1

 

Dad called me back to Montana. Mom’s not doing so well and, though he won’t say it, neither is he. A flight from Los Angeles to Missoula, a drive up the Bitterroot Valley, and three miles up the western slope to their small ranch. I spent my adolescent years here, doing my best but never fitting in as a farm kid, never quite finding my place in a landscape that didn’t seem to want me. At 17, I was happy to go.

 

Now I’m back in the living room with its low 1960s popcorn ceiling—so low that but for two inches this room would be classified as a crawlspace. The house was never the priority. In 1972, Dad retired from twenty-one years in the US Air Force and went in search of a new beginning, wife and four kids in tow. The plan was to settle in Missoula, near the university where he would get a forestry degree. Mom and Dad went house hunting, soon casting out beyond the city limits and the smaller towns further away, until they saw this place forty miles south.

 

It was July and a wet year, making the ground springy underfoot. Dad says that when he walked out to the pasture and saw a motley herd of cattle including a Jersey milk cow, it felt like home, which meant it reminded him of the Wisconsin farm where he spent his childhood. Mom said little but cosigned the papers and produced the down payment from a stash she’d accumulated through frugal housekeeping over years. Relatives and friends wondered how this city girl would fare as a farm wife.

 

Now, he waves me toward the door. “Take your mother for a walk.”

 

 

2

 

Mom’s and my relationship is strained though better than it was. Other than our history, we don’t have much in common. I haven’t provided kids and grandkids to gossip about, so we talk about variations on the weather.

 

Now we walk, chatting pleasantries, an ordinary act that still requires effort. We go slowly, to accommodate her ankle and knee, not so sturdy since a fall down school stairs in one of her last years as a first-grade teacher.

 

I ask how she is. What’s keeping her busy? Her answers are short. Cryptic. She comments on my rental car in the driveway. She asks how my work is going. I say it’s fine. Freelance work is always feast or famine, but I get along. She nods. Then: “And where did you grow up? Do you have brothers and sisters?”

​

. . .

​

10

 

By dumb luck, I’ve rented the caretaker’s apartment on a property that has a labyrinth, 108 feet across, its circuits marked by fieldstones and surrounded by crabapple, blue spruce, chokecherry, oak, and other trees; rose bushes; Concord grape vines; hops that trail to the sky; and hundreds of lavender plants proliferated over twenty years. The owner, Helmut, is a family friend. His wife Patty inspired it, and together they built it and opened it to people in search of walking meditation. She and Mom taught at the same elementary school across the valley and commuted back and forth together through all weather. Patty died a few years ago.

 

It’s a mile up the hill but a universe away from the architecture of my family. Walking the labyrinth will be a solace, especially on days of alien surprise, when another remnant of my mother disappears and someone new appears. The necessity that brought me to Montana propels me here, too, winding to the center and back again.

 

A maze and labyrinth are often mistaken for each other, but they’re entirely different experiences. A maze is a puzzle of progress and dead ends until, by some luck or will or canny problem solving, the walker arrives at the center. But this is no triumph. Getting back out of a maze is another problem of its own.

 

A labyrinth is a single path that requires one decision—to enter. Then simply follow the path. It takes me close to the center— tantalizingly close—after only a few turns. But before reaching the center, that path must wind back on itself, reach the outer edges while wandering through 360 degrees and only then arrive at the center, the still point around which everything else revolves.

 

Today, I choose to enter.

 

. . .

​

139

 

Lessons are everywhere, if I can scrape together the focus to find them. I learn new skills, new terms, new ideas, new habits of mind. I try to empathize with the difficult tasks everyone has—including and especially Mom. Otherwise, I’ll fail to do the best I could. I’ll hurt the situation rather than help. I’ll confuse care with control. I’ll confuse grief with grievance.

 

 

140

 

She is here and not here. I grieve the person who no longer recognizes me while loving the person who is here—who is, in fact, emerging. She echoes herself, and the self she is today is always the authentic one.

 

Sadness drips through me, but around her I stay cheerful. I watch for gestures that are tacit requests for understanding. And because we have history, I can guess better than most what she means. This is what I can bring to this messy table.

 

I let go (again and again) the woman who was. I don’t insist that she be my mother. Something new is happening. I don’t need to replay the relationship that defined us for decades. Nostalgia is a way of cursing the present.

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. . .

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244

 

When we moved to the ranch, the post and barbed-wire fences were falling down. They were supposed to keep cattle in but often let them out. As a new rancher, Dad decided to refurbish those boundaries with deep-planted posts chemically treated to prevent rot. In rocky soil, that’s doing it the hard way, but he was told it was the way to build a fence that would last a lifetime. “Build for the ages,” he would say of any construction project.

 

He was offended when, a mere forty years later, the fenceposts started to lean. Forty years was not, in his book, a lifetime. Nevertheless, the bottoms were rotting. He was outliving his fence.

 

Digging post holes takes a younger man’s strength, so he took to planting steel fence posts alongside the leaning wooden ones and wiring them all together for stability. He’d never have done that in earlier days, but now it was a reasonable adaptation. We do what we can with the strength we have.

 

“We live too damned long,” he says to me now. I wonder what adaptations he’s cooking up while he looks out his windows for signs of wildlife. He seems to be willing himself to the end in a state of mind that all is still possible—as his dreams tell him—even while his body disagrees. When I ask him if I can get him anything, he says, “Yeah! Another twenty good years!”

​

. . .

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250

 

Dying will not be optimized. The process defies calculation. This frustrates anyone who demands predictable, sleek routines. We begin with routine, but it nearly always breaks when a different need erupts.

 

Ali and I follow Dad’s stray thoughts into the place he inhabits today. To ignore that would do violence to the opportunity that lurks in what strays. I know where his body is going. Materiality is evident. But so much else is happening invisibly. What arrogance it would be to sweep that away prematurely, just because my eyes can’t register what moves in him now.

 

I think about this in the spring as I rake the woodchip path of the labyrinth. I think about this in the fall when, bent over or on my knees, I trim the lavender plants. I work steadily and stop to take in the hawk-like scream of a Steller’s jay. It can also cackle and warble, a few of multiple calls in its lexicon.

 

This all takes the time it takes. Efficiency has no place here. There are shortcuts, but why?