Ammi Midstokke: Same trail, different day
My grandmother is 95, or 117, or somewhere in between. Every day, she wakes up, drags her 30-feet-of-freedom cable into the kitchen to make the World’s Weakest Coffee, butters a half slice of toast, and starts a fire in her wood stove. The latter she does with half a used tissue and a stick.
She doesn’t wait to see if it takes, because she’s done it enough times to know. By the time she makes it back to her chair, it is roaring. She settles in to set high scores on Mahjong and Solitaire on her iPad. When her eyes get tired of the screen, she’ll switch to a book. Her tiny dog, itself only a living whiff of a taxidermy wonder, half barren of hair, and blind, might bark at the door to be let out, and my grandmother will slowly move in that direction.
“Alright, alright. I’m coming,” she’ll say. And then the two have a sort of conversation until the other makes it to the door, and the one refuses to attempt the leap over the threshold. They go back and forth until the dog finally tumbles out onto the walkway, stands again on all fours with a shake, then totters away to do her business.
This dance goes on all day. Stoke the fire, let the dog out, take a nap, eat a sliver of a pastry, watch the Packers win or lose, let the dog in, drink a beer from a chilled glass, crush some card games, read, go to bed.
When I visit, as I did this week, I tug on my running shoes and escape the predictable rhythm of it all. I wonder if she gets bored. Statistically speaking, she must be repeating some solitaire deals by now, and she’s so sharp, she’d probably say, “I’ve already played this one.”
My grandmother lives on the Deschutes River. Its banks are so close we must raise our voices when sitting outside. It roars into the cracked windows at night, a rumbling lullaby whenever I am there. As a child, this place in Oregon was my first exposure to snow, to hooky-bobbing behind a vehicle, to rafting, to bird watching, to the way little old ladies form powerful covens of bridge-playing broads, betting their lives away one nickel at a time.
The trail behind her house separates her yard from the river. It wanders over volcanic rock and wooden bridges and babbling creeks until it splits. Here, a footbridge crosses the river to another neighborhood that used to be one house, and is now second homes, lit up by a fortune of Christmas lights. I trot past the homes and beyond, to where the trail leaves the HOA rules behind and hugs the riverbank again.
I never look for a different trail, though I am in a mecca of such things. I don’t need to, because this trail is different every day. On this first day, the sky is blue and I’m out before the sun has crested the top of the ponderosas. When its glare begins to illuminate the spaces between the trees with a warm gold, the frosted and bare high desert bushes become an explosion of crystals. The whole forest is sparkling in those few moments between ice and melt, a glittering wonderland of morning spread before me.
The trail is bare, but for all the pine needles, and the river runs quiet except for where its rush over rocks reminds the woods that it is still there, still powerful. I try to smell things, but only one leafless bush has an aroma – something like a sage, but woody like burning Palo Santo from South America, or the cologne of an old man worn by a young man, perhaps. Decent, compelling. Everything else smells simply “crisp.”
The next day when I go running again, it has snowed and rain is falling on top of it. The trees are dropping globs of slush onto my head and down my back. The river has swelled and yesterday’s spills are today’s roaring waterfalls. There is noise everywhere now, the dripping of water, falling of snow, the great splash-sploosh of my feet in slushy puddles. Today, I smell a skunk and wonder if and when they hibernate, or if my dog will find it beneath a log. It would not be the first time.
When we cross the bridge and make our way back to Grandma’s house, we are soaked from the inside-out. My shoes squish when I walk. The dog looks like a drowned rat in a drowned jacket that droops off her soggy body. We shed our layers and carry them, dripping, to the wood stove.
My grandmother is recalling some quarterback’s stats, or who is out with an injury for how long, or any other number of football jargon things I cannot relate to. I think she was born long before football was invented, probably sometime around when Pheidippides was running to marathon. Which is to say, it makes sense that she knows everything about it and recalls most historical facts related to it.
I can’t decide if I am looking forward to this phase of my life (it may depend on whether football is mandatory) or if I am terrified of it. The same thing, somehow, most every day.
As I’m leaning over to stoke the fire in hopes that it will dry out my clothes, she pipes up and asks me, “Do you know what happens when you open a box of matches upside down?”
I’m holding the box in my hand, moving it out of the way. I think about it for a moment, all those tiny sticks exploding into a marvelous monologue game of pickup. I can hear them bouncing off the hearth and a thousand soft thuds on the carpet. I think about what a journey each one would be for her to pick up. I see her shuffling behind her walker, over to the hearth, grunting with each lean, narrating the whole debacle to her deaf dog, her oxygen machine hiss-thwacking to the same rhythm. It would have been the highlight of her week, warranting both an extra nap and an extra beer.
I realize then, that no day is ever the same.
She says, “I wasn’t paying attention,” and I think it is the attention that makes the days different, the trails different, even the rituals different. Attention is what displays the changes in those we love, as we witness their lives unfold. Attention is how we see seasons shift. Attention offers us shooting stars and blue herons. Attention is what allows me to watch with wonder as my grandmother goes about her days, each one a small gift of newness she unwraps with anticipation.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com. She hopes you will give and receive much attention this holiday season.