Trying to Remember A Path

The oranges grow heavy on their branches, dropping to the ground on windy nights. In the morning, we gather them, filling buckets, making juice, giving them to friends. The earth is brindled with sunlight and shade, and feathery clouds streak the sky like scarves flung high in celebration, and I don’t know why I get to be here, but here is where I am.

And yet, even while isolated in a place of enchantment with someone I love, it’s getting to me. All of it. I’m feeling sad, frustrated, and angry, while many less fortunate are truly suffering.

So here I am, grousing and gathering oranges, not exactly part of the solution.

What will we learn from this experience? What will we accomplish? I am certain that the goal is to emerge better than we were, but how? First, stay healthy, be considerate of others, acquire patience. I also want to become stronger, and wiser, and do something tangibly constructive and hopeful. But my head is a jumble. My thoughts refuse to line up in any coherent goal-oriented way.

Today I thought of how the sidewalks of my childhood glinted with shining flecks of mica, like diamonds, and how puddles turned to rainbow pools when filled with neon light. I thought about my mother, and for the first time, I was astonished not by the absence of her, but by the fact that I had her so long. I thought about long-distance phone calls, and dialing Meridian 7-1212 for the time (“At the tone, the time will be…”) and flicking the coin return whenever I passed a phone booth in the hope of retrieving a forgotten nickel. It’s a random procession, fascinating but inexplicable.

And I thought about the little pear tree in the backyard that my grandfather expertly revived, an artist with a shovel and pruning shears and some secret choreographing of soil, skills carried over from a 19th century Neapolitan boyhood. I remembered a line of clean laundry, and the fragrance of lilacs, and my little brother’s fascination with a dead rabbit we came upon while walking a trail in the Bayard Cutting Arboretum in 1969.

I thought about road trips, how big and wide the country is, and how empty when you’re feeling bleak inside, and I remembered with amazement that I have been to Istanbul. I have seen whales, a mountain lion, a solar eclipse. I was a teacher once, and I am a grandmother now, but no labels really clarify.

I’m just a work in progress. And trying. (Very trying, as Monte would say.) Lately I can imagine the doorway of my house when I no longer live here. This is what happens: the evidence is irrefutable that we are going to die. It certainly renders everything more precious and poignant.

But what a bounty my life has been! Inequitably distributed, oranges included, and I received a stunningly generous portion. I simply took my place in an epic saga, lavish and lucky, and now there is abundant time to contemplate it all, even while time is running out.

Richard Blanco wrote: “Every story begins inside a story that’s already begun by others. Long before we take our first breath, there’s a plot underway, with characters and a setting we did not choose, but which were chosen for us.”

Exactly. Leave it to a poet to say what needs saying. I want to honor that greater story, speak its truths, and proceed with gratitude.

Another poet, William Stafford (yes, him again) asked: “Is there a way to walk that living has obscured? (Our feet are trying to remember some path we are walking toward.)”

I’m distracted by debris and dazzle, and this is uncharted territory, but somewhere beneath, there’s a path. My feet seek the course as I walk, a pilgrim, as Robert Macfarlane has written, “whose every footfall is doubled: landing at once on the actual road and also on the path of faith.”

I am trying to remember.