Here, in my inadequate rendering, you can see the spartan garden with its cheerful bouquets. Already, dog walkers and wagon-pulling young parents are stopping to admire the blooms and to inquire about my gardening state of mind. Everyone is so eager for simple sensory happiness. A crocus. A cardinal. My front-yard farm might be a community service this year.
Yesterday our college friend from Brooklyn called with an update on the NYC debacle. As he was talking, the distributor's truck was picking up unopened cases of beer from from his shuttered bar. My friend feels like it's inevitable that he'll get the virus, given his work environment. Plus, he's just put all of his savings toward paying his employees. Yet he didn't sound down and out. He spent much of the phone call telling me about the fun he and his husband were having, making one elaborate meal after another.
And it's true: there is pleasure in all of this, amid the fear and loathing. These bike rides I'm taking with my son: when would we ever do that otherwise? Yet when we shoot back up the driveway after a ride, both of us are beaming and red-cheeked, drunk on wind and sunshine.
It will be another sunny day today. I'll lug trash to the curb, hang clothes on the line, simmer a giant batch of chicken stock, edit a manuscript, mend a comforter. I've started rereading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, set along the Kennebec River in the years just after the American Revolution. I admire Ulrich as a historian of domestic life, and also as a prose stylist; and I know the Kennebec region well. It feels right to consider the past, at this moment when we're terrified about the future.
During our walk through the cemetery the other day, Paul was telling me about the Battle of Fredericksburg, a Union debacle, in which soldiers were stupidly deployed up a cliff face, where they were picked off by the Confederates. In Paul's telling, the surviving Union soldiers spent a cold December night clinging to those terrible heights. But strangely, miraculously, the Northern Lights were visible in Virginia. And so the soldiers spent their night of horror beneath that beautiful, unearthly glow.
I'm probably remembering this story all wrong. But the image clings, don't you think?
6 comments:
Paul's story reminds me of some of those of my brother when he was in Vietnam. The Americans would be told to take a hill, for reasons never made clear, and too often, the VC were able to pick off the soldiers as they started up. If they were lucky enough to survive to the top, they had no idea what they were to do next.
It's a beautiful day here, beauty amidst the horror of numbers in the DMV rising.
You're recalling it right. Maine's Joshua Chamberlain I think may have mentioned the lights in his memoir. He certainly recalled the banging of a door in the wind in the dark that frigid night. To him it sounded like it was saying "Never, forever, never, forever." Debacle is the word: Union boys sacrificed on an open hillside with no cover. If you're at all interested, historian Bruce Catton gave a vivid account of Fredericksburg in his "Glory Road", the second volume in his trilogy on the Army of the Potomac. And thanks to Maureen; her sad story is echoed in Vietnam vet memoirs and novels. Futility: often rightly said by veterans to be the best description of war.
Addendum: Which is not to say there aren't just causes worth fighting for. Only that the frequent experience of those doing the fighting is one of death and futility.
That contradiction between horror and beauty is why I love Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story." Last lines :
"In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about the special way that
dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the
mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen."
Nature can be an implacable killer; hence hurricanes, drought, wildfires, floods, viruses.
But also an immeasureable healer. While I was lying on a hospital bed with cancer, the sight of birds flying on the updrafts outside my MaineMed room's window filled me with joy. As did the bald eagle soaring over my house last evening with the setting sun turning its wings to gold.
Keep talking and feeling together: this is what we need. Thank you for reaching out.
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