100 Daffodils.
In this balmy late autumn, I walk with new acquaintances in an oak forest where I’ve never wandered. Oaks are sparse in the woods where I generally walk, these lovely-leaved beauties, the ground beneath them strewn with acorns, some broken, their centers chewed out.
I’m with other women who are unwillingly on a journey similar to mine — cancer and chemo, the shock of our worlds slashed apart. Our conversation drifts to the kindness of friends and strangers, and the flip side of kindness — a kind of harshness: why can’t you get on with your life since the chemo is finished? (a raw impossibility) and didn’t you eat enough kale? For the record, when my daughters were young, I grew three kinds of kale in my garden, fifty plants to carry us through the winter, fenced from the foraging deer. All that kale, so carefully tended, and yet, here’s the luck of your draw: cancer.
It’s a rare kind of privilege to walk with these women, listening, offering snippets of my own story. On this cloudy afternoon, these woods are light-filled through the barren branches, the poplars and beeches still shimmering patches of gold. One woman ventures, “All nature has scars.”
Every year, I dread this season of dwindling light, the creeping-in edgy cold, the giant fist of winter readying. And yet every late autumn, the falling leaves enchant, the wood stove’s warmth soothes, the moon gleams its crescent cut-out in the starry sky.
Writing this book about cancer has pushed me to read and gather facts and history, the scientific low-down. And yet, simultaneously, I appreciate more and more the great mystery of this universe. A friend counsels me that I can hold two things in one hand: knowledge and uncertainty. But these, too, are beyond numbers; this world’s mysteries are multitudes. My sister once remarked that cancer is the great leveler: it’s humbling. On a recent chilly morning, I planted one hundred daffodil bulbs: a meager offering to this sweet place where I live. The story behind these spring beauties will surely sink down and vanish into the sandy soil.
Auto Mirror
In the rear-view mirror suddenly
I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral;
great things dwell in small ones
for a moment.
Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass
