Old Women and Rivers

At the table in the kitchen of the big house in the dream I shared with you in an earlier blog sits an old woman with very large hands. The table is large and white. We are drinking tea and smiling. It is in the early hours of the morning. We don't speak; we simply sit together. I admire her hands as she holds her cup warming gnarled fingers which are expressive and expansive.

Today I have a lump in my throat. I'm not sure what it is -- anxiety, sadness, things unexpressed that coil there waiting to be born. I look at her, wanting to talk, not sure how to begin, what I will say.

She cocks her head, which I now notice is wrapped in a bright scarf of reds, blues, yellows and oranges. She is listening. I listen also. In the distance I hear water and the sharp call of a bird. It sounds like a brook is burbling along out there somewhere. I am plunged into memories of brooks I have walked beside, streams I have fished in, rivers I have loved. Once when I was young I cut a reed from beside a small creek and lay on my stomach in the mosses using it as a straw to sip the ice cold water. Once when I was fishing in a quiet river pool a family of baby martins ran across my boot top as they played. Once I fell in a river, and when I surfaced saw the huge, alarmed eyes of my then-small children who were crouched at water's edge watching where I had disappeared. Fat old rivers, fast racing alpine streams, dilatory creeks snaking through willow wallows, tricklets of newborn spring water -- image after image flashes through my memory.

My friend Paul likes to find the source of rivers. He comes to them where they are still quite young, babies really, little streams struggling through boulder fields in the bosom of some mountain. He follows them back to their birthplace. Some are born in high lakes bordered by glaciers. Others seem to emerge from the rocks themselves, gradually forming from a multitude of trickles into something with a bed and a direction. Still others emerge from alpine springs. Paul likes to look at the tiny place of origin, and likes to imagine the river as it is further along, authoritative, capable, carving out valleys, carrying huge boats on its back, fertilizing farm lands.

When I reach this point in my thinking I suddenly remember my companion at the kitchen table of my imagination. I turn my attention back there, yearning once more to ask something, I don't know what. The old woman has gotten up during my reverie and left. A younger woman wearing an apron is plunking down a mixing bowl, and a child has wandered in, eyes crusted with sleep, to demand silently to be picked up onto my lap and held.

I feel a bit sad, off balance, frustrated with everything I do not know. I lean my chin against the head of the small one in my lap and sigh. Sometimes there are no words, I guess. Sometimes there is just the waiting.

Then I notice that the old woman has left her brightly-colored scarf in a disorderly heap in the middle of the table. I pick it up, and the child and I examine it quietly. It comes to me that I could put it on. Will I? What would that mean?