Circling My Father

A single rock formation fills the trail. I marvel at the layering, buffs and tans, pinks and whites, all the colors of sand on a beach. Mica glints in the late morning sun. I see as an artist sees, long and slowly, losing time, until wonder becomes realization, sinking now like a stone into my belly. My pack grows heavy. We've been here before, the dogs and I, and I feel as if I am dissolving, melting down into rock. How could I have been so stupid, losing the trail not once but twice, circling not once but twice? This is my life, wandering, not around a mountain, but inside a world of illness and of death, week after week, day after day. Weary and wilting, I sag to my haunches.

One minute my father was whole, eating his lunch, a ham-and-cheese sandwich on rye bread, savoring taste, glancing at an envelope on the glass-topped table, a table that when I would visit was full of envelopes, some opened, others not. The next minute he was broken, lying on the pale gray carpeting (conscious? unconscious?). He would remember none of it: the stroke, the slide from his chair, the medics, the ambulance, the heart attack in the emergency room. He was 91, living alone these last five years since my mother's death, failing, cantankerous and as mean as he's ever been. Assisted living? What did I think, he couldn't fix a sandwich? Take a pill? He wasn't ready. He'd let me know.

But the stroke has changed him, turned him nice. There is a physiological explanation for this. It's about the parietal lobe. Probably there are lesions, a word derived from the Latin laesio, which means injury. "A lesion," my friend a neurologist tells me, "can cause release." Of what? A sweet and loving child? A man he could have become? A man he has become, one who tells me I'm pretty, that he loves me? Yet, I don't trust him. He is new, but not new. He still has that sly smile, still flirts with the pretty nurse who cares for him in the Care Center, calling her the Redhead. "Hey, where's the Redhead? I want the Redhead." The man sparks, and I know he'd toss me aside for the light of the Redhead's smile. So, is he conning me, stringing me along because I'm it, an only child and all that is left for him?

The dogs find scrub and burrow in. They're standard poodles, an anomaly in these New Hampshire mountains where I hike, driving two and a half hours from my house on the coast of Maine. Here, labs dominate, but standards are strong, athletic dogs, and Lucy, my older dog, has an intuitive sense of danger. She avoids slick rock and sheer cliff. Sam, a silly, energetic pup, will venture close to an edge. I watch him carefully. Both dogs carry packs, with water bottles, collapsible bowls, kibble, booties for a scraped paw. I adore these dogs. I'm mad for these dogs, and when I hike, they're the only company I need or want, much to my husband's apprehension. He'd like me to hike with a friend. These dogs are my friends, my best friends. They nuzzle and push against me. "What?" I say. "What do you want?"

I know, of course, and so I scratch their fur, fill their water bowls, and feed them snacks. I feed myself snacks: tamari almonds, raisins, and dried cranberries, tart on my tongue. I chew slowly, smiling inwardly, seeing myself in my mind's eye, the bag lady of these White Mountains, wearing her dirty hiking trousers, too big and cinched at the waist, her sleeveless lightweight hiking shirt, an athletic bra flattening her flabby breasts. I am a woman in her late 60s, small-boned, sinewy, wrinkled, tough—but I'm tired. This is a long trip, ten miles round trip. It is August and sweat is slick on my arms, around my neck. The dogs and...