Cottage

I’m up at my cottage alone. I turned on the electric and the septic siren sent two mallards from the front yard. The water had come up to past the front steps this spring. Large snowfall totals and four inches of rain in 48 hours pushed the dam upstream past its limit. Volunteers sandbagged the weakest berm. Houses downstream fortified and were on evacuation notice. The rain held, the waters receded, and the cottage lives to fight another year.

It’s been over 500 days since my mom passed and some days it feels like 5000 and others it feels like five. I saw some older woman with streaks of gray hobbling down the world foods aisle of Family Fare and my heart thumped a heavy beat and I swollowed to stop from crying.

The cottage, without my mom, feels a similar throat-narrowing and heart lowering evanescence. I stand in the kitchen watching the boiling lake water on the stove for coffee tomorrow and remember how she fretted over the minutest detail and sacrificed her vacation for the happiness of all else. Every meal was planned: starches, fruits and vegetables, protein (vegetarian substitutions for her son and picky nieces), and always some sort of sweet, ordered-ahead-of-time online or baked-fresh dessert that lured even the most apprehensive of eaters to the kitchen to be blinded by the sunlight streaking in over the glacial hills to the east. We’d gather in shifts around the dining room table or sit on the furnature and huddle over a wicker-backed paper plate of goodness.

To never see her again. To never see her dancing in the kitchen, hands shaking like a front-row Beatles fanatic, humming along to some silent melody. My mom didn’t really drink, she never smoked, but she was the embodiment of joy—she just happened to be born with a bad heart.

One day in junior high she got hauled away in an ambulance from chest pains before school. She had open heart surgery to replace her aortic valve with that of a pig’s shortly thereafter. She recovered but was never as active. Her replacement aorta went out before it was expected and she was one of the youngest recipients of a TAVR which stretched back open the impaired aorta for ideally the rest of her life. But she slowed down again, had a long hospital stay in Ohio on the way to see her grandkids and never made it back. I saw her in September and she looked frail. I think I told my sister sometime thereafter, before her death, that she looked like Grandpa before he passed, that puffy gaunt gray of late life, like everything good had come to pass, like they were now a passenger to whatever life threw their way, that if she didn’t change something her ticket was set to expire immediately. God it hurts to recall this. Why can’t we intervene and help before it’s too late? It’s always too late.

The birds ceased singing at exactly 10. Like a chorus conductor had swung his arms across the lake. It was silent for a whole minute. No wind, no insects, no howling. Then the peepers and crickets started, slow at first, maybe one or two, then the whole lot, creating an offbeat symphony of tweets. Had they held my moment of silence for peace? For me? Or does everything flow through an unemotional tunnel and what escapes is diverted into meaning making? I’ll never know.