Patricia Smith is the author of the novel The Year of Needy Girls, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She received her MFA from VCU in 2001. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Heart and Humanity Magazine, Salon, Gris-Gris, Prime Number, Tusculum Review, So to Speak, and Parhelion Literary Magazine, where it was nominated for Best of the Net, and several anthologies. Her essay, “Border War,” which appeared in Broad Street Magazine, received a Special Mention by Pushcart. A teacher of American literature and Creative Writing at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School in Petersburg, she lives in Chester, VA with her wife. 

The Familiarity of Water

It’s the middle of February, the pandemic still one full year away, and none of us can begin to imagine how our lives will change. On this day, I find myself at an inn on Lake Cayuga in Aurora, NY. The setting is one of pampered luxury—thick bathrobes and heated floors, lit fireplaces, exquisite meals and wine, a king-sized bed and sunsets on the lake. I’m one of twelve women writers, invited here because of someone else’s generosity, this time away a gift, the opportunity for a solid ten days of uninterrupted writing, a break in our real lives full of families and teaching, of laundry and groceries, of parents with dementia and all the tasks that pull our attention away from writing.

Meanwhile, my mother, too, is not in her real life. She is in week two of her new life at an Assisted Living facility where she paints, wins at Bingo, watches movies she forgets as soon as she sees them. At eighty-five, she is living with Alzheimer’s, still vibrant and outgoing, still with her sense of humor, but alone and lonesome at night, her husband of fifteen years unwilling to care for her. He is still living in their shared house, once our family’s summer cottage and now their home by the beach. She thinks he is elsewhere, getting treatment for COPD, the lie we had to tell to get her to move. 

Here, in the small village of Aurora, NY, I look out from my room to the lake and the geese who gather on its shore, now a snow-covered expanse of lawn. There is something about these birds and the way they squawk into the wind that unleashes my grief. I’m afraid I might sit here for the entire week and do nothing but cry and mourn my mother who is still very much alive. The snow falls and the sky darkens and the greyness of the landscape tugs at me. In the evenings on the phone, my mother sobs. “Where is my husband? My house? Why am I here?” she wants to know. 

My mother’s loneliness is unbearable. 

At home, my wife Cindy and I have a cat, a Tabby, who acts more like a dog.

Frick waits in the window when he hears my car pull in the driveway and runs to the door. Not long ago, his brother, Frack, stopped eating. When we couldn’t get Frack to care about food, we took him to the vet who said it was too late to do much of anything. Frack still purred when I petted him that last time, but he hunched up and wailed, too, a sign, the vet told us, that he was in a lot of pain. 

We arrived home with an empty cat carrier and Frick hasn’t been the same since.

He wanders the house looking for Frack and sprawls in the spot on the rug where Frack loved most to lie. Now, Frick hates to be alone. Meow, meow, meow he says constantly, only eating when we’re right there with him.

Back home from Aurora, in the early hours of the morning lying in bed, I hear a patter above the ceiling. Too light for squirrels, there is a constant scritch, scritch, scritch. Birds, Cindy and I decide, living beneath the eaves of the house, in the soffit. Cindy bangs on the wall to scare them away, but I find comfort in the sound of their claws, the way they scurry back and forth.

They’re building a nest, Cindy says, spying the evidence when we look one morning. The idea brings me joy, those birds creating a safe space for their babies. Don’t scare them off, I say to Cindy. I want them to stay.

It’s summer and my mother has been in the Assisted Living facility for six months. We spend a week at my mother’s house, re-made once again into the summer cottage. We are there alone, Cindy and I, without my mother and her husband. They are living separate lives now, from us and from each other. My mother’s husband has moved out to live with his daughter, a fact he cannot admit to my mother, while she continues with her painting classes and Bingo. She has added singing on the wrap-around porch with a group of men who, she tells us when we visit, like her best in shorts. Her phone calls are chattier and upbeat, full of stories about chipmunks who climb on her lap while she and the men sing songs, or about day trips for lunch or ice cream, the exercise classes she finds too easy, the walking group she claims to co-lead. She chastises the other residents who don’t sign up for all the activities, commenting on the folks who would rather sleep in their wheelchairs in the lobby. Still, at the end of each phone call and visit, she wonders aloud when she might be able to go home. Soon, don’t you think? she always asks. She misses her husband who, she reports, calls her each night. I think it’ll be soon, she says.

At the inn, I sleep in a king-sized bed, big enough for four people. If I wake in the night to use the bathroom, I return to bed and crawl into a different section, the sheets cold and fresh. I sleep deeply and wake without an alarm. 

One morning, there are no geese gathered on the lawn. No geese swimming in the lake. The water is calm and flat. The sun shines onto the snow, the trees, the bright blue water. On this day, everything is still and quiet.

I imagine my mother rising each morning in her new place, unsure of what might unfold. Does she recognize her new friends? Do they share their memories together? Their fears? I think she must live in the moment now, moving happily from one activity to another, until at night when she climbs into her bed, the one she thinks is temporary, the one she tells me is big enough for both me and Cindy if we were to visit and stay over.

Back home, in the mornings, Frick cries at our bedroom door. Because we have allergies, we keep him out of the bedroom. But Frick seems to know the minute I open an eye, and the meowing and the pawing of the door begin. All he wants is to climb on the bed and curl up. All he wants is attention from us, his people. All he wants is to feel loved. To belong. He waits outside the bedroom door and thinks: any minute now. Soon.

On the third day at the inn, I wake to falling snow and whitecaps on the lake. A few geese bob on the water. Some huddle, sheltered by the dock and boathouse. The sky is dark. Outside my window, one evergreen, tall and snow-covered, bends in the wind. A few other solitary trees stand in the wintry landscape, their blackened trunks bare and frail like silhouettes. The scene is bleak and lovely all at once.

I have managed to write some new words in these few days away, but I also can’t help staring out this window for hours, immersed in the story of the geese and the snow, my heart breaking, the story of my mother unspooling, the end predictable but not.

At home, the bird noises continue. Scritch. Scritch. It is hard business, this nest-building. And when Cindy climbs the ladder finally, peeling back a broken piece of siding, sticking a gloved hand inside, she discovers a bigger nest than either of us imagined. Such detailed work these birds have forged. There are no babies, thankfully—just all the grass and twigs and leaves, everything necessary for a cozy home beneath the eaves of our house. Do we have to remove it? I ask as Cindy pulls out more and more of the nest, reaching far back with the handle of a rake, but I know the answer. It isn’t good for the house to have them up there—not to mention the big hole in the siding where the birds managed to enter in the first place. It isn’t sound to let them stay.

What will happen? Where will they rebuild?

On my last day in Aurora, the geese return. They swim in groups or float at the water’s edge. The sky is again a bright blue. We women have bonded and during our final gathering, we marvel at our time spent together. Because it isn’t certain that bringing together twelve women who don’t know each other and putting them in one house, albeit a stunningly beautiful inn, will result in a week of camaraderie and new friendships, but it does. We are grateful for the break in our lives, this “time out” to focus on our work. I don’t confess to the others how many hours I’ve spent watching the geese and the lake, how I’ve spent more time writing about my mother instead of the novel I’m supposed to be finishing. I don’t tell them that I’m more familiar with the daily habits of these birds than what my mother is doing and where she is living, that I can’t picture her in the new place except for what I’ve seen online. I don’t talk about the familiarity of water, the comfort of rising each morning to its presence, how my mother, too, loves water and her house by the ocean, how we both think of her home as the best place on earth, how she will never live there again, and how, if I let myself think about that fact too long, I fear I will, quite literally, fall apart.  

In the summer, at my mother’s house, Cindy and I enjoy late afternoons at the beach. All morning, we clean and prepare the house to rent, the only way my siblings and I can imagine hanging onto this place, the only way we’ll be able to continue paying for our mother’s care. Everything my mother left behind fills her bedroom still—her clothes, her jewelry, her shoes. She needs none of it where she is, none of the dresses that hang in her closet or the low-heeled shoes or the necklaces and earrings she loved to wear. There will be no more weddings to attend or holiday parties or even gatherings with friends. My mother’s life as she knows it has abruptly stopped, has been reduced to Bingo and Trivia games and songs on the porch. Her presence is everywhere in the beach house still —in her handwritten recipe cards that fill the box on the kitchen counter, in the artwork that hangs on the wall, her grandchildren’s pictures adorning the refrigerator. The remnants of my mother’s life, as if she has just stepped out for a minute, or taken a short trip.

At low tide, Cindy and I settle into old, rusted beach chairs and read books. This is the landscape of my childhood, this town with its summer residents, tiny post office, lobster pound, the jetty that juts out and creates the harbor. In those long sunny afternoons, as shadows lengthen across the sand, the waves lapping, lapping, the tide creeping back in, I wonder, how do we learn to go on? How do we learn to live when we’ve left behind so much? Already, it feels like fall. Already, and too soon.