“Where is your brain?”
My grandmother’s soft yet indignant voice carries from the other room where she is talking politics with my mother. I stifle a laugh and glance over at the Hobbit. “I love it when Grandma talks politics,” I whisper.
The Hobbit looks over her shoulder and grins, before hissing back, “I’ll never understand how a couple as liberal as Grandma and Grandpa could have had four kids as conservative as Mom and our uncles are.” We decide between ourselves that, like our red hair, it must skip a generation.
I carry my coffee to the front porch, where I look out over the hollow and lose myself in the memories that swell from it … the afternoons spent digging in the dirt for potatoes, picking blueberries from bushes I could barely reach, and shucking corn or snapping beans alongside my grandparents on the front porch swing. This morning, the “For Sale” sign at the road marks so much more than a plot of land for purchase; its presence is a nod to the inevitable passing of time, the natural transitions of another’s life, and the closing of not one chapter but instead far too many to count.
In the living room after lunch, lined faces pour over wills, powers of attorney, and similarly dry, excessively lengthy legal documents. Grandma talks of decorating plans and various details that she is looking forward to tending to at the new place. She isn’t fighting time’s toll and, having spent the previous afternoon with my dementia-riddled grandfather on the other side of the family (the grandfather for whom help came far later than it should have), I appreciate her courage to face her deteriorating independence head-on and with such grace. Grandpa doesn’t say much about the move, and knowing how much it pains such a fiercely independent war veteran to admit to needing a little extra care, I follow his lead and leave the subject alone. He’ll speak about it when the time comes, and frankly, until then I am content to be regaled with stories from his days as a veterinarian.
Once Grandpa’s voice and the legal documents have been exhausted in equal measure, the dogs and I head for the woods, slipping and sliding on dead leaves as we make our way downhill to the creek. There are no leashes, no cell phones, and none of the constraints or self-important rushings of the city back home. It is just the dogs and me, traipsing down the mountainside at our leisure, making our own schedule just as we make our own paths. Once we reach the creek, Napoleon catapults himself into the current and Elsie, not yet having learned to look before she leaps, follows suit only to scrabble up the opposite bank just as quickly. She shakes off once, looks at the water accusingly, and then she’s off to bob happily through the underbrush behind Louis, who is already pursuing his own adventure somewhere across the woods.
The woods. They are unusually still; aside from the wind grating dried leaves against dried leaves, and the intermittent jingling of Christmas collars telling me exactly how far from me my dogs have strayed, there is silence. And it comes as a shock at first, as I stand in a sunbeam and reflect on how long it’s been since I have found such quiet. I turn my face up to the sun, with eyes closed and an involuntary smile of contentment playing across my face, and finally, finally, the chaos and pain of the last few weeks is shrugged away, shed and left behind not so unlike the dead skin of the rat snakes I used to chase through the same woods as a child.
It is the first Thanksgiving in many, many years that I am truly, warmly thankful. Thankful for things I can’t even put my finger on; the heartbeat I can press my palm against, the grandfather still flirting with his wife at the kitchen sink after nearly sixty years of marriage, the quiet place in the middle of nowhere that I still have to retreat to, the clownish company of my dogs, the life I find coursing through the lyrics of my music.
Whatever the specifics may be, I am thankful … almost overwhelmingly so. And finally, blissfully, I am also at peace.
As a firm believer that all things happen for a reason, I am currently failing to understand what lesson is to be learned from today. Originally, it wasn’t supposed to be so complicated.
