November Ghosts

On my blog roll, you’ll find my friend Rachel’s blog. She’s the mother of seven who almost died on the mountain with me. She’s writing about her experience with Levi, her 6th child who has a very rare and terrible disorder – and how the family deals with it. Just this morning, somebody said to me, looking at Rachel’s second son, “There are no sweeter, more beautiful kid in this ward than those kids of Rachel’s. So, if you want to dip into courage, love and faith, you might give her a look, and for heaven’s sake, leave a comment.By the way, I have been upbraided and mocked by Dick Beeson for (among other reasons) begging for comments. But the fact of the matter is that it’s a hard thing, whistling in the wind, and just knowing somebody has walked beside you for a little is actually, I’ll admit it, thrilling. So my Gin and I have decided that we’re always going to let people know we’ve been there, like a short embrace.

Now: reflections on the pooping out of the year. (Did your dad ever say he was too pooped to pop? And why is it okay to say you are pooped, anyway?)The tag end of Indian Summer—sky outside is properly gray, and it’s been sleeting a little. After all of this beautiful weather (during which I did NOT get the Christmas lights up, but did wash the outside, downstairs windows), I’m not sad about the dreary day; makes it all the better to stay inside and rest.Rachel has come to visit, and is asleep in the sienna chair in the west study, where Murphy, sacked out of the couch, has also fallen asleep. I am in my corner of the couch in the living room, attached to the wall by a cord, and Guy, with his computer open in his lap, has pretty much collapsed into oblivion. Char is upstairs listening to some British voice read to her, and is probably drawing. Not so holy a Sabbath day after our hours of church, but peaceful, and in a somnolent way, companionable.

(no pictures – I lost the links. But I put in too many pictures anyway.)

These last many days have been nice—a few holiday-feeling errands run, some ornaments made, hours and hours on the couch in ancient Japan—we are within ten pages of the end of the first writing of our fantasy—and the occasional desperate bit of house upkeep.

The leaves were brave this year, holding on to their true yellow a week past Halloween, and that’s when the magic thing happened to me. I was alone in the house—Guy in the studio, Murphy in the animation lab, Char at her dogged job—all, in other words, tucked in their beds, visions of—I don’t know—dance in their heads. And I, as I said, in medieval Japan, communing with the Spirit of the Very Earth. When comes a knock at my door.

I open it to find two fresh young things, one a stranger, the other my Raphaellian beauty, little Emma, from across the street. They have come for a piece of old rope. For climbing a tree.

Not sure what inspired me to do it, but I threw open the gates and said, “You want a rope on a tree? Just follow me,” and marched them over to the arched gate and into the back yard. Big tree. Fat rope. “My kids used to swing on this all the time,” I told them, and let them have at it. For the next hour, the yard was full of squeals and laughter and shouting.

And it had the strangest effect on me. That yard used to be full of kids. I can see Ginna in my mind’s eye, swinging on that rope—all of them out there all the time. I had never realized how silent the yard had grown to be. The dogs, with somebody to chase around, were in heaven.