Dialling Back

It's oranges I miss the most. Mandarin. Navel. Blood oranges, though I never did taste one of those. I would in a heartbeat now. I think of all the times I could have eaten one but didn't. Chose an apple, if anything, but mostly ignored fruit all together. Now I think of Christmas oranges tucked into the toe of the kids' stockings. I can see the two of them unhooking those socks from the mantel, stretchy woollen tubes with their names embroidered into the band around the top, Claire's name bright red, Hal's forest green. I see them seated by the tree exploring all the goodies Santa left. I watch them pounce on the tiny action figures, pull-back trucks, beanie babies, digging deeper, past the Christmas Smarties, Hal's favourite, and the marshmallow toasties Claire loves, till they reach the toe, the end of the line. The orange that no one will eat gets shaken out and left for me to scoop up and put back in the bowl with the unshelled nuts that won't be eaten either. Now I could eat a whole box of those sweet delights. If only.

Once, a long time ago, a friend said "what if you had to dial back your life a hundred years." I thought then, oh there's a poet for you, thinking of his war-torn homeland, how the destruction has set back the clock and stopped life as he knew it. But that was his story, nothing to do with me, and I didn't bother thinking about it at all. Then, wandering through a bookstore a name on a jacket front caught my eye. A book of poetry by my old friend. His poems spoke of barrel bombs and scorched olive trees, of love-lost parents and children, of dying jasmine trees. Each poem was a window into a world destroyed, my friend's breaking heart evident in every line. He'd made it home, so the jacket said. I like to think that whatever stopped the flow of power into my home stopped the war in his country. But who can know? 

I had just sat down at the piano when the power went off. Annoying but not the end of the world. Just for fun, Alistair and I were working on Saint-Saen's The Swan--le cygne, as Alistair would have it. I could hear him in his studio sawing away at the cello part, which fortunately carries the melody. I would have been practising the accompaniment, a mercifully simple line of mostly repeated sixteenth notes. On my electric piano. If there had been power. What could I do instead? It was summer. I'll go do some weeding, I thought. The day was clear, not a cloud in the sky, which did make the outtage odd in the absence of a storm. But in the country, where we now lived in our retirement, it wasn't entirely out of the ordinary. I grabbed my sunhat and garden gloves. It was hot, as it had been most of the summer. Nothing was thriving and it was so dry there weren't even mosquitoes. Which meant no dragonflies. I hadn't noticed any butterflies, so no caterpillars for the birds. It was worrisome in a vague, background kind of way. Nothing to do with me, though, if I'd even thought to notice. Now I can spend a whole day sitting with a bird book in my lap, slowly turning the pages to the American goldfinch who I carelessly called a canary all those years only because of its bright yellow coat. That seems so disrespectful now. To the rose-breasted grosbeak whose name I never learned even when it showed up on a white winter's day in all it's hot pink glory. Pine siskins, nuthatches, the different woodpeckers. I know them all by name, now that they never come by. 

I turned the hose on the garden, completely forgetting the power was out. It was only when the hose went limp in my hand and the water dribbled to a halt that I remembered. No electricity. Foolish me. I had drained the pressure tank and now there wouldn't even be water to fill the kettle for a cup of tea. Well, how long could it last? 

Sometimes now, when Alistair has the strength to put bow to strings, I will lean my forehead into his back. Even though I can hear the music, I feel like deaf Beethoven laying his head on the piano to feel the vibrations of his own compositions. I feel our lives, past and present, trembling along his bony spine, each piece of music a link to a moment in time. Recently he played a portion of Albinoni's adagio in G minor. Claire was a babe in arms when he was learning it. Through his spine, through my forehead, deep into my brain where memories are fresh as the day they were stored, I'm back with Claire's baby breath against my cheek, her head nestled into the crook of my neck, her little fist curled around my thumb. I hear the clatter of lego blocks, Hal sitting on the floor by my feet, searching for the best pieces to build his space ship. 

There is no end of possible scenarios, I suppose. The neighbours, in those early days, when we'd still get together to share the last of our rotting freezer foods, had ideas galore. The Russians with their cyber-attacking skills got most people's vote. They'd wait us out till we were all starving, then come in and take over the whole of North America. All we had to do was somehow stay alive long enough to offer ourselves up as serfs when the Russkies finally got here. There wasn't a peep of information coming to any of us, even to those who drove their cars as far as a half tank of gas would take them, saving the other half to get back with the news. No one learned a thing other than it all just stopped dead.

I've settled on a mass ejection from the sun. I think of that flaming ball as a wrathful deity, sending a bolt out of the blue so powerful, so destructive, that it knocked us right back to the stone age where we can't cause so much trouble. No satellites linking us to every dark corner of Earth. No way for us to talk to each other or pump oil, no GPS to guide us to where we don't belong. All fried in the coronal blast from Our Father of Life. What the lord giveth, he capriciously taketh away. 

I come into the studio where Alistair plays softly. He puts down his bow, stands, and takes me into his arms. All that's left of those long limbs is sinew, bone and drooping skin. I can feel the hardness of his fingers against my ribs. So little of us left, yet still our hearts beat on. "I'm out of rosin," he says, "I can hardly hear the strings at all now." I nod, my chin hitting Alistair's collarbone. If not for his sweater cushioning them, I swear our bones would clank. The end of music is the end of him, I know this to be true. And his end is my end.

We walk out onto the porch to catch the sunset. I watch the shadows lengthen in the yard and feel the chill of evening set in. I think in all those years of internet I never thought to research what a jasmine tree looks like. My friend's poems tell me their fragrance is divine.