Binge-Reading A Secret Garden at Midnight
Prayer in time of COVID
[I really was reading A Secret Garden and thought of the characters older, and of our time, but still in the same emotional moment, Mary willing Colin to live and not being too gentle about it! Book-Mary never did learn to be patient, but she was still a little girl when we left them. Here Mary’s fitting in prayers around her workday, same as I sometimes fit writing around my workday. I’m not sure whether that’s a curse or blessing of our times.]
Evening: You are too sick and frail now to read this, but I write it, morning and evening, for you to read when you’re stronger. Causality works backward, I sometimes reckon. The future summons the past.
So, you know, from the future — today, now, whatever day it is when you read these words — I summon you.
Live! Live! Live because of frosty sunrises and hot tea under a quilt with the whole day to unfold beautifully before you. Live so I will have someone to share my thoughts with and you will have someone to share yours.
Live because even if you stay on this earth 50 more years you will not have taken away one second, one ounce, from death. Even if dying seems sweet, you lose nothing by living as long and as well as you can. The fair green country will still be waiting for you in all its fullness, in no way diminished by your tarrying here. There is only abundance.
Live because my greedy self likes waking up with you sound asleep clinging to me, shyness forgotten in primordial innocence. Live because every part of you, fingers, toes, taste, turns of phrase, is dear to me.
Live because no one else pauses for thought just your way before answering a question, live because of your gentleness and inexorability, live because who else can bear the weight of being loved so very much?
This is your last life, maybe, and you are tired of always coming back, but it is my first, perhaps my only one ever. I swear, sometimes I hear the days speeding away — zoom! — and I’ve barely gotten anything done, barely ever been loved in return, barely learned to do anything right.
Have mercy on me and wait a little while. Live!
Morning: Good morning! I skipped a bit of work on an errand to return my brother’s drill but mostly to go up on Missionary Ridge and look over the valley in the sunlight.
The Confederates defended the ridge, but the Union troops stormed the slopes and took the knoll a few hundred yards north of here. Now the park is marked by Union granite—so many dead and so far from home—but the cannons that overlook the valley recall the old Confederate line.
In thought I brought you with me. Look here, I said. Look there!
The gully there near where the Ohio and Minnesota Army markers stand was full of sumac, pokeweed, all kinds of overgrowth and bracken. I made a list: yellow leaves, red leaves, purple berries, purple flowers, red berries, white flowers the same shape as ironweed, on the same long bending stems, but I didn’t know what they were called.
Brown thrashers swooped and darted in the raggedy-leaved wild grape vines overgrowing the big pecan tree at the monument park. Such peace. Such a blue and gold sky. Such hazy, glimmering light across the valley. We live in the most beautiful place, you and I, the river valley and the long ridges running north to south, north to south. The horizon’s always a mystery: which rippling line is mountain, which is cloud?
I described everything I saw in my mind, bundled it up in thought, and sent it to you.
Hope you had a restful night and feel better. I am wearing a new long flowing brown dress and hoping fall stays warm a while longer so you can see it. No need to answer all this if you are tired. Imagine we have a quilt on the grass and you can lie there and dream while the soft air heals you.
Later still: I’m working and blinking back tears now and then but for some reason I’m also melting with desire. Uggg. Don’t worry too much about that part. Don’t worry so much about these big demands, either. Even asleep, even in that wretched state where pain prods you awake and exhaustion holds you half-under, your heart will discern your true course and, sure as groundwater, you will follow it.
Evening again: Going to class. I don’t know how you keep your days in procession, but for me it’s discipline—habitus, that’s a good word.
Last night between 11 and midnight I binge-read A Secret Garden, skipping ahead to find the scenes that follow the sick lad to wholeness. I knew it was a crush, of course, but didn’t realize until now it was prayer.
I’ll write to you tomorrow.
I always loved A Secret Garden thank you