Absentee Indians and Other Poems

Letting Go

56 Letting Go JOT GeoTge and Nancy Benton I sit in comfort nestled in your chair before a fire you have built drinking from a mug marked with your name: Nancy. Marked like this place with scents and stories with the trappings of your lives. I watch as you leave them now not like animal leavings to ward off intruders, but a gentle legacy. How graciously you pass things on like a lovely holiday pudding sent round the table. And quietly you list: extra linen in the closet, a full collection of spices, lantern wicks top drawer. a set of French Classics for rainy-day reading. I listen as you instruct: how to start the generator with the power ?if so it's not callingJor a load; how to squelch the CB, fill the propane tanks, snap and lock the trundle beds, light each pilot light and heater. Then with ageless long-legged grace you descend the stairs, and delicately you point touch the vacant space the gap between the boards separating the last step and the walkaway. This ghost spot, tiny cleft in time in time will house a wild orchid. Just here the Round-leaved Orchis blooms again each year. Blooming as you have in some gap of time or space just here on the point of the small bay on the north side of Farm Lake. Now you recite as if it were a bedtime rosary names and relationships of long-time lakehome residents, a list of newcomers their origin and occupations. With yawning arms you point the locations of resorts and garbage dumps. Hum rituals of care and cleaning familiar as old camp songs. Identify the propane supplier, the brand name of the composting agent QyickJohn to use in the outhouse. 57 As you ladle the information I grow dizzy not from the minutiae I must remember but from the rotations of the moon I see in your eyes from the tiny crackings of your heart as it pulses one more time around each fine-carved piece, each memory, holds and then releases the worn pages of bird books bright tulip-patterned dishes chair arms puzzle games the dinner bell caressing objects as incantations calling sounds from twenty years past gently letting go with each storied item moment by moment this era from your life. Two long-time comrades settled in your companionship side by side year by year now affectionately you share the remembering, bit by bit piecing together details of building and furnishing and childrearing a changing roll of names of fishing holes and trophy catches. The routines here mapreading and handstitching so satisfying to perform clearing brush and trellis gardening satisfying to tell and to hear. Each departing step creaks out more dock sounds and water lapping tell them still when you are gone. In my sleep I play Goldilocks to the cottage and porridge and chairs. The bed does not fit right, the pillow, the blanket. This time it's the moose who come home: Someone has been living in my cabin! And here she is wondering if in the aftermath of your going each tinkle of silverware each whistle of the tea kettle the clatter of pots and pans will sound like laughter will echo voices of old friends who stopped here once who sang and toasted and pan fried fish. And your voices? And ours following you? Will they join chorus sing welcome to those rustles of time past? And when you have gone leaving us with your blessing I touch small pieces of your lives 59 60 as if they are sacred objects instead ofjust canvas gloves left to dry on pegs above the big wood stove. I place hearty northwoods snacks pippin apples and granola bars on the wicker tray at the far right end of the counter as you have done for years. I sing lullabies to this place as if it were a lonely child whose mother has gone away. And I wonder if I can learn and if the cabin will teach me and if the lake will soothe me and I wonder if twenty-five years of BoundaryWater breezes blowing by and by will be enough time to study the Orchis art of blooming then letting go. ...