Frances Hider
Plain Sense
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things...
—Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things
1 … a summer day
In a distant corner at the bottom of our garden where home ground meets the yellow-flowered fields, late afternoon sun plays on the berry-laden hedgerows twined with oval pointed garlic leaves. Meandering here at the end of the day, I crush soft, pulpy wood bark underfoot and surprise a flock of sparrows—who, six seven eight or more quarrel and flutter up.
Ivy scouts among the tangled undergrowth and flushes an orange-beaked blackbird, then another. They squawk, flurry, dark wings skim bottle-green nettles and shake golden seeds from tall grass stems.
Our perambulations create a stir in the lives of others.
In the house, you sleep. Peaceful in a hospital bed with side arms and moving parts, white sheets and soft pillows. You, in a room of medicines and memories, the ever present and the errant past. A sliver of light slips through a chink in the blind to lie stark across your cheek’s pallor.
It’s six p.m. Each day fatigue wins—and you sleep.
In the hedgerow the sparrows settle. The air is clammy, ambient with outsideness, and a warm, feral muskiness, which hints at life passing. In the breeze long arms of wild seeding digitalis heavy with mauve trumpeting flowers wave one to the other. While you sleep, I lie on lumpy ground shaded by long grass moist from a brief summer shower. I too close my eyes but shun slumber.
Our bedroom, with its white sheets and medicine bottles, now accommodates two separate beds, yours and mine. The room bustles with people. There are four,
you say,
and by way of pointing, lift your head from the pillow and gaze into the distance, into the past.
You say,
can you see them? that man over there by the window and a very nice woman . . .
but the thought trails away before the others—persons three and four—
conjured up out of time, can drift into view.
I sorted the problem, you say.
And I realize, you are back at work dealing in the to-and-fro of hospital politics. You, the strong, confident, well-liked anesthetist I first met, silver-haired even then.
And, as if in answer to your question, I almost but not quite catch in the corner of my eye, a figure’s glimmer.
In the refuge of my dwam, I’m lulled by the scuttle and scratch of life in the undergrowth, the buzz of a bee in the fusty recess of a fallen tree, and the sweet scent of moist grass. But in the midst of respite, a thick earthy whiff of organic decay loiters on the warm air. Life festers. The soft skin of my nose crinkles, nostril’s flare. And a rotten vapor of dread seeps into my thoughts.
The course coughing call of a magpie, a black and white passerine delinquent, dissolves the vapor of my thought; but dread lingers . . .
In the bedroom the day has run its course, a night light glows, soft and low. Sleep beckons us both. Side-by-side on our separate beds we doze, Ivy asleep at our feet. At the witching hour you call out—troubled. You lift your head from the pillow and peer into the gloom. And then, sotto voce, address the other of your dream. The wisp of your voice is fluent. Conversational. I strain to hear, eager to know where and in which landscape past your thoughts have landed.
You cough and cough again, saliva catches your throat, tickles the epiglottis. I hear you choke. Panic. I extend an arm from my bed to yours, rest my hand on your shoulder, and let my words, softly spoken, quell the storm. The moment passes. The night passes. Fret remains.
By morning light you are quiescent but weary from the night meander. While I ready for the first chores of the day, your head sinks into the hollowed pillow, you doze mouth ajar, teeth caffeine yellow, endearing, a sliver of pink gum revealed.
2 … memory
On warm air swallows swoop long and low through the stable doors to reclaim their lofty nests. In May, for a day or two, whistling and calling, they loop in and out; rustle eaves, clear old feathers and last year’s bric-a-brac. Twigs, eggshell, cobwebs and fluff, memory held in debris clings to the edge.
Then silence.
But for the white, gloopy droppings on light fittings, rafters and the stable door—the only sign of their presence—the nesting swallows are hidden from sight.
Each morning I sweep the clean wood shavings to make the pony’s bed and pile the soiled flakes ready to remove. And I wonder if the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of bristle against concrete is a reassuring backdrop in the lives of the swallows and nestlings, as their calls and swooping flights are in mine?
Silence will greet me, when later I step in the house; when I pull off my boots, when a litter of soft, white shavings flit from my trouser crease to scatter on red quarry tiles.
Silence . . . yet I know you are there. Awake, motionless, tense, your eyes wide staring at a crack in the ceiling’s plaster, your breath fast and shallow. Where are we, you ask, fretful.
I say,
we are here in our home in Scotland, it’s morning time, you are my loving husband . . .
that’s me, you say . . .
I am your loving wife, I say. We live here with our faithful spaniel, she’s nine years old . . .
that’s old, you say . . .
She’s black with a white ruff and one two three four white tippy-toes I say, as I count each toe with a tap of my finger on your hand. Your eyes focus, your breath steadies, Ivy leaps on the bed, she turns once twice three times, to settle tight against your leg. And the day begins.
Shades of you linger in fields and stables. You climbing over paddock gates, calling Ivy to heel. You delving into feed bins dishing out portions of meal. You with your back to me picking out a horse’s hooves. You whispering into a donkey’s velvet ear. You looping a loving arm over the pony’s neck. You, leaning on a gate smiling . . .
At school you were nicknamed Smiler, so you once told me.
“… and I was less alone,” writes Lia Purpura on finding the “perfect skull” of a small animal among a fall of orange-red leaves below the call of birds in maples and pines. As I sweep the stable floor, as the swallows above nest, memories of you silently warm my day. And I too am less alone.
3 … a day like any other
A day yet to break. It’s mid-morning but could be dusk or dawn. Dark gray skies shroud the tree tops, hold time still. A mist, heavy and wet clings to the air; it muffles my breath, dampens my tread on the soft wood-chipped garden trails.
To my left, veiled by unruly bushes something rustles. High above a bird volunteers a desolate cry. Then all is hushed, sound is softened. Life pending. The day is what the Scots call dreich.
There is a quiet about you today. Yesterday’s chaos of words spilling, teeth chattering, hands fluttering, all that anxiety has dissipated. I’ve left you to rest, comfortable, dozing, a smile on your lips: a kiss on your cheek. While you sleep, I walk our woodland garden paths.
While I walk our woodland garden paths, my unease lightens. That yet to be done—unwashed dishes, abandoned clothes, mounds of paperwork cluttering every surface—fades from conscious thought. Yet darkness lingers. It tightens my innards. A night past, a night still to come. Moist air presses in, settles in rivulets on my jacket, seeps through trouser seams, lingers as a fine net in my hair, and precipitates tiny cold tears on my cheeks and lashes.
In low dreich light, Ivy ploughs a furrow through the long grasses threaded with seeds and studded with water. Later, I will pick out tiny grass awns from the fine black hair on her belly. I like these days. Time rests. And I sally into the muted mist without a backward glance.
The greenhouse looms, ugly in the mist. On the angular regular man-made form the paint is peeling, the timber rotting and panes of glass are missing, or shattered on the flagstone floor. In a single pot a wild-seeded glossy leafed blackcurrant intertwines with the dry twisted arms of a perished vine, life and death coexistent.
In sleep you’re articulate. Awake aphasic. Words have become as slippery as melting ice; your thoughts progressively trapped behind amyloid plaques and tau protein tangles. Once so fluent, our conversations falter and fragment. And I wonder if the sound and form and delivery of English have become like a foreign language. Cruel considering you loved words, studied Old English in years past and spun a joke in French. As you rouse I put my ear to your mouth to catch a whispered word, your head leans into my shoulder, your hair caresses my cheek and the chasm of lost words between us becomes no distance at all.
My low mood lifts. The day is less dreich than I anticipated. Yet, it comes to me in the breach of the clearing mist: between all and nothing, life and death, white and black lies the gray-toned path of dying. While you slip into the gray-toned space between one and the other, I, tentatively, trace a path through our woodland garden.
Across the field fence, obscured by the remains of the mist, the dark shadow of a horse, then another, slide into view like phantoms, arousing fear of the unknown. And I yearn for the touch of your hand.
4 . . . September . . . moonlight and bridges
Moonlight filtered through the undrawn blind casts an ethereal veil. In your chin’s tilt, the offset line of your nose, the curl of white hair around your ear’s lobe, time bends. I glimpse the younger man’s shadow and dare to let a past shade in. You, at the bedroom window, on your feet, by my side watching the Corn Moon light the sky.
Time, eclipsed.
In the early morning, pale-yellow sunlight shimmies over the kitchen sill. Beyond the window, backyard pots of sage, rosemary, flowering parsley, chives and feathered dill thrive still. A magpie, sleek in black and white, postures, bows and ruffles his feathers. He teeters on a wire-edged seed plate, then takes to the air, his wings spread as an accordion might in flight.
You, acquiesce to the morning’s rigmarole of washing face and neck, arms and legs, and everywhere in between. One two three tiny prickles have mysteriously appeared in your bed. Your sheets are changed, clothes gathered over stiff limbs, socks pulled on feet reluctant to be encased.
I saw a magpie preening, I say, by way of distraction. You nod your head.
I say,
he’s a handsome fellow but burdened in his mythical characterization.
This captures your attention, and encouraged, I carry on.
He’s a two-toned symbol of all that is good and all that is evil; he’s a transporter of witches, a sorcerer’s shapeshifter, and the devil’s blood lingers on his tongue, or so the Scots say. He’s cursed for refusing the Ark’s shelter and is said to steal the souls of gossiping women—you grin as I mime “gossiping women.” Yet, to others he’s sacred, a bearer of good news, a symbol of love who once each year joins his kin, forms a magpie bridge, spans the Milky Way, so forlorn lovers might meet.
5 … leaves have fallen
I’m late to rise. Before this day spins out of control, before your need for my care overtakes the quotidian, I, dog at heel, step into a late September morning’s warm embrace. Sunlight skims my cheek. My hand brushes the needled fronds of aromatic rosemary and releases the fragrant scent, which lingers in my wake.
Ahead, in the woodland’s cool grip, Ivy flurries. She disrupts the nettle-thick undergrowth replete with white anemones still in flower, her beating tail a beacon of spaniel zeal. I pass an old holly bereft of berries; it leans across the path on stick and stem. Towering overhead, Scots pines—their gray trunks thick with strands of yellow large-leafed ivy curling up and around—give shaded cover. Wings slap as a wood pigeon takes flight, then another. Ivy glances back, beckons. And deep into the shaded canopy of contemplation, I follow.
It is days and months and years since we sat hand in hand in the clinician’s office. When you, laughing a little, looked to me for help with the date, the prime minister’s name, and with counting back from one hundred—in increments of seven; your grip on my hand tightening when you tried to name our location and recall five random objects after five minutes’ duration. You could tell the time—it was two p.m.—and draw the face of a clock. But for all your talents, drawing was never one, and the wonky clock face on the page screamed denial.
In the carpark—away from the airless room, the ailing spider plant on the dusty window sill, unforgiving chairs and unbearable kindness—we reassured ourselves: that it wasn’t that bad, that we would cross the bridges as we came to them.
I recall the time you first asked for reminders of once familiar family and friends, children and dogs. Was it shame I saw in your face? We were in France. I remember it well. I wrote out a family tree, which you poured over, underlined names and dates in thick black marker pen. Later and later still, in the small hours of the night, you slipped out of bed and checked it again. Did you think I was asleep?
Corrupted memories, loss of words, confusion of time and place. Between the random and the lucid, the frailty and fatigue, you are you. And I embrace the person you are. But admit I miss the person you used to be.
I have come full circle. Underfoot, the path is littered with early fallen russet brown leaves and lime-green winged keys of maple trees scattered in yesterday’s breeze. As I step out of the woodland, the house in sight, I glimpse a future time. By the garage in a grim spot trapped by a wall, alongside a spiral of rusted wire and discarded irregular shaped stones, there lies, scattered in disarray the wing, the bone and downy feathered breast of a pigeon. All that remains.
I haven’t got long––very short, you say, in a moment of lucid thought.
At night, as you doze, I stretch my arm across our two beds and lay my hand on yours. Curled in a cocoon of blankets Ivy snuffles in her sleep. The relentless passage of linear time, marked by the dresser’s ticking clock, echoes and echoes in the room.
Yet the house is timeless in the familiarity of its sounds; the clicking clock, the distant vibration of the kitchen fridge, an unexplained creak, the soft burr of a car passing by, the muffled too-wit of an owl in the garden calling its mate and the eerie answering too-woo.
I put aside the task of imagining the unimaginable, in this moment the future has no place. I allow my sadness to subside and take comfort in the plain sense of things, the present, and the warmth of your hand beneath mine.
Author’s Note:
Lia Purpura, “Poetry is a Satisfying of Desire for Resemblance,” in Rough Likeness: Essays, (Louisville, Kentucky: Sarabande Books: 2011), 26. The author refers to a blue sky in the original text not maples and pines.
Frances Hider won the Women on Writing creative nonfiction essay competition in 2021 with her essay “Safe Haven.” She lives and writes in Scotland.
