A Smile at the Turning of the Year
There is a certain bleak beauty in the Hudson valley in winter, the watery sun highlighting the dead weeds in the foreground and lending a dreamy indistinct quality to the leafless trees on the ridge.
As always, the turning of the year brings with it thoughts of the past and the future, of love and loss, the transience of life, the permanence of death. Now more than ever as my younger sister is dying of terminal brain cancer.
It will be good to walk, as we so often do, around the fields and through the woodland surrounding our house. There is the familiarity of the terrain, the soothing rhythm of a pedestrian pace, the comfortable silence that speaks of 35 years of marriage walking alongside my wife.
I have just finished the fascinating book ‘On Looking’, and the voice of Alexandra Horowitz keeps murmuring in my ear that what I am seeing is filtered by what I pay attention to, which in turn is limited by what I know. In her book she circumnavigates the same Brooklyn block with a series of companions, each chapter comprising the insights and observations of a different subject matter expert.
A professor of architecture is drawn to the different stone used in the construction of the buildings and sidewalks, noting the distinctive quarry marks of regional sources of sandstone and the fossils of prehistoric bugs embedded in slate.
A student of Entomology literally turns over stones in search of living bugs.
I wonder what I miss as we walk these same fields and pathways year after year. I’m mostly attuned to the changes in the seasons: the fading evidence of autumn’s glory of fruits and seeds, the budding harbingers of the coming spring.
Not only the changes, but the changes in the changes. On the first of January it is more common now for our winter boots to squelch through mud than to walk in a soundless space under veils of white lace.
We pass the skate shack by the unfrozen rink rippling in the breeze. A red-tailed hawk is circling in the fading afternoon light. Will future poets see in this hurling and gliding the skate’s heel sweeping smooth on a bow-bend, or will such references mystify future students of Gerard Manley Hopkins?
Is global warming a thing, or are we simply in a cycle of cycles, a summer before the next ice age?
The other day we were drinking coffee at my sister’s house. Her husband sat beside her on the couch, his arm around her shoulder. Not only a gesture of companionability and care, but in this case one of literal support.
The encroaching tumor has robbed her of balance, of memory, of any real sense of the past or the future. An oncologist observing her might note the asymmetry of her face, the distension of one eye, and speculate as to the progression of her condition and offer a prognosis.
Her family knows that my sister has long outlived many such prognoses. They are content to surround her with love, and to await with her the unfolding of events that are both unknowable and inevitable.
The conversation and laughter swirl around her. She sits contentedly tracing and retracing the floral pattern on her skirt.
Slowly she raises her head and looks across the room at me. A smile starts gently then grows until her whole face is involved, a huge happy hundred-watt grin.
I know that smile.
I remember teaching her as a teenager to ride at full gallop across the fields behind our house. To lean forward and grip with her knees to urge the horse into a run, to shift her weight to anticipate the turns, and to swing her feet forward in the stirrups to brace for a stop.
In my mind’s eye she sweeps smooth across the meadow, pulling up directly in front of me. The horse is blowing, nostrils flared, head tossing, side-stepping, ready to run. She sits easily in the saddle, looking down at me with that hundred-watt grin.
Joy in living.
This, perhaps more than any other, seems to me the strongest argument for eternal life.
If only we have eyes to see it.
