Hi, there!
It is an odd thing, being injured.
I forget if I told you already about
my small accident—I was horsing around outside and rolled wrong, and managed to
severely insult my back, which now seizes up at the least provocation. As you
can imagine, a huge proportion of my every is now eaten up with avoiding
triggering another spasm. Chris has to do nearly everything—I can’t even get
out of bed without help. Per hour, this has got to be the most painful injury I’ve
ever sustained, and the second-most inconvenient. I’m hoping there will not be
many hours, though. Already I’m seeing some improvement; as you saw today, I
can walk normally at least.
I’ve been injured before, of course,
and the interesting thing about injury, aside from the anatomical detail (on
one occasion I found out I had a body-part by breaking it), is the way that the
extent of the doable becomes so suddenly circumscribed. At the moment, I cannot
bend at the waist from a standing position, nor can I rise from sitting or kneeling
without help. As a result, I find myself staring at items on the floor (my laptop
bag, a pair of socks, my shirt), and even though they are right there, these things might as well be ten thousand miles away,
for all the good they can do me. I can’t reach them. A few years ago I spent a
summer with what turned out to be plantar fasciitis, a condition I really
recommend you not develop, such that every step hurt, not hurt a whole lot, I
could still walk, but it added up, step upon step, until I was exhausted with
pain. A quarter mile came to seem a long and terrible journey, a thing to steal
myself for, if it could not possibly be avoided. In the glow of good health, of
course, a quarter mile slides by under my moving feet more or less
automatically. Distance expands and contracts with my bodily strength.
It occurs to be that this sort of
temporary disability is simply a foretaste of getting old. I assume I’ll feel
better in a week or two, but someday, unless I die in some accident first,
there will come a time when I am permanently and progressively disabled in some
way or other, when distances that now fly by under my feet come to seem just
too far away, when things begin to hurt more or less all the time, when I will
need help with even the most basic things. I don’t know what will fail, but
eventually something will.
I don’t think of this in a morbid or
frightened mood; age is the price of living a long time, and I intend to pay
it, if I can. More than that, age is part of life, just as the end is part of a
story. I’m enough of a storyteller not to begrudge this structure to things.
Instead, I feel a kind of kinship right now with the elderly, while for a week
or two I feel the rough edges of the old woman hiding inside myself.
I’ve been thinking of aging
recently, in part because my husband has just had a birthday. A old college friend
of his, in the course of wishing him a happy birthday, mentioned a former history
teacher of theirs. The man had been something of a mentor to them both, and is
now dead. All of Chris’ college professors are dead, or at least he assumes
that they are, so much time has passed. Inevitably, I fell to wondering how
many of mine will still be around when I turn fifty-six (a question with
obvious relevance to you…).
Of course, Chris is talking about
professors he had in his early twenties, which adds an extra decade of time to
the mix. Also, his professors were not baby-boomers, and I believe your life
expectancy is greater than theirs. So I think it’s entirely possible that I
will be able to invite you to my fifty-sixth birthday party—and you will probably still be too busy to attend. Yet your death, and that of my other heroes
and baby-boomer friends, is another thing, like my own old age, that I shall
have to cope with, if I live long enough.
I was injured this past Saturday,
while horsing around on a lawn. Just prior, I had been playing happily with my
guide books, looking up plants and taking notes, drawing pictures…I found that
the witch-hazel in the back had four different types of leaf damage, plus one spiky
green growth that was probably a gall of some sort, and many three-part little
buds that I’m guessing will become flowers in the fall. There were three or
four types of moss at least, interspersed with scraggly tufts of some little
rush. Rushes, as you may know, look like grasses, but their flowers
structurally resemble tiny, inconspicuous lilies. They’ve gone to seed now, and
when I look through my lens I can see pointed, greenish seed pods each cupped
by three tiny triangular bracts. In the front yard, in among the grasses and
sedges, I also found wood sorrel (an old
friend), and mouse-ear chickweed, a tiny little thing with pairs of green,
fuzzy leaves and flowers with delicate white petals each cleft almost in two. I’ve
seen it before, but not often enough that I didn’t need to look it up. The new acquaintance
turned out to be some kind of speedwell, probably common speedwell. Usually
these sorts of vernacular names are easier to remember, and much more charming,
than the Latin, but the speedwells are an exception. Their genus name is Veronica, a pretty name that one of my
dorm-parents in boarding school also bore, if I remember correctly. Veronica the plant, then, is a plucky little
creeping thing with four purple petals, the bottom one thinner than the others.
I remember all of this because I wrote it down. I was planning to tell you, and
thinking also of using these letters to assemble a little book of natural
history, full of careful observation and carefree speculation, my modest
offering after the likes of Pilgrim at
Tinker Creek, and Honey from stone.
And then I jumped up like a child at play and fell down like an old woman, and
I’ve been temporarily old ever since.
The thing is, Nature is not simply something
I observe and wax poetic about; I am also a biological object, subject to
damage and nibbles and frost, and so are you. We are fit subjects, therefor, of
any natural history discussion. Our treasured individual dramas and the
fleeting tragedies of anonymous birds could equally well be viewed with fond,
detached hilarity. A sunny day can bring a predator’s swipe; a walk down the
street can slice the heart.
And a cool summer’s evening can fuzz
the air with mosquitoes till I tell myself I can persist only five minutes more
before I must go inside, Chris has gone in already. But I will persist those
five minutes, it is a matter of pride, and in those five minutes a great blue
heron flies over, its wings as big as tablecloths flapping silently, its shape silhouetted
black against the purpling sky and framed by the equally black arms of pine.
There is recompense for those of us
who stick around, even if we must be nibbled a little.
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