Riding Eastward to Peer through Death's Door

This is the event that I feared since little girlhood, and this is the train that's taking me there to help, I guess, to see it through. My mother aged ninety years has given up eating; all of us daughters and granddaughters and a couple other old girls are trading shifts in her apartment where she clings to her intention of 'letting nature take its course.'

A drama of hearts has been roiling, quieting and welling up again all these past two weeks or longer. The train is retracing the courses of so many historical passages, certainly my own, and inevitably more and more whose evidence keeps receding into the ground with ever more accruing human occupation. Everywhere are ruins or defunct things drawing my eyes to them, such as the ornately cast and moulded end of a stone bridge like something from centuries ago in Italy, tipped on the rim of a ravine. The territory reaching ever eastward could be the surface of a brain bringing back to mind where we have all been on one occasion or another. The wheels on the track make a pulse beat; the conductor's horn far ahead is now and again muted into a likeness to a cello, or split into a medley of horns, symphonic, a rudimentary musical theme for the day's travel. We are trailing that undertone, like a far-carrying orchestral tuning-up, the opening to a new act in a drama across the spreading breadth of the upper Mississippi River Valley.

I

A cousin my own age has been calling, crushed with depression, so I take time with her over the phone as my trip proceeds. She's had lovers through adulthood, but when her favorite from among these people lately let her down, as seems to be some of our repeated lot when it comes to lovers, I feel she needs a separate passion or several of them, things larger than herself, to minimize the disappointment, yet it's seemed to me for a long time that she has been short on central passions. What do I really know? She has an empty heart, along with doubts as to what would ever take up dwelling there but never leave or grow tiresome.

She's another person who has offered me her home to share if ever I wanted, though I too have turned her down, not caring to move out to the urban Northeast. But I will not disappoint my mom; I'm coming. I'm so grateful to my late dad and my mom, who live in my heart, for the huge capacity they gave me to enjoy what my senses pick out from the world, from the margins of back yards petering out along the track among the hamlets we cross in Ohio running eastward, sheds, contrivances, names of businesses, names, the persistent trees that vary a bit more from the familiar as we leave Pennsylvania for New York, all just samplings taken in during a train ride. A whole life consists of enjoyments in categories, and at the best of times, maybe, these intermingle, in some hearts making a foundation for new art, and an impatience to begin creating. If I could impart my parents' gift to a soul as desolate as these Lower Great Lakes-region warehouses here in the Rust Belt...  Her depression is still beyond my understanding, but I know that depression kills and that her recovery will have to be demonstrable to her and then taken on piecemeal. Maybe along in her process the most meaningful experiences we'll be able to share will no longer have to be sad ones.

Country music reminds us that this land is full of voices crying: come home, come ho-o-ome! even if the person being summoned was never fully clear as to where home was. But this symphonic rail route serves to remind me that home in some sense is everywhere we've ever been, space that we've relished crossing and re-crossing. If I had time, I would walk out from this railway and be on my hands and knees learning every plant and creature that is found here by name and image, by which means the lore of them with their descendants might be saved for all eternity. 

Some more of what I'm urged to expose, exhibit, draw from all my North American places can be seen here: www.epiphaniesafield.com