovered near him, often patting his shoulder and saying, “It’s okay, Mikey. You’ll remember soon.” Or simply, “Everything’s going to be fine.” At other times, she accused him of being “mad” at her, or asked, “What’s wrong with him? He stares at me like I’m invisible.” Or the question I hated the most, “Do you think Mike has Alzheimer’s?”
1932 I went home for a week for Mother’s birthday. Dad met me in Ludington. Fresh strawberries! And all Mother’s beautiful flowers. I help her as much as I can. We sat in the swing and talked and talked while we pitted cherries.
Took a cherry pie over to Linnie. She has a 6-pound baby boy. Too bad there’s no father.
Dad caught four big pickerel in the canal. Lithuanian picnic tomorrow. Mother is baking three pans of kugelis.
I experienced an avian phenomenon and had no one to share it with. Kipling was helping Ray gather firewood, Louise and Mike were napping. I was mixing frosting for a cake when I grew aware of high-pitched shrieks, like a hundred screen doors screeching open and closed. It was a shrill cacophony.
I stepped out the front door of the little house. And there! The trees along the ravine were filling with thousands, literally thousands, of blackbirds. They choked the trees like black leaves, screeching and calling to one another. More kept flying in to join the party, crowding the branches, jabbering insistently – and incessantly – to one another. Gathering, alighting, twittering.
I sat on the front steps and watched the trees, my frosting forgotten, willing Kipling to come home to see the assembling of birds, for anyone to drive in and share the wild commotion. It was ear-splitting. None of the blackbirds landed on the ground; they kept to the trees, shaking the branches with their rising and alighting. I’d never seen anything like it. I stood and stared, turning until my neck ached, mesmerized.
Minutes later, a few blackbirds flew off, then a few more. Suddenly, all the chattering and calling stopped and the thousands of birds fell dead silent.
Then, in a great whooshing and flapping of wings that made my heart pound and my ears hum as if I’d slipped underwater, the birds all rose into the sky in a gigantic black cloud and winged off to the east for what seemed like a passage of minutes. And the farm returned to its autumn stillness as if the blackbirds had never alighted in my presence.
1932 Mother sent a chicken for my birthday. Billy surprised me with a dozen roses.
[Remainder of 1932 is blank except for a notation on Dec. 21: We went to a party at the Garrison’s and came home at 6:15 this morning.]
Next Tuesday, Chapter 26: Dubious Visitors