(from Japanese 木漏れ日 : sunlight filtering through trees,
creating a sort of dance between the light and the leaves)
by Christie B. Cochrell
Lynn closed the door against the eastern darkness and turned on every light she could find. The bulb inside the garnet-red hurricane glass, which turned on with an ornate key. The lamp with the dull tobacco-colored shade on the old pinewood desk. The reading light over the quilt-covered bed—brighter than expected. And then even the bathroom light, because the year was failing and the sun had gone too soon, too absolutely, sunk into the stagnant pond below the historic Virginia inn that showed no sign of trout, not a glimmer, though trout had been promised in the listing of inns. They would have been sullen, leaden, anyway, any trout in that pond. Lynn imagined the taste of muddy listlessness in them, in fish meant to be sleek and quick and iridescent.
For a little inner light, she poured mint tea into a bathroom glass, deliciously cold. She'd left the bottle in ice earlier while she'd gone looking for the walking trails that the inn’s map showed starting in the unpaved parking lot, skirting the pond, then heading off across hilly pastures into the woods, looping along the fence-line to some springs she never found. But on a grassy rise thick with white yarrow, she did come upon a red clay tennis court, clearly abandoned, and up higher, among feral trees, a ruined house, its openings caved in upon themselves.
Coming back at nightfall to the country inn, built in the mid-1800s, Lynn couldn't help feeling that it too was deserted, in spite of its pristine white trim and dapper purplish brick. Most of the rooms were shuttered, closed for the season, with few or no guests expected during the middle of the week. She was reminded of the haiku Matsuo Basho, also a solitary traveler, wrote at the end of his life—
All along this road
not a single soul—only
autumn evening. 1
Her friend Shu, who had grown up in Brittany and practiced at the Buddhist zendo on Belle-Île before ending up as head groundskeeper at the northern California university where Lynn had studied speech-language pathology, had given her the haiku as a talisman for her wanders—these yearly autumn quests after elusive words of melancholy, nostalgia, and transience all intended for a collection of photography and attendant musings. Mono no aware, saudade, sehnsucht, hiraeth. Japanese, Portuguese, German, Welsh. The language of the psyche. The words of longing—and the words which countered them--offered solace.
Not hungry yet, but wanting human warmth, she went downstairs to dinner, in the glassed-in porch pooling with candles, the night just beyond. With rich wood paneling on the inner wall, and garnet linen cloths on the tables, the sense was strong of being holed up snugly against the late October darkness, as if on a boat. Only two other tables were occupied, one by the two women who'd come in asking about a room while Lynn was being given her room key, late in the afternoon, when the light was dappled and inviting.
“We saw your sign up on the road, and thought we’d poke our heads in . . .” Two women around sixty, one hearty and solid and reminiscent of Julia Child, in a weatherproof field jacket, the other more fragile, with silver hair cut in a messy shag, wearing black leggings and an oversized tribal print cardigan. Out rambling the countryside for antiques, birds? Planning a book, as Lynn was, making the most of yearly vacation? Lonely together, somehow. Maybe with grown-up kids they never got to see, looking for brave adventures in their stead. Or with decades of infidelities between them, looking for nothing, anymore.
At the far end of the dining room was a party of six—older, rich, talking about the ingredients of rum cake, about sailing the canals of Burgundy in a barge.
Lynn ate a delicious spicy crab soup, with crab from Chesapeake Bay, and looked at the reflections of the candles in the greenhouse glass, remembering an inn on the opposite coast twenty-some years ago, where she'd been stranded with the stranger who had been her husband. She'd felt trapped in the wrong life, longed to be by herself with a good pair of walking shoes and a couple of paperback mysteries investigated by the charming Amsterdam detectives with a Zen approach to life. A working boat harbor, it was, with dark woods close around. Redwoods and evergreens, pushing and pushing in. It scared her that the road went no further from there. It narrowed then dead-ended at the oily landlocked harbor in the woods. She felt the panic even now, even with all the tricks she'd learned to ward off those feelings.
“It was dreadful in Barcelona,” one of the rich old men across the room was saying. “You can’t imagine. The tour leader fell asleep on the bus.”
Another of the men, who looked a little like Lynn's father, with thinning hair and a trim white circle goatee, made her sad—especially his clownish polka dot bowtie. He didn’t talk, or seem to listen, much. Deaf, maybe, and so excluded from the others’ conversation? Or sadder still, just dull, without stories. Looking at him, she wondered where she'd be if she hadn’t gotten out of that marriage. Where she'd be now, with winter coming on and darkness pressing against pregnable rooms, instead of being free to follow rambling little roads that led through places like Goose Creek, Crums Church, Pidgeon Hill, past taverns with hand-chalked menus and an 18th-century gristmill on a slow green river, past pastures with dry-stone running walls enclosing leggy thoroughbreds or, in one case, a small white plane sitting wing-deep in overgrown grasses. To stop at Willa Cather's birthplace in the Shenandoah Valley—her favorite author's cherished "sleepy pine woods, slatey ground"—and then, late in the day, at some haunted Civil War battlefield. To photograph the inestimable light in the Blue Ridge Mountains, then stay the night or week at country inns like this one. Notebook and camera and maps in hand, and a stash of Sumatra coffee for dawn wakings.
Unscripted weeks of komorebi, sunlight dancing through leaves, to head off those feelings of loss and self-doubt that gathered this time of year, the almost inexpressible feelings for which only other cultures had words, the words Shu had taught her, to fill that autumn emptiness by naming it. He'd inspired her to photograph the golden-crowned sparrow whose song offers the quintessence of mono no aware, the unbearable beauty of parting, of late October afternoons. Then she'd found quotes from T.S. Eliot, from Pablo Neruda, from Tom Stoppard even, and took countless pictures of what was beautiful and doomed. Lens filters made it all hazy, distanced, with a browning, melancholy tone.
At the Virginia inn, after the soup, Lynn ordered roast pork with sage and tiny red potatoes (not able to face fish after that murky trout pond), and while eating, watched the others, wondering about their lives. The windows felt like a membrane of ice, the yellow circles of the candles seeming to melt holes through to the other side. She was grateful to be in unexacting company, safe in her introspective solitude, her protective bird blind of words. Always the observer, the onlooker, the one who chose to stay light and aloof.
But as Lynn considered dessert, a warm gingerbread with candied ginger gelato, a commotion upset the cozy room—a falling chair, a glass shattered, a cry of outrage from the silver-haired woman with the tribal cardigan. In the affronted silence from the table of six, their dissection of some private prep school on the river "perfect for our grandson Dylan, though he hasn't got much use for books" summarily curtailed, her raised voice cut that much louder.
The heavy-set woman kept saying "Bella, Bella," trying to soothe her shockingly unhappy friend. Bella wasn't to be soothed, though, and launched herself at the other. She lunged and missed—hitting the wall too hard. Then limp and dead quiet, suddenly, she slid into a small diminished heap, shoulder and arm bunched up against one of the chair legs, bangles dripping off her wrist.
The innkeeper, who had been clearing plates, rushed out to call a doctor from just up the road, while the large woman, blanched and terrified, sat on the floor and nestled her unconscious friend in her substantial lap.
"She'd gotten better—I was sure. But now she's hit her head again . . . Oh hell, this is awful." She explained that Bella was struggling with the after-effects of a brain injury, which included episodes of impulsive anger like this. "It's been over a year . . . since a bike accident last June."
Lynn stood next to the couple, wanting to help. She felt useless. She watched the injured woman's eyes flutter open and register nothing, and the other—"Margaret Wendel," written in round cursive in the guestbook—gently dab her vacant face with the cloth napkin Lynn had moistened in a water glass. There was an old scar from the corner of Bella's mouth down to the jawline, which Lynn thought could be read as incised sorrow.
After the doctor came, and helped Bella back to the guest room at the end of the long hallway with its hand-woven plum and rose rag runner, Lynn went out to sit in the darkness of the inn's side veranda, warmed by an electric stove with simulated flames. Still, she shivered, recalling the torrent of emotions. Margaret's anguished words while the doctor kneeled to examine her friend.
"I knew. It's all my fault—they'd warned us. A head injury means keeping absolutely quiet, staying with what's familiar. But I insisted on pushing ahead with our annual trip to the country, to collect leaves for Bella's silkscreens. I had convinced myself a change would do her good. It's been so long; we'd gotten so dreary at home. A year already, years ahead . . . Who knows if she'll ever. . ." She nearly gasped for air. "And this is the result."
"You've done what you thought best," Lynn assured her. "That's surely a good thing."
"How can you think you're qualified to say that?" The anger smoldering in Margaret's eyes, mostly directed at herself, flared up and ignited the stranger's easy platitudes.
Later, the silent older man had followed Lynn out to the veranda and sat down in another of the Adirondack chairs, facing outwards into the dark. The others of his party had all fled at the first sign of trouble, saying they desperately needed Drambuie, Bridge, "for God's sake, fun." Lynn was grateful for his companionable silence.
"That constellation there,” he said after a bit, pointing a few degrees below the roof of the long, open porch, “Scheherazade, the storyteller."
His voice was pleasant, low, not what she would have guessed. Lynn had been taught to call the constellation Cassiopeia, but he went on and she listened, enchanted, to the names he gave to other flickering groupings of stars, bright in the absence of city lights. His solemn gesturing felt like a benediction.
"There, slightly left, is Bathsheba, mother of Solomon; and just beyond that tree Sacagawea, the Shoshone interpreter. Right next to her, The Nurse, young Juliet's feisty champion. Later tonight The Seer with her bright sword will be rising—Joan of Arc, attended by angels. And though you can't see her this time of year, my favorite winter constellation is Ella Fitzgerald, with her diamond earrings and her microphone. All the grand dames I look up to—in every sense. There, spirited and constant, whenever I need them."
He went on more prosaically, "Since I've spent a major portion of my life among the stars, I figure I'm entitled to enjoy their company."
Archie—"short for Archimedes, if you can believe it"—had been Chair of Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, he explained rather apologetically. He'd wanted to study folklore instead (“Ethnologie et Patrimoine"), to curate fascinating exhibits like those at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec where he’d grown up, "playing ice hockey like a young savage." But life had disappointed him.
"Marriage too," he confided, still gazing starward. "Which came bound up with that ragtag and bobtail of in-laws and hangers-on. Sad people, you can see. Nothing ever gives them any joy."
Lynn didn't dare offer a comment after her blunder with Margaret, but she often wondered about such people, whether at the same time nothing caused them any true grief, either—or any of those wistful feelings she found everywhere. Those subtle, aching distresses that visited the solitary, the introverts, the empaths.
"I love that you collect constellations as friends or guiding angels," she told him. "With me, it's often as not words." She mentioned some of them, the yearning and the curing, culled from the authors she had gathered for her book. She quoted Tom Stoppard's "Autumnal—nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day . . ." Then T.S. Eliot's "wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,/ Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened."
"And Willa Cather does yearning especially well," she added, thinking of her earlier visit to the farmhouse. In "A Wagner Matinee," the farmwife who once studied music was undone by grief at the thought of losing it again, forever; in Lucy Gayheart, Lucy, sadly remembering her beloved teacher and lost times, recalled "how often she had run out on a spring morning, into the orchard, down the street, in pursuit of something she could not see, but knew!" That was essential saudade, sehnsucht.
Lynn herself had been luckier. After she'd fled from panic, from those murky woods and still murkier obligations to a man she didn't love, she'd found herself possessed of steady hope. At twenty-eight she'd gone back to finish a degree in speech-language pathology, and when she'd gotten disenchanted midway through, had taken a weekend brush-drawing class from Shu, the Japanese French groundskeeper at the university. He’d taught her Zen circles and faith in men again, and for her low ebbs, untranslatable redolent words from the various languages he spoke with musical cadence.
At breakfast the next morning, Margaret sat solidly alone at one of the tables in the rain-rinsed glass room. Lynn approached, hoping to make amends.
"Bella will be all right," Margaret answered politely. "Resting today, before we head back to Reston." She was subdued, and apologized for being rude the night before.
Lynn apologized in turn for having been presumptuous.
"All year I counted on getting away . . ." Margaret went on. "Thinking that a few days doing what made us happy shouldn't be too much to ask. The leaves starting to turn along the Blue Ridge Parkway . . . all the trees whose leaves and bark we learned in school—hickory, linden, larch, dogwood, black walnut. And Bella's favorite, wild cherry."
She ran her spoon around the blue rim of the oatmeal bowl, unconsciously drawing circles. "Excuses, of course. Lies. My needing hope too desperately."
Lynn saw that what she'd thought about the two when she'd first seen them had been wrong: it was Margaret Wendel, not her friend, who was the fragile one, her resilience as precarious as the shell of a wren's egg hidden in the grass.
She said gently, "The Japanese call what you two are doing momijigari—'autumn-leaves hunting.'” They find it essential, too. And then there's shinrin-yoku—'forest bathing'—an important part of healing and preventative health care. So, they wouldn't agree with you that it's selfish or vain."
Margaret looked infinitely sad, and unconvinced, but said only "Thank you, for that."
Nearby the table of six filled, with the women in outspoken high spirits and scads of gaudy jewelry, and Archie deaf and mute again, oblivious to their banter. Someone else she had gotten wrong, Lynn told herself, amused. She should have paid attention to that impish bowtie. She overheard them talk about leaving right after breakfast for Virginia Beach, the Norfolk Premium Outlets, thrilled by the idea of shopping.
“I thought we’d planned to stop at Monticello,” Archie interrupted. "To see the gardens, and Jefferson's telescopes and astronomical clock.”
His wife’s reply came swift as a scythe. "None of that historical stuff, thank you."
"You might as well be back at work, my friend," chided the pompous man with wavy Ronald Reagan hair who had complained the night before about the Spanish tour guide who'd dared inconvenience them.
When they got up to go, Archie the quiet troubadour of stars followed obediently in his fellows' wake, plotting his astral circumnavigations, giving Lynn a stealthy wink as he went by.
Late in the afternoon when she came back from a long walk through the gracious Virginia countryside, she saw Margaret putting bags into the rear seat of an electric blue Mini Cooper. Bella already sat in the front seat, her mussy silver hair pulled back with a tortoiseshell clip, her artist's face expressionless.
Margaret stood for a long time watching the black pond. Even now hoping for trout maybe, Lynn guessed, for skimming dragonflies or glancing sun-minnows, silver and green. But the stagnant water yielded nothing.
Then, shoulders squared, she wedged herself into the Mini, and with Bella unresponsive still, pulled away up the gravel drive.
Lynn let herself into the inn. The Eastern autumn dusk would turn night soon and close her in with her own shortcomings and compromises, whatever she'd done or failed to do. Each year again it came to that moment of reckoning (like what the Germans called torschlusspanik), though it could be held off a little, momentarily, by a notebook and pen, some paperbacks, the smells of dark roast coffee and the lavender sachet tucked in the folded flannel nightgown on the bedside chair, her grandmother's chased silver hairbrush on the windowsill. The charms of every sort that get one through. Momijigari, komorebi, even the redemptive kernel at the heart of mono no aware—the keen, keeling sense of joy in the present moment that the lurking knowledge of transience allows.
Why is it so hard, the sweetness of the heart of the cherry?
Is it because it must die or because it must carry on?(Pablo Neruda)
And when she later got up from her writing chair to close the blinds, Lynn glimpsed Archie's Scheherazade twinkling down on her, faint but distinct in the inky sky above the trees. Those biding ranks of trees, whose names Margaret had recited like a kind of litany, an oft-repeated petition, had caressed like a strand of prayer beads, one by one—hickory, linden, larch, dogwood, black walnut, wild cherry. Each redeeming angel called by name as they muster around, quietly circling the wagons.
1 translation, Sam Hamill
Christie B. Cochrell's work has been published by Catamaran, Orca, Cumberland River Review (with a Pushcart Prize nomination), Lowestoft Chronicle, Tin House, and a variety of others. Chosen as New Mexico Young Poet of the Year while growing up in Santa Fe, she’s traveled far and wide since then, and recently published a volume of collected poems, Contagious Magic. Living and writing by the ocean now in Santa Cruz, California, she loves especially the play of light, the journeyings of time, things ephemeral and ancient.