The Last Golden Hour
Mid-November and seventy-five degrees ahead of the first winter storm. “Look how beautiful it is today,” I tell you, forgettable words as we descend the steep grade back to town. Each word is meaningless and yet painful to utter, a kind of goodbye before the cold front. We wasted the day looking after my oldest son who does not want to be looked after. Your unbonded stepson. He wrecked his car on a Kentucky backroad. His girlfriend clawed his face. Cuffed, no charges filed. A chip in a tooth.
Halfway down the hill the city’s jade courthouse belltower submerges into the yellow and red hardwoods. Up rise the russet bricks of streets and homes built to last. You dip with the belltower at the first intersection, lowering your head and lifting your eyes to watch the stoplight. The lines on your forehead assemble into three birds, flying away. You nod for me. “It is beautiful. Sure is.” The world operates on a timer. We reach the next intersection and wait again. Watch the light, watch your temper, temper your words.
Each tree is so luminous, so distinct – yet impossible to impress into my wax of memory. Trees are like words, I think, each so precious and so self-signifying as to be incomprehensible except as abstractions. I want to say something to you about this, but philosophical language forever eludes me, teasing at the truth before flapping away. The idea that I will not be able to recall these yellows, this light, makes me too sad to pursue the thought past platitudes. “Probably the last beautiful day of the year,” I say instead.
How we spent the day makes me sad, too. My own firstborn son telling me to get out. His blue eyes framed in scrapes, challenging you to a fight; his mouth shaped just like mine clenching around words, privacy, respect, the way a dog shakes apart a rabbit. My beautiful boy has lined your face with his ugliness.
Now we are almost home and the sun shines sideways across the city. We will never get this day, this weather, this beauty back. The jet stream is shutting it all down tomorrow with a funnel-full of Canadian winter. How I wish we could migrate like the grackles flocking in the treetops.
I open up my phone camera and roll down the window. If I could post a picture to social media, it would prove to strangers and the strangers my relatives have become how good everything in my life is right now. It would prove it to me. I want to document the beauty of my daily life, proclaim it – claim it. I’m remarried to a loving man, relocated to a city of hardwoods and bricks away from the Kentucky hollers. Our brick house sits behind the brightest yellow maple trees on a respectable block in a stable neighborhood. We are here for the long term. We are solid. A sure thing.
With my phone out the window, I try for a picture, but the foliage goes rusty. The camera renders it all too granular, each leaf a singularity corroding the edges of the treetops into a flattened sky. Our street is made ugly in high definition, potholed and embossed by powerlines I ignore in my living witness. I suppose there are many flaws I overlook through my loving lens. Unbelievably blue, this sky, and somehow not blue enough through the lens of my camera.
I think again of my son’s blue eyes, how the scabs rippled and threatened to reopen around them as he scowled at us. He had his own life now and we were not welcome in it. Privacy, respect, dog-shaken rabbits.
“So beautiful,” I say and delete the picture. “Too bad it’ll be dark in an hour.”
“It’s the last beautiful hour of the year,” you say, putting the car in park. You pocket the keys and take my hand so gently I want to cry.
Maybe I just need to cry. Maybe this is the time for it. I meditate on the treetops, the golden hour light touching each tree. The sun caresses the bricks like a widow running her hand over bannisters and ledges before she leaves a home for the last time. I have many reasons to cry, and not only for sadness. Tears of happiness are also a kind of sadness, I think. Tears of gratitude must recognize mortality. Even in permanence there is impermanence. Everything solid dissolves. I have a good life.
We sit under our own flaming maples until the grackles take flight. Hundreds of blackbirds gather and swirl the air and I think again of how very like nature are words in their perfection, abstraction, signification. But then in one twisting murmur the grackles are gone and with them my ability to articulate the thought. “Maybe we should take a walk,” I say.
Your wrinkles gather into a smile as if you had predicted it. “Sure thing.”