i want to begin by thanking each and every one of you who've written - both here and countless notes by email - about the post i wrote on friday. the notion of parental concern is obviously a straight to the heart subject for many of my readers - so many of you have reached middle age, are heading into the older part of middle age where our parents are beginning to leave us, bit by bit. they leave us in body, they leave us in the ways that we knew them as younger folk; they leave us, they leave us, they leave us. i want to stress that i never take the time i have with my parents for granted, and am scrambling these days to adjust my schedule so that i can be on the road to alabama more often than before. i want to stress that both of them are still physically healthy, that i talk on the phone with my mother at least once a day (usually in the evening), a habit that was formed just after my brother passed away four years ago. often we have not much new to say, other than to inquire about one another's day, about the weather, to tell a random anecdote or two, to say i love you. two out of three times, my mother will put daddy on the phone before we hang up, and the usual thing is for us to make a little joke based on something we used to joke about long ago. he remembers these things; it is what he had for lunch an hour before, or if the dog was let out five minutes before, or that he placed the house hammer in his sock drawer, that he cannot recall. too, daddy has begun to invent memories of his own - day to day occurrences, such as the new neighbor stopping by to return a plastic food container to my mother: in daddy's mind, the fellow stopped by to admire the brick wall out back, to admire my car parked out in the drive, has come by three or four times to visit. daddy smiles as he tells me these things, and i smile back in return and say how lovely a neighbor he has.... the neighbor that has in reality come by the house just once, to return an empty plastic container.
a couple of you have written to tell me not to be anxious, to appreciate that my parents are still alive and that they have each other, that i still have them. another couple of you wrote to say that you could never live as i do out in the middle of nowhere, alone, with only my thoughts to bounce against one another in this mind of mine (my words, here). it is hard to live alone, when feeling like this, i'll be the first to admit; it is tough not having a partner here, another kindred adult, with whom i could share these rattly, ricochet feelings and emotions, reactions to the things that happen in my life from day to day. they could not, they say, live far away from town, from cafes and bookstores and ultimately, from other people. i've loved this life for a long, long time, but after ten years of not having a significant other in my life, i'm beginning to ponder the value of this self imposed isolation, the merits of living alone and in close proximity to no one else. sitting on the phone with my older son robin, listening to him lay out plans for an imminent move to colorado, waiting for his calls from boulder where he is spending this week interviewing for jobs he has actively sought, i wonder what it would be like to still be married to their dad (well, no, not this - just to A Dad, their dad but not their dad, if you can possibly know what i mean); i ponder what it would be like to have their other parent right here tightly woven into my life, listening to me as i voice concerns and apprehensions, excitements and sadnesses and joys regarding our boys sons. we don't talk on the phone, their dad and i; we don't call one another and exchange notions on how to handle this thing or that. it isn't easy being a single mom at times like this - one child lining up a new life that begins halfway across the country, another son making plans to leave the country for two months to study spanish in equador. i wonder about these things. i really do.
perhaps, for that matter, i feel too much as well. my mother told me on the phone the other night when i tearfully babbled about watching grandchildren grow up from afar that i needn't project things that have yet to take place... an ironic statement, as this daughter of hers moved six hours away and raised the grandchildren she loves so much to spend their adolescent years thriving in these beautiful mountains and not being smothered by conservative social doctrines and prejudices in montgomery, alabama. i lie in bed in the middle of the night, wide awake with an endless cycle of these thoughts circling round and round in my head, and i know she's right; but it still doesn't bring the relief of sleep for a good four hours, not until dawn is almost here and the rain has begun, finally, to fall - some tiny drops actually blowing in and sprinkling my face from the open window above my head. at times like these, the wide awake hours that come deep in the still of the night, i take deep breaths, i stare at the tree branches outside the window swaying in the wind, i try to lie still and empty my mind. but - living alone - being alone - this is not always an easy thing to do.
i'll tell you a funny little story: walter and i walked up the road (a very steep road) the other evening to the waterfall that flows up above the house; on the way home, i stopped to admire a healthy patch of huge leafed clover, and was amazed to find, in that one patch, twenty one four leafed clovers. twenty one! i picked them, carried them home with other
wildflowers, and have the clovers all pressed into a novel that i've yet begun to read. when i told my mother about my find later that evening, and wondered what sort of animal could have possibly fertilized that patch to make it mutate like that, she did not miss a beat and simply replied, "a unicorn". it was so good to laugh with her, like that. when i walked back up there again last evening with walter, i found an enormous four leafed clover and had the lovely idea to write daddy a simple note with the clover pressed inside, just so he would have the pleasure of receiving something in the mail. i typed it out, so he wouldn't have difficulty reading my sketchy handwriting, and was sure to include in the note vital info, such as "your loving daughter nina tom", and "i'm thinking of you up here in the north carolina mountains"; he has asked several times recently "where are you", meaning, i think, where do i live. i live here, daddy. i live right here.
in my years of strolling the beaches of port townsend, i've found a lovely assortment of special rocks and treasures, but two of them have become favorites that i keep on a shelf in a glass case. the first one you see here, a round rock with a line and a circle, absolutely floored me when first i saw it resting in the sand; it was lying with the circle hidden, only a single line creating a diameter of white. when i flipped it over in the palm of my hand, i saw the amazing markings, the circle over the line.
the second rock, a deep moss green in color, i found this past march while strolling along North Beach outside of port townsend. i love this rock for the color that cannot be captured with a camera, for the smoothness i feel when i rub its surface with fingers and thumb. i love it, even more, for the bird's foot that is etched in white lines across one side, its "leg" circling around and splitting into two lines that then form the middle and bottom lines of the foot. both of these rocks seem a bit like life, to me: the lines circle around, they split and then they join again. one faithful and dear reader wrote and sent this robert frost quote to me:
and i, in turn, shared with her a favorite quote of mine, also robert frost:
and so, i dance. we dance, we all do; we skitter from this side to that, swinging like a pendulum, we slip and slide and, like an eclipse, we pass through the shadows and then come back out again into the light. the path is a circle, this much i know; we end up where we began, and - (lord, i am quoting a lot here, maybe one day someone will be quoting me for a change) - as t.s. eliot once wrote, the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time. and now i really think i know just what he meant by saying that, this knowing; having been there once before, having made that circular journey, we are that much wiser for the trip back to where we first began.
at least that's what i'm thinking today, anyway. xo
