The Warmth Between

It was quiet with their departure.  Four generations had gathered - from 93 years to 10 months - to visit, to feed, to be fed; to reminisce, to imagine; to experience new things, to walk in wonderment through the woods; to simply be in one another’s company.  And then the car was loaded and backed down the driveway, and it was quiet again.  

We straightened a few things, paused for a moment, and then settled in the cool of the waning afternoon by the fire outside; its flames making visible the affective mood.

An intermezzo of sorts - a harmonic sequence between the joyful  “firsts” of today with an infant’s fresh awakenings, and yet another “first” in our own progression of grief with my dad’s birthday tomorrow.  There are more such firsts to come in a quick progression - this birthday, and Thanksgiving and Christmas - but it’s the birthday that is upon us just now in its poignant immensity.  It’s a poignant juxtaposition, what with the echoing memory of a life well-lived, and the experiential joy of a life just beginning.

In the sunset, then, between these glows - the gratitude and the grief, the anticipation and the memory, the joy and the melancholy, the embers center us.  They are the warmth between.  And in their light, Louise Erdrich’s sensible wisdom offers a satisfying fullness.  

“You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”  (From The Painted Drum)

There are, to be sure, things I have overlooked.  Important things I have missed.  Tasks I have neglected.  There are blossoms I have ignored and sunrises I have taken for granted.  There have been rain-filled puddles I walked around instead of splashed through; rain showers I sought shelter from instead of tilting my face upward, into the falling drops, with mouth open wide. There are stories the details of which I have forgotten or found, in the moment of their telling, uninteresting.  There have been silences I spoke into too quickly.  There have been tender evenings in the midst of which I simply went to bed.  

Apples, in other words, have fallen all around me and I have missed out on their sweetness.  

But in days like today, and in years like these treasured ones, I am grateful for the ones I have tasted.  

Every sweet bite.

Every juicy dribble down the chin of my days.

Despite the cool of the day, it’s warm tonight in the glow of these logs - the glow of these loves,

And I’m full.