Last March, my parents spent a month in Vermont to experience the joys of Mud Season. My sister and I went up for a long weekend: cozy and comfy (filthy floors), piles of dirty snow outside and us snug as baby kangaroos.
So we thought that perhaps a spring trip this year would be good to get The First Visit over with. In July, a big group of us will participate in the Prouty Challenge in honor of my dad and very likely intern a bit of his ashes under the maple tree – we thought perhaps having that also be The First Visit would be too much.
Most of the local family came over with us: loud, laughing dinners and not a few tears. It is strange to think of that house as partly mine.
April 2 is 6 months. Last Friday (as my uncle reminded us when we sat down to dinner) was 2 years since Mimi died. There’s a flinty part of me that says “welcome to getting older,” but that doesn’t make loss any less difficult.
But Innisfree keeps inside it the memory of all the people who have loved it, from Cousin Fonrose and her writing room on stilts to all the folks under the maple tree, to my young cousins who spent Saturday morning rolling and rolling down the hill in the snow. And who all call me by my childhood nickname, thus obliterating a decade of my grumpily demanding to be called Virginia.
Oh well. I probably needed to pull that stick out of my butt anyhow.
I had an interesting (to me) thought the other day that is along the lines of “getting older.” I thought about Mimi and all of the loss she experienced in her young years. She was born in grief, and she experienced the loss of her Dad Howe before the age of 18. And she found a way to keep going. I don’t know how she did it. The idea of her carrying around her Sad like we are, it just blows my mind. Someday we will be in our 80’s. We will probably still cry when we talk about Dad.
But that is ok. I guess as long as our feet keep going forward it’s ok.
I don’t know how, either. I hear jokes come out of my mouth, I observe myself being silly, but there is a heaviness now, since all the losses of the past year.
heaviness. Yes – that’s right.
The really yucky part about getting older is the lack of people who knew us when we were young. I think that when you get older, you get just weighed. Saul Bellow mentioned that was why he moved out of Hyde Park, because every street was the street where a friend used to live.
As I mentioned to Johnny yesterday, it’s all right to cry to make yourself feel better. Admittedly, he had just whacked his patella right on the bottom edge of the bus. And probably the entire bus hated us for several blocks.
Maybe that’s part of why so many writers write about childhood’s end – to capture that part of oneself that is progressively forgotten as time goes on.
I’m glad to say that I think I’m more like that small girl now than I was earlier in adulthood.
Do your kids listen to “Free To Be You and Me”? I’ve had “It’s All Right To Cry” stuck in my head for a few days now.