Excerpt from “Betwixt,” the eighth essay in a series of fourteen in my forthcoming book Going Nowhere: A Sonnet in Essays
Betwixt
“threshold (n.) Old English þrescold, þærscwold, þerxold, etc., “door-sill, point of entering,” a word of uncertain origin … The first element probably is related to Old English þrescan, either in its current sense of “thresh” or with its original sense of “to tread, trample.” The second element has been much transformed … suggesting its literal sense was lost even in ancient times.”
At 118 dog-years, Ernie possessed the right to stand in the doorway like a cat, contemplating liminality.
Seven doorways pierce these walls. These make the house porous, a Schengen zone of in and out. Curtainless windows open out into treetops or a slope covered with ivy, eye-level with wrens and squirrels. The screened porch straddles outside and in: wrens use the pet door to gather dog fur from the rug for their nests. Sometimes they fly through the French doors and demonstrate their intention to nest in the bookcases, say between Annie Dillard and Bernard Moitessier.
***
On the edge of writing something new, hesitating, paused, unsure whether to charge into it, or back out of it, I often resort to etymology. The Oxford University Press blog about the word “threshold” includes a photo of Hadrian’s Wall, snaking across bare green hills as far as the eye can follow, with a caption that tells us the Romans’ word for threshold was limes, from which we derive lintel, limit, liminal.
Some places have sharp borders: a concrete wall topped with razor wire. Others exist as a liminal zone: a roadless forest of pine and birch, snow-dusted, 300 miles wide. Unbreached except by snowshoe hares and owls. But the sky above all borders is a liminal state: equally blue, equally grey, equally crowned with lofty cumulonimbi, north and south.
***
My old friend’s last letter to me described his thoughts about retirement: that the future stretched before him like the long Atlantic beach at Sauveterre, where we swam together when we were young. I can’t see around the farthest bend, where the threshold between sand, water and sky is indistinct, he wrote. But I have a feeling it’s going to be beautiful. A few weeks later, he died—his heart, fittingly enough, for he led with his heart, following its direction, and using its capacity profoundly until it literally broke. My letter responding to him had arced across the Atlantic, passing over that beach. It arrived a day too late, and sat unopened in his mailbox, in that liminal space where our friendship had thrived for nearly forty years.
***
The phone rings: I am asked to take a political survey. As the survey questions enter specific territory, it becomes increasingly frustrating. First, it’s obvious that the questions are subtly engineered to derive favorable opinions about right-wing hot-button issues like immigration and terrorism. Even more disturbing, the young woman posing the questions obviously has no idea what or who she is asking me about:
Do I approve or disapprove of the job “Meetsch MeekunnELL” is doing?
What about “NunCEE PELoosigh”?
After asking her to repeat several questions, I ask, “How do you not know the pronunciation of these names? They are on TV a thousand times a day!”
She replies, “I am Asian resident.”
So the anti-immigrant faction has hired a company in Singapore or Taiwan to ask me if I favor building a wall to keep Mexicans out of Arizona. The medium is the message; I can only imagine how furious this questioner would make someone already inclined to hate immigration and global trade.
Across the false line we draw between one group and another, between other and self, reality floats untethered as a hawk, clear-eyed.
***
I dreamed about walking down the road and finding a great open space of sunshine where shade should have darkened the way. I said to my companion—someone liminally present, without identity, maybe just my own shadow — there should be three big poplars here. But their great silvery bodies were gone, and the rustling applause of hand-shaped leaves, gone. Three wide, flat circles of white wood in a snowfall of sawdust lined the road.
The phone woke me from that dream and, still half-asleep, I learned that my stepdaughter had … how did he put it? Not “died,” but “passed” or “gone” like someone stepping through a door. In her case, though, the threshold was not so clearly defined.
Death slams like a screen door when someone steps off his bicycle and drops to the pavement, felled by a coronary. But a brain cancer patient traverses that 300-mile boreal forest. You lose sight of her slowly among the monotonous landscape of flat snow and 10,000 identical trees. She begins to blend with the vertical trunks, like marks of days counted off, a year, two, losing language, losing shape, merging with the featurelessness so gradually that it’s hard to say in the last few days or hours if she is still here. Or elsewhere.
***
Some of the sweetest hours in recent years have been spent in the henhouse; often on summer afternoons when a stormfront catches me unawares, head down in the tomato patch. A wave of wind will suddenly slam into the trees on the ridge, the slim poplars bowing and swaying dramatically and then, far off but racing towards me, the drumming of coming rain, battering the treetops from the ridge on down. A thousand feet from my own shelter, I duck through the henhouse door and sit on one corner of the perch. The free-ranging chickens don’t seem to mind rain; they take cover under the rhododendrons or, if they happen to be near the house, on the patio furniture, like comical garden party guests. In the coop I am alone with a mother hen or two and maybe one girl busy laying an egg. The rain hammering the tin roof and streaming from the eaves makes the dim space even more a world unto itself. Responsibilities of garden, house and office drown in peace. Just us chickens.
The layer pants like she’s practicing the LaMaze method; all her feathers lift subtly away from her straining body. Then, a soft clunk and she settles down to rest, first peering under her breast, arranging her production just so with a palpable sense of accomplishment.
The broody mothers sit motionless, flattened out over their precious eggs, a dreamy look in their eyes. If the hatch date is near, and the storm not too noisy, I can hear chicks peeping inside the shells, or tapping to begin their exit. The mother chucks softly to them, a low murmur of encouragement. I share her patient yet tense vigil, teetering on the perch between joy and sorrow, birth and death. So much can go wrong: out of nine eggs, usually only five or six, sometimes fewer, yield healthy living chicks. Sometimes they go wrong early, and the egg is a warm little tomb for a half-formed bird. Sometimes they make it right to the end but are too weak for the heroic struggle it requires to emerge from the egg. The mother can only sit motionless, wide-eyed, completely focused on the drama taking place underneath her. She neither stirs nor eats in those last crucial hours and holds herself just so, to keep from pressing down on the cracked egg and new hatchling. I have sat through the hours with them, understanding more than they realize the desperate balancing act that is every birth, human, animal or bird. Sometimes the hen is forced to make a terrible choice, to leave a last egg unhatched because it prevents her from caring for the ones already two days old and jumping out of the nest. Once I have known a hen to deliberately smother a tiny chick—the eighth one to hatch—who did not seem to be growing. She had tried for two days to mother both Octavia and the other seven and she just couldn’t manage it. The next morning, Octavia had been trampled to a silky black rag and Fanny had a grim look in her eye.
They love their chicks—there’s no other word for the tender care they provide. But motherhood is full of pain as well as pleasure, a compendium of moments: rapture, terror, boredom, fury, tenderness. No mother is exempt. I’ve seen a hen—Suzy—who lost a chick to a deformity on the second day of its life—stand over the place where it had last been alive and shelter that spot from a thunderstorm with her body and her wings. Who could tell if that was rain or tears on my face, or for whom they were shed?
***
My young friend Amory, reading my manuscript, frowns. “Why is there a dead chicken in the middle of this chapter? That shouldn’t be here.” I agree. I disapprove heartily of dead chickens. I prefer them bossy and plump, fluffing their feathers, preening themselves, pecking up grain and talking all day to me and amongst themselves. And yet—
When we choose to live our lives in the country, alongside or among the lives of animals, death is always hovering nearby. Our lives are long; theirs are short. Dangers abound. In my long sojourn here, I’ve lost so many of these daily companions, from the nesting phoebe whose fledglings were killed by a rat snake to our handsome dapple grey horse who slipped and fell in an ice storm and had to be put out of his misery. I’ve outlived at least six beloved dogs. The saga of hens, chicks, roosters, foxes, raccoons and hawks is a tapestry of joy and grief. Every time I check on the health of the bees in the hives, despite my exaggerated care, somebody gets smashed.
And now, I am aware of a shadow of death that begins to pass over, one that may extinguish companion animals and plants even before I have met them. As spring and fall shift, and the conditions of temperature, rainfall, and daylengths no longer match up, desperate disjunctions arrive. Quietly, subtly, the meeting of mayfly and hungry migratory bird may fail to happen. The bloom and the butterfly who depends on it may miss each other by a mile or a month. Many of the moths that used to swirl beneath my porch light, drawing toads to their nocturnal smorgasbord, seem to be missing. The toads are fewer, smaller.
But what is the alternative? I wouldn’t want to live without the knowledge and joy these lives bring. And therefore I must also live through the sorrow, striving to prevent as much suffering as I can. Knowing my efforts are pathetic. Feeling, with each unhatched egg, every missing birdcall, the way the hinge between beauty and grief works, every folding and unfolding expanding my aching human heart. I don’t believe there is such a thing as feeling too much. I think we got to this pass by feeling too little.
