On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

The Hours, Passing

It’s the morning after Twelfth Night and time to take down the tree with its many lights. Time to wash and fold the damask cloth the color of wine that has warmed the holiday table. Time to put away my aunt’s silver service in a Colonial American design — three-tined forks, pistol-handed knives — in their tarnish-proof cloth. The label on the cloth reads Bailey, Banks and Biddle, Fine China and Silver, a reminder of how different my aunt and mother’s elegant, Philadelphia girlhoods were from mine, where I ran, harum-scarum through woods and fields, figuring everything out myself, eating with stainless, neither of them alive to protect me. Still, I love the way the light catches the silver’s sheen, which is always lunar. I love the fact that someone who once loved me savored its cool heft in her hand, leaving the set to me when she died, though I use it only for special occasions.

Always, even when so ill with depression that I could hardly lift my head, I have looked for what shines around me — a ditch of spring rain in Oregon, filled with the light of reflected stars and hundreds of new frogs singing; the spangle of mist that fell over me once on a boat off Cape Ann, when a humpback whale breached and exhaled beside us, her breath falling over us, touching our skin like the world’s first blessing; the sound of sea otters off the central California coast, floating on their backs as they broke abalone shells open, the tappity-tap-tap of the stones they used as tools a sweet and mysterious music. Always I have collected bits of light and glitter both domestic and wild, hoarding them up inside, bright fires to warm the winter season.

Always I have tried to turn away from the darkness our ancient brain programs us to expect. Always I have struggled against the night in me and others, though it is only the other side of morning. Always I have burned a bayberry candle on New Year’s Eve, its sweet green filling the house with the scent of possibility and luck, its small light showing the way in the dark. Always I have kept Whitman’s words above my desk — you must accustom yourself to the habit of dazzle — knowing they are the title of a book I must still write.

I have believed in solitude as something different than loneliness, though I am often lonely, too. I have believed that shyness is a bit like wildness, something that lives inside the light, a force one can sometimes touch, the way just yesterday I held a purple finch that had struck the window, cradling it in the warm nest of my palms until it recovered from being stunned. Until it fluttered off into the blue spruce, the small wind of its departure brushing my cheeks. It’s the little things that matter most — love the opposite of death, breath the only way to know we are alive in the moment — though the passage of our hours here is sometimes as long as night, as thick as the lid of gray that clamps down over the Upper Midwest in December and January.

Or as long as the moments I sit here, in my mint-colored, flannel nightgown printed with pink roses, watching as it all passes before me, as if in some great pageant from the past, alive with saints and mummers. My seeing it is just one tiny oar dipped in the stream of time, my life one small boat sailing toward what we imagine is redemption, the way my ancestors sailed from their rain-shrouded British and Celtic islands, nothing in their sea chests but worn clothes and kitchen utensils, blankets they’d woven, and a recipe for leek and potato soup. And hope. There must have been that, though what they dreamed of no one can say for certain.

Despite everything, despite loss burned black as old blood inside me, despite the spoor of soot-colored sadness traveling in each synapse’s slight misfire, I believe shy is another word for shining, silence another word for invisible speech, mystery another word for answers. Though none of this is what the world wants, with its brokenness and violence. Though I turn to put the silver away, touching each piece gently before wrapping it in its special cloth, knowing it shines, even in darkness, tucked away in my grandmother’s oak and curly maple sideboard. Even the brass key she touched every day gleams as I lock the sideboard door, its worn gold glowing, giving me comfort in the short light of winter.

[Note: The phrase “shy is another word for shining” is taken from a poem by Ingrid Wendt]