Dear Nancy:
As you know from all the beautiful notes and photos and songs and many kind wishes on this Facebook wall, yesterday was my birthday.
Birth Day.
That day has always been a haunted one for me. One of my farthest back memories of Birthday is being nine years old. It was Saturday, and my father was out in the garage and my mother was out there, too, and they were quarreling, as they often did, about how unclean the world was. All those leaves in the yard as the trees let go into fall and look at the mess our feet made, tracking in dirt and debris. And the furnace that needed cleaning before winter set in and air from the vent blew dust all over the world that was our house. The phone calls my mother was getting from someone who hung up, time after time, and just who was that, anyway, she wanted to know as they stood out there and fought. But me, I was inside that day, wishing. I wished for a big, fat birthday cake. I wished for candles and presents with blue bows and glitter. I wished we were all happier, but we were not, and so September 12th became in my memory a day that celebrated sadness rather than joy.
Birth Day.
Many years later, of course, birthdays became another kind of commemoration of melancholy. When I was fifteen I birthed a boy and gave him up. Re-lin-quished. The word was like icing I kept in my mouth until it melted little by little, tasting of loss.
It is only now, mornings like this one, the day after a day of plenty—gracious birthday words from loved ones and strangers alike—that I am able, at last, to celebrate the fact that Birth comes in waves.
I walked my three miles with my dog this morning. Leaves are beginning to cascade. I love that word for their falling. A woman walked on a rise in the distance, her baby in her arms and her two dogs running behind her. They were gathering the last tomatoes from their garden before autumn sets in. My husband was sleeping late, the house all cool with the windows open to the air after the rain. As I walked I fell to thinking about his sister, who has experienced the great loss of her own husband of forty years, had her own birthday this week. She went out to a celebratory dinner last night. She will come with us to the sea at Thanksgiving. Loss. Joy. Loss.
In your last letter on here you talked about not believing that we can produce words on command. No new book in eighteen months, as a publisher might like, right in line after the last one? No failure, that. Birth comes in waves and words are like birth, too. They are born, enter the world, find their lives. We wait as new ones are born inside us, tell us their story, find their way to the page. We wait as sometimes words don’t come at all, as silence gathers inside us and we are still, somber, mourning, respectful of the fallow time.
Happy Birth Day, Nancy Peacock, even though it’s not your birthday. I wish you a day of quiet, of stories told, remembered, said, unsaid.
Love,
Karen