Resurrection

If you are arriving mid-story, please  start at “Turning the Compost” and then jump right in.

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After meeting Bea on sidewalk that summer day in Toronto, we learned we’d been living just six blocks from each other for quite some time. She invited me to her apartment which was just a short walk from where we stood.

I can’t tell you what we talked about, as  it’s almost 40 years ago now. But I can tell you what I have been unable to forget all these years.

Her apartment was the main floor of a huge brick triplex next to a downtown subway station, set back from the sidewalk and almost entirely hidden by bushes. I want to say it was completely hidden, as if it only emerged because we were looking for it.

 Could other people find it? I tried to imagine a mailman on the front porch but I couldn’t. If Bea had said it required an incantation to enter, I would have accepted it without question.

I imagine I laughed as I parted the branches on the path to get to the door,  because it felt so similar to how it felt to reach her house through the corner of the yard at the lilac bushes when I was a child.

She didn’t unlock the door because Bea never locked a door.  “If someone needs something, they are welcome to it” she would say. “If someone needs something, they might find it here.”

I don’t know how this is possible, but her apartment smelled just like the farmhouse. Like roses and old books had a baby. The tall windows were half-clad with city dust and dark green ivy, giving one the feel of having entered a burrow. Every wall was covered in books or art. I recognized the teak end tables shaped like elephants, and the hanging egg-shaped wicker chair with the thick lambskin on it.

There were enough plants on the three-tiered plant wall under grow lights to qualify as an arboretum installation. Unexpected movement amongst them revealed a free- roaming little lizard named Art.  Art Gecco. I’m quite sure I didn’t get the pun until years later.

 As I write this now, close to the age Bea would have been then, I recognize this as post-divorce Bea . I  was meeting the distilled version of her. Bea seemed to travel with  an entire ecosystem of her own, and it was was full display. Fully intact,  here in downtown Toronto.

She encouraged me to enjoy looking at the books on the shelves  in the living room while she poured  wine for us to take to the garden. I’d never met anyone who poured white wine into stone goblets before noon on a Saturday.

 The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Herman Hesse. The Hero with a Thousand Faces  by Joseph Campbell . The Bhagavad Gita.  An Ostrich egg carved into an ornate carriage. Nested Russian Dolls. Photos of her kids and their families. Polished stones and shells. I went to the kitchen to ask something,  and promptly forgot what it was.

On the wall was a cork board full of photos of people. Each had been cut into people-shapes rather than left in square frames. It was clear the people were  clustered in ways that formed meaningful groups.

They were organized, is what Im trying to say. The board had a strange geometry to it, as if invisible strings connected them all in purposeful ways. One got the sense  relationships were being fortified right there on the wall, and  people were perhaps  being introduced for the first time.

Then I saw it. All by itself, at the top of the board.

It was a cutout photo of my mother I had never seen. She was notorious for disliking having her photo taken. Had my mother ever smiled like that, that I could remember?

Then I saw them. Two small bird feathers attached to her shoulders. My mother had wings.

Which in a weird way answered the question that had refused to rest for all those intervening years “Where do mothers go, when you can’t see them anymore?”

Well, I dare say the answer was more than obvious.

Mothers, when they disappear in the middle of the night without saying goodbye, flew to Toronto on finch-feather wings to  live in the kitchen of their best friend, next to a subway station. 

I had questions, but the  goblets had been filled to the brim, and I was being called to the garden.