All the Dancing Birds (7 page)

One never forgets their porch days, with the sound of fresh vine beans or snap peas crackling in the women’s hands, while the shoes of men tap out the songs of Riley Puckett and Fiddlin’ John Carson. A Southern porch brings the happy chatter of neighbors from up the road; it serves up plates of fried chicken and fresh-baked blackberry pie. It also holds the wild imagination of a girl on a swing, her Ma’s arm curled like a question mark around her shoulders, a book shared between their laps.

Yes, a porch allows for grand laughter and raucous music, as well as countless hours for dithering away a rainy day unfit for anything other than rocking and reading, while the fierceness of clouds pass overhead.

I wish you could have sat on the porch with your MeeMaw as she rocked in her chair, holding a thin book to her breasts, swaying back and forth, as if holding that book and swaying would give her eyes something to think about other than their gathering blindness.

I wish you could have known her audacity.

I’ll never forget one day‌—‌a rain-promised summer day when the humidity hung over our shoulders like sacks of damp laundry and great thunderclouds filled our lungs with moisture and effort. Your MeeMaw insisted I sit with her on the porch to fan our faces and read her beloved Milton. Specifically, she wanted to hear his poem
On His Blindness
.

She sat plucking snap peas from a bowl, pinching off the stem end and pulling away each pod’s tough membrane with one swift movement. Ma’s cat (which she naturally named John Milton) lolled at her feet. I sat on the swing, a glass of lemonade sweating onto the floor at my feet, wishing for something,
anything,
other than John Milton’s old duddy poetry.

I remember your MeeMaw asking me to repeat the last line of the poem. “Read that last line again,” she said, her voice thick with clouds and coming rain.

“The last line?”

“Yes. Say the last line for me.”

“They also serve who only stand and wait
.
”

“Read it again,” Ma said.

“Again?”

“Yes.
Yes
, Lillie Claire. Read it again.” Tears began to form in her eyes.

“They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Suddenly, she jumped upright from her chair, flinging the bowl of peas across the porch, causing John Milton the Cat to run off, squalling in displeasure. Her arms flailed in front of her, her blind eyes sprung wide open as if something bright and wild had exploded deep within them.

“I’m standin’ and waitin’,” she cried. “Oh, dear sweet baby Lord Jesus, I’m standin’ and waitin’!”

Your dear MeeMaw pleaded for healing and redemption, the strength of her voice informing heaven that she would not accept her fate with a simple, shrugging sigh. Her moment of truth was dressed in the last line of a Milton sonnet and she cried to God to fix her. She smacked at her eyes with still-young hands wilted from years of scrubbing floors and making pies.

“Jesus, come put your healing mud on these eyes and make them see again,” she cried out. “I’m standin’ and waitin’ for you. Can’t you
see
me, Jesus?
Here
I am. I’m right here! Standin’ and waitin’. Standin’ and wait‌—‌”

Oh, I can’t go on. I only know that what happens on a Southern woman’s porch is sometimes magical and sometimes horrid. But whatever occurs, it must be dealt with sensitively, courteously‌—‌and always with a fluttering fan in one’s hand. Please try to remember that one thing if you should ever have a porch where you can sit, sipping lemonade, while allowing your gaze to wander over poetry that will scare the living daylights from your soul.

If you ever have a porch, do make sure you hold a proper fan.

Be brave,

Love, Mother

P. S. I’m still selecting words for my sonnet for you. It’s difficult, but thanks to the heavenly stars, you love me in spite of my recent shortcomings.

I fold the letter and put it back in the box. I had hoped to find a different piece, a thing of cedar-scented comfort rather than a reminder of heat-sodden lungs and blind eyes and the hell of John Milton. I consider pulling a different letter, something that might make me laugh, but instead close the box and find what contentment there is in the simple mystery of chance.

Somewhere in the world it must be time for a glass of wine.

I place the box back on the shelf and stand in the dim closet, not really anxious to leave the dear space that wraps around me like Ma’s arms.

I place my fingers over my eyelids and feel each round hardness beneath. I press sharply into them until I see star-pointed sparkles of light.

With my fingers pressed tightly to my eyes, I pray that what I see‌—‌sparkles of bright and dark together‌—‌will be etched into the slate rock of my mind and that I will not forget this moment.

My eyes are good.

What they see is good too. I spread a prayer across the walls of the closet.
God, if you’re out there somewhere, you probably know that something is taking my mind. But still‌—‌please‌—‌let me remember this one small thing. Help me to always remember the generosity of good eyes. Oh, and a Southern porch
.
Please don’t forget the Southern porch, because I probably will.

I leave the closet and go to the kitchen, where I open a bottle of Cabernet that grips my palate with thankfulness that I still remember how to work a corkscrew.

Chapter Seven

N
ow here I am, my mind crisp and crackling, words springing easily to my lips. I am invincible today.

Yes. The day is brilliant and the joy of it washes over me like a warm summer rain. I feel as if I’ve circled back from the dark side of the moon and now I fiddle with the bright side of everything.

Angels once again live in my mouth, moving my tongue, forming words out of the crack-hard fissures and crumbling monuments within my mind. I’m told that’s the way with this Alzheimer’s disease thing I supposedly have‌—‌good days here, bad days there. It seems, though, that my days are sectioned into
moments
of good and bad.

This is a moment of good.

Allison and I are sprawled across my bed like teenagers at a sleepover. Her hair smells of fruit and flowers and I swoon beneath its scent. I’m mesmerized by the simplicity of her deep green eyes.

“Bryan tells me you’ve come down with some sort of disease,” she says. “But maybe you just need a nice vacation. So, listen to this. I’ve decided to forget fishing in Canada and now I’m thinking of a couple of weeks lolling on some beach in Maui. How does that strike you? Grass skirts, little umbrellas in some tall, rummy-yummy cocktail. Bare-chested
men
.”

“Oh, well… I‌—‌”

There it is‌—‌the bad moment! Suddenly, thoughts fidget in my mind. Doors slam in my face‌—‌one by one‌—‌shutting out content, meaning and distinction, closing off the soft nooks and crannies of all my delicious words. All that remains are the hard and ragged edges of a dark and empty mind. Entire syllables, usage, syntax and pronunciation are suddenly locked away. Unavailable.

I’m aware that I’m a sudden wild-eyed mute; I hate these moments that come and go like storms on a November Sacramento night.

Thankfully, Allison chatters on, unaware of the clattering chaos in my head. Perhaps the angels that live in my words have flown to some other woman’s mouth. I know what Allison is saying, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to initiate a sentence of my own. I can only manage puny responsive sounds. Simple yeses, noes. Little sighs and shrugs. Words that should accompany these gestures are simply missing.

I’m swimming through an expanse of mud.

Finally, I stumble across a few small snippets of misdirected thoughts lying on the floor of my brain. This gives me hope. I manage to string together a small daisy chain of words.

“You’re a… a… um, a
sweetheart
, dear. Hawaii sounds nice, but what I have won’t go away… by… by simply taking it somewhere for a good tan.”

“Maybe all you need is some pampering. Look at you. You need a manicure. A facial. A nice coconut-butter massage, and who better to do all that than a handsome native in a Speedo?”

“Allison! How could you say‌—‌?”

“Come on, Mom. Maybe you just need to have a good roll in the hay. When’s the last time you had some crazy, howling sex? Dad’s been gone how long now?”

“Ten years. Still… Allison
Claire!
You’re so rude.”

I make a juvenile face and stick out my tongue. We look at each other with wide eyes and then burst into high laughter. We roll on my bed like litter-mate pups. We are, at once, young girls again with coltish legs and slender arms, gasping with thoughts about boys and kisses and the forbidden delight of such entanglements.

The door to my mind (which had just moments earlier been so rudely slammed in my face) blessedly opens wide and I’m once again breezy with fresh air and words. I splash memory and language about the room as if there is no end to what I know and this bright and joyful moment will go on forever.

It occurs that this is how things will be from now on. Good days and bad. Good moments hunted and chased down by bad ones like Sherlock’s hounds. I’m learning not to expect my lips to stay bright for long.

Afternoon arrives and Allison, even with all her oven-mitted, spoon-churning fumbles, helps me in the kitchen.

Brian arrives late, sputtering apologies and excuses that seem to spill down the front of his shirt. He offers to flip the chicken breasts around the barbeque like he’s the man of the house. Nevertheless, he grumbles as he searches for just the right spot of heat.

“I thought we were going to have steaks,” he complains. “I really had my mouth ready for something large and beefy.”

“Steaks!” Allison wrinkles her nose at the thought. “That’s totally unhealthy. Cow meat is just wrong.”

“And chicken meat is
right
?”

“We need to think of Mom now. Maybe it’s not good for her to have beef. Don’t you know that cows stick their tongues clear up inside their noses, for God’s sake? How healthy is that?”

“Okay, I’ll give you that one disgusting thing about cows, but chickens don’t have a lick of sense. Christ, look at the way they flip around even after their heads are pulled away from their bodies.” Bryan winks in my direction. “If we want to help Mom, we should at least feed her something halfway intelligent.”

My children are off and running with what sounds like adolescent sibling banter; I’m off and running with a lovely glass of red wine and light-filled thoughts crackling through my mind. Yes! Allison and Bryan are mid-squabble and all is right with the world, in spite of my broken brain. I move indoors to poke at potatoes baking in the oven and put the broccoli on to steam. I’m able to figure out the workings on the oven and stove‌—‌always a good sign that I’m having a rare moment of excellence.

Bryan works at the barbeque while Allison sits at the table. As I watch from the window, an amused smile still making its path across my face, my eye wanders to the strawberry patch. Due to my singular neglect, they’ve overgrown themselves this year, encroaching into small cracks along the asphalt drive, widening their influence with flourishing enthusiasm. I make a mental note to whack them back into a proper and more manageable shape.

Sounds drift in and out the open window and I’m happy with that. For the moment, I’m a flat, smooth stone, good enough for skipping many times before sinking down into my mind’s brackish pond of forgetfulness.

YOU BLESS. You bless your ears and all they pull into their secret whorls and curls: the delightful banter of your children who could as easily be looped on drugs as they are on trying to best one another in passionate discussion; the tiny scrape of metal as your son slides his chair away from the patio table; the hiss of chicken turned on the grill; the clack of your daughter’s high heels across the patio’s concrete floor; the movement of fabric, sluicing across your thighs as you walk through your house; the now-and-again silence of calm in the sweet fragrance of forgetfulness that your husband is forever gone and you miss his hands so damned much you would give up your ears and all they know for just one more touch. Still, all is bright and lovely with your ears as they listen to sounds so normal you forget you are now often a reluctant outsider. You assume that soon you’ll constantly be paragraphs behind in conversation, not to mention what will happen to your understanding of nuance, your flagging imagination, or that silence will sit on your head like ash. One day you’ll have nothing but stillness in your mind. Today, though, you bless your lovely ears because you hear and discern the language of your children, and you tightly embrace the crackle of this bright and sparkling moment. Still smiling because you’ve discovered your ears, you walk outside and clearly announce that, Damn it, your strawberries can grow in the asphalt if they bloody well want and‌—‌furthermore‌—‌you’ve decided to buy a bikini for Hawaii and you’ll not hear another word about it.

After we’ve eaten dinner and the dishes are washed and put away, after Bryan and Allison blow goodbye kisses across the room, leaving me to another silent evening, I once again find myself at my writing desk, scrawling words onto paper. It’s becoming harder to select words, to find the order in which they should occur, to spell those words, to especially hold my thoughts long enough to make sense. It takes a good deal of time to formulate something into a cohesive conga line of words dancing after words, dancing after more words.

When I’m finished writing the day’s thoughts (I use the last of my rose-embossed stationery), I take the papers to my closet, fold them carefully and add them to my growing collection of letters. I consider moving the box to a more convenient location, but decide moving it would take away the ritual of reaching for answers in the dim of my closet and, as an adjunct, I might very well forget any new hiding place. I decide life is mysterious enough.