Full Circle

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The wind was picking up. Bill turned on his lamp next to his easy chair, the room had darkened. He didn’t remember falling asleep. That happened often these days. Nod off in church, nod off watching tv… He used to tease his grandfather about his frequent snoozes, back when the idea of himself ever being that age was impossible. He stood slowly, his body stiff as he stepped out onto his back porch, gazing out onto the prairie.

Dark blue clouds moved quickly across the expansive sky, flashing lightening, long and jagged. Bill lifted his head and shut his eyes, feeling the wind whip around him. It felt alive, as if it had come to engage with him. Opening his eyes, he watched the tall grasses sway in unison and waves, turning this way and that, like a coordinated dance they’d planned to greet the storms arrival. The few trees dotting the landscape shook back and forth and up and down, twisting abruptly with the erratic shifts of the wind.

He loved when the land used its voice, made its presence known. He felt like he got to know it better each time it spoke up. He thought of the land as a woman, a woman full of range. She got quiet and still. Gentle and cleansing. Angry and harsh. At times merciful and other times merciless. He respected the need for all of this. A time for everything after all. She develops us this way, he thought. Demands a response in us. Most of what she did though, she gave. Endlessly, infinitely she gave.

There was a time, a very long time, when he couldn’t sit and listen. There was always something else, some other thing willed on him to do, something that had seemed more important.

He had missed this.

He felt the first flickers of rain on his arm. He breathed the scent of fresh dirt deeply as the drops of rain intensified.

Boom! Bill jumped.

He laughed. She had something she wanted to get off her chest today. He invited her to reveal it all. He was free to listen now.

All I’ve got is time, he thought. Seemed his whole life had been a series of chores, doing something that needed done. Work, wife, kids. He looked back over his whole adult life, and it whipped around in a frenzied blur of activity, so little of it belonging to him.

He and Evie had managed to send three fully functioning people out into the world. They were all doing fine, at least as far as he knew. They only called every so often and visited even less than that. No one had told him parenting would bring such little return on such a substantial investment. Eh, he was still glad for it though.

The rain was really pouring now, and he let it cover him. He felt entwined with her now, like part of the landscape.

Smiling, he remembered the children running around the yard with flashlights during a summer storm, gathering up nightcrawlers for fishing. They’d made a contest out of it, running and bumping into each other as they rushed to fill the bucket. He remembered that moment often, how happy and free they all felt, the rain washing away the sweat from a hard day’s work. Evie laughing from the kitchen window as she washed the dishes. It hadn’t really occurred to him then that it would ever change. It felt like things would just always go on being that way- the kids little, himself strong, his wife radiant.

Maybe she would have remained so too, if she could have caught a break.

  Evie had always reminded him of her collection of cacti. She'd grown up in an inhospitable environment, surviving on little, developing adaptations to manage. You could no more get close to Evie when she felt vulnerable than you could hug a cactus. He tried once and was left to pull the stinging barbs of her words out for a long time after. Still, he marveled at her strength and resilience. She stood unique and proud, like the saguaros they’d driven through on trip to Arizona. He had watched her looking intently out the window and wondered whether she was relating to them but knew better than to ask.

Looking down, he saw how the parched ground soaked up the rain, the change in the grass would be evident by tomorrow. If only it had rained like this the summer he had taken an over the road job.

It had been a mistake to drive a truck. He should have known better, but those were drought years. He’d lost the crop. He had to supplement. Jobs were scarce in rural Nebraska towns, and they were a good forty-five miles from the nearest one anyhow.

He could see her struggling when he came off the road for breaks. She was left with an awful lot- three kids, no family to help, the farm. He understood. He saw it as something they had to get through together, as temporary. She saw it as him abandoning her, fleeing to freedom, getting away from it all.

Eventually, she also got stuck on the idea of him being with other women out on the road, something he had never given her reason to entertain. Talking to her was no use. He longed to reach for her, get through to her, but when he tried, she swatted his hand away violently and looked at him with such disgust he had to turn his head to hide the tears that sprang to his eyes.

After years of driving, it became clear to him he would have to return home to stay, he had waited too long, though how they would manage he didn’t know. Her fury at his imagined affairs culminated one night on his arrival home in a frenzied attack, tearing at his face and hair, screaming her accusations and rage. It felt like bullets, one after another, tearing through him, leaving him full of holes. He thought they’d died that night.

He shivered in the rain.

They didn't though, die. As the old farm dog Buck, looking like death, had licked his torn flesh from his run in with the barbed wire fence and slowly healed into a quieter, humbler version of himself, so did they.

By the time the children moved on, they had settled into a quiet and comforting routine. She got him bananas and dried apricots. He brought her coffee. They sat together after dinner in their respective lawn chairs, sipping cider, old Buck at their side. They didn’t talk much. It didn’t feel like they had to.

One fall evening, she asked him to find her a sweater while she tore down the last of the season’s garden. He went to her closet and noticed a shoe box on the shelf with the lid half on. Curious, he brought it down. He was amazed to find it full of every card he ever gave her. The most recent, from her birthday a few weeks ago, lay on top. He carefully returned it and took Evie the sweater. When he continued to stand there, she looked up and asked, “What?” He opened his arms, and she entered them, her head falling to his chest, the way she used to do.

Years later, when she lay dying, she drifted in and out of sleep. He too had fallen asleep in the chair next to her when she whispered, “Bill?”

 He waited while she gazed at him.

“You didn’t cheat, did you?”

“Never, Evie. Not once.”

She had nodded, drifted back off, with a soft smile.

It was peaceful, her passing. Her face was smoothed of the worries she carried. She looked younger somehow. He’d kissed her and picked up the phone.

Now, wiping at the rain and tears, he welcomed the warmth of the sun returning as the rain slowed to a stop. The birds started to sing.

Evie.

A last, gentle wind wrapped around him, like an embrace.

He smiled.

Her range.

Full circle.

He wanted to be there for it all.

And he had been.