I just finished making my daughter’s bed. In the normal course of a day’s events, this would not be anything worthy of note, it’s something mothers do, a way of tidying up. What makes it something to write about is the mere fact that she was here for a visit, ten days’ worth. Now she’s gone, back to that place I find myself referring to as ‘home’. It just rolls off my tongue. That place she’s lived for three years now, the other coast. Sunny L.A.
This is home, too, always will be in that memory bank of hers, an odd image as I write but one so suitable to what we think of in terms of savoring and squandering. When she first left for college, back when the notion of her coming and going had a predictable rhythm, people would ask: how does it feel to have an empty nest? To which I quip, ‘My nest isn’t empty, it’s just a little quieter.’ Of course, the dog was very much alive and barking and keeping me busy and entertained in the way dogs do. And the dog’s presence – what she added to that place we call home – was something my daughter counted on more than anything else during holiday or summer breaks.
The dog is gone, a year now, though not my daughter’s relentlessness about my (a.k.a.) her need for a replacement. There is no replacing a dog that lived with you for thirteen years. A dog with her very own personality that any other dog would forever be measured against. There is, though, some sense in some people’s minds that home, by definition and/or suggestion, needs a dog.
My home does not need a dog as much as it needs a daughter. Her cosmetics bag and toothbrush on the vanity in the bathroom. Her clothes sprawled on the floor of her bedroom. Her complaints about the thermostat being too low. Her nestling under a fleece blanket to watch TV, flanked by that duo she used to call ‘’rents.’ Her need for me as she falls asleep, not feeling so great.
Her unmade bed.
* * *
A writer puts down words, intent on expressing some urgent thought, some deep reflection. A week has passed since my daughter went back to that other home of hers. A week during which I read Joan Didion’s exquisitely poignant Blue Nights. Why I would even choose to read a book ostensibly about a favorite writer’s recalling moments surrounding the life of her daughter, now gone, seems perverse. And yet it makes all the sense in the world. When we talk about mortality, she writes, we are talking about our children.
Now comes the wrap-up, the thought left unfinished.
I head into my kitchen, daylight nearing its end, the sky a twilight blue artists dream of. The moon, pearly yellow, a lone pendant on a chandelier of tree branches. I stand in front of the window, completely riveted by its commanding presence. Everything about this moon on this night, January 8, 2012 (a week since my daughter has gone back to that place I’ve come to think of as her other home), calls to mind a picture book I read to her when she was young, Happy Birthday, Moon. There is a bear, in this delightful story by Frank Asch, so entranced by the moon, he wants to give it a birthday present. Only problem is that he doesn’t know when the moon’s birthday is, or what to get him. He climbs a tall tree, to have a chat with the moon. No response.
Maybe I am too far away, thought Bear, and the moon cannot hear me.
Visit Deborah’s website here . . .
My son has asked me “Where is my sister?” Given that he doesn’t have one, it’s quite the existential interrogative for a person whose life revolves around Hot Wheels and superheros. Indeed, where is she? Such a loaded question from a boy who is apt to ask a thousand mindless ones.
