swimming in our ponds

I’m sharpening knives in my kitchen on a beautiful, sunny fall Sunday morning. Sundays are “two cup mornings” - that being coffee. Things are slow and methodical. Sunday afternoons are when we go to the cemetery, he and I, to visit the resting place of our daughter’s bones. She’s not there, not really, but there’s a comfort in the ritualized and methodical. I collect flowers before we go, walking from the wilds to my gardens, making as beautiful a bouquet as I can. In the winter I pick evergreen branches with purple berries still clinging to them or bring sprigs of winterberry. Whatever nature has on offer, I am grateful for.

When we get to the cemetery, we hold hands as we weave between ancient headstones from the 1800s, silently reading names and dates of the families buried beneath. We make our way to the back where old crosses, markers of soldiers that returned home from great wars, lay broken and tilted. There’s a great oak tree here with hanging branches that fill with birds and chipmunks all summer long, but they’re quiet now. The hard work of harvest is ending and soon there will be snow.

Our daughter’s headstone is at the back of the cemetery. It’s the only new headstone in that area. She would have liked that. Maybe she does like that. She was always a soul fascinated by the old, by tradition, by heritage. When she was thirteen she started mapping out our family tree. She called grandparents and looked up government records and ancestry websites trying to piece together her roots. Yes, the old part of the cemetery, away from the shiny, polished granite headstones is where hers needed to be.

When we arrive at the marker of her grave, we each set upon our tasks. My husband empties the glass jar inside the brass vase that gets filled with clean water and fresh flowers. He wipes off her stone while I clean up the grasses and any new weeds that pop up around it. We planted trailing yellow flowers there this year. Last week, someone pulled them out. They were beautiful, crawling and tangling around her stone. I’m going to plant them again next spring.

When the business is done and we settle in, stillness descends. We stand together, leaning on each other, staring in disbelief still. We look at her name before us, engraved by the skilled hands of the stone carver, and wonder why they’re there. Still, it’s incomprehensible, but there is nothing like words etched in stone to assure you that something is very, very real.

Mostly we are silent there save a prayer I share. Sometimes we talk to our daughter. Sometimes we share stories. But mostly we listen and are still. Sometimes deer will come and watch us. Other times birds call from overhead and dragonflies come and land on her name. This isn’t where she lives now, we understand that. But for us, it is a place of peace and a place to go, no matter what, that pulls us into a precious time set aside for just the three of us.

I’m thinking of us going there later today while I sharpen knives in my kitchen. I can hear my husband on the tractor outside. We just spent this crisp fall morning, still warm in October, marking out where the foundation for our maple sugar shack will be laid later this month. It was a beautiful morning and now there is work to do outside, where it’s going to be a beautiful afternoon. But my heart is heavy. My heart is always heavy when it’s a harvest day.

Every year our two geese, Harold and Maude, raise their babies and every year around this time, we kill those grown babies. They’ve been together for around six or seven months now and the goslings are as big as their parents. This is how things go on a farm - we raise what we eat. And so I am here sharpening knives, thinking about going to the cemetery later today and wondering what a goose and gander feel when they come out of their house, call their babies and hear nothing in return.

I imagine they’re perplexed. I imagine they’re sad. Every year, it’s the same - the loud, boisterous ruckus of dramatic geese suddenly turns completely silent for a week or two after harvest. Harold and Maude take to the pond and swim around quietly. They know their goslings are gone. Of course they know. To say they’re too dumb or they don’t have familial connections is ridiculous. That doesn’t mean they’re human. It doesn’t mean they lie on the floor in a heap remembering the warmth and sparkle that lit up a room the second their daughter walked into it with her thousand kilowatt smile. No, that’s me, not a goose.

But it is pain and sorrow and it’s all shared in some way in this stream of life. Theirs. Mine. Ours. All of the beauty of this place and all of the sorrow in great, rushing rivers through us all. I am saddened by their silence and I am heavy with the responsibility I hold for it. But I am also responsible for their lives. They’re ten years old now and have always been together. We have given them that too - that consistent bond between them will go on until one of them fades. Just like us all. That we can offer as their caretakers. That we can have for ourselves. And in that, a tiny bit of reguge. Not a lot, but enough. It has to be.