Testing the Waters

So... I'm gonna see how I feel about publishing something I've written on this thing. I wrote this just over a month ago, it's fairly unedited, and were I to ever do something serious with it, I would probably review it a few more times.

Anyhow, here it is:

She had been dead for 2 months before I cried for her. It wasn’t that I was too shocked to mourn, and I’m not some kind of cold-hearted bastard, I was just too busy. School had just started, I was still trying to get my footing in Seattle, and then, she was gone. Midterms are not canceled just because an 80 year old woman in Oregon dies. I went back for the funeral, and then I went on with my life.

Two months later, my world had stopped spinning. I was back home for winter break, and it was cold. Everything was cold. My parents were in the middle of rebuilding half of our home, which meant that there were lots of cracks in the insulation, and the cold was beginning to get in. We would keep the fire burning hot all day. Since she died, and we were the only other ones in the family with a fireplace, we had more than enough firewood. Most of the time, we huddled together in the living room/kitchen and tried to keep one another sane. Sometimes we talked about her.

A few weeks before Christmas, I took a walk. I don’t know why. It was cold. Damn cold. I was wearing four layers of shirt under my coat, a hat, and two pairs of socks. Have you ever noticed that we never bundle up our legs? Nobody owns snow pants in the Pacific Northwest. We wear jeans all the time, when we go skiing we wear long-johns under our jeans.

I walked the three blocks down to her house. Nobody was there, but I knew where the key was. She lived next door to her son, my grandpa, and I was praying to God almighty that he would be at church. He was.

Inside, the place was in a weird state of gutting. She was a pack-rat, lots of those children of the depression turned out to be pack-rats. They never threw things out. My family had inherited, besides the fire-wood, a majority of her food reserves. Most of which was from pre 1980 and contained dairy.

The garage shelves were bare, something I’d never seen in my entire life. I got into the house proper as soon as possible, it was cold out there.

It was cold in there too. I don’t know why I assumed it would be warm inside a dead woman’s house. The pictures were all gone, as well as most of the useful kitchen items, but most of the books, and nick nacks were still there. The better furniture had been removed, the TVs were all gone. I sat down on one of the couches, and looked around the room.

Years of after-church afternoons flooded back to me. Evenings so hot that you’d sleep on the cold tile floor in the kitchen. Bowls upon bowls of taco soup and broccoli. And always her, sitting in the chair, doling out equal amounts of wisdom and bitterness, sometimes I wasn’t sure which was which with her.

She’d been sick for a long time, but she didn’t really take care of herself. She liked sweets, and she liked CMT and she liked to read. The cocktails of prescriptions had started to take a toll on her mind, and sometimes she forgot.

I saw her a few times after she’d gone to the hospital, after they had her on morphine and not much else, when lucidity was improbable. But, I don’t count those. The last time I really saw her was the day before I went away to school. She must’ve known that something was going to happen, she must have known something. She told me that she had a gift for me. She went into her bedroom and she came out with an old bible. It was a leather bound, black thing with her name monogrammed on the front.

It had been her bible for a very long time. It had been damaged by smoke during the fire before my father was born. It’s especially obvious in the back, where all the maps are. The pages are browned and crinkle they way near-burnt paper only can. I pick it up sometimes and smell it. It still smells like her house. It may be the only thing in the world that does.

It was damn cold, and sitting with nothing but the wheels in your head moving isn’t a good way to keep warm. I walked through the rooms of the half-empty house for the last time, and I stepped out onto the back porch. The still-green stump of the old pear tree was sticking out of the ground in her back yard. She loved that tree, and it was at least as old as she was. Every year it would drop pears on the ground like a slothful piñata, one every few minutes or so. She would can the pears, or just eat them raw, and we would help her.

Not a week after she died, her son, my grandpa, cut down the pear tree. I don’t know why. I don’t want to know why.

The night before I left for school, I had a dream. Well, I had a lot of dreams that night, but I forgot all of them but this one. I was in a transition between dreams. One dream was ending and another was beginning to fade into my sleeping. I felt someone say, pay attention, this is important. Then, I found myself standing at the edge of a clearing in the middle of a mountain valley. The sun was just on its way to setting. The field was filled with tall grass that swayed in a gentle breeze.

There were people, standing, sitting, laying down; in groups of three or four, or alone. None were moving, they weren’t frozen, they just weren’t going anywhere. They wore 30’s era clothing, jean suspenders and flannel shirts. There were some trucks and tractors, also 30’s, laying around in the field. They weren’t broken down, but the grass around them wasn’t depressed. It was like they’d just been left there, they weren’t necessary anymore.

One of the women stood out. She was about 30 years old, and she stood alone in the field. She had brown hair, and she was wearing a dress with yellow flowers on it. The breeze picked up for a moment, and she raised her arms out to her side. With the wind tugging at the hem of her dress, she closed her eyes and smiled.

I walked the three blocks back to my house, thinking about her. Thinking about all of it. Thinking about the half gutted house. Thinking about the pear tree that died with her. Thinking about the Bible that was sitting on my shelf at school. Thinking about my dream. I saw her, standing in the field, yellow flower dress billowing lightly, as the cool evening turned into a warm night. I saw her holding me when I was newborn. I saw her watch my dad so that his parents could work. I saw her sacrifice for her children when their father died at 35. I saw her, and I knew that I wouldn’t see her anymore.

I cried for her.