“…the strange idea of continuous living…”

A knock at my kitchen door wakes me. Midafternoon, home from a long morning at Dartmouth for routine things, nothing major, but a day that began in the dark after scant sleep. The week before, I’d left a message for a man who painted three sides of my house a few years ago to ask about an estimate for my barn and that fourth side that somehow I’d never painted. Last fall, sick and not knowing the (cancer) reason why, I’d managed to get out my sander, but that was about as far as that plan went.

The painter is a person my daughter and I know in our overlapping circles, so I’m not surprised when he says he’d heard of my illness. We talk for a bit in my kitchen. Then I grab my sweater, and we walk around the barn. A stunning sunlight makes me blink. Our conversation winds around primer and caulking and ladders. In the back, where the woodchucks claim domain, the painter turns the conversation towards politics and the word that’s so commonly used now — cutting. We talk about cancer research (which saved my life) and the bitch of enduring chemotherapy. A house finch perches in the honeysuckle in the wild tangles below my house. The honeysuckle’s bent branches are dotted with tiny fans of new leaves.

It’s been a day for me. I once had unbounded energy that I spent so easily with my garden shovel, my paintbrush, laptop, trowel, my two hands. I lean back against the barn’s peeling clapboards, beside last summer’s clematis vine that appears shriveled, used-up, no good. I have complete faith this beauty will bloom again this year. Listening to the painter, I wonder, why make any guesses about anyone or anything, really? What will happen will happen. Yet, I can’t help myself. I’m betting on the clematis and its purple flowers. The painter offers me his good will, and I take that, too.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

~ Ada Limón