Time

Here in Ohio, in the house where I remember my Nana and Grandpa, and now where my Grandpa says little and sleeps much, and has been remarried for much of a decade to a lovely, gentle person, here in this place:

As I sat on a folding chair in the basement, feeding Elspeth to sleep last night, I looked at the laundry line strung between posts. Laundry pins stood in a row like little lonely soldiers. I imagined my Nana's fingers, strong and swift, clipping up printed sheets, efficient and precise. And upstairs I remembered the voices of my great aunts and uncles as they clustered in the living room, the clatter of coffee cups, the burbling of the coffee pot.

My siblings and I used to play shuffleboard in the basement, amongst my Nana's endless rock collections, paint supplies, canvases.

But then, as I fed Elspeth and put her down to sleep, Merry danced about my sleeping, silent Grandpa. Later that evening Mom and I soaped and rinsed dishes side by side, and I remembered my Grandpa methodically rinsing every dish, stacking and then washing as my Nana put on a pot of coffee and laughter filled the kitchen.

Once again the incredible sense of disconnect, the sense that what is past is not past after all, the sense that time is nothing but an illusion--this hangs in the air. Deep inside I can't help but feel that time, the death of my great aunts and uncles and grandparents, the fading of my Grandpa--all this is real, but it is not all. Our Western understanding of time, this belief that all is linear, these words of "past, present, future; before, now, then--" all these do us a disservice. They are small words, labels we stamp on mystery, words that consign processes and people as impossibly finite.

Somewhere I feel that we are all still living together, in a place where time makes no difference, where death and birth are just memories of a place long ago, and the now, the now with everyone we love, is all there is, forever. It's not sentimentality, or a wish for what can never be, or a trembling silly vision of faces in the sky. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it is real. You can call it heaven if you want, but I feel again, as I often do, that it is already present, just beyond me, but here already if I could only touch it.

But I do hear now Martin playing a song, and I did hear just two minutes ago my Grandpa say words out loud in his old, strong voice.