Spectral
by Rebecca Meacham
I say, Do you want to see the Northern Lights? And you say, What?, because it takes two or three times for you to tug the balloon string of meaning from the words floating by, to recognize how recent events, when placed in a certain order, tell a story.
This was never hard, before.
I’ve read that over age 80, the brain can’t rank details, and so each time we talk, I answer your questions about who was driving and what car they took and when they left the house. But the story is about your first granddaughter’s fishing trip with her boyfriend, the first fish she netted, the force in its flip. Or the story is about your second granddaughter’s film camp trip. You grip each detail so tightly you can’t stack or sift. Which makes sense, I guess, with an old brain, a brain that’s treaded its grooves into dust—specks of wisdom and regret and failure and lists and solutions and gossip and Broadway show songs and contempt for Republicans and deep griefs and fierce angers and fiercer loyalties, and your compassion, just so, so much compassion.
It's impressive, the number of names you hold: your law partners and clients, your brothers’ wives and ex-wives, characters from your book club novels, my high school friends and childhood rivals and college housemates and co-workers and students and my husband’s whole family and our neighbors and your nieces and nephews and each of your granddaughters’ friends and sworn enemies and—
You hang on, mostly, that’s what you do.
I tell a winding story. I learned it from you. Now I pull each thread and show you the steps as I tie a simple bow. We once wove tapestries. We weave dishcloths now, functional but bright.
We are weaving one right now.
*
Northern Lights, Mom, I say. You haven’t seen them yet.
I’ve watched them all summer. There was a month when people realized those pink shadows would catch fire on their phone screens: green shards skirting tree lines and red swirls above Ferris wheels. People took selfies under electric skies. People cuddled in backyards everywhere, laughing at the colors. I saw a pure white ribbon snake above my head, and I turned cold in awed vulnerability. The ribbon dipped and crackled. My ears popped. How puny were humans, really? Skunks had been digging up our yard at night and I felt, all at once, exposed.
Behind me, though, your bathroom window glowed. A moon of comfort. Turn back, it’s always there.
Once, years ago, when I picked her up from daycare, my older daughter couldn’t find the moon. We’d turned a corner, and she didn’t know the moon was just above our car. Where moon? she wailed. Where moon go? Heartbroken, because wasn’t it impossible? How could it just up and go?
*
Now, on a November night, I open our back door. Your hand is the same size as mine. I help you down the steps. The leaves on the patio have dissolved into stencils. Your hand is, in the words of poets, soft and warm as a bird.
I’m giddy. We don’t hold hands often. The sky is streaked, and I say, That fat white line above the pine tree, see it? One night, I saw it pulse.
We hold hands as I point at what, on second thought, are probably just clouds.
But who needs a second thought?
I’m holding your hand, holding it gently—and once again, I’m a tiny girl in your shadow, cradling the baby blue jay you’ve rescued from our cat, and I hear your voice guiding me— hold it gently, yes, that’s right. I’m relieved by its stirring, how its small bones push into my bones. The insistence of living, warm and steady, still within our grip.
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