Keeping The Rhythm
There are times in life, when you just step up to play your part, fulfill your role to the best of your ability, knowing that there has been no rehearsal. Moreover the role is not one that you would’ve happily chosen.
We are in Eagle River, Wisconsin for a few days. Laura’s aunt is in her final days of struggle with liver cancer. We came to spend time with her and with her son and daughter in law. This afternoon we will go with her to the hospice care facility. She will leave her home, Ridge Top Farm, for the last time. She related to us last night with tears how hard this would be for her because the home-place is a part of her. There are memories of a life with Kurt, and the horses which they both loved that occupied the barn and pasture a short walk up the hill from the house. Memories are attached to the home place. Later this week with her niece, my wife, they will sort through the old photographs. Laura will take notes.
The five of us sat together in the living room after dinner and watched an old episode of Gunsmoke. Tall manly Marshall Dillon is the strong, reassuring father-figure for barely civilized Dodge. The antagonists are cartoon-like, unstable, ignorant predators, disconnected to the chaos and the sorrow their violence visits upon the majority of their fellows. As always all of this is somewhat true to real life.
Watching the program our concentration was momentarily diverted by a comment by Shari, “There’s the fox walking along the edge of the lake.” I was too late to see it, but others did. Silhouetted against the fading light on the snow-covered lake, just beyond the pines at the edge of the shore, passed a fox.
I
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
excerpt East Coker, by T. S. Eliot
2 thoughts on “Keeping The Rhythm”
Metaphors abound in our lives. We can choose to make the connections, learn from them and grow in the process or we can ignore them. Everything we see, everything we do, hear, read, taste or feel can help us understand both the world around us and ourselves. The T. S. Eliot piece is a perfect addition to your observations about this time in your lives and the process if bidding farewell to a loved member of your family. Also a bit apropos of our loss of much of Notre Dame last night, crumbling from fire, but also time had taken its toll as well.
This we know; that our journey through life will offer something new each and every day for it is what we make of the new and how we accept the changes that imbue us with an ability to face the end. Best to Laura’s aunt.
Thank you.