Such As They Are

Sunday morning was thick with fog. The trees were like ghosts, and the sun, appearing intermittently, was a pale moon, and I walked past shuttered shops and sleepy houses with thatched roofs, and the town yawned itself into a new day, as yet peopled only by dog-walkers and cyclists. Church bells clanged noisily, drowning out my thoughts and the low growl of old grief, which goes with me everywhere.

The idea of this trip has been to get to know our fifteen-month-old grandson Felix. He is quite a personality, fully immersed in the physical world, pushing a toy truck, muttering incantations and making motor sounds, filling a bucket with sand and rocks, tasting everything, and running off on chunky wobbly legs. I’m afraid I am a boring, nervous grandma, and don’t always know how to relate to Felix, unlike Monte, who is doing fine and has even introduced him to the ocean. But sometimes I lie down on the floor and Felix explores me like an unfamiliar wilderness, climbing over me, lifting my shirt to touch the skin of my fat belly. My belly is one of my most appealing qualities. (Who would have guessed?) I like his too, and we thump our tummies like drums and laugh uproariously, and then move on to the next amusement.

In Oxford, we are staying at the house of our friends Neil and Dot, which has become a welcoming and familiar base. We stayed there for the first time in January 2015, soon after my mother’s death, and that upstairs room with its slanted ceiling and warm lamplight was a comforting place to have landed. Now, nearly six years later, in the wake of everything from a global pandemic to the birth of a grandchild, we are here again, during a spate of uncharacteristically hot weather, and there have been rowdy crowds partying well into the night out on the patio of the pub downstairs. But in the morning, we looked through our narrow window to a rustic backyard and watched an elegant fox astride a concrete block wall, all patience and wildness and mystery.

That glimpse of wildness is something that sustains me, as do the solo walks and notebook scribbles, as do the many manifestations of love and duty to which I am bearing witness. My daughter, whom I have recently noticed has fine threads of silver woven through her thick dark hair, is a capable and diligent mother, and she, her husband, and Felix, are a sturdy little family trio, as she, and Monte, and I were, long ago. The long-ago aspect to this startles me, because I’m struggling to grasp how everything happened so fast.

I’m also struck anew by the relentless demands of parenting, the constant giving it requires, and I’m proud that my daughter has so gracefully grown into this role, while maintaining other elements of her identity as well. But somehow I had forgotten how much it takes, how exhausting it can be. It humbles me to realize that I too was loved like this, a little girl in a family with more kids and far more difficulty, but hard work and sacrifice kept us afloat, and countless breathtaking kindnesses, most of them taken for granted. I’m carrying around a huge surfeit of unearned love.

I realized today that it is Rosh Hashanah, and this new year poem by W.S. Merwin seems fitting and beautiful:

TO THE NEW YEAR

With what stillness at last you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible