Dorothy’s Urn

Abstract

Dorothy’s Urn Patricia Harman (bio) My husband is crying in his sleep again. In the morning, he won’t remember his tears; he won’t recall the grief that overwhelms him. After I hold him and tuck the covers around his neck I pad out to the living room. Outside fog shrouds everything. I stand at the windows, looking out through my reflection, to the bare oak and maple. White ghost woman in her white terry cloth robe, short graying hair, middle-aged flower child. Snow litters the ground in patches, circles the bottoms of trees like lace. I can’t see the Gazebo out in our yard. I can’t see the lights from the cottages on the other side of the cove. The mist is so thick it muffles even the highway noises, a half-mile away. There’s not a sound. How much of my life I live listening. When I step out of the house in the morning, I’ll listen for bird sounds, cardinals and robins and wrens. I’ll listen to music as I drive to work and the news on West Virginia npr. In the women’s health office I share with my gyn husband, I’ll listen to heart sounds and lung sounds. I’ll listen with my fingers to a woman’s breast, for lumps. I’ll listen with my fingers as I probe her body for swollen or tender ovaries. I’ll listen to what she tells me about her life, both sadness and joy, and I’ll listen for what she leaves out. My husband’s mother is dying. For weeks Dorothy’s been dying. On Saturday, just as I’m getting used to the thaw, it turns winter again. I wake surprised to see snow pouring down in small hard flakes; pouring like rain with no wind and no swirls. Already, the beehives, below the barren vegetable garden, look like small igloos. The pine trees are weighted with nine inches of white, their limbs pulled down toward the ground. By sunset, the snow stops, and the low heavy clouds are lined with red. On the porch, mourning doves gather to glean seeds that have dropped from the bird feeders. Eleven plump smooth gray birds waddle just five feet away from the glass door. I wander downstairs to Tom’s studio. [End Page 46] “What you makin’?” I ask as I stand in the doorway and watch my husband pull the soft pale gray clay up into a vessel, his broad shoulders hunched over the pottery wheel, his short hair silver in the fading golden light. “A cookie jar?” “It’s an urn for my Mom.” Tom gives me a sideways grin. “She requested it for her remains.” “A funeral urn? Doesn’t it make you too sad? Seems kind of morbid.” He shrugs. “No, not really. Well maybe a little, but I like doing it for her.” Tenderness of love. Too sad for me. Outside at the feeder a redheaded flicker picks through the millet. When he leaves, a downy woodpecker takes his place. There are chickadees, slate colored juncos, wrens, finches, and house sparrows; then a gang of grackle comes in like the mafia, rowdy brown and black speckled birds that gobble up the food, chasing all the smaller more docile birds away. On the turnpike from Pittsburgh to Toledo, with the polished urn wrapped in two peach-colored towels in my lap, we fly by snow-covered cornfields. Living in West Virginia, you forget that the earth is not, everywhere, wrinkled. Without mountains, the sky curves over us like a blue cereal bowl. Every exit across northern Ohio looks the same. There’s a McDonald’s or a Wendy’s with a service station, conveniently located at fifty-mile intervals. To the north the sky gets lighter, and you know that Lake Erie is out there. Grey water, crashing onto the break-wall of small tourist towns. When you pull off at a rest stop, sea gulls patter across the parking lot. We are on our way to visit Tom’s mother in the nursing home. Grandma Dorothy, once a miniature powerhouse, is now a...