Lark Ascending

by Silas House

He tasted and smelled like the mossy rocks and the clean water, like mountains made only of cedar. I can still draw that scent up to me, all these years later. On occasion when I am caught up in all of my remembering, that smell floats to me. Maybe it’s only cedars nearby I’m smelling. Maybe it’s him, come to visit.

For two years we were as free as two people can be. To taste and be tasted. Every part of us humming and alive. If you are very lucky it happens occasionally that your body fits with someone else’s in such a way that you feel you are not two separate people but one being, that you’ve gone beyond the physical. To know each other by heart. To sit and be silent with someone else. To feel as if you are alone, yet with someone. To feel safe.

I hope wherever he went, there are cedars.

There were too many thoughts swirling in my mind when I was still. They were always present, but if I walked, there were more distractions. If I kept moving, the grief had a harder time catching up with me.

Everything reminded me of all the people I’d lost.

doubted the existence of magic, but not enough to completely deny the fact that it might exist. If anything in this world was holy it was a tree. This much I knew for sure.

“I just think that some places feel better than others, a perfect storm of good things merging. They’re safe places, where you feel better just because of where you are. And when people feel good, they’re better to one another, so they become safe places, too.”

Seamus eased away from his young man and settled against her legs where she lay. She needed comforting and if there was one thing he was good at, it was this. He knew how to be still and let his stillness make folks feel better.

“A murmuration,” Helen breathed out. “That’s a good word, too. Did you make that up?” “No,” Helen said. “I collect good words.” “Where do you find them?” “Everywhere.”

We were already traveling by the time day had tightened the corners of the sky with its whiteness.

It took me a long time to come to that realization, though. Back then I didn’t know hardly anything. I am ninety years old, and I still don’t know a whole lot. But I do know that the worst thing in this world is the intolerance that leads to so much violence.

When I was little and sick, my mother used to sing a song to me. An old song by a band she loved. I could hear her sing the same line over and over, so clearly. I could hear her perfectly in my mind and I hummed along. I was unable to sing, but I could hear the words. I could hum to keep myself awake. This one goes out to the one I love And I thought then, we could have our people with us anytime we wanted, in our minds. It was not having them physically that was the harder part.

It is hard to say if a place makes people a particular way or if the kind of people who congregate there shape the place.

A person does not have one life, but many, all within the same lifetime.

And I’ve never loved anyone the way I loved Arlo. All these years later, I still dream of him. I wake up feeling happy and sad at the same time. As soon as I open my eyes, I am overjoyed that I had time with him again, but then a freshened grief washes over me when I realize he is still gone.

Joy and sorrow are the things of life, the two things always tangled together. Anybody who’s ever lost anyone knows that.

The most unfair thing in the world is that dogs do not live as long as we do.