I’m in the shadow of the house next-door, slow-swinging on a squeaky loveseat, thinking about the seasons. The loop. The Möbius Strip of it. How every year the same things occur but every year they’re different . . . I wonder when would be the best time for this body to turn back to dust, if given the choice? I think of that Camelot song: if ever I would leave you . . . it wouldn’t be in springtime with its wild plots of fledgling hopes and furtive tender shoots. Or summer with its birds and bees stirring up the blooms. Or fall with all its woodsy smells and amber colored promises. Or winter awash in shimmery lights and shiny new intentions––resolving yet again.
But all that winds up and down around us as time moves on and our bodies go from spry to “why does it hurt when I do this?” As it happens we don’t even notice. The creaks that creep in around the edges. The clouds encroaching on our peripheral vision. Floaters becoming spidery phantoms sliding across our eyes. Memories piling up like debris, getting pushed out to sea and lost again––brought back suddenly by a melody or a scent on the wind. A déjà vu moment––haven’t I done this before? Lived this before? Have we met? And faces move in and out of our spheres like the phantoms traveling across our eyes and we try to remember how we know each other, why we never knew each other better. We stumble down this path––some of us with guardrails and so certain of our footing, others tripping off the edge––maybe we land in a soothing room with a view and three squares. Or perhaps in an antiseptic institution of absent relatives and flickering fluorescents . . . way leads on to way, only ever forward.
I run my fingers over my forehead, tracing the shallow dent where a trip in the dark a few months back left a gash and nearly cracked my skull. It shook my senses. Bent my perspective. Slowed my synapses. I know it––I’m not seeding fresh ideas into pockets of fertile earth and watching for them to unfurl––so little is sprouting. The pollen and all its potential is caked in my brain like after a heavy rain, not weightlessly drifting and seeking new places to propagate. But maybe it isn’t that bad. Maybe that’s just worry.
The uncertain future churns up laments of the past, but the now is known: sitting in the shade as the sun creeps toward my bare feet. I look for the pollinators, mostly missing from my yard this summer, but it’s a bounty for the few bees––their saddle bags cartoonish and puffy with the orange stuff. There are no monarchs dipping in the milkweed. I have yet to spot a hummingbird––iridescent and implausible––needling for nectar. The tree hanging over me, usually a racket of hungry robins and waxwings, has no cherries weighing down its limbs––it lost its buds in a cold snap. Even those black and white tiger mosquitoes, recent arrivals here in southern New England, aren’t silently hovering around me like the last couple years. I don’t miss them.
A wave rolls across the treetops. The bamboo shakes itself. The chimes tumble out a flutter in a minor key. I hear a bus rumble and exhale on the corner of Hope and the noises of people passing by chip-chip their way to my dead end. The sun catches up to my toes.
Four young raccoons were in the yard last night––quiet and curious, crawling on the shed––peeking through the holly branches. They ate the shiny red berries with their tiny paws. Their arced bodies a disconcerting sight; it’s where their wild is. So raccoons, yes, but nothing else to spread the wealth of this blooming yard across the city. I find myself staring at the flowers to see if I’m missing the bustle of the bugs’ buzzy presence but I’m not. The dainty pink cigar plant is offering up its tiny tubes to no one. The typically flamboyant fuchsia petals of the Dipladenia are curled into themselves and it hardly matters––it has gone shy in the absence of lovers.
Andrea Sloan lives and works in Providence, RI. She writes a weekly newsletter for her wine shop and is active in and supportive of the local literary arts community via memberships, sponsorships, and critique partnerships. She has a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and is always making pictures on film and phone. She is working on a collection of experimental essay, remembrance collage, and narrative memoir from which this piece is excerpted. Another of Andrea’s essays is forthcoming in Ocean State Review.
