October 14, 2008
Tuesday

Well let me tell you ’bout the way she looked,
The way she’d act and the color of her hair.
Her voice was soft and cool,
Her eyes were clear and bright,
But she’s not there.
          — Rod Argent, b. 1945
              English singer-songwriter

You must be wondering, Constant Reader, where is she? You haven’t gotten an update message in two weeks, and you wonder if you’ve fallen off the notify list. Goldengrove’s unleaving. Isn’t it time for Margaret to be sighing again over loss and change? You look at the list in your feed aggregator, and see that Markings is grayed out. She’s not there.

Yes I am, and this weekend, briefly, so was Lynn. Her workplace was closed yesterday for Columbus Day. She arrived Sunday morning in time for church, and we spent much of the afternoon and the dinner hour together. She went out with friends in the evening, and I had her favorite raisin bran muffins ready when she got up Monday morning. And in the afternoon we accomplished a task that was not the sole reason for her visit, but was something she’d mentioned a few weeks ago that she desired.

We packed up her Christmas ornaments and she took them home when she left. That is, she took them away from this house, her home from the time she was born in 1985, to the apartment in Lancaster where she’s lived alone and on her own since May, the place she now calls home.

“This is my tree,” she said, calling up a web page as we sat together in her apartment one early evening last month. I had time between events in Lancaster to have a light supper with her after she arrived home from work and before she went out to her aerobics class.  She seemed excited about having her own tree in her own home. The two years she lived with two other girls in an apartment near campus didn’t seem to count. They’d never put up a tree, and I don’t think she had the feeling of living in a never-ending Friends episode that she’d expected.

I keep all our Christmas ornaments in a tall chest in the living room. One or the other of us has remarked every year for the last several that we seem to have reached the capacity of the one deep drawer to hold what now number more than fifty boxed ornaments (twenty-five for the years Ron and I have been together, twenty-three for Lynn, plus some extras). I used to write “Lynn” or “R&M” and the year on the box, usually on the price sticker. Eventually the markings started to smudge and the stickers to peel off, and some of the boxes deteriorated or vanished. So I made two lists on loose leaf paper, and it was her own list that Lynn held yesterday, checking off each ornament as I pulled it from the drawer and placed it in a plastic storage tub.

She laughed at some of my notations. For some reason, I included a drawing of the teddy bear that was her first ornament. Beside “2002 — Lenox Skate-time Bear” I wrote “In memory of Sammy Skates.” She didn’t know what that meant, and I had to tell her about the animated plush skating bear Ron bought from some co-worker’s fund raiser when Lynn was three or four. You pressed a switch and the thing wobbled around to the tune of “The Skaters’ Waltz.” The floor covering in our kitchen was too textured for it to move smoothly, and anyway the placement of the battery compartment made it unbalanced, so it was always falling over. We might have still had it the next Christmas, but it soon disappeared. The demise of Sammy Skates saddened me not at all. But I did feel sorry that Lynn couldn’t remember him. What other memories of the very bright light she has been in my life have escaped her mind?

There were some tender moments, at least for me, in this culling and packing of ornaments. There was the wooden angel piece that was a gift to Lynn from a friend who died last December. I sighed as I laid that in the tub. We have two plastic ornaments celebrating Snuggle Bear, one from 1986, the year he became Lynn’s transitional object, and 1987, the last one the manufacturer of the fabric softener produced. I persuaded Lynn to let me keep that second one.

I put the list and the retained Snuggle ornament on the table in front of a window in my study. This table is something of a home altar. I have a candle there, and a Fontanini figure that represents the woman at the well, the bible story from which I continue to draw my deepest inspiration. This morning as I worked on my novel I heard laughter on the sidewalk in front of the house. I got up to look, and saw a little girl about three years old walking by, followed by her mother and their two little dogs. A small gust of wind came up, and leaves swirled down from the trees that have just begun to go loden to ochre to scarlet to gone. The child tried to catch some as they fell, shouting and twirling about with all the joyful energy her small body can hold.

I touched the Snuggle ornament and the list, and then looked around the room at the pictures of Lynn at various ages that I keep here.

Yes indeed, Goldengrove’s unleaving again, and I’m sighing over loss and change again. She’s not here, but she is where she needs to be, and what’s even better, she is who she needs to be. I can’t wait to see her tree.

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