Over the Bridge & Under the Moon

This weekend, my friend C. came to visit from the Lonestar State and charged me with taking him somewhere in Georgia he'd never been. And though a well-traveled fellow, this charge really only eliminated spending the day in Atlanta. Instead, we drove up 441, winding up into north Georgia between hills burnished deep orange and coppery brown by the late-arriving fall. The sun was glorious in the sky overhead - a crisp blue that would be cold to the touch, scattered with breaths of cloud.

We wandered through the woods along a narrow path, following the blue smudged arrows on the sides of pines, oaks and birches that marked the High Bluff Trail. There was only the crunch of thousands of leaves under our feet, the slow rustle of a slight breeze in the trees, and the calls of whatever birds were out to enjoy the fall day to punctuate our sentences. It was easy to be in the forest, in the low sloping hills, among clumps of green moss and clusters of mustard-yellow mushrooms.

But later, we hiked down into the gorge, down hundreds of stairs that wound down between rock walls. Down to where the water poured from the gullet of the walls into a river that ran over smooth flats stones in swirling eddies and quick whorls. As we descended we could hear the water churning against gravity, and we were pulled down, too, to where a suspension bridge crossed the river - the only way to get to the observation deck for the falls.

I said I couldn't, but C. didn't understand that bridges are not an inconvenience but a terror. Not a dislike but a panic. He never gave me the option to not go. So I closed my eyes and held his hand and took a step out onto the wooden slats held in the air by thick wire cables. I could feel the vibrations of the bridge under my weight; I could feel the blood in my ears. I could feel my fingertips pressing hard against my eyelids; I could feel a hand in my sweaty hand and I squeezed it tightly, focused on that hand to lead me to the other side.

***

Later, back at my house, I put on my pajamas and pulled back the covers on my bed. It's only the third time I've slept there, and I crawled between the sheet in a familiar bed set in a still strange landscape. I clicked off the bedside lamp and lay there in the darkness for a moment, keenly attuned to the sounds of the hardwood floors settling. To the heat hissing through the vents. To the weird way that the grate on the carport door sometimes twangs. Straining to categorize every sound, it took me a moment to realize that cool, silvery light had slipped across my face and fanned out across the blankets. I turned onto my stomach and peeked through the blinds. There, high above my house, gazing down into my bedroom window was my beloved moon. After all this time...so many months...it was only then that I discovered my old friend looked in my window, just as he has all my life.

Perfect Happiness: In Pictures

Weeds

For Ronnie, lawn maintenance was nearly a religion. He mowed, edged, watered, fertilized and weeded. I can remember him talking about needing to tend the yard like one would speak of nurturing a child. He labored over it in the warm months and planned for it in the cold ones.

So when the weeds began encroaching on the front lawn after he died, it became almost an assault on his memory. Anna's mentioned the weeds frequently to me; they seemed to be feeding on her grief, popping up across the lawn and in the straw beds stretching around the yard's perimeter.

On Saturday morning, she and I decided to tackle the front yard. She sat near the sidewalk and I sat near the road, and we each methodically plucked weeds from between the blades of sod. The sun moved higher; we scooted a path back and forth across the lawn, leaving a trail of weeds atop the grass behind us.

And as we broke apart the fragile roots of those tiny but persistent weeds, we uprooted the thin barrier between casual words and those that reached deeper down.

"Does it seem like a long time," I asked. "Or like it was just yesterday?"

She sighed. "It depends. But most days, I just think about how long it's been and I wonder how I made it this far."

"I really missed him this week," I said. I hesitated to say this...did she want to hear how I missed him? A feeling that undoubtedly paled in comparison to her own sense of loss. She was silent.

"And...and when I think of him-" I pushed on - "I think of him chuckling. I can still hear him chuckling." My voice was quavering at this point and tears were sliding down my flushed cheeks.

"Me, too." I could tell she was crying, too. "You would never expect his laugh to sound like that."

"No," I laughed - a watery, thick kind of sound.

And it went on like that. She would tell me something she missed, and I would respond, and vice versa. Sometimes we laughed; sometimes we cried more. Our muscles were aching. The sun grew hotter, burning my shoulders and her forearms. And we kept on pulling, weed by weed, discarding those unwanted plants in heaps of green tops and spindly brown roots systems.

They seemed to cover everything when we started. But by the end of the afternoon, the lawn was a clean stretch of green sod, pristine and trimmed. Just like Ronnie would've wanted it.