The Past We Are Living
My friend Rosemary and and I buried the past. We wrote secrets on a fragment of paper, placed it in a tiny tin box that clicked snugly shut, and buried it in the ground behind the garage of my family’s Long Island house. We were sure that we would return one day in the distant future and easily find it again, but it didn’t take long to completely forget how many steps back and sideways we had walked. There was one futile attempt to unearth it with a spoon a year or two later, but it was irretrievably lost. Decades later, the house burned to the ground, and in a completely unrelated event, Rosemary died, but I imagine that box of the past is still there in the ground someplace.
It’s curious to contemplate what an interesting sense of ceremony Rosemary and I had, and our teenaged attempts at romanticizing and curating our lives. I suppose I do that still, with each blog post a particle in amber, or a message in a bottle, dispatched to parts unknown. It’s an impulse I have always had. I pluck pieces of story from each passing day, like layers of old wallpaper or paint on a wall, trying to learn or salvage, turning what is fleeting into something to keep, in case perhaps it matters.
In this quieter time that envelops us now, details that might so easily have gone unnoticed are shimmering with significance, small humble work takes on new meaning, and the present lengthens and deepens. Donna witnessed a monarch butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. Chris painted her kitchen a joyful shade of orange. Teresa mills wheat berries into flour and made face masks from old bikinis. There are those (like Cornelia) who observe bird dynamics that would never before have been of interest, and a few friends who hand-feed lizards. Sue is perfecting the martini. I am perfecting the nap. We are very attentive to dinner and books.
We recognize how the continuity of friendship and community sustains us, and we adapt to new ways of maintaining it. We learn the protocols, the odd dance of zoom and FaceTime chats, beloved familiar faces on a flat screen, the slightly chaotic chorus of goodbyes, the little ache afterwards. In fact, Loretta participated in a zoom discussion recently about this very time we are in, and how it is changing us. “We contemplated how the garment has become unraveled,” she reported. “How will we stitch it back together? What will we leave behind? What will be new?”
Apart from the tragedy and sacrifice that is, as always, inequitably distributed, we are beginning to see that some of the changes are necessary and good and overdue. Perhaps we are giving the natural world a break, returning it to itself a little, respecting the otherness of different forms of life. We are certainly consuming less. Noticing more. Treasuring our loved ones more than ever, even if we cannot touch.
Collectively, this is the tapestry of our lives, and the ornate embroidered details are exquisite. When Rosemary and I buried the past, I didn’t understand that the past is never over. And I don’t know what I would write about the past we are living, but maybe it would be something like this.