something will come to you

 

 

This afternoon we sat for a while by the small pond in the back of the large cemetery, watching the dragon flies. The cemeteries here are beautiful parks and when I started to discover them during those strange and silent lockdown months I realised how busy my working life had been and that I must begin to pay attention to the world around me. Sitting under the willows with the dragon flies darting here and there I remembered my grandmother. and how she was always busy, so many chores, always on her feet. This is of course not true, she would also sit down and watch tv and talk while her guests ate the cake she had baked. She used to stack up on chocolate bars and hand out one each to her grandchildren if they had been good during a visit. The stack of these chocolate bars was in the big sideboard in her dining room on the shelf below the silverware drawer, next to the tea set. This is the same sideboard where, after his death, my brother found that box full of letters my father had collected, letters he had received from the women he must have dated over the years. I never saw these letters, I only know what my brother told me. "They were from all over, love letters mostly, some desperate, in German and French and Swedish, he must have met them on his travels. God knows what he promised them. Anyway, I got rid of them all there and then."

Once my grandmother had handed over the chocolate bar, we knew that we had to thank her politely and that we should never tear open the wrapping until we had left her house. Most of the time the chocolate was white with mould anyway and we broke it into small pieces that we flung out of the car window on the way home. Into the fields of Franconia.

My grandmother died thirty years ago in her sleep shortly before her 103rd birthday and on the way back home from her funeral we crashed the car during a sudden snowfall on the motorway, a rear-end collision while driving very slowly but a total write-off nevertheless resulting in the first of two spinal surgeries for me, one that summer and the second one, almost 20 years later. 

My grandmother is buried in her hometown, my grandfather, my father and my father's sister are buried next to her. Their cemetery is on a hillside in a dense forest. I think I've been there maybe five times including my father's funeral two years ago - mainly when I helped my father over the years to place several expensive terrocotta pots with seasonal plants like some sort of offering between the tombstones, but I know I can find the site no problem and I can see the writing on their tombstones when I close my eyes. Not that I have plans to visit. As was the custom, my grandfather's profession - senior magistrate - is recorded and for my grandmother it says senior magistrate's widow. In Franconia, back in the days, the wives insisted on having their hard work that enabled their husband's career recognised and honoured.

Eventually, the gnats got the upper hand and we left the pond and the cemetery and cycled on to the Italian icecream parlour where I had a scoop of butterscotch and R had pistachio.  We swapped half way.

I feel almost back to normal these days, I am digesting ice cream without pain, the resorbable stitches at three of the four incision sites have almost disappeared. The GP is a bit concerned about the fourth incision but I think the redness is due to a mosquito bite and we agreed to wait and see.

Another snippet I found at the back of my blog draft archive:

 As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.

Richard Wilbur