Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

The Letters

27 The Letters This week the letter from my mother is a half-page long, the handwriting shaking its way across the paper. She was proud of her penmanship. Each loop had been perfect, each word aligned with the next, each T crossed as if she used a level. It was her elegance, a dignity she held between thumb and forefinger. “Not much to say,” she writes. “This room is a room. They will move me to another.” She always writes on Friday. “Good way to end the week,” our years connected from there, upper left corner, to here centered perfectly. She would fill two pages with her crisp judgment of a book, a movie, descriptions of her times swimming, dancing, going to hear the “news lady” talk about the week’s events, how she’d done on the quiz, and what “The Colonel” had ordered everyone to do: “Feed 28 the birds! Clean up the leaves in front of your place! Support the troops!” Now she writes, “I’m tired.” My wife is sleeping on the couch. It’s late afternoon. I watch her breathing, start to count the breaths, wonder why, stop. The cat dashes by. Bees hum in the bee balm. I pour a cup of coffee, steady it with milk, stir until it turns from coal to caramel, the steam rising, the long evening beginning to spread itself outside the window. I look across the room, notice on the shelf our Scrabble game, think of the tiles, each letter singular, able to take its place within a word. ...