Snapshots of Summer

Snapshots from my summer, random and rich:

I sit in the quiet of the nursing home at night. Small sounds are large.  A fan hums. The refrigerator. The rustle of the nurse shuffling papers. An alarm sounds loud, and I leap to answer it, cocking my ears to the right and to the left as I head down the hallway. Almost every bed in the memory care wing has an alarm, and it can be hard to tell whose alarm has gone off. Sometimes I hear alarms that are not really there—high-pitched memories in my ears.

I sit beside a fire in the front lawn. Logs glow red. The grass is cool on my feet.

The sun shines gold, a ball of god-fire in a darkening pastel sky. “Hold it,” my sister says, and she photographs me on the fence, in the field, holding the sun. Then it is red, a construction paper cutout pasted onto the real sky, which is grainy and soft.

A woman sits with us at the nurse’s station. She was beautiful once, tall and shapely. Her eyes are empty now, blue ashes seeing a past we cannot. “You get a gold star,” she says, her voice excited. “You get a gold star.” With her pure white hair, the queenly way she holds her head, she is beautiful still—if you would not notice the swollen legs, the flat chest under her v-necked nightgown, the square initialed patches of medicine on her sagging skin. “You take a gold star, Buddy.”

Two women sit across from me in a small room. They wear neon orange tops, neon orange pants, neon orange slippers. Their skin is white in the fluorescent lights, freckles and skin spots pale brown. “What is it like outside?” they ask. “Is it nice?” They ask this almost every time.

“It is beautiful,” I tell them, and their eyes are wistful. The chairs in the room are bright blue plastic, exactly the wrong shape to sit in—too long for the thighs, too short for the legs, too sloped for the back. The walls are block walls painted a nondescript shade. Someone has scraped paint off the door in the shape of letters—HEL. I love this place, because of the women I have loved here and the things they have taught me, the triumphs I have witnessed. I hate this place because the women I have loved into, hoped into, prayed into—too often I have seen them come back. It is here that my heart has been seeded with a distrust of human nature, an element of cynicism and despair.

The shade in my room blocks the light when I go to bed every morning. Overtop the shade I have hung blankets to make the room black as night. A fan hums from my desk to block sound. It works; every time I wake up, at 12:30 say, or at 2:00, I think it is the middle of the night. I can never remember what day it is. My room is always muggy warm.

My niece’s eyes are black as night and wide as dinner plates. She is very serious until you tip her upside down or throw her into the air. Then she grins. She never sits still.

The river at twilight is blue, black, and gold. If I would fall into that, I would enter a world where tables and chairs are made of diamonds and fish glide in constant motion and fairies wear crowns of ice and tears. The sun tints the water pink. Black cherry ice cream melts on my tongue. I pray, and I remember why I pray. I wonder why I ever stopped and why it is so hard to keep that connection.

The butcher room reeks of gut and blood. It grows steamy as I scrub with hot water and soap. When I step from the back room into the front room, the air slaps my skin, cool as ice. The room has been sprayed down and smells of water and bleach.

A skunk cavorts across an empty corral, tail held high. A rabbit perks on its hind legs in the road, ears up, while a little way down from it, a cat sprawls flat. Deer are thick this year. They herd in the fields and along the roadsides like slim brown Jerseys.

My sister is slim and laughing, her hair wild. “Let’s run in the rain,” she says. We race across the yard, race back in damp clothes.

Summer is rich and wild.