Breathing life into things.
The Garden of Eden, Working Backwards
Working backwards. A trip out from a senior center to the farmstand. It’s a beautiful day, cloudy, the trees nearly at their fullness, the spring green beginning to change to summer green, darker, more muscular, powerful. The fields are plowed and planted. The older people come out to sit on the benches. One complains that it will be hard to get up. “I’ll be here to help you,” says the woman accompanying the group. Another helper is inside with her charge. She is an old woman in a wheelchair. Her face is empty, but she is buying things from the farm to bring back to her room. She pulls out her credit card and gives it to the helper to make the purchase for her. “Can you hold these,” the helper says, piling her purchases in her lap, balanced in the wheelchair. There is a barely concealed irritation. Then the helper makes her own purchase. But the older woman has forgotten something that she wants. “I’ll need your card again,” says the helper briskly. And the old woman responds, “I’m sorry,” in a tone of voice that is not empty like her face. The tone reverberates, sorrow, helplessness, dreaming of a day when she could do these things herself. There was no chair. She was not as alone as she is now. The music of her voice is heartbreaking, like a puppy’s bark, abandoned in a drain, begging to be found. She and her wheelchair are blocking the aisle and the helper has had problems moving her around. The sense is that she resents this creature and her role in keeping her attached to the rest of the world. The older woman is frail, but her voice is strong, in the way that calls for help break through the static of the air. At least she has come here, to the farm, on an overcast spring day, but she is powerless, at the mercy of the helpers, at the mercy of the small white bus, the standard for elder transport, that brought them here. She must have some money, but who put her in this home? Is she from here? Could the helper have brought her back outside, instead of leaving her to block the passage, as if it is her fault? Will there be time enough for all of them to sit outside and enjoy the soft air pouring off the growing trees and plants and fields? Time enough before they must return to the long-corridored carpeted hallways of their closed-in home in a suburban town, without farms? The others of the group, mostly men, not a big group, seem more robust and less cultured than she does, or at least less fragile. Her blank face, blank of suffering, skin chalky with disuse, still holds her intact, as she tries to sit upright in the chair, asking to be helped to buy something from the farm.
Working backwards. The supermarket is filled with people buying processed foods, one trolley filled with gallons of milk – for a restaurant? Older people putting items in a basket that seem healthy, some juice, some oranges, an ice cream for a treat. Outside of the supermarket, there are pots of flowers for sale in the parking lot. The equivalent of Christmas lighting for spring. Adding color to show that you embrace the time and season, now of growing. But some of the flowers look as fluorescent as the blue energy drinks, and flaky pastries filled with a mix of yellow cream and chemicals, and everything in bags, in plastic, frozen, sealed. It is a dead place, filled with the dead. And they check you out to leave, one receipt saved in a plastic folder, proof that the goods have left with you, scanned, passing from one life on the metal shelves of the store to another, your wooden shelves in the kitchen island, the empty canvas of a home.
Working backwards.
There is a crushed bunny in the road. Fur flattened, mangled limbs, red blood now brown and drying. Could someone not wait the few seconds it would have taken for the small creature to cross the road? An ear remains upright, strangely untouched.
Working backwards.
Garbage day and the garbage men came and took the trash away. They must have dropped both bags for the apartment building, as there are bits of tinfoil and energy bar wrappings and paper towel and coffee grounds and eggshells in the driveway and the road. No one has time to care. Later on I will put them into another plastic bag, to be picked up and dropped next week.
In the afternoon, I drove out to go see the ocean, and there by the side of the twisty road was a dead robin. This road led to the beach, a place where people would park, because you could see the water without leaving your car. The sand seemed brought in from some sand factory, because the majority of the shore was either rocky or mud flats, where clammers would dig up holes, gaiters on, buckets by their side, cold in winter. Now that summer was approaching, the small bay was filled with white floating plastic globes, for docking boats. The houseboat – remember that, from last year – it was there now again. Smoke came out of the chimney last fall when it was cold. Further along was moored a beautiful sailboat that floated patiently, waiting for its owners to step aboard. And on the way, was the dead robin. So perfect, that it seemed you could reach out and hold it gently in your hands and breathe life into its rounded breast. And it would fly away, and all would be right with the world, its beating heart lifting up into the sky, to sing the morning song with the dawn, and the evening song with the darkening trees.
To breathe life into gentle creatures. Their feathers, one atop the next, a soft covering for delicate bones, a beak that can open and sing, wings that extend and float on the wind.
Our existential crisis is that some want to breathe life into things. And some do not. They think that destruction of holy grounds, pure waters, tent encampments, ornate buildings, young men and women, old men and women – they think of destruction, in its various ways and means, explosive and dismissive. Ruin water, poison health – without recourse. And worse – knowing that no one cares. And then there are those who slow their cars when they see birds or rabbits or children, and breathe life into the air.
We will win. I hope.
