You are sitting here with us,
but you are also out walking in a field at dawn.
This morning I was remembering the dead. Our parents, a few dear friends, the 3 dogs who graced our lives, and passed on far too soon. I was remembering how I’d prepare visits–fresh sheets on the beds, one of the quilts from the basket on the trunk. Bread rising in the bowl that came to us from John’s mother. Wine chilling in the fridge. This morning I was awake early, watching the light come in through the white curtains. All night a solar lamp we’d set up on the eaves of the sunroom glowed like a smudge of moonlight. And there was a moon too, and the morning star.
You are in your body
like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you are wind.
There are days when this is true. There are days when I feel the dead living through me, when my skin feels transparent, when old love and pain for things said, or not said, are close enough to touch, palpable as the tendrils of sweetpea I’ve been coaxing into their netting.
We have so little time, it seems, to live and to ensure another generation. When I let the cat out after his breakfast, I could hear a robin singing so stridently that I knew it was the last song, the end of the season. As I swam my quiet laps in the lake, swallows were mating, also the end of their season. In our house, the beds are all made with fresh sheets, a homemade quilt, extra pillows, and sweetpeas in tiny jars. There’s light enough at dawn for those arriving, for those leaving.
Note: the lines are Rumi’s.
