by laura menefee
The Killdeer have returned, about three weeks early.
It has snowed the past few days and will likely continue on and off over the next two months. Temperatures are warm, for February– 20F above to about 35. Nevertheless, there are still no insects for these small plovers to eat. The ice is not good–people have been rescuing their ice shacks–but it is still not gone. They also eat small fish and sand crabs. The crabs are still under the frozen ground. What will they eat?
I’m half-listening to a discussion of Health Insurance Companies “raising insurance premiums”after recording huge profits last year, while justifying their executives’ multi-million dollar salaries.
It makes me mad.
I turned it off.
I am learning to appreciate silence. Until recently, I usually had music on during the day. Early music is my favorite and always makes me happy, with traditional Irish a close second. But lately, I love silence. Which is how I noticed the Killdeer.
These long silences are broken up with occasional runs into town, which usually take much longer than I would have anticipated. But it’s ok. I’m in no hurry.
Take yesterday–usually nothing would have frustrated me more than having to wait in line while a Post Office clerk chats with her neighbor.
Now, I just listen.
Just before Christmas, I was the neighbor being chatted with, at the local department store. My neighbor, who once had a dairy farm, is a cashier there and I happened to be in line at her station. “You know Else died?” she asked. There were people in line behind me.
“No!” I said. the last time I’d visited, she’d told me about how she’d refused chemo and radiation, two years after stopping her tomoxifen. “I’m 83,” she said, “I gotta go some time!”
Else was the woman who’d lived in my house for 57 years before I did. She’d farmed, milked cows, and raised 5 kids with her husband, who’d died of a heart attack just 10 years before I moved here. She’d moved in with her unmarried son who was in his 50′s, just down the road, in a pre-fab house carved out of their erstwhile wood-lot.
And now she had gone.
“She was sick a long time, you know,” my neighbor said.
“Yes,” I said, aware of the people behind me in line. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Else had “stopped by,” as they call arriving for a visit, unannounced, here, one morning shortly after we moved in. My husband was at work, my kids had just left for school, and I’d gone back to bed. She just walked into the kitchen, and announced, “Hello! Hello!!” I got up and met her, still in my nightgown.
“How are you liking it here?”
“Fine,” I said. I was singularly unused to this type of early-morning familiarity.
“Good!” she said. I offered her coffee. I was embarrassed about the main floor crowded with boxes, the kitchen still disorganized, no furniture arranged yet.
“No, no,” she said, “no coffee, no food, just sit in the kitchen and visit a few minutes,” she instructed. We exchanged a few polite pleasantries, about the weather and the house, and I promised to “stop by,” which I recognized as a formality involved in “returning the visit” from my Victorian-era reading. She was 77 then.
“We used to call her Fat Else,” one of my neighbors said. “We’d see her out there, callin’ in the cows, and we’d say, “There’s Fat Else…”
She wasn’t fat any more. After two years of breast cancer treatments including chemo, radiation, and radical mastectomy, she was on tomoxifen therapy for the maximum 5 years. Would her life have been extended had she been allowed to continue? Two years after stopping tomoxifen, her breast cancer returned.
Her neighbor’s husband had died of stomach cancer, ten years before her own husband died. In those ten years they shared widowhood, the two women spent much time together, calling or “visiting” every day. At that time, Gretchen, the neighbor who lost her husband first, was raising “replacement calves”–the female calves born to dairy cows–and raised until they could be sold as “freshened heifers” to dairy farmers.
I once asked her if she did her own mowing and planting herself.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I love getting out in my tractor. It’s a good day when I can get out on my tractor.”
But one year her family decided she couldn’t manage the place any more. She was falling and “her mind was going,” Else said. They took away her calves, the barn cats all ran away, and her her dog was shot. They put her in a nursing home in town. Her house remains empty until she dies, when it will be sold.
I made my good-byes to my neighbor at the department store, wishing her a Merry Christmas, and drove home, in silence.
