Breathtaking

Pare things back to the breath, to the knowing, nothing extraneous, nothing not true: The rocks edging this Maine island are rough, the waves furling pewter and punctual, the trees bend without breaking in the wind, and the snow sits wet on the porch. But still there's a wisp of something I'm missing: a thread, a breath, time, a touch. Now let go and I'm drifting, sailing on a fine thread, trying to span the gap.

My mother sleeps in the next room. She is nearly ninety, her lungs a tangle of dried grass, prickly pine branches, and sawdust. She is weak and anemic, hardly able to move for lack of iron and air.

Look to the light and the air: blustery March day with fluky wind, errant, threatening, and it is my turn from a line of siblings to be there and take care. Savor the quiet between rounds of feeding her, reading to her, answering the same questions. Savor the time before the last time.

Ten years earlier, I arrived here at my mother's island home in the glory of summer, a few weeks pregnant and feeling anxious about the baby. I was too old. But I was eager to connect, to plan, to rejoice with my mother. It was my turn to need care.

She liked to say that she hadn't just given birth to each of the six of us; she had nearly bled to death every time, a bold exaggeration suggesting her irreverence. After two miscarriages, I wanted that swagger.

Not only was my mother exuberant, she infused the mundane with a sense of grandeur and drama. Just as every birth was a near death, everything she encountered grew more compelling through artful remembering and retelling, the invariable drift from the dreariness of fact to the vividness of fiction. There was exaggeration, even lying, but mostly a pleasure taken in the drama of the stories to be told.

On that visit, after hugging her hello, I noticed a jar on the kitchen counter. In the jar was a Pripet spider, colloquially named for the spider's home on the northern end of the island. A major figure in the town's folklore, the Pripet spider was recognizable by its size: it has a thick, long body, with a coat of brown fur and a narrow, pointed head. We had an influx of them into our house one summer, so much so that we began naming them. There was Greg, scooped up and taken out to the other side of the big field, and Vincent, so hearty and strong that he moved the plastic cup hastily placed over him clear across the room. I have never seen a Pripet spider run away. If one is spotted, it neither cowers nor hides. If things get dire, a Pripet Spider will jump—not a little hop, but a gliding leap so confounding that you can only reel back, dumbstruck.

My mother had put the spider in the jar to kill it, slowly and carefully, using rubbing alcohol poured over sawdust so that the spider would suffocate with its body still intact. She planned to wrap the dead spider in cotton, tuck it into a box and send it off to the Arizona–Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, where it would join dozens of other spiders in a giant display in the museum of arachnids from around the world. She would include a note, identifying type and genus and conditions of capture, handwritten in her eighty-year-old scrawl. She would be responsible for contributing a unique specimen. She would join the annals of science. She would leave a legacy.

It took a day and a half for the spider to stop breathing.

Now, ten years later, in the winter, our time together is so quiet. I patch her fraying sweaters, the ones she refuses to let go. This one, buttery beige cashmere with fat buttons, belonged to her mother, but the threads at the elbows straggle across holes. I sew an invisible running stitch with white thread, binding cotton to wool, the mending...