The reluctant sun sheds its tardy rays on Brooklyn Creek as it wanders across the low-tide mud flat. The light catches the white plumage on the head of my Bald Eagle, splashing in the stream. I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks. The gossipy cacophony of the flocks of Brant geese, resting in the harbour from their ridiculous migration from the Arctic, seemed to have pushed him out of his routine. The Chinook jumping in the Estuary excite the anglers. And after the heavy rains of last week, my mycologist friends tell me it is an outstanding year for Chanterelles. So many things to be grateful for.
Gravid dew drops outline the miraculous spirals and radii of the super-sized spider webs on the porch. I think of Charlotte, the arachnid heroine of E.B. White’s, Charlotte’s Web. (although these days I have been referring more to his The Elements of Style) I remember when I was a young mother watching the video with my two small children – two long decades after I had read the book. I remember my leaking sorrow at the thought of Charlotte dying without ever seeing her babies– all 500 or more of them. Her babies would learn of her genius and compassion only from the stories of Wilbur and her other survivors. I’m struggling with similar sorrows today.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it is past the autumn equinox, that immutable delimiter from where darkness will exceed lightness. It’s a time when I count the days to December 21st when the light will return. It’s a time when I wake up with a dry cough and a slight burning in my throat and wonder for a minute if it is now my turn, my turn to have COVID. And then I remember the smoke that filled the valley over the last few days and darkened the days even further with an hourless monotony. And that reckless bike ride I took despite the smoke. My sorrow for the loss of summer deepens. And it is easy to wallow helplessly in our global sorrows, political and medical – and the two are not separable.
I am tired. My sorrow is a dignified affair managed with a procession of denials where I rely on distraction and doing to make sense of things – baking of banana bread, breathlessness at the top of the steps at the Spit or after laps in the pool, – and then immobility in front of Netflix with a glass of wine. And I would prefer to be surrounded by the chaos and the authentic anguish of toddlers in their transitory moments of grief – from an attack by the coffee table, a dropped ice cream or a forbidden iPad – sorrows usually resolved by a hug or a kiss until the next time.
I cannot visit my adult children or my grandchildren. The two-dimensional spaces of Zoom and Facetime and the like will do but they are insufficient. And despite all my privilege and denial of the situation, I am exhausted.
What to do? Rest. Carry on but permit my grief and allow my sorrow. Find strength in the beauty of the natural world outside my window. Await the arrival of the snow geese and trumpeter swans to the field stubbled with the remains of the corn harvest. Tell stories to my loved ones.
