Her Dreams

My native winter habitat is the sigh and drip of needled forests, smell of leaf rot, salamander squirm, and the phallic droop of red alder catkins softened by rain. Instead I am in her room, strictly vertical and rectangular, beige walls hung with a single vestige of other-than-human life, a large close-up photo of Squirrel-tail Grass, a colorful but rigid caricature of nodding summer seed heads.

An expansive west-facing window is streaked with January downpour, and black asphalt below holds dimpled puddles and 23 vehicles queued up for drive-through COVID testing.

She naps with furrowed brow, her mouth an open disturbance of mumbles and broken phrases unvarnished by consciousness. Legs squirm nonstop beneath hospital blankets. The accumulated agitation of 87 years seems to bleed out in her dreams. She has fought for dignity most of her life, fending off assailants both real and imagined. I hope the indignities of hospitalization are fading into a larger landscape of inconvenience. Does she experience anything that resembles rest, anything but fighting, even in sleep?

For two nights my own sleep has been a jigsaw puzzle disassembled by nighttime interruptions for blood pressure, blood sugar, blood draw, and the beeping alarm when a bag of intravenous bodily fluids becomes a deflated balloon snagged on an aluminum pole above her bed. The hospital recliner has overreached its role as a chair and has become my bed. I rotate on it like a chicken dripping on a rotisserie. If the scattered pieces of my sleep could be reassembled, they might form a picture of rest. No one offers to piece it together.

At noon I stop at the highway for mail and paper. A gray gravel driveway gullied by rainwater rises toward the flat-roofed house perched on an ancient erosional terrace left behind by the river. Now the stream is rain and snowmelt and soil washed from fire-scorched hillsides upstream, a muddy torrent meandering across the valley floor. I turn away from the wash of winter, put aside leafy summer memories of bicycle and trout fishing .

I light the woodstove, stoke it with fir. The wood was sawed, split, and stacked in the woodshed last summer by me, my brothers, and a neighbor. There is instant coffee in the kitchen. I rarely drink instant coffee. I rarely drink coffee in the afternoon. Today I have nothing to lose but sleep. I will return to the hospital, and sleeplessness is a foregone conclusion.

The glass door at the back gathers daylight muted by rain, fence rails drooping like swayback horses, flower beds sprouting decaying lily stalks, and blackberries creeping around the paint-peel barn raised five decades back from the remains of her Uncle Marion’s house. Dad was here until three years ago. Several years before that, he became beat down by Parkinson's and was unable to forestall the forces of entropy. Gravity drags all that he built toward the ground. A sad tranquility hangs on me like those low-slung clouds softening the prickle of winter-bare maples on the hillside.

Caffeine quickly wanes. I stretch out beneath an old blue and white quilt on a worn couch in my boyhood living room. In the sprawling yard beyond the front window, wind and rain pinwheel the pin oak leaves still clinging to their branches, as if clinging was the same as living. Her two black cats, Chaos and Destruction, brother and sister, are tired of the monotony of their own company. They encircle my legs in lithe ebony, implore me with a feline inquisition of green eyes. I don’t know, I say aloud.

Dreamless sleep drowns my thoughts. I hope to god that I do not speak, even to the ears of cats.

---

My latest book, “Dancing with an Apocalypse” is available in Eugene, Oregon at J Michaels Books, and Tsunami Books, or online and for ordering through your local bookstore at Barnes and Noble.