A Heart At Flood Stage

It is hard to know what to call this time of day.  The sun is still above the horizon and the time is almost 8:30 p.m..   I cannot possibly refer to it as afternoon, but it will not be night, real night, for another couple of hours.  Despite imagining that my neighbors would say I am putting on airs, I settle on “evening,” from the Old English æfen for “end of the day.”

Whatever I call these moments of whisper breeze and stillness, I speak it with deep affection.  I love that I can watch the shadows of the pine trees spread like spilled milk, that I can hear the call of the bobwhite unmuffled by the midday heat, that I am surrounded by the softness of a day winding down, yawning and stretching and preparing for rest.

This particular evening – Sunday, the day after the summer solstice – the temperature has fallen from 93° to a balmy 86 and I am grateful for bare arms and legs.  Ordinarily I would walk toward the sunset, stare into the neon oranges and pinks as they drip into the horizon, but something is drawing me in the other direction, into the shadows, to my parents’ house.

I walk slowly.  My feet move in less of a stride, more of scuffling.  The dry dirt makes small puffs as the toes of my shoes kick it into the air.  Owen, confused by my measured steps, darts back and forth across the road, spinning and bouncing like the puppy who showed up at Sandhill eight years ago, not the gray-muzzled old man he has become.  

The house looks the same, I guess.  There is a dead branch – brown leaves covering its brittle bark – dangling from the oak tree in the front yard.  I pull on the branch and quickly realize that the grip the tree has on it is still strong, will not yield to my strength alone, will let go only when confronted with the blade of a hacksaw.  I understand that kind of stubbornness.

I stroll through the yard, stare at the gnarly grapevines that line the edge of the backyard, the wizened pecan trees under which we used to crawl and fill buckets.  I can almost see them – my mother reaching into the deep green leaves and pulling out fat gold orbs of scuppernong sweetness, my father scaling and gutting fish that he has just caught from one of the ponds. There are a flood of memories.

There is a reason that flood is the perfect metaphor. Like uncontrolled water, memories can overwhelm everything in their path. They can knock down the thickest walls, upend the deepest roots, drown the strongest swimmers.  

But not today.  Today I am not crying, my eyes are not flooding.  I have not been tossed back into the torrent of grief, the inundation of emotion that can come with the recollection of great loss because, while it is true that flooding destroys, what is also true is this: Rising water lifts.  

The memories of my parents and this home lift me into gratitude and wonder at what was – and still is – so undeservedly mine.  The rush of emotions that pulse inside me as I remember the sweetness and tenderness of those people and things now gone are not like the deluges that wash out roads and drown livestock.  They are like a rice paddy or a cranberry bog, whose harvest brings to the surface a bountiful crop and a celebration of all that has been.  

Near the back corner of the yard is my mother’s long-lived gardenia bush.  The flush of blooms is long gone; there are only a few limp brown blossoms clinging to the limbs.  Out of the corner of my eyes, though, I glimpse – near the bottom, almost completely hidden by dark green leaves – a single white flower.  I pinch it off and bring it to my nose.

All the way home I hold it gently in the palm of my hand, its scent and the memories it invokes lifting me up and up and up.

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