Time, it stretches
This is a little story about grief, but mostly, it is a story about all our stories — not individual grief, but the grief that is the echoing cup of time, felt so greatly inside our homes and hearth today.
Grief runs, rain falling like comfort on the tin roof outside, dark drawn around like a blanket encased by the moon.
I stand in the silence, hollow in my belly, remembering. The swell of the silence round, filling the growing space.
May you live in interesting times, the saying says.
When I was a girl, I had a fascination for abandoned farmhouses. I’d try to spot them on long drives, convince you to stop, so we could peek in through the windows, imagine what life was like back then. Whenever back then was. At the end of the road, down the dirt track that we called home, there was an empty farmhouse, doors flung wide to the weather, silent and still but not. It was the ‘but not’ that got me.
Of what are we made?
We’re made of something strong. Something defiant. Something laughing, something crying. We are the child afraid of being the last one awake in the house. We are made of song.
Mostly, we are energy and noise, echoing until the ripples of soundwaves get so quiet they can’t be heard, only felt. That’s the round emptiness in an empty house, suddenly devoid. That’s the treasured photograph, the only thing left from decades before, dust settled around, too museum-like to move.
The old farmhouse had a dusty wooden floor and the open front door looked right onto the ocean. No people for so long there was no plumbing at all, no kitchen, no bathroom, the lean-to out the back from the century before. We hung out there for hours, days at a time. Never brave enough to stay past nightfall, we always returned home tired from doing nothing but exploring, from imagining who’d lived there, where they’d gone.
Outside the house the brambles grew close, opening out onto a short, white beach filled with middens from more people long gone, still felt. Across the field with the long grass waist high was a rubbish dump from the 1800’s, and we’d dig there for hours pretending to be archaeologists, reconstructing histories. Secret beach. Our beach. Their beach. Always theirs, any fool could feel it. Never an animal, never a snake, no birds. A secret beach filled with secrets.
Time stretches, and now a day is a moment and yesterday’s memories pile one upon the other, photographs falling from the sky, my eyelashes fluttering, sun piercing through the slits of my imagining and my present moment.
This too shall pass.
