In the Circle

When I am finally back in my own small house, surrounded by four oaks that have seen the Civil War, I wake to the resonant call of a mourning dove. I look outside my bedroom window and wonder, what’s next? I am grateful to return to ordinary days, but I’m altered. Finding work to replace the projects I’d had to give up, paying the medical bills, taking care of the house and my little patch of land—these are small matters. Mortality is no longer an abstract thought, but I place that thought aside, knowing it will come up again. As Anne Lamott says, peace of mind is an inside job. I’m the only one who can acquire it for myself. I find it as Death’s newest apprentice.

What’s next? 

In February, when I am finally cleared to drive again, I act on an uncharacteristic impulse to take an improv class. I resume work on the children’s picture books I’d begun a few months earlier. My client in Canada calls with an offer of work; I accept with gratitude and plan a trip for late March. 

I visit my son and daughter-in-law and walk with their two eldest daughters to the park. I tell them I am thinking about getting chickens in the spring—how would they like to pick out their own chicks? It turns out they would like that very much. They immediately start thinking about names. 

Theirs is a loud, lively household with crayon on the walls and Cheerios in the couch cushions. If Sean is sitting on those cushions, he’s apt to have three-year-old Virginia perched on his shoulders, five-year-old Eleanor snuggled by his side, and one-year-old Caroline on his lap. It amuses me to watch this man’s man raising three daughters, “feral princesses,” as Christina, my daughter-in-law, calls them. When I thank them for taking such great care of me when I was in the hospital, Sean draws a shape on the table with his index finger. “There’s a little circle and you’re in it.” That is all he says. It’s enough. It’s everything.
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