Little Spectacle Lake, Allegan MI. Photo taken by author.
Two days ago I drove an hour south to pet sit for a veterinarian friend of mine. She has eighteen animals. Seventeen cats and one dog. My friend has a heart that will not allow her to give up on anything living, and so her menagerie consists of animals with varying degrees of disability and need. The dog is just old.
She took two of them on vacation with her: a paralyzed cat who requires around-the-clock care and the elderly dog she refuses to travel without. That left me here with sixteen cats at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a house that does not belong to me, with a small inland lake waiting quietly in the backyard.
Upon arriving and meeting the animals I felt a bit panicked that I would not remember everyone’s names and needs. I even made myself notes with descriptions of each animal. I am visiting someone else’s life and I want to get it right.
By evening, after everyone was cared for and my duties to them were done, I wrapped a coat around my shoulders and stepped out into the night air. I walked slowly to the edge of the water and settled into a chair.
The sun seemed suspended between the darkening sky and the dense trees lining the opposite shore. It was the very time of day when the sky becomes something more than sky. When color dissolves into feeling. When edges soften.
I closed my eyes for a few moments, listening as the night gathered around me. Small splashes in the water. Birds singing goodnight to one another. Announcing, perhaps, they had lived another day. Rustling in the tall grass to my right, where I had been told the deer would eventually make their way to the water.
The sun had disappeared behind the tree line when I opened my eyes. The colors had deepened into something I always wish I could recreate in paint and never quite can. In those colors I felt Becca draw near. She was a part of them somehow. Her laughter alive inside them.
A smile formed on my lips.
There you are, my sweet girl.
Then, somewhere from far behind me, I could hear geese calling into the deepening evening.
I heard them before I could see them. The melancholy calls drawing nearer. I tilted my head back so I could watch them pass overhead. They appeared in a straight line. A few dozen of them suddenly above me, moving across the still water.
Something in my chest ached then. Not the sharp ache of absence, but the longing ache grief leaves behind. The ache of loving someone whose voice you no longer hear.
And yet, my smile grew.
It felt, somehow, as if Becca understood this kind of longing. As if she moved somewhere inside the beauty of the evening and ached gently for me too.
Their calls were lost to my ears before I no longer saw them. Their shape remained a little longer. Then, that too, was gone.
Night seemed to fall quickly after they disappeared, as though they had pulled the plum-colored sky in behind them.
The birds had finished their songs by then. The lake quieted. Evening grew still as it accepted the night.
I sat there for a few minutes longer, wrapped in the hush of it all. The water darkening. The last color leaving the sky. Somewhere in the grass to my right, something moved softly toward the shoreline.
Then, eventually, I accepted the night too.
I stood and made my way back toward the house where sixteen cats waited for breakfast and medicine and reassurance in the morning.
And I thought about my daughter.
For years, I imagined her reaching for beauty. Chasing it somehow.
I no longer imagine her reaching for beauty.
She is made of it.
Words Can Express 