Nothing to worry about, thought the honey bee, it’s just a dead human.
He whizzed past my face without a care in the world. The longer I rested there in corpse pose, the more the creatures grew confident. A hummingbird hovered into the garden, flitting about above my body as it tasted the sweetness of the canna lilies in bloom. I assume they are sweet; I don’t really know.
Forty-five minutes of yoga in the hot late morning sun, and corpse pose is quite appealing. If you’ve got to lie down and die, may it be on a sweaty yoga mat in the middle of a flower garden. But unfortunately it seems death is rarely such a light and easy matter.
I Got a Call From My Grandmother Today
And for a woman of ninety-three years of optimism, there was a faded sound to her voice when she said, “I’m not doing so well.” And I had this feeling that this was her call to tell me goodbye.
She has told everyone she knows that she is ready to go. She wishes she had gone already. She has lived a long, good life, and her health is deteriorating by the day. She is ready. It is easy to talk lightly about death when it is for someone so prepared and who has waited so patiently, and I was doing well staying rational on that sweaty yoga mat.
There is no sadness in such a death, the bees seemed to buzz. But I wasn’t naïve enough to think that my rationality would last when the time came.
I Pondered the Day’s Tasks
I had already built a massive teepee frame from fat stalks of bamboo. It stood like a giant several feet above my head, and I positioned it close to my passion vine, hoping it was giving off a come-hither expression.
The thin metal trellis that the passion vine was currently living on looked sad and helpless beneath the vine’s weight. The passion vine had taken over in a very fairy tale-like manner. Passion vines are very Jack and the Bean Stalk. They’ve got big ideas—things like: Let’s stretch our tendrils to the sky until we’ve found immortality in the great beyond...or at least until we’ve busted into the land of the giants. They need a trellis as large and in charge as they themselves are.
The trouble was getting the passion vine’s severely tangled appendages off the old trellis and onto the new. It was something like the hair of a giant child after it blew a giant bubble and popped giant amounts of gum all over itself. This was no easy comb out. The rational thing to do was to cut it all off at the base and let it start fresh on the new teepee.
But I didn’t want all the growth on my passion vine to die. And I didn’t want to be rational. So instead I started untangling.
Two Hours Later There Was Not a Dry Thread on Me
The humidity was so thick it could carry a person off to live with Roald Dahl’s cloud people. The mosquitos had their own agenda, and as the sun was getting low they were just beginning to get organized. My fingers felt as though they had painstakingly forced five hundred fingers from their steely grasp on the trellis bars and on each other.
I shouted out a loud correction to one of my canine girls, who, judging by the sound, had decided to do a bit of bowling for chickens. This involves the dog pretending to be a bowling ball, the chickens the pins, and the dog then throwing herself at them. The pins re-stack themselves back up quite quickly. Such fun.
Between the shouting at the dog, the fingertips wanting to fall off, the sweat and clouds of humidity hanging on me like I was a clothes line, I decided this was far from the place of rationality. I had drifted far off into the realm of insanity. A quarter of the vine remained deeply tangled.
I started yanking at those remaining woody vine stems, ripping them off where they would, while seeking some place between rationality and insanity—some comfortable middle ground. A place where a person can be emotional, but in a controlled way.
I stepped back after the frenzy of ripping and looked at the beautiful vine. Some of the flower buds had been damaged and lay torn on the ground. Many leaves were lost, but about half of the vine was intact. I slowed then, and moved carefully to wrap what remained around the poles of the teepee. There were tiny baby leaves at the tip of each piece, tender and eager.
Life is precious. Life is fragile. Life is fleeting.
I love those deep red passion vine flowers, and I will love the time I have with them now. And when the first frost comes and they are gone, I will acknowledge that it is nature’s way, and I will love them still. And my grandmother too.