Birthday tree 2017

I've been watching the birthday tree.

That would be the maple tree in front of our house which Lon noticed, and then I saw, too, had turned brilliant red when the sun rose on Sunday, November 2, the day after our son Kris was born. Sometime in the next few years, as the tree put on its annual show for our All Saints' Day baby, Lon dubbed it "the birthday tree."

Lon liked to make legends. Some he made by living them, "Front Page" style in the newsroom. He also liked to name his cars and compare life to his favorite movies. He liked our kids' birth stories, myth-size family stories, and created them as well as kept them.

I came to believe in his story of the birthday tree. The pink glow that its scarlet leaves cast on the living room in late October and early November is like a filter on an aging actress. It lifts my spirits, gentles my soul, and probably hides wrinkles, or at least bathes them in flattering rose-pink.

But it's not a typical year for this red maple in the parkway. Midway through October its branches were dotted with red leaves, but they blew off on a windy day. The leaves still on the tree are green or dull green-grey. They were nothing to today's Halloween Batmen and Spidermen, the miscellaneous hooded middle-schoolers with gruesome greasepaint, or the tiny preschool princesses (one of whom  carried her blue princess pumps and plopped them on the porch at my feet when she said "trick or treat"--they hurt to wear, said her mom, but they were still part of her costume).

The birthday tree has not gone glorious, at least not yet. Might be the lateness of the fall, yet another sign of pervasive climate change. Might be damp weather, or dry weather, or grief.

I miss Kris intensely. (He died three months ago, at the age of 30.) His cheerful, alert, oh-fuck-it spirit is very much alive to me in photos and memories. I resist saying much about this, whether it be in simple words or in metaphor, lest the explaining take the edge off, dull the memory or diminish how much I hate that this happened.

The weather app says it will rain tomorrow, on Kris's birthday. From the look of the tree today there won't be a scarlet surprise in my front window in the morning--no matter what the pigments do as winter approaches. Maybe next year.

I've got a snapshot of Kris, maybe seven years old, climbing in the tree in spring, red t-shirt, red buds on the branches against a blue sky. Can't post it, because the computer and scanner are resisting the commands coming at them from the mouse.

Maybe next year.

Rainbows

It was a two-rainbow week.

Rainbow #1 appeared in the sky on Tuesday morning, a dreary morning. The air was heavy, too warm for October. I backed out of the garage, drove south for a block and turned right—west—and saw the full rainbow stretching broadly over the houses, the school, the school yard. The harder I looked, the more it seemed to be a trick of light. Real things waver in the wind--flags, trees, kites. Airplanes cut right through the current. The air that high above the ground was surely moving but the rainbow held steady, in one place, that was not really a place at all. I drove a half-mile before I encountered the rain that had refracted that bow, but by the time my windshield was wet, the rainbow had faded.

Rainbow #2 was spectacular. Saw it at 5:45 last evening, again while driving. The sun was bright and sinking in the west, but there was rain where I was. I looked east and there it was, stretched across the  sky, dividing the heavens from the earth, or so it seemed. It lasted the full 20 minutes it took to drive to our destination—like it was permanent—-and seemed to grow more wonderful the longer you looked. The legs, if that's what you call the parts that seem anchored in the ground, vibrated with color, and a second rainbow, fainter but still distinctly there, formed above the first one. I'm proud to say I did not rear-end anyone despite the distracted driving and managed to take a couple pictures when the car was stopped. My phone dinged with a video of the same rainbow, texted by a friend who lives ten miles northeast of me.

It was everywhere! And yet--where? This one shone so bright and strong, it looked like there must be a pot of gold somewhere nearby that you could drive to. Its sheer persistence seemed to be saying something, as if God was broadcasting an upbeat message to the world after a particularly awful week.

One can see how rainbows made it into Genesis.

Sadness

I took two trips in the last week. One to Michigan for the funeral of my cousin John, who died too soon, too young, at age 57, of liver cancer. The other trip was to Washington Island, for a fall weekend with my daughter at a familiar place, full of family memories.

Now that I'm back, been to a choir rehearsal, checked my Twitter feed, unpacked the suitcase and put my feet up on the ottoman in front of my usual chair, I feel like a stranger in my home. I've thought a lot in the past seven days about being a child in an extended family rooted in Detroit and in rural Michigan and about who I am as an adult in that family. I've thought a lot about the years of being a mother to young children as they played lakeside on Washington Island.

I don't want to come back. It's not just the work week ahead, the meetings, the problems to untangle, the trip to the grocery store. It's something about lugging a load of leaden grief with me through all those things--lugging it, mostly silently, grimly.

 Both Cousin John and my son, Kris, who died in July, were extroverts, the lube in the social network, happiest when everyone got along. And joyful to be around.

 That joy resides in the past now. When it does break through into the here and now, it shows up in tears. Wet, salty, runny tears remember love and sweetness and special sons.

There's nothing to do but feel it, I guess. That's what grieving is--slowly letting in feelings that seem too much to bear at first, in anything more than the tiniest dose. And learning to love those feelings.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 

Perhaps by those very holy tears.