Soil and Stone

I rise with the dawn, the birdsong and the breeze. Heat rises from the earth and ghostly vapors hang above the trail, obscuring all but a few footsteps ahead. I know my way, though. Grass, freshly cut, stains the fringes of my gown. I carry slivers of it upon my legs, passengers of undergrowth sent to nourish distant pastures. The wetness closes in around me, compassionately stifling, a botanic embrace. I pause as I reach the lichgate. It is opulent and foreboding, terrible with strength and beauty. Iron and timber flanked by cobblestone palisades. To keep out the living and hold in the dead.

I have come to visit you.

The gate is open, as it always is when I arrive. Not wide, but wide enough to slip through without catching my gown on the outstretched latch. As I pass this threshold the haze begins to lift, unveiling forested knolls, aged stones and gleaming obelisks. Knotted roots dancing, entwining all. Hewn cherubim and angels adorn the paths, harps, trumpets and bowls in their hands. A silent, wistful song is sung between them. Absolution for those at rest and assurance to those with life.

I scale many hills to find your headstone, sable and gold-flecked, flat upon the soil. Sweeping my gown beneath my legs I sit and listen to the silent cherubs. There is dew glistening on my shins and I watch droplets turn and cascade to earth. I turn to the carefully etched name on the stone and I begin to trace it with my fingers and hum softly. It is a song familiar and strange. Ageless and yet new to me. It is a sound we shared in life but I cannot tell when or how or why. It simply is, and it fills the quiet.

The birds have silenced but for a single starling perched atop a nearby oak. It warbles a careless song too. It is a melody rife with longing, but not sadness or pain. It sings for itself in the calm of this new day, as if it were simply passing the time. Carrying on.

You and I rode in a rusted machine around the square every Friday night. The car reeked of burning rubber and, every Friday, you said you would get the fan belt checked. Some nights we were joined by a cavalry of juvenescence, noise and music and laughter violating a peaceful night. The other boys wore their varsity jackets but you stayed in denim. We would drink the wine pilfered from your father’s cabinet and dance beneath the gazebo to the song of crickets and frogs. Perhaps my aimless tune is a reflection of that wildness we had. Incoherent like the dizzying drunk of youth. Felt more than heard or seen or smelt. But this is when I miss you most.

The starling has flown and I am heavier, the cushioning of the grass dissipated. A breeze plunders the stillness and carries with it the scent of lavender. I am lifted, taken to our garden. The plot of earth in which we grew. You begrudgingly parceled berms and swales in your flawless expanse of green, but you dutifully tended all that could grow. We would share morning hours in near silence, only broken by grunts and light profanities. I would fashion rows of basil, sage and rosemary. Tomatoes and cucumbers scaled trellises and figs hung from our tree. I would harvest for meals and look back to you in the yard, sore and sunkissed, colored with sweat and earth. You would then drink beer and I would drink lemonade. We would feast on the fruits I had prepared. We would feast on one another.

I pull on the grass and it severs quietly from the earth. I hold the blades in my outstretched palm and see that I have captured a small beetle as well. I watch it confusedly scour the edge of my hand and then pause. Its wings extend and it disappears in the cloudless blue. The color of your eyes. A color I could never match when I tried to paint you. When you laughed and shook your head and I told you to be still. Then you crossed your eyes and stuck out your tongue and I laughed far too much at the absurdity of this artistic folly.

But we saw the world that way. In color and form on an infinite spectrum of light. High on mushrooms but higher on one another, we would lay in our garden at night and free ourselves to the beyond. In those starlit oceans we lived, hundreds of thousands of miles away. You and I were one singular cosmic particle, born of a burning sun casting elemental fury across a boundless universe. You would describe patterns and shapes you could see in the depths and I would cry at the majesty of forever and the seemingly ordained beauty of everything. I would apply these emotions to canvas. Gently but assuredly. Iris and peony and sunflower malformed, electric and graceful. Ceasing to be flowers, they were notional life scrawled onto white nothingness. Clouds of amethyst and ochre and blood melting into one. Living outside of definition or destination. Just as we felt ourselves to be. And all this while you would sit quietly and read from Proust or Melville or Beckett. It was this cosmos we fashioned for ourselves.

My face is upturned to the blue and my eyes are shut, tears welling upon their lids. I let the light back in, a skyblurred prism of memory and longing. And it is in the seeing of this memory that the song finally resounds, and it is Dylan. It is Tangled Up In Blue, and I hum it again to myself and I remember how I would sing it to our son. I would sing and you would strum a broken guitar and laugh quietly to yourself. You would look down to measure your chords and deep folds of concentration formed along your brow. Our son would smile and coo, but he would hate Dylan when he went away to college. When he married. When he had children of his own and would sing The Sound of Silence to them and you would roll your eyes and then eventually smile too.

You were an architect, and you retired early. There was futile passion in all you did at the firm. An acknowledgement of trading skill for joy. Frugal, but never cheap, you promised something special on our 25th anniversary. Only weeks prior, you hid two tickets to Peru in our dresser for me to find. We hiked and camped our way to Machu Picchu and you beheld the grand citadel with tearful eyes and customary humbled silence. It was as if the Incans had carved it from the mountain itself and, through it, found a kinship with their land, their galaxy. A natural, methodical, holy sanctuary. In the silence, I began to uncontrollably sob, as if I had met an ancient god and been gifted all her knowledge. You reached for me and held my hand, and then you kissed it and we sat amongst the llamas and let time wash over us.

That evening we sat outside of our tent and saw the fire of daylight pass over the Andes. Stars flooded the purple darkness above and we shared a joint and lay beneath our celestial canopy. Deaf to all but the moment. Then you asked me if I was afraid to die. I didn’t answer and let you continue. You thought that memory was an afterlife itself, as intangible and unprovable as God. You said that the shapes and patterns of our world are a blessing, but that ascribing it to a heavenly body felt as futile as teaching oneself quantum physics. To what end, you said. You paused for a long time and then said that we can’t worry about anything after this, but we must carry each other’s memory as long as we can. I said that I wasn’t afraid to die. Then we made love.

The tears are dry and my vision has returned. I am tracing the bark of the oak before me, finding the knots and weathered skin and feeling its toils and aches. And I think of the last time we lay on our backs in the garden. You said that the ground felt stiffer than before, and I laughed and said it was only us that had gotten stiffer. I handed you the joint and you inhaled deeply and coughed and then were silent. I said that this was all I ever wanted, and you grunted softly as if falling asleep. Then you asked if I would want to be anything else. Searching my periphery, I said I would love to be a rake. Then you laughed and coughed. Minutes passed before I finally said that I would be a tree. I would be something that really grew. Something patient and graceful and strong. I said that a life lived is nothing to a tree. I said that they are gods on earth. Gods that learn and teach and flourish and wither. You grunted again and said that to grow old is divinity itself. I laughed and said, “then we are divine.”

The breeze has stilled and I lower my eyes back to the earth. Back to your headstone. It reads that you were born in June of 1942, but there is no date of departure. It is yet to be etched. An identical stone beside it bearing my name reads January 3, 1943 — August 18, 2022.

I am here. Above and below. A reflection of myself and of you.

However my time has ended, it is not a void I am now in. It is a roiling and cascading nebula full of us. Of memories, joy, heartache and wonder. And there is no beginning and no end. There is a seamless horizon always behind and always ahead. Time is meaningless but magnificent in this infinity. You and I are everything all at once. We are discovering one another again and again. It is a restful bliss. It is calm and clear, like our endless, starlit sky. And I can’t wait to share it with you again.

I weep now, but it is not in mourning. I weep for our youth, our music, our garden and our son. I weep for the fruit that we bore.

I will wait, because waiting is also joyous and celebratory. I will wait and hold your memory, as you are holding mine, and we will fashion our cosmos once more.

The starling sings again and I turn to see an elderly gentleman entering the cemetery. He holds a bundle of peonies in one hand, and in his other, the hand of a younger man. These two are nearly identical, with tanned skin and impossibly blue eyes. They are separated only by time and wisdom. They are scaling the tiered hill of this holy sanctuary, only ceasing to reference the younger man’s phone. I see him look up and search the stones and the trees and the cherubs and angels. He pauses suddenly and points toward me.

But I am not here. I am alive within you. Within him. Within his children. Within all who knew or loved me. In this I am eternally me, and I am eternally yours.

You, sunkissed and gray, begin to amble toward me. Your body aching but still strong. Still flourishing. It is you I have come to visit, and so I rise to my feet, along with the dawn, the birdsong and the breeze.

For Mom,
February 4, 1956 — July 6, 2024
You are alive in me, and alive in us all.