gardens in the sky

One night last month I was tossing and turning, trying to coax my anxiety into sleep. Like sleepless people everywhere, I tried to conjure some tranquil surrounds, some balmy beachside or some wooded glen. I often, though, trade these prosaic locales for my own imagined spaces. I like to picture fertile backyard gardens, the kind in which all of the tomatoes are staked and the carrot tops line up just so. In my mind’s eye, I see raspberries growing with the stubborn persistence that they’ve shown during my whole life in Michigan. The berries I’ve always imagined planting would be transplants from my Dad’s patch, ones that he’s raised up for four decades and before that, grew up in his parents’ garden. They’re berries with a past and I’ve always imagined that I’d have them as well.

Whenever I think about this garden, I think of my Dad coming to Kentucky–or wherever it is that J and I settle–and helping me till the soil and plant the rows. My Dad is good at things like planting vegetables and training vines up an arbor. He’s good at other things too, things that call for coordination between hand and eye, between muscle and memory, between space and certainty. Lately, I’d been thinking that he’d be good at making dollhouses and wooden toys for his grandchild and the grandchildren who will arrive sooner or later. I’d had planned to offer up this idea over Christmas, to suggest that we start building them together. After all, he’s spent his whole life rebuilding people’s bones, their internal architecture, all with hand and eye and muscle and memory.

But now it seems that it’s time for him to care for himself with that same tenacity. On Friday we learned that he is very, very sick, and so I’m not sure what this space will become over the next several months. I don’t know how much I’ll feel like making and doing. How much I’ll feel like writing and thinking here. Or how much my own life will change as I watch and wait, nurse and fret. I’m headed home soon and I suspect we’ll just take it moment by moment.

I suspect that the sunsets will begin to feel more vivid and taste of meals together more rich.