After the Otter

Tomorrow I settle into my mother’s room until, finally, her journey is over. She’s so peaceful now, with the additional morphine; I am relieved for us both.

Her room is dark, so her sleep is uninterrupted. In the warm darkness a mounted tv screen display features a loudly purring and vividly orange cat. I’m so grateful for the cat.

The air is stale, but it can’t be helped. That’s what happens now. I love her, so this is not about her.

This marks the end of a nearly 4 year journey. 4 years ago I arrived on this shore, with my son, with a vague ambition of giving him more opportunity. In the process, I discovered that my parents were truly not doing so well, to put it mildly. Covid and distance had separated us for a few years…and the difference was profound.

Every spare second was spent wrangling information from medical centers and doctors. Passwords flourished like mold in a derelict squatter’s flat in some northern industrial town…they bloomed across my cloud as I navigated all the new services and med-techs with utter bewilderment. The usernames and facial recognition apps cannibalized each other as I became both my parents as well as myself on line, after searching through the swathes of papers in rusted file cabinets that yielded me the right to fulfill this responsibility. Households were moved, houses sold, homes rented, parents given cautiously to places that were equipped to care for them. My son grappled with high school on his own, largely unsupported, but loved with the despair of one who cannot reach back in time to fix the problems that ailed her parents and stole her time with her boy.

In short, for a few years, each day was a shock.

It happens like that for so many people, I’ve found. It’s fascinating, how we all tumble along until it comes to a stop. For a while, anyway. No one is unique, really, as we all do this at one point or another. But it feels and felt wildly alone. So, I found solace in my solitude as I drew as close to wild places as I could.

Each of these works is autobiographical. They are all from my walks and drives around the island where I live now. Each has a stark memory attached to it.

One of them is accompanied by a poem…addressing a brief moment where I stood outside myself and realized everything was rapidly changing, in so many ways.

They are titled: Battlepoint Magic, The Fairy Dell, Sundays After Fieldstone, and After the Otter. I can’t be bothered right now to tell you which is which. Perhaps you might enjoy trying to figure it out. Here is the poem:

After the otter

flared his nostrils and decided

she was

no harm,

the camera

refused to cooperate

and failed to capture

its cocky, cheeky

churnings and bubblings.

And after she, of the camera,

tore herself away from

the bank of wintry

roots and grasses

and the now

obsidian smooth pond,

it dawned upon her

that

the world was now all

somehow, significantly,

changed;

After the otter.