Life Like a River

 

from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry:


Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.

And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time. Toward the end of my life at Squires Landing I began to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me. That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in. Finally it wears in. Finally I realized and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would then not be my memory that I belonged to...

Some days, sitting here on my porch over the river, my memory seems to enclose me entirely; I wander back in my reckoning among all of my own that have lived and died until I no longer remember where I am. And then I life my head and look about me at the river and the valley, the great, unearned beauty of this place, and I feel the memoryless joy of a man just risen from the grave.

So many Fourths of July live in my memory.

Diving for pennies in the pool at Mayfield Country Club and cheering the big kids as they raced. Running around in a wet bathing suit and bare feet on the golf course after dark waving sparklers and catching lightning bugs in a jar.

Picnics at Whitford Woods, where my dad hunted and where we gathered sap in the spring with the Amish kids. Families seated on blankets around the small lake. Tweens strategizing how to get noticed by the cute boys, who were utterly oblivious to us. Paddling canoes and roasting hot dogs and marshmallows as our parents drank martinis and when dusk finally came they set off fireworks bought illegally just over the border in Canada.

Parades in the neighborhood as the children grew up. Scott Green, dressed in a kimono and coolie hat pulling my toddlers in a cart like a rickshaw. Grilling with the same group of friends and their children after chasing rockets in a cotton field.

What seemed to be endless Fourths at the Roberts' camp on Lake Bisteneau before we had the first thought of leaving all our friends behind to move to Austin. I imagine them all there today but with all the children grown and a new crop of children riding in the four-wheelers and behind boats on boogie boards. Ron will take credit for the ribs Betsy spent the week preparing...well, he will pull them off the grill. Then will he light the fireworks or will it be Trey and David? And the kids will fall asleep in the back seat of the car on the ride home.

One lonely day in my car driving home from Colorado with the few treasures I retrieved from the home I so loved in Telluride. The grief of having to sell that sacred place because we could no longer afford it. Allison Krauss on the radio singing on the Mall in Washington, DC.

And, oddly, today we spent a couple of hours in the basement looking through old stuff that has been stored too long and that needs to make way for the life we are living now, a life blessed with nine grandchildren so far and even one who lives in town and who has caused our living area to be stripped of every little tchotchke, which obviously we didn't need in the first place. These children are our reality and have no share of those memories, standing as they do at the beginning.

And so JB just got home with his 90-year-old mom, and Michael will join us, and among the four of us we will have a quiet Fourth. The Star-Spangled Music Fest was more than enough to sear this holiday in my memory, so we'll watch the concert on the Mall and the fireworks in Washington and over the Hudson and eat a wonderful dinner of pulled pork sandwiches with cole slaw and corn on the cob and lady cream peas and watermelon and apple-blueberry crisp.