🍃 TREE 425: Dance Me to the End 1

Today, tomorrow and Friday we are extremely fortunate to be enjoying words and song choices from writer and maverick writing teacher Alison Acheson. The drawing is entirely my fault.

Grow slowly
Jeff

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These excerpts are from my memoir, Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days With ALS, a story of my time caregiving. It’s recently been re-released as an audio book, narrated by a voice artist with the perfect tone and pacing, Ellen Dubin. I am so grateful for her part in this story. We do learn from the most exacting times in our lives and, in spite of all, it is a gift to be a student. Mostly, I learned big things about the small. (Lightly edited and reprinted with permission from Touchwood Editions, 2019) —AA

One: Fig Leaves.

I stepped outside, taken by the shininess of the leaves of my fig tree. The tree, seven years old, as wide as tall, swallowed an entire corner of the yard, and the leaves were huge and bright yellow-based green. A sunny, happy colour. In August the fruit would be heavy, tumescent, hidden behind those leaves, yet soaking sun into the pink sweetness. Too sweet, really.

In the afternoon, I stepped outside again. My spouse was getting a CAT scan; this is how ALS is diagnosed—by a process of eliminating other possibilities. I felt short of breath, and a wave of claustrophobia. Not my mother’s claustrophobia, needing more space; this was all about wanting to escape. (But perhaps all claustrophobia is.)

Then I noticed, as I looked into the yard from my deck, that the leaves of the fig tree were no longer their happy green. Even though the sun shone bright as ever for the day, maybe more so, the leaves were dulled, the green now flat.

It wasn’t the leaves, I realized, stunned; it was me. How did that work? Was the physical so connected to the emotional that my eyes saw differently?

I kept returning to the deck, hoping.

And in the evening dusk I spotted bats overhead, swooping as bats do, the first time in three long years, and was inordinately happy to see them.

Two.

Sometimes you have a fly on your frog’s eye on your head. That’s just the way it is.

Three.