If A Tree Falls....

I wake in the memory of my childhood, surrounded by the walls that house the echoes of my past. My mother's house is quiet this morning as it is every morning, the sounds of our former life here lost in the walls and ceilings of the rooms just as her memory of much of that life is lost to her. My feet reach the footboard of the bed, the same one I slept in as a child, the one that held me while I grew, and grew, and grew, a process I thought would never end. It did, but not until the mark on the doorframe was just shy of six feet.

My sister and I share this bed now. Not on the same nights, but it is shared space. Our space, sacred space that we sleep in with one ear open, one ear trained on our mother's room just as we did when our children were babies. An ear that will wake us to sound, any sound. A cough, a moan, our name. The sound we fear the most, the sound of her falling. We have not heard that sound but we know it exists.

If there is an up side to this disease, this silent erosion of a person, the erasure of our mother, it is that unpleasant events are soon forgotten. The five hours on the hardwood floor of her bedroom, the fall the next day that blackened her eyes, her face, her arms, her hips. The month of July spent in the hospital, Rehab and then the Nursing Home. The fall that brought us, my sister and I, back to this house, to my old room, this twin bed.

We are back but we are not alone. Much of the village that raised us, our children and now our granchildren still stands with us as we walk together. Walk as other families walk, slowly, gently toward the quiet. The quiet that steals from us. The quiet that removes one word at a time from our mother. The quiet we are helpless against.

It is quiet in my mother's house this morning. Quiet that contrasts sharply with the sounds of my house, my husband awake long before the rest of us, our grandson gliding into his mornings with sweet smiles and a gentle voice, our granddaughter slamming into hers with her mother's dread of morning clearly embedded in her genes and our daughter following them down the stairs, eyes almost open as she referees the start of the day.

If I relish this quiet, take time and wrap myself into it, is it a betrayal? Have I become the enemy's consort? Have I sided with the thief who steals my mother from us? These are the thoughts the quiet allows to surface. Thoughts that remain hidden behind the noise of the day, the noise of life, the noise of the creation of memories.

Hurricane Hanna will arrive today. I hope she is loud.