Washtub, Whelk, Widow, Woods

Just before dawn, we hear, through the window cracked open above the bed, an Eastern screech owl's tremolo. It is the only sound. So much is in it. Our limbs twine and warm and harden and soften. Maybe we've dreamt it, but no.I have just come back from a visit to my childhood home where my mother cares full-time for her mother, who, at ninety-seven, is getting used to a catheter, whose meat is cut up like a child's. Late August nasturtiums spilled from the metal washtub on the front porch, three shades of orange.This is not my house; it's his, and his kids’ when they're here, but they're with their mom this week and their beds are empty. The first sun is cool slate falling onto the world beyond the big window, onto poplar and mimosa and vine. How beautiful the moths that flap at this wide window at night, how scritchy and bandit-like the raccoons that come for his compost. Summer is turning toward fall. Fall will soon turn more deeply toward fall, the earlier dark, the winter caps pulled out. Before dreams let me go entirely, I have the sparse notion of a child of my own to whom I would give my too-big longjohns to wear with cap and coat on a winter walk. You, my child, are a tiny pinprick of dawnlight in the universe, you who cannot fill a thimble, but your wind could set a big shirt to sail on a wash line.The letter I would write you about it—the owl's tremolo, the whinny that sometimes follows. The sound creates a habitable space in time, a shelter where I put down my thoughts. A sound like a refuge. So singular and lonesome and secret, so full and empty, like the sound the prophet Elijah waited for, holed up in his cave in Mount Horeb, the pre-dawn sound of God talking. There was a wild wind outside the cave, says the biblical text, and an earthquake, and a fire, but no voice. And then—a low whisper, a thin silence. This was the only sound, and Elijah wrapped his face in his coat and went to the cave's mouth to listen. But the part about the cave comes after the rain, which comes after the war, which comes after the widow, and it's the widow I want to write you about because hers is a story of homes that take us in for a time, as he has done for me, as I have done for him, given shelter.He and I rise from bed to coffee and work and soaked oats. When you're sheltered by another, you can sense what he has sheltered there before: the marriage, the babies born, the kill butchered and butterflied, and the many clots of buttered oatmeal. And I like to imagine the nasturtiums I saw in their bright gold burn, as I turned to go, sensing the world of their brief washtub home. They bent from noon heat toward the cooler portion of mountain evening. Their stems coiled and crept, broad leaves like wide open faces, spiced blooms like the prettiest paper. Mom had started seeds in trays at the windowsill in March, transplanted the leggy hopefuls in May. Rehomed to the tub, the nasturtiums could feel out the story of suds and lye, all the submerged blouses made unfamiliar there, and shapeless, until stuttered down washboard rungs and hung in the wind like small sails (sails again) on the line.My father's aunt Aggie gave them the washtub, along with their first wringer washer, in 1972. Mom filled it with dirt and flowers when a hole rusted into its floor. The nasturtiums reach out for present sun and know, even so, the summers long in their home's history, the dogs in the divots under our porch and Aggie's.Hear the hymns murmured from dry lips, curse the tobacco pouch forgotten and soaked, find the bits of sweet oat roll and venison baloney in the denim pocket running the washboard with the rest. The hummingbird comes to the orange flower face, this flower foreign and far from where it belongs (native to the tropics and subtropics, the Andes, not the Appalachians); still, the bird's long tongue and the nasturtium's deep spur meet together, shape to shape, need to need, the sucrose nectar extra sweet down deep in this bright flourish on porch steps. Groping along the tub's contours, the blooms may be blind, may be seeing.How these flowers spill lavishly from the tub's rim. I picture his wash taken from my drier, the clothes of his children, in the shelter I give him and them in return, my house twenty minutes from theirs. Lululemon Goodwill shorts, Adidas things, socks with and without pairs, training bras, they all spill onto the table. An abundance for the chore of folding and sorting. This tumble of unreadable shapes is made decipherable again only when filled with a body. I think of the spill of laundry and the spill of showy blooms yearning for evening—I loved looking at them as I turned to go, my mother framed for me by the screen door, like when I was a child boarding a school bus—when I first picture the widow. I picture her like the nasturtiums bending from noon heat toward the cool, though there were no blooming things in droughted Zarephath. No—in the widow's hot lap, only a few sticks for a stick fire to cook the last cake of flour and die.So odd, then, to want to write you of her shelter and respite. To write what might have come from the prophet's tenancy with the widow. To suggest it brought about a kind of happiness, and that the rain, when it later came, was a rinse revelatory of that happiness, rinsing away all the dust and hardness to show a supple thing. But first, to recount the stick fire and the last crumbs of meal.In the drought of the thin pages of I Kings 17, God said to Elijah: Hide yourself by the brook Cherith, east of the Jordan, and the birds will care for you. Elijah thus knew meat torn from a small beast's belly by a raven's beak and delivered, like mama bird to nestling: Here is your meat, little one, in your yawning gullet, and now I must feed the others the leftover. Go lap water from the brook, and here the liver, a dark disc of iron. Elijah, childless, at times dreamt of a baby with a tiny curl of hand like a prawn, like a centipede coil, all those ions and the softchew skin, an intensified star warming the small breast. Maybe he dreamed a child because the ravens fed their nestlings after feeding him.When the brook dried up, God said to Elijah: Go to the widow of Zarephath and she will care for you. And there she was, at the gate of the city, starving and gathering sticks for a final fire. Bring me a little water, a little bread, he said. She said, All that I have can fit in my palm. He said, Bring me a cake of it and I swear the jar of flour won't deplete, the jug of oil won't drain until God sends the rain. She took him in. Each day she lifted the lid, and after so many days, she stopped doubting the perpetual enough.Since the jar never emptied, the prophet took a handful of meal to the ledge of the roof each morning to watch the dawn dream up the city and to feed the birds as thanks to their species. The man and woman smelled of earth and sweat, with no water to waste on the washtub. She pulled out her dead husband's few things for him, and he sensed in the clean clothes the other man's body and gait and voice. He filled the clothes. She beat their shirts and pants over rocks, scrubbed them with sand. To a stubborn stain, she took alum and soapwort, with spit for lather. But then she gave up and they wore their layer of dust like another garment and, without the chore of laundry, she had time to draw a magnolia border on the kitchen wall in gypsum and soot. He found a sap to stay it, like lacquer. She seasoned their cakes with nasturtium petals pressed some other year in a book. She pulled on his coat to seek sticks at night when it fell cool, and he read to her, scripture but also tales; he fixed the loose floorboard and the cracked cistern with the same multipurpose sealing sap. She sewed on buttons, mended his trousers which were perhaps her husband's, made corn-husk dolls for the girls from homes less lucky. For her boy she made a tiny clay structure to resemble the city at dawn which the prophet saw dreamed into day.And the boy. His chores were thought and play and making the beds and making sure the littlest birds got some grain and not only the proud ravens. Their time was slow, inhabited. The three of them—this odd family—sat listening together to the tremolo of the screech owl, near and invisible in crepuscular light. Just when they thought it was finished, it would sound again. Round and whole, from mate to mate, a message that light and dark are softly one. That dawn and dusk are doorways to each home you will know in time.I wonder, have you ever heard it? The tremolo? The steady trill like a washboard of song. And the whinny to follow? As if a horse head were softly thrown back in silhouette to shiver dust from its mane. The letter I am trying to write you about it—this the only sound. So much is in it.Before the hospice nurse arrives, my mother leaves the house barefoot to walk the cold-dew field of late summer, an acre or two of grass and garden and unkempt pine. It's cold but she goes, makes the loop and the loop along the fence, checks the spring box, heads back to the house to my grandmother. In this circumscribed time, Mom gently salves and wraps the bed wound on my grandmother's heel.And here is the nurse, Camille, pulling up, climbing the porch steps past the tub of nasturtiums to check vitals and pills. Then Cindy, a home health aide, coming to bathe my grandmother. In the bathroom, she says lift up the girls, meaning my grandmother's breasts, her near-century skin like paper in a paper garden within this home that is not my grandmother's home but is. They drive away, Camille and Cindy, Grandma's hair clean and still wet. She is swaddled in a flannel gown. These two women travel from home to home, box trailers and brick and whatever, making hospital corners with the clean sheets everywhere. They see to the bed wounds and catheters, they resupply bales of Depends. Unseen hands touch the tenderest parts in beds all across creation to say: Let me make you at home in your body that's grown strange to you. In this house foreign, temporary, this house you've lived in all your life but don't remember, this house of a distant relative, this house you've never seen before. A house so unfamiliar when the sunlight and shadow land in turns through the window as the wind hurries the clouds.In between visits, my grandmother naps, Mom walks the field barefoot, picks kale and beans and puts up a canner of peaches with Dad. They scald off the peelings and stack the warm halves in wide-mouth jars filled with sugar water like nectar.During my visit with my parents, I picked kale with Mom at dawn. There was a morning moon and a mist. She said our neighbor Mary isn't doing well and her four girls are putting her in a home where there's Bingo and macramé. Why not keep her in one of their houses, she said. Not everyone can do what you're doing, I said. But I wished it for Mary too. I thought of the nursing home my youth choir sang for on Sunday afternoons, a woman in the back rocking like a baby in the invisible arms of our hymns. I felt guilty because I never wanted to go. After singing, we kids would hold hands and run run run once outside, down the tiny hill by the institutional walls, the grass never greener and our breath never quicker to come.On my drive back to my own house, and to his, I saw signs on the roadside for Foster families needed and I thought about it. I have that spare room. Why do they call them nursing homes instead of facilities, wards, barracks? Because they're homes. They're foster homes, no one there for good, just passing through, getting a bite and a warm bed and someone to salve their heels for a night or two. Or a year.In a circumscribed time, Elijah and the widow were gently happy. It's possible. And the later that the long drought only that The made the But before the rain, there's the part when the boy took He was a boy the prophet for those as his The was steady and and the child the widow could the jar of flour fill up the boy waste away like a me him to my Elijah said. The widow said She to sticks and curse each one for fire, curse the man given And there was the face, A not like a the a tiny of window so to His had long the child for their of his face, not not Elijah was not to let this face from this him to see the the boy on his own bed and onto the bed as if to for a and his body over the dead not his own three his making a home for the like a mother a for a the Elijah might and He his dreams by the brook as the boy to The and Elijah that to be a prophet is to see your life as to let go of hot a like a cold of all of even before I you in the and set you up in your there for a when light and dark are softly one, even before then, I knew you would the widow back her with of sticks that she when she saw her in the in her then, some kind of her but it just It was She her She the into and and felt to the boy like To the prophet she I know even with the jar and but now I then the prophet for the He to the four of and them as and them at the brook He their as if pulling out bright the of When he had turned to go, the He was not to stay for good, it was a The two of them back into the a few the magnolia and a roof that had given shape to their three They saw in light the life made there, out and The prophet had his sheets and them on the table. They were not had in to the The boy gently them took the them up, and under the he saw and and of He saw the of the city for which he had made three tiny clay birds in from to in for the widow and the boy were She felt in her the about to in from the he and the kids in a they into my bed for him and me, the spare for his the for his the shelter in her a who knew my and and as hers all She his hand from the for our I will put them up for the night, for three And then go. All care is foster I keep all homes a each at our passing if I have a child of my Adidas and hair out the as he turns to go. but I gave him a home. I want my care to as if from a a a with the sound of the to the who with the the from which a like a man's then the for a the its body into the for a until it's A shelter from and so the body. The on with to the the it the and This is home where you for a and the washtub and the widow. homes taken do they The nasturtiums last all the to in their For what A It's A brief time for brief before But they so of and I wonder, have you seen I it's This home where they How beautiful and our in this world before we are let loose from hands and coffee and put the many in a tiny at my grandmother's at the the hot the Mom the she walks as far as the in the for the small of my grandmother to in the hospice they take in the my have started feeding in the they know of a through with a baby the said she this child in her refuge. She is here in the cool I cannot keep but find you a beautiful along a brook, the is in where you can your one hands to make you at home in a home that's grown is this I don't I only my dreams and in them I am a And Mary is in the home and the hands of the nursing home are not her her head not in a lap of but these to make her at home where there is still a small for things, a a box where Mary might keep the of her body. They to make her and for a time, as she Here is your home for on you can warm before you a fire for me in the in his house the The kids us for their for and we All the he and the sweet I then and cool for that rise in the like we like them—this is what makes time puts four it and a roof above it. And all the at we walk toward the to for don't to keep for at this our bright on the day of rain, when the tiny birds sheltered in the to be by the after a when the the dust to the widow's of happiness, that is when the prophet The not a return, but the boy was to his mother about and they shelter from the or don't it, and he felt the prophet In her long night she was near the window so she could the in the The boy was that into their and grown in after the The water, and they don't the day but this will them under be for the to and the will and coat in the is to shelter to under the ledge as and down of in here he came, like a a for He was soaked to the in a coat that was her dead a a of a cake by the stick fire. He took in the and roof and He said to the I back to see what like once the you The of the house in one beautiful and I wanted to he said, about a sound. I was in a cave because was coming for what done to the of along the and I was I wanted to God to There was a wild wind that the to but no voice. There was an and a fire that the to but no voice. And then—a low whisper, a thin silence. This was the only sound and so much was in it. All was in it, he said, and I thought of the owl's tremolo we heard To the widow he said, The part of you that the is the She He said, It was like the voice. The in the Not in the fire, not in the I wanted to have read about that their from the in the of a on an the in the of a I have seen the in the hung on his Their is still there through empty, a of life well and a cooler summer, like And they are in the to let go, a of over the of the washtub in which the first abundance She took in she gave all that was in her She said to the I am not your mother with a lap of to the man and I am not the of your I have for you before you go and I will your All her care as if for out her as they turned to go and she was framed for them in the screen her face, even her taken up in her small then dead one day then to her like in even he up and She sang his about the of fire and the of fire that took Elijah in a to without but her is not is the the tenancy of the prophet her into a woman of of of a The widow in her house of sunlight across the of present She the so there with refuge. She down on the bed in the where the prophet once and where he brought the boy back to She is not to to a of for the Then the thin and The into the house, into the her magnolia border sun and and sun again as the house to the wild at the of the a for the and and passing