Dissolution

Landscapes dissolve, along with the people who inhabit them, the same way an old television picture tube keeps the darkened silhouette of a scene frozen on the screen for several seconds after it's been turned off. As a kid, I would stare a long time after the screen went dark, convincing myself that I never saw it fully recede to a place I could not see.

When my husband left for war the first time, I still saw him everywhere in the echoes, the imprints he left behind. "He's gone now," I would remind myself—as if that's all I had to say about it. The Army had only given us nine days to get ready. But there he stood in front of the open refrigerator door, or on the porch lighting a cigarette, or plucking his cap from his head as he passed between the house and the garage. "Fine," I said after weeks of this, "but it's not like he's dead—so he can't haunt me forever." I walked down the pasture of our small farm in southeastern Minnesota, moving behind the grassy paddock and the willow tree, and stood in the waist-high thistles and milkweed where the land dipped low enough for me to lose sight of the house. It was there, the one spot I knew he wouldn't be, where I waited for the images to fade.

The ways and places in which we experience the dissolution of one thing into another come to us as mysteriously as they leave us. Like the beach. Each receding wave pulls pieces of the shoreline with it, but it comes right back, bringing something new. My grandmother, struggling through the sand with her chair and bag of old bread for the seagulls, could never get to a beach fast enough. The sun glinted off the bedazzled sequins of her "go-to-hell" baseball cap as she pointed to the perfect spot ahead and motored on.

I remember watching her swim her last swim in waist-deep ocean waves that began to feel more relentless to me with each passing minute. They unhinged her balance, tossed her, and challenged her strength in a way that kept her from entering any deeper. She had lost her husband earlier that year; the beach we were on was a piece of their life together and their memories, so I sat back and waited until she slipped and rolled under the surface. Feet in the air, she pushed against the undulating water, once, twice, and in a spray of water, her head emerged and she righted herself in shallower water. She coughed and whooped and cackled in delight. I was halfway to her before I turned back to my chair. Not quite a widow myself yet, somehow I still knew that she wouldn't come out of there until she was good and goddamned ready.

________

"Daddy's energy didn't go away," my four-year-old said, "it just got invisible." He was setting up an opposing army, a horde of little plastic green soldiers, on the carpeted staircase of our new house in town. I was drinking wine.

"You seem sure about that," I said. I'd been walking around that house for weeks, dumbfounded that I never saw my husband anywhere. No echoes. No imprints. But how could there have been? He'd never set foot in here.

"Yep," my son said. Then, "Watch this—" And Hulk appeared from behind his back and smashed both armies to smithereens.

I filled my wine and walked out to the garage for a cigarette.

I had moved the kids to town to heal. A place called Lake City. I traded in our 125-year-old farmhouse for a house that was nearly brand new and easier living. Vaulted ceilings, not cracking plaster and lath. Attached garage, not one that had been converted into a chicken coop. A landscaped yard with river rock and nursery trees, not the wild, misshapen results of natural selection. A short concrete driveway at the end of a paved cul-de-sac, not a long...