Before Winter’s Solstice

Early this morning, I dreamed I was standing at my mother’s grave, down there in the flat delta where the cotton fields stretch like bolts of corduroy for monotonous miles. In my dream, I wanted to say some words to Mother, because I knew that she would be able to hear and understand me, but I could not bring myself to speak. There were leaves blown against her little tombstone with the hummingbird carved into its sleek surface, and they seemed to be telling me that it was all gone, my life and difficult relationship with that haunted little woman, that no matter what I might say to her, none of it would matter because she was truly gone, even if she heard me while I stood above her earth-hidden casket, and that I would soon be gone, too, and only leaves would remain, and the wind that would shape the piles of leaves would remain, and that someday I might hear her words to me as well, even though we will rest many miles apart in the sorrow-soaked soil. And as I stood there I knew with hard certainty that I would never return to her grave and that the leaves blown against the headstone would be the only things that I had ever seen that would remain with her after I drove away from that mean little county.

When I awoke with the alarm sounding, my throat was raw and my mouth cottony, and I asked my wife as she arose whether I had been snoring, and she said, “A little bit, right there at the end.” And her words rang in my head as I went about the early morning’s business, letting the dogs out and preparing their breakfasts. A little bit, right there at the end. The words, their content, their rhythm, their tone…they brought the sadness of my dream back to me and gave me that uneasy feeling that usually comes to me when I am trying to decide whether to attempt to please God, or to outwit Him, that feeling that inevitably changes into the sour realization that I can finally do neither, that He is either pleased with me or not, and that I can never outwit Him because I still don’t understand the rules of the game I’ve been playing for more than threescore years.

And perhaps the sadness of the dream came over me not because of my wife’s soft words, but because I knew without looking at the calendar that tomorrow is the winter solstice, and that the leaves are blowing even now, even as the low, glowing red wire of undeveloped rage hums up inside of me, the rage that I carry each day when I see the wicked triumphing and the meek being trampled and the average soul watching the whole sorry mess with too-avid eyes. All the silences and the questions either unanswered or addressed with pat, prefabricated responses. The days chill my very spirit.

Tomorrow is indeed the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and like the old, buried ones of my race, I will try to peer through the gloom and see the light just over the hill, the warm light of the sun and its life-giving, earth-thawing light, which comes around again as we spin around it in our wheels within wheels on this arc across the eternal black and spangled span of creation.

But for now, the leaves truly do remain, and my unspoken words remain, and some things truly are gone away from me.

~ S.K. Orr