Concave is the Bowl

Post 3

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

11:58 am

I’m pond-side at my home, warmer weather today and bright. One summer, long ago, when I held hidden hurts tighter, I stood at the edge of another natural curve, rimmed with taller, West Coast pines and no clear way down. I had come for the blue water, based on a picture from a book that told me to go there. I had seen the photograph and ignored the print—long hike down, no swimming, long hike back up. I never put my hand in that blue clarity but water is always in my plans. The cure for anything, said Isak Dinesen, is sweat, tears, or the sea. I’ve spent exhaustive years with each and now I’m home, sitting on another kind of edge beside water, a spare coat draped on the stone bench, warmed.  

With each post, I’m migrating clockwise around the house. To my right are the two red buildings, arena and barn, wood fences. The house is behind me on my left side. Directly in front of me is the kidney-shaped pond, perhaps forty yards long at its current depth and fifteen yards across. It is spring fed, but I don’t know where that spring begins or if it even still exists. We have been known to top it off with a hose in hot summer months, when the grass cracks underfoot, desperate for drink.  Now the pond is passably full, enough to survive the winter.The curtain of ice is beautiful and nearly smooth, gray and opaque with white veins. The cold weather has been slowly freezing it solid and skate-able but I haven’t yet found a spare moment to find my skates and sit on this bench to strap them on. I used to play because that was what time was for. I didn’t have to make time to be exhilarated.

I turn slightly and look out beyond the pond, to the pasture past the pine trees and then the road. Hondo and Simmie are not grazing in their pasture but standing and thinking horse thoughts. Hondo, the black and white paint, has moved to the edge of the fence, noticing me. He is rigid-still, ears pricked forward and curious.  I can hear spring birds today, the sudden warming drawing them out. They are tentative tweets, but joyful. Every being celebrates a reprieve from what is deserved.  I try to whistle in imitation but the tone is not right, the clear notes not as sharp as the whistling deep in the trees. They answer me but I’m not sure it is a response. What are these sounds I’m trying to produce, whee whee whee? Trill, trill, trill. What foolishness to capture the song of a bird in letters and printed ink.  I try again and the bird is silent. How can I spell the silence in the absence of a bird’s song?

I have other worries. I do not know the names of these trees. This ignorance is developing as a theme, a growing concern since we are only now waiting to hear the final word from the township before contracts are signed.  I think I believed that describing the woods would be enough of a farewell, how they look, how I feel when looking at them, what lives beneath them. No, not close enough. I’ve touched these trees, broken and felled them down but have I actually known the bark under my hand? I claim this land but is it fair to feel such loss when I don’t know sugar maple from sweetgum? On this bench, looking out at the trees along the rim of this property, I’m convicted of this sense of ownership I don’t deserve.  How deeper could the goodbye be if I was intimate with this place.  I need to develop my point of view, up close to the bark, the grasses, and the sandy beach of the pond. I want to be a credible witness to a place I treasured as home, saying goodbye with the heft of a strong handshake between friends.