Someone tell the plants

don't know if I'm coming or going

There’s about two weeks in spring when the stairwell in my house smells a particular way that’s the way the entire house smelled when we bought it sixteen years ago. Each spring it’s a little weaker, and I guess some year I will no longer notice it at all. I don’t know what the source of it is—some tipping point in the humidity, or the timing of the reproductive cycle of a spore-forming mold somewhere in the walls— or why it lessens over time, which suggests it had more to do with the nature of the previous occupants. I love it every year, and pause on the stairs to sniff it up on the days when it’s there. It reminds me of that dreadful time when we moved in with a 2 year old and a 2 week old. My life was both ordinary and unrecognizable—we’d bought a house, but not for the first time. I had a new baby, but he was not my first baby. Nothing was shockingly different. It wasn’t the major, pre/post dislocation of doing big life events you’ve never done before, though I don’t know how anyone is supposed to take a new house or a newborn in stride. I guess I was still in my 20s and thought I could handle anything, which in some ways I could.

I got to work in the yard, which was mostly a bare expanse of cheap fill—pale dead dirt studded with bits of tire and mysterious pieces of mechanical or electronic debris. There’s a picture of my older son, around two or three years old, wearing a bike helmet with no bike nearby, holding a stick, and screaming into the sky. He looks like a visitor to an empty planet, standing at the edge of a hole in the ground I was digging to try and make a little pond. The other day, I wheeled my wheelbarrow by that pond, and thought how rounded time is. This is one of those thoughts that are generated reliably by certain actions. Christophe and I read an essay a long time ago about this phenomenon: the writer said that every night when they pull down the blinds and turn the lights down, they think the words, “sleep chamber complete.” Mentioning this, with embarrassment, to their spouse, the spouse reported that they too do this, saying the phrase, “heat capture” inside their mind each time they seal up their thermos of coffee. These reflex phrases are often rather self-serious. The people that have them report them being embarrassingly solemn, incantatory. I have mine about the wheelbarrow, when I wheel it by the pond: “the roundedness of time,” my brain intones. I’m not really thinking about the roundedness of time so much as responding to the prompt. I have wheeled this barrow by the pond for the same chores for about fifteen years now, and time is rounded, but I’m not really being struck by anything profound when I think these words. Or, I should say, it’s profound, but not news.

When I think it, I am also aware that time is not only rounded. Or it’s always rounded, but the rounds are multiple, overlapping, and sometimes scaled so as to seem linear. Like how you can’t appreciate the curvature of the Earth unless you can get a long enough view. On the ground in my little clearing in my yard, it seems flat. I have an idea about this being related to something in calculus—something about taking tiny little linear tangent slopes, and doing enough of these little tiny linear segments can approximate a curve, or something. But it’s been a long time since I took calculus, and at that time, I thought I was dumb in math so I didn’t pay attention to its metaphorical value. The shrubs around the pond are like these little linear segments—every year a bit taller, or a lot taller, or just more sure of themselves. There’s a broad mock-orange my father-in-law gave me when he moved away from his last house, and the juniper I bought in a gallon pot that is now 25 feet tall, and the Fothergilla and Clethra that sneak shallow roots under the surface and pop up new shoots in random and annoying places. Fothergilla is known in English as witch-alder, and I wavered on which name to use just now, because it’s a meaningful statement on me as a person, whether I choose the Linnaean Latin, or elect to evoke witches. In the end, I am mentioning both because the self is not unitary.

The plants have their linear growth, but also their roundedness. They’re up and alert and leafed out now, and then they’ll go to sleep again in a few months. Sometimes I briefly forget where I am in that seasonal round, and am seized with dread. It happens when I am out of touch with the outside world. Lying in bed, the windows closed, when it’s dark out, it could be May, or it could be November, and reading aloud to Christophe something like these lines of Hayden Carruth’s:

If the orderly massacre of order creates an order,
then let it be new, even now, from the beginnings of things.
I am cold to my bones, my red hand clings

like a wind-plastered leaf to a white bole of birch,
the sky is speckled with snow-flecks
driven downwind, vanishing. It is all a song

vanishing down the wind, like snow,
like the last leaves of the birch
spinning away in harsh beauty. 

I am seized with panic for a moment, that it might be fall, and it will be dark and snowy soon, and I am not ready. I think of Scrooge, unable to look at the writing on the tombstone, pleading, “I have not the power, Spirit, I have not the power.” I love the winter, but not now. Not yet. I need the summer to heal and sugar down my roots, replenish the stores, before I descend again. If I had to go straight back to winter right now, I don’t think I have it in me.

There’s an attic window of a house I pass on my way to work in the mornings, when it’s still dark out, that illuminates with the sunrise for a few days at certain times of the year. It’s like a tiny, domestic Stonehenge—windows at each end of the empty attic align with the sun verge and the purple and pink shoot straight through them to my eyes in the seconds that I am passing by, in the days when the Earth is passing by just so. I can get a little dislocated, at those moments, about whether it’s spring or fall. It makes me think of the peepers, the little frogs that sing early in spring in huge choruses. A few of them will also sing again in fall. It’s a feeble echo, just a few voices, and I was told by someone that it’s because the day length is the same at that point in the fall as it is when they sing in spring, so they are fooled. But if they are just automatons, why don’t they all sing again in fall, when the light seems right for it? There must be other aesthetics and feelings they respond to. Other cues. They’re not just little light-sensing chips. Not like the little machine I made for science class in middle school—a circuit I soldered together with a sensor and an alarm that made a noise when the room got dark. I was proud and astonished that I’d made it, though I had to explain the “usefulness of my invention” as part of the project, and I couldn’t think of one. My mother, who worked 3-11 shifts, and thus had a different perspective on waking up for work days, suggested I call it a “third shift alarm” and I did, for the purposes of the the class, but I hated that it had to have usefulness. I really just wanted it appreciated as a marvel that I had made such a thing with my own hands. When I plugged it into the wall of the classroom to demonstrate it, it shocked me, mildly but decisively, and I pretended nothing had happened, for some reason absolutely unwilling to let anyone in that room know I’d been hurt. I proceeded with the demo, my fingers tingling, projecting, I suppose, the affect of calm assuredness I have cultivated my whole life to keep people from crossing the moat.

Why was I talking about this? The peepers, right. As if they are just light sensing automatons. No more than I am, when I get confused about where I am in time, and the seasons. It’s like, if you asked me when I’d be home, and I told you I was situated at 3,850 feet of elevation on the mountain I was hiking. With only that information, I could be on my way up, or on my way down, but you can’t know with only the one point. It’s like how I walk in some woods near my house, and there’s a spot near the the back of the dairy farm, where a few stepping stones cross a stream, and then a small hill leads up to a fallen pine. Sean and I sat on that fallen tree last year, talking about his mom, her death, but I don’t remember the exact content of what we were saying, so I don’t know if she was dying, or already dead. That seems like it would be an obvious distinction, but it’s not. The same elevation, on the same mountain, but had we already summited, or were we still climbing? It felt about the same, just before and just after she died. The atmosphere at that elevation is the same whether you’re coming or going. What I know is that her death is inscribed on that landscape, for me, in those woods. Like saying “heat capture” over the thermos or “the roundedness of time” into the wheelbarrow.

My son, Malcolm, took a Wilderness First Responder course this spring. He showed me all the materials, all the flowcharts and frameworks and heuristics and acronyms. I was reading through the guidance on when and how to perform CPR, and in dry language, preposterously ill-suited to the subject matter, the booklet said not to attempt resuscitation in cases of decapitation. My immortal son could not understand what I tried to say after I read this, and as I felt a lurching inside me. It was not the thought of a decapitation that troubled me. After all, the decapitated person is beyond caring about it, and cannot suffer. It was the thought of the person the booklet was striving to address. A person who would have to be told not to start CPR on a decapitated person. My son thought the instruction was kind of funny, which it kind of is—the idea that anyone would need to be told not to start chest compressions or rescue breaths on a body and head no longer connected. But the thing is, human beings need to be told these things. We get confused, we get magical, we slide around in time, we are not ready to understand. If your companion who was very recently still alive and talking to you is suddenly decapitated, might you not, in your deranged disbelief, try to save him?

The funny thing about the booklet is not the advice, but the idea that the booklet is the right place for the advice. What you need, when you have slipped out of time and are beside a body that you don’t yet understand is dead is for someone still living to touch you, gather you up, take your face in their hands and say…what? “Do not attempt to resuscitate” or “he’s gone” or “there’s nothing we can do”? None of which will make sense to this person at that moment. Someone dies in front of you, it never makes any sense, and cannot be made to make sense. They were just alive, and now they’re dead, and what has changed but a couple seconds passed? You can’t make sense of what is different between the person being alive, and the person being dead. Or between you being alive, and them being dead. A person with you, trying to help, what can they do or say to help you? Why shouldn’t you attempt CPR if you want to? What’s the harm in it? The booklet doesn’t say.

There are times of year when the thought of winter does not horrify me—when I start to be ready for it again. When we watch a TV show in late August, sweating, and there’s a scene of snowy woods, and I feel a longing for the cold and blue light. When I am so tired of the droning, biting insects, and I think, with an eager, anticipatory ache, of the wool sweaters lying in their cedar coffin at the foot of our bed. I know I will feel that way again, but not now. I am not ready yet.

When I push the squeaking wheelbarrow through the yard, or see my own boot prints or droplets of sweat in the dirt of one of the garden beds, I wonder, who will tell the plants once I am dead? Who knows if I even will live here anymore, when that happens. Still, when I think about what I’d like done after I am dead, it’s just that someone tell the plants. The best way would be to put me in the dirt, and let them learn the news that way, in their own language, translated for them by the beetles and worms. If that cannot be, then I think speaking it aloud to them would be alright. But if it’s winter when I die, then waiting would be best, until they’re all awake again. No sense calling in the middle of their long night. The news will keep, and in the morning, they’ll be ready to hear it.