That’s him. Back to moi. El, I can’t tell you how invigorating it is to no longer wake up in dread. How can the plow horse truly imagine what comes after having the harness removed? The harness limits his imagination. I’m just beginning to see beyond sorrow and hard work.
So picture me now. I’m overlooking the meadow from my perch on the wicker chaise. Hiram Circumstance recently mowed around the house, but as it turns out he never mows anywhere else except the graveyard from the day we leave until right before we return in June. He says it’s good for the ground to have a grass coat on under the snow. （He didn’t say grass coat—that’s my embellishment.） I told him not to change his habits for me, or to change them very little. He said, “I wouldn’t know how to do any different.”
It’s a yellow mid-September day, warm in the sun, the light much softer all around than that glitzy glitter of July that our mother said was nature being tasteless. We had a hurricane a few days ago, but you wouldn’t know it now. It wasn’t so bad here, though I did hear there was a fire at the Dirigo Hotel in Southwest. I’ll drive over there and have a look one of these days. There are a hundred things I could and should do in the house, but one of the new possibilities open to me is that if I decide to shirk the chores, there is no one here to make me feel as though my moral fiber has unraveled. Mrs. Circumstance never chides me or even looks at me sideways. She is out from under a burden, too.
So, with my morality intact but with duty and industry on hold, I’m sitting in the sun, alternately writing you and watching little Nan. She’s running through the meadow grass, grasping the stalks, pulling her hands along their full length until, having arrived at the tip, she has to let go, at which point she lurches forward but puts the brakes on with a sturdy leg before she tumbles. She opens her fists and takes inventory of the seed heads she’s scraped off, and nods at her successful catch. Now she’s rubbing her cache hard between her palms, and when she’s somehow satisfied—with what, the consistency?—she raises her arms, fingers pointed skyward, then bursts her small hands apart, releasing a fine beige powder to its fate on the breeze. What a sight to see she is. What a presence, in all her robust vigor, this gold morning!
Before we knew her name, Polly and I called her Very Very, because she’s very very so many qualities—intrepid, solitary, vivid, energetic, darling. And tough. She makes me laugh, but I keep it quiet to avoid interrupting her. I don’t think I really need to worry about that, though. She’s too occupied to be interrupted by the laughter of a middle-aged lady sitting up on a porch a whole meadow away, miles and miles. A mind away, more than anything, a whole other mind.
Why did we stop running and playing? We loved it so much. Who made the rule that the child’s pleasure in the body must come to an end? I blame the Puritans!
Now she leans backward, spins, falls, rises again, hurtles onward, rushes sideways. I lay a scrim over her—like a cellophane page inside a geography book that shows just the mountains or the rivers—and there we are, El, the children of Leeward Cottage and Meadowlea, you, Edmund and I, and Polly and Teddy, running until we can no longer breathe. Our lungs catch fire and we drop into the wildflowers and grass and swallow to squelch the flames. We invent games and argue over rules, but no one ever doesn’t want to play, and our angers with each other are brief. Days and years of summers pass this way, marked by our wayward binges and recklessness. We are a small tribe with rituals appended each new year. We swill our freedom and, in our drunkenness, climb trees to their thin, swaying tops, lick blood from our cuts, hold hands, and run in circles until we lose our balance and careen into a heap.
Right now, decades later, I could testify in court that it was Teddy, not Edmund, who just fell on me, yes, I am certain, sight unseen, because I know how each of us felt, our weight, the scent of our hair, the response of my skin to each one’s different touch. How simple it was, and how indelible. I see you at every age, El. Today, on the same porch beneath the same sun, hearing the same waves lapping, I can’t believe it’s gone. Over forever. Yet it is, and I am far from being a child; except for Polly and me, none of those children are alive. Who would have ever predicted that?
Nan grabs two more stalks, one in each hand. I know the feeling of the bladelike stem slicing my palm as I pull along the length of it until the fuzzy plump tips wobble like field mice in my fist. My fingers, like hers, are restless and crave activity, to write in this blank notebook, to paint, to make and do all I haven’t had time for since our father got sick. So much time, crushed and scattered in the meadow. So many days spent doing what I never loved. But that is true of many people, to the end of their lives, and I mustn’t wallow.
She approaches the graveyard now, a favorite spot of hers. She makes the graves into a slalom course or hides behind stones from imaginary foes. She and Robert Circumstance play here together sometimes, though he is careful not to step on the grassy plots. He’s old to be playing with her, eight now, but she’s livelier than his siblings and there’s no one else. Robert’s a thoughtful boy. He especially avoids our father, whose mound is still raised and impressionable. His stone hasn’t been set but leans up against a tree, waiting for the day when I ask Hiram Circumstance to dig it in. That will require some degree of ceremony that I don’t want to think about right now. Nan has no such scruples. She climbs on top of Daddy and jumps off, all of about six inches. It does me good to see Nan jumping up and down on top of him—remember how we used to walk on his back and he called it a massage?
Now she has headed back up toward the Chalet. Has her father signaled her in some way? I don’t see any sign of him. He never seems to pay any attention to her nor tries to know where she is. Polly found his behavior negligent, but perhaps Nan is—in general—better off for it. Not every parent pays attention in a way that is to the child’s benefit.
She runs around the back and is out of my sight. Elspeth, can you believe people actually live there? It’s as small and plain as it was during our reign. The old shingle roof was replaced a couple of years ago with asphalt tile, but it’s thin. The squirrels find it not nearly as hospitable as the shingle was. Polly pressed her father to have the place fixed up for the sake of the little girl, but Uncle Ian said it was Ben Reed’s responsibility, not his. We knew the condition the cabin was in at the end of last summer, and presumably it was similar with the addition of winter’s wear and tear when they moved in. The woodstove was working, but the wood pile had been utterly depleted. Two little cots, a table, a woodstove. I always loved those sweet rooms. We pretended to be orphan girls there, remember? I have asked Hiram to go talk to Virgil Reed about what he needs and to see what can be done to make the place more habitable. He’ll make it sound as though it is routine maintenance, in case Virgil Reed refuses out of pride. I’ve ordered real beds. I’ll have Hiram put them in and see what he can find out about whether or not they plan to stay for the winter. To be honest, I hope so.
Remember I wanted to have five children? Though I got over that by the time I was sixteen. You wanted thirteen, on the theory that out of that many, one of them would be The Second Coming! That’s so funny—a combination of a willingness to put in the hard work, and a rather grandiose idea that you’d be the next Mother Mary! Well, you’d have been good at it, and a good saint, too. Between us that’s eighteen children wanted, and none created after all. You set such a calm example, El, of the value a woman’s life might have without a family to tend to. That helped me enormously, and still does.