At the Window

          Today, in late June, late morning in Southeast Wisconsin, I sit at our kitchen table and look out at a panoramic scene from two stories high. Surrounded on three sides by glass, I face forward in a ladder-back chair, padded cushion behind me to comfort my seventy-one-year old bones. I sit as captain in the lookout seat, much as I did in the past. Although it was a different house, without all the windows, there were the same six chairs, the same cherry table. The place we gathered for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for games, algebra and English homework, for reading out loud to the children. Today it is used similarly—reading out loud to each other from my Times and his Wall Street Journal, writing poetry and prose. We play games of Scrabble and Canasta, and enjoy most of our meals at this table even with extended family.
          This is where morning begins. With a large, faded Brewers cup and New Orleans roast, I awaken to who I’ve become during the night. I feel very much a blank slate, not fully cognizant and without direction until I have sat here for a while, simply looking out these windows to the large cedar deck, the feeders that hang 20 feet off the ground, and then beyond to ancient oaks and hickories that dot the slope to the water. I inhabit myself much like the sun when it first rises. It’s not a smooth glide into the sky, but operates more like our dimmer switch does. There is a full stop between clicks before the sun moves up another notch, and spreads more light. My sky slowly changes color, fills with billowing Van Gogh clouds or striated wisps. Sometimes it remains undercover. Are my leaves fluttering, blowing, or quiet?
          I take a sip of coffee.
          I note that raccoons foraged during the night, smeared grape jelly all over the railing. The resident ravens have pilfered the fallen seed, pawed the hummingbird’s feeder to the ground, inebriated on nectar. No squirrels that I can see, though sometimes they are still curved around a feeder, oblivious until I open the door. I often feel curved around the night like a squirrel. Only when I sit up and begin to notice what changed while I was sleeping does my emotional gauge begin to register.
          This morning, for example, I was not aware of anxiety until I had absorbed more of the morning. It is 90 degrees again—14 days in a row—everything is in motion. Wind orchestrates a colorful symphony. Red nectar sprays from the hummingbird feeder (just refilled). Niger and sunflower seeds look like black rain blowing sideways. Water sloshes over the sides of the blue birdbath on the deck, and the green dervish of trees spins out twigs and leaves, an occasional limb.
          The lake, even with its low water level, roils. The sky races by in its mirrored reflection. The grosbeak and cardinal peck each other, mouth-to-mouth, feathers ruffled. Again and again they come at each other until the grosbeak relents and moves to the other side of the feeder. Even the birds are touchy in this heat. They alert me to my own unease, and to the inertia that has bothered me lately.
          Twenty-five years ago, these wooded three acres held rock, trees, water. On a limestone shelf, the land was as it had always been. Across the lake were wetlands. Shorebirds built nests, raised their young, and still come today, but in smaller numbers—geese, herons, hawks, and ducks. Fish were more plentiful. Native Americans once hunted and fished here and the name of the street we live on, Rockwood Trail retains the sense of a dirt trail through woods, following the twists and turns of the lake.
          We built our home here to be part of this. We wanted to be respectful, yet didn’t feel guilty taking what we wanted. We cut down the minimum of trees and the house rose brick by brick. We wanted a low profile home, wanted it to partner the land like the Frank Lloyd Wright homes we’d studied in Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Spring Green, Wisconsin. Although we had decided on high ceilings, the rest of the home is like a prairie home—natural oak, brick and stone from Wisconsin quarries, glass, glass everywhere. It is the inside-out home we imagined with big open spaces.
          When I look outside now, the wetlands on the other side of the lake are gone. After years of fighting for the land, developers won. A certain irony in that we did the same thing—we too wanted a room with a view. The new homes are set back farther from the water than ours, but are now part of our winter scene. When trees stand stark and black against the sky, I notice the amber lights at dusk, soft and welcoming, but those same lights make my husband think that someone behind them may see me when I walk undressed in front of our window. Does it matter?
          Thinking of change, I remember how my husband took Zachary fishing on this lake. He was eight or so, and didn’t like it as much as he thought he would. They returned early. The water was scary. But that didn’t stop him from talking about their boat trip. He had overcome fear just to go. Zach had earned his bragging rights. And now he is gone, dead at fifteen from mitochondrial disease. Still, I can still hear the shouts of pleasure from that boy. Even now I hear his laughter, his sister’s, as they chased each other back and forth on this deck. I see him watering the petunias in their old rickety wood barrels with Grandpa’s help, and then the bang of the screen door to the gazebo.
          Attached to the deck is a cedar walkway that connects the house and the gazebo. Zachary loved that wooden bridge, and the “tree house” as he called it. So it is—supported on cement pylons, in the middle of a green maze of trees. Zach and his brother Sam would go inside the “house” and spy on the squirrels. At eye level, there was a nest, and they could watch the babies, the moms and dads.
          For Sam, it was always the birds that fascinated. And the birds came—chickadees, scarlet tanager, orioles, robins, blue joys, hummingbirds, sparrow, finches, canaries, cardinals, and many more. Both boys enjoyed watching Grandpa fill those feeders from the deck. He had rigged up an aluminum pole with a hook on the end. He’d swing a big arc and into the air the hook would go, latch on to the empty feeder and bring it down to the deck. The boys would help fill them. Then Grandpa would swing the full feeder back into the air, and slide it onto the tree. Afterward, a short-lived water fight ensued, the shrieks and laughter still bouncing out there. They didn’t just hose down the deck, but sprayed each other until they were soaked.
          As Frank hoses the deck down today, everyday, I wonder if he does so unconsciously—the deck doesn’t need it. Maybe he thinks of them too. For Sam is gone now as well, only seven-years-old when he died from the same disease as Zach.
          I watch small sun-filled finches on the tall feeder hang on as they swing in the wind. I just counted ten. Their feathers blow and stick straight up, like Sam’s hair used to do. His hair was that color.
          With refills of coffee, I have begun writing this down, so many colliding emotions as I look and write, look and write. In between I take applesauce with the enormous amount of pills that help keep me alive. I live with the same disease as the boys. The same disease their mother is dying from. Only I am in relatively good shape. I can still walk distances, do yoga and lift weights. One of the side effects of the disease though, loss of hearing, remains a huge challenge. I had been a concert pianist and harpsichordist as a younger woman, but I cannot even hear most of my CD’s, or the tone of the piano keys much above middle C. Music is a jumble of noise. Going to a theater, whether a play or a movie, has become an event of the past. Unless there are sub-titles my brain cannot process the different voices. With intense listening, I can hear a single melody line if there isn’t too much orchestration, a lecture if I’m in the first row, and most of the time, Sam’s birds.
          The oriole zooms in on his hazardous orange-roofed house, hops down to indulge in orange and grape jelly. How Sam would have loved that. One time, as we sat together on the sofa, I said I was sorry his hamsters had died. Perhaps my eyes watered, but what I remember is Sam putting his chubby hands, one on each side of my face, saying, Don’t be sad Gramma. I’m going to go where the hamsters go, but it’s a good place and my tummy won’t hurt. I will get to fly like the birds.
          A brown flowerpot rolls from under the table on the deck in widening spirals. From around the corner, the wind carries a twig of sweet potato leaves, the bright -spring green momentarily air born, and then dropped without ceremony. I watch in fascination as the pot rolls back, the leaves blow forward, until the clay pot flattens the leaves. Back and forth it rolls, as if on a mission, before it takes a bigger arc and crashes below. It seems an apt metaphor for my interior landscape—an empty pot, my leaves steam-rolled flat. I am restless, like that, unsettled, and without direction.
          I pause here, wondering…why empty? We have so much. I pour another cup of coffee, walk around before I come back to my chair with a surprising question—is too much the problem? Overwhelmed with stuff, I’ve lost my way? It’s true that possessions do not fill me like they once did, and the house is too big, too many rooms we don’t use. I begin to list in my notebook some of the reasons we have not downsized—good furniture, an art collection, harpsichord, a concert grand piano. I cannot write fast enough: Gramma’s china and sterling silver, the rocking chair my great, great grandmother used to rock her babies in, my mother’s hand-knit sweaters, some of which I’ve had since high school. Oh, and not least the library that long ago over-flowed into every room in our home. My pencil stops in mid-air. Our very life buries us alive.
          There’s also worry about my father who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and lives so far away, worry about my daughter growing sicker each day. Anxiety about getting old. These big changes are like limestone—formed undercover, over a period of time, silent. Permeated by weather out of my control.
          We built this house with hope that it would be filled with grandchildren. In our forties when we married, we foolishly thought love would over come any problem. Frank’s parents, mine, all seven children enlivened the house with spouses and girlfriends, but like age itself, the circles became smaller and smaller. Adult children with their own lives, parents dead, a son dead, Zach and Sam, and my father’s Alzheimer’s. Three grandchildren we seldom see because of divorce and differences. The last big Thanksgiving celebration was two years ago. Only our granddaughters were there.
                                                                                …

          When our small family still sits around this window, we always enjoy the deck and the gazebo. Not that long ago we saw a deer swim across the lake, all of us crowded together to watch its progress. And one Thanksgiving, fifty turkeys marched up the back slope. But today, it is too hot even for geese. They are sprawled next to the lake. Unmoving.
          I think how different it is now, my own circles narrowed by deafness and the lack of energy. I no longer get up early and walk. It takes me a couple of hours to really fully engage, so early morning anything is generally out. I no longer schedule a lot of activities in one day, generally try and limit it to one. Before I could give two and even three tours in a row at Ten Chimneys just a few miles from here (the theater home of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane), and still see friends in the evening. Conversation and the attention it takes to hear, tire me out. I do not attend group gatherings. The cross current of conversation forms knots I cannot untie.
          But here at my window, I am whole in a way that pleases me. There is peace watching nature’s ever-changing scene that helps me make sense of myself—the mood changes, the feeling less at times that is so debilitating. Here, in the destruction and healing of nature, I become more intimate with myself. Perhaps it is the one on one—taking time to absorb winter’s quiet, or spring’s budding, or like today, watching the myriad ways wind gives expression to the uneasiness inside me. I get to know myself in a way that was not before possible. Serious illness limited, but also extended my boundaries. The silence that keeps me from luncheons and movies has also given me this time and privacy to grieve loss while still allowing the small daily pleasures to gain entry. Here, at the window, everything becomes one of a piece. And at the best of times, there is nothing if not gratitude—just to be alive.
          I think of my father, ninety-four years old. It is his love of birds, of nature itself that continues to live in me. He watches in a similar floor-to-ceiling window in a facility he never dreamed he’d live in. Does Dad notice or miss his house? Outside his door there are ponds, a small stone bridge, large trees full of birds. His neighbor feeds hummingbirds. Every morning now he walks outside to the bridge and feeds the fish. He is sure they know when he comes.
          I think of us, each at our separate windows, and wonder what he thinks at this turn of events as he lives more and more in the shadow of Alzheimer’s. He will not see the change of season as I do, living in Sun City West, Arizona. Instead, he will experience monsoons, wind and driving rain. In Wisconsin, I will experience the changing color of fall, burning leaves, and shorter days. Eventually I will see skeletal burrs and knots, the ridges and damaged limbs of trees. I will see leaves fall, turn brittle, and finally blow away. I will live with the death of autumn, and will realize that silence is an old friend, for deafness has taught me this. I now know beauty in crooked and bent spines of trees denuded of any covering, as I lose one by one my own protective masks. I think of winter differently, see ice on the pond, snow- covered firs, the clever way that cold and snow clean everything up and wipe the slate clean. Most important, sitting here at this window has made me aware emotionally, not just intellectually, that everything has a season—my seasons of motherhood, student, teacher, performer, and this last season of old age braided with old love and writing. And each season brings with it something we would not have had, had we not accepted what came before.
          I can rage at what happens with old age, but in seeing the lake flood over its banks, two grand and ancient oaks that had to be cut down from disease, a bird that has flown into the window, I know we are all subject to the same deterioration, even destruction. All the raging in the world does not stop time’s loosening.
          Learning to live with age is a lesson in humility, and not easy to swallow even though inevitable. Seventy-one, and peripheral.
          The elderly in our culture are simply not seen. Or if they are, they are often seen as less. Last week at the gas station, the machine would not take my credit card. The attendant came out with an attitude. He kept saying I can’t understand how anyone would have trouble with this. It’s So simple, repeated enough times that I’d wished I had gone elsewhere. In restaurants, the young waiters are often condescending in the way they address me like a child. Excessively polite, over-enunciating, in case I don’t get it. Or worse, just uninterested, not attending the table at all, as if they had better things to do.
          In the past, I would have been furious or made some retort to the guy at the gas station, but I believe that sitting here as often and as long as I do has taught me the importance of space—how the quick response is not always the best way, how silence can be life-affirming. Waiting for a hummingbird to show up, or watching a red-tailed hawk for what seems like forever, allows me to hear myself, to sit with my emotions, with loneliness, isolation or like this morning, anxiety. And from the vantage point of the window, the world outside transforms these emotions into both connection and surrender.
          There were times when I thought the house might pass from generation to generation as children and grandchildren always enjoyed this place large enough to roam in, nature surrounding them, and the sense of contentment found here. It is a soothing home, the large kitchen and its windows. The binoculars, extending our individual range, are often in use—we vicariously live through the person in the canoe, or the fisherman on the lake, even the youngsters sitting on one of the huge boulders, laughing and pushing each other.
          This will not remain a family home. Our children have moved on, and this home has fulfilled its mission as respite —as time out, an interlude, but too far away from the highways, the city, the hospital where my daughter spends one day a week in the infusion clinic. Someday, a stranger’s eyes will look out these windows. Perhaps they will hear echoes, wonder what the people were like that lived here.
          For now, watching the seasons pass by the window, knowing the staying power of lake and trees, gives me a more solid under footing. The deer, raccoons, geese, the countless songbirds and winter dwellers will change as I do, but I sense they will always be here, though different.
          The window continues to be my gauge, my solace, inspiration and despair, my touchstone of time past and time present. How barren to even think of writing without it. Even today in high wind and heat, the empty pot and crushed sweet potato leaves, is affirmation—despite all that is broken.

Mary Jo Balistreri has two books of poetry published by Bellowing Ark Press, and a chapbook by Tiger’s Eye Press. She is presently working on a manuscript of personal essays. Widely published and recipient of many awards, Mary Jo also has six Pushcart nominations and three Best of the Net. Associate editor of Tiger’s Eye Press, she is also a founder of Grace River Poets, an outreach for women’s shelters, schools, and churches. Please visit her at maryjobalistreripoet.com