Pleasure and shade

When my mother was alive, she was perhaps the strongest voice in support of my writing, or at least its most enduring. She wanted me to turn full-time to the work that I have flirted with for decades. Worrying about its practicality, my ability to adequately voice anything of value, I have never felt empowered as a writer, but she cheered me on, and often it was that cheering that made me sit down to the keyboard to "speak" my thoughts. Now she is gone. And writing feels an odd task without that spirit hovering. In fact, I have not stopped long enough to write a  single sentence, much less something more substantial. There is always something to do. The bills must be paid, and now I am doing both mine and hers. The garden needs weeding, and a prodigious garden it is in this new house.  Actually it is many gardens, each with their own needs. The fact that they are planted with perennials that "do not need watering"  is deceptive. There are weeds that encroach from the forest that surrounds us, and Japanese beetles gorge on lily petals. Oddly, they seem always to be paired in connubial bliss when I find them. It must be a good life: constant sex and tender flower petals for food.

The cardboard boxes are at last completely gone from living room, bedrooms and bathroom, but there are others that encroach behind the wood stove in the dining room / kitchen, the tiny office nook, the mud room and of course the office which remains substantially untouched. We drove three car loads of flattened boxes and peanuts and bubble wrap and packing paper to the local dump on Monday, thanks to prodigious work by my husband, but there remains a lot to do in the garage that houses the remnants of the move. And much of it feels vaguely Sisyphean. I emptied spices into bottles in our new 48 bottle spice rack, in hopes that I could free up a Tupperware, but found that there were still remainders in many bottles, and some spices that were not amenable to being decanted, so now we have both, and I suspect I will continue to paw through the Tupperware first, in an effort to get rid of the spare bottles.

It seems that there is a theme here. We make progress toward a goal but there remains something that grounds us or pulls us back, a past that lingers. And so it is. Each day as I sit at the computer or open the mail, there is a remnant of my mother's passing that echoes in the abiding quiet here. There are "in memoriam" cards and emails from associates of my mother's from 50 years ago. Friends look into my eyes and ask how I am, as though I could have completed the grieving by now. (In fact, I think I have yet to begin.)  Instead, as we craft each day in our house of boxes and petals, of morning and evening light, of insects that flutter beneath the old beams, I find myself thinking of how very much my mother would have loved this place. The first house I lived in, had doorways that opened onto other vistas of inside and out. My mother always commented on how open everything felt, and that is even more true here. As I sit at the dining room table, the tiny office nook is in front of me, the living room to my left with the lattice that bounds the potting shed visible through the northwest window. To the right are two of my mother's sculptures that came back with me from New York, and the still blooming lilies from her friend Annette, on a window sill overlooking the shade garden of Hostas, Hellebore and Canadian anemones.

There is something fungible in this time; something without temporal bounds. I am celebrating our new home and braiding that celebration with my mother's passing. The two are twined in ways too deep to yet understand. But I know that she no longer rails against the lingering debilitation that she felt humiliating. I know that she knew that we had found the home that she predicted we would. I know that she took some pleasure in the chronicle of the move, a mere 48 hours before she died. But each act, is shadowed with something that lingers; each pleasure has its shade, each shade, its pleasure.