MindSpinner

I like Jane Kenyon’s poems. They have the honesty and simplicity of fruit plucked and eaten while I’m still standing in the garden, except that they are never merely simple. The one I think of most often is “Otherwise“:

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood,
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Kenyon’s words hang in the air like prophecy, even now.

When I was a little girl of six, my mother, two-year-old brother, and I followed my father when he was transferred to Okinawa. We lived on base the first year, where every afternoon Taps was sounded at 4:00 p.m. Wherever we stood (and I was usually outside), everyone stopped at attention. Military personnel saluted. I did not salute because I was a child, but I was motionless for the duration of the bugle’s haunting strains, as children are seldom motionless otherwise. The music was moving and sad and tugged at something beyond my understanding. And then it ended, and I was once again at play. Someday, everything would be otherwise.

Early in 2002, when my father was buried at Arlington, I heard Taps again. As the lone bugle sounded, time folded over on itself, and I was once again a little girl of six, standing on the sidewalks of an Air Force base on an island in the Pacific. And for the first time, the little girl of six finally knew that all those still moments all those afternoons in the presence of that haunting music were always moments that would become this one, where I stood before my father’s casket on the hill near three pines above the Pentagon, which was still then breached by the wounds of 9-11.

At William and Mary, in 1978, a freshman hallmate told me she’d talked to the boy I’d just begun to date. Did he like me? He said he did. How much? A lot. A lot a lot a lot. In a rose garden at the Williamsburg Inn, he would propose three years later. He borrowed the last of the money he needed for a ring from my friend. There would be a wedding and children would be born.

Now all this is otherwise (excepting the children, of course), and I seldom think of what has come and gone. Much more has come and gone than this, including the pain of this otherwise. Tonight my freshman hallmate called from Virginia for what is turning out to be a lifelong conversation in annual two-hour installments, punctuated every so many years with a visit there or a visit here. She remains a link to a life before otherwise.

Sometimes my son, who struggles on and on with depression, says, out of the blue, “I want to go home.”

“Where’s home?” I used to ask, thinking home might be one of the many places we’ve lived. I know now where home is, for him. Home is the time before everything was otherwise.

I have four years left with my children. From the days when I held them at my breast, I have been keenly, poignantly aware that they will someday go. Life then will be otherwise. There won’t be eight weekly loads of laundry or a messy boy’s room downstairs. There won’t be punk rock reverberating in the house, or Fruit Smoothies and chips on my grocery list. There will be only one bottle of shampoo in the bathroom, of a very ordinary sort.

Last week, life almost became otherwise prematurely, abruptly, when my daughter took it into her head that she wanted to try living at her dad’s. (Reasons will not follow.) The notion stuck there, and felled by grief as I was, I would not have stopped her. It was her stepmother that put an end to the idea instead, and her father called today to tell her that things just wouldn’t work out. So she will be with me still - the otherwise I dread is still coming, but not yet. On the other hand, I have no doubt that from this day, for her, some things will always be otherwise because this is the day she learned where home could no longer be.

So otherwise looms as loss we fear.

But that’s not all it is. Otherwise is also the eventual result of the imperceptible progress of healing after great pain, the sort of pain that you get through first only by whispering, “Just breathe. Just breathe and hold on.” Even that, too, becomes otherwise, but only when you’ve learned to bear what there is to bear, and finally to look beyond.

My daughter is at her dad’s for the night only, as usual, and my son is visiting a haunted house across the river with friends (and parents of friends). The cat lies in his basket asleep with his paw over his eyes to block out the overhead light. The room is still except for the hum of the laptop in front of me on the bed. The new, glorious camera sits out on my dresser because I almost made it home in time to catch the sun shooting rays through the clouds at sunset, but not quite. Beyond the camera, I see reflected in the mirror a woman sitting cross-legged on a bed, her head cocked the better to see through that little swathe of clarity at the bottom of her glasses. I study her for a minute. She seems more content than she might be. She looks - and for a moment I see her as if she is someone else - like a woman who’s found constants in the midst of the ebb and flow of otherwise.