Two Hundred Seasons

I have watched you change with the seasons for 50 years now. That’s 200 seasons this May.

The day we married you dyed your hair with tea so the green wouldn’t show in the pictures, but I could still feel it, when I ran the strands through my fingers, curly strands that were strong and silky and bursting with growth and life. The shadows of the vines that snaked across the gazebo roof fell in patterns across your face while you said your vows, and I was sure even those shadows took on energy and life from touching you; they shifted and swayed independently; they danced and sang as everything around you did in the spring.

I’d fallen in love with you in the fall, when you radiated a different kind of energy. I had seen you sitting in the grass looking up at the sky as I rushed back to my shop, your orange and gold ringlets heaped upon your shoulders. I was late, but I slowed to watch you for a moment and to wonder what you were looking at, because you were so still, so peaceful, while everything around you shimmered with time’s passing. When you turned your face to me I was arrested -- the brittle grass reached up with its last breaths to tug at the cuffs of my pants, turning me back.

I sat down beside you in the grass, late as I was, and you smiled and looked back up into the branches again. I followed your gaze. You asked me what I saw there. I saw nothing unusual, nothing worth remark. Late September leaves slowly browning in the trees, squirrels chattering angrily at one another, the sun glaring bright and low in the sky. When you responded I could hear you smiling – a gentle crackle of a smile, like fire on a dark night. You talked to me about anticipation, how plants store energy deep in their roots, how bulbs and tubers form, how what appears to be death is nothing so ominous, is really only a preparation for rebirth, a necessary redistribution of energy.

For all these 50 years I’ve remembered, when other memories collapse into dust or shatter against the walls, every word that passed between us that day, the day I never would have left your side there in the grass without your insistence, and then, only because you promised to come to the shop at suppertime. I showed you my craft, anxious that the noise of the saws would frighten you – I treated you like a wild animal then, always afraid you would bolt from me, though I needn’t have worried. I had no idea then the strength of your love, the rootedness of your resolve, your character.

I’ve never quite understood it … how you can be rooted at all when your body is always responding to the speed of the earth hurtling through space, the nearness or distance of the sun. Whenever you tried to describe that feeling I ended up in tremors; all I could see, all I could feel, was the terrifying cold vastness of it, the sense of utter helplessness, complete lack of control. I couldn’t see it like you did. You said you pictured it in your mind as a kind of cradle, a nest that enveloped you and swung you in a gentle circle year after year after year. You called yourself lucky. You found comfort in the certainty of the seasons; they helped you hold steady in the face of all those other changes we can never predict.  

When we lost the child I thought the blinding heat of summer would never end. I’d anticipated a winter grief – a return to the solitary months I’d only just begun to make peace with – in January, the gray that lowers over you, the hunched and sunken slowness. But that isn’t how the seasons go. It was summer, and you had a summer grief – a rage, a chaotic, frantic, kinetic mourning I couldn’t share or relieve. I simply stayed and shut my eyes with my hands reached out in front of me, and prayed for autumn. When it came you breathed deeply for several days to pull the cool into your lungs and your blood, and the peace returned, with a deep, sweet melancholy. You told me then you were grateful for my silence, that I had made myself a wall for you to beat against, and if I hadn’t you would have leapt into the air and floated away.

I have seen you dry and ragged when long drought pushed back the fall. I have seen you plump, shining, your lips red with pomegranate picked fresh off the tree. I’ve watched you try to buck your fate, taking pills to wake yourself from February’s stupor, baths and tea to induce more sleep in June. I’ve pushed away the wild black tangle of your hair as you leaned with me over my work, helping me plane a tabletop, the sawdust settling powdery on your naked, glistening cheek. Even that scent – the smell of your sweat that dripped onto the wood as we worked – even that was extraordinary, like rain in the summer beating hard on rich, black soil.

This morning when my eyes opened to this stark and sterile room, I had a sudden recollection of you sitting in your chair at home, the chair I made for you. I’ve been meaning to refinish it – its varnish is so worn around your shape – but you told me to let it be. Embrace the wear, you said; the wear is just the way of things. Your hands rested on the arms, your fingers gnarled and knotted, swollen around the knuckles, like mine. A book of poems on your lap, your eyes shut.

Confronted by your stillness I felt the earth slide forward without me. It would continue … the world would keep on its trajectory, whether we moved or not, whether the grass grew or the leaves browned. Futures would continue being made, though the whole world stood empty. I steadied myself against the table, and when I looked up you were watching me, gently rocking in that chair, smiling as one smiles at a child who has just said some sweet, painful, naive thing.

I remember you, all 50 years of you, all 200 seasons, as I watch your eyelids barely fluttering, your hair drained of color, brittle as winter reeds around your head, thin as a dusting of snow on the pillow. I’d like to caress your cheek, but rest is so important for you now – I daren’t disturb you. I can hear you in my mind, softly chastising, asking me to embrace this, as I should embrace everything, telling me to look for your energy elsewhere. I would like to, my love, but for now you’ll have to forgive me. Just for now I’ll sit here and stare at the roots of your hair, praying for the warm breath of spring to come early, just one more spring, to sprout the tiniest shock of green in you once more.