Two Visitors

Each year my home hosts two visitors. They arrive separately, each at the same time, year in and year out, without fail. They are anticipated, and, while not particularly welcome, for I issued no invitation, they are not unwelcome, either. I suppose you could say that they invade my home on an annual basis, but because, practically speaking, there is nothing I can do to stop their arrival, I have learned to accept their advent, even to anticipate it, and use it to do what I like to do best: observe and learn.

* * * * *

The beginning of August, usually within the first three or four days, marks the appearance of what I call the “storm window spider.” From some deep, sub-windowsilled lair, it emerges into the 1/8-inch space between the storm window and screen of the very window before which I sit to eat breakfast and lunch, and, often, to read. Obeying a biological directive not to be denied, my storm-window spider opens the spinnerets at the base of its abdomen and filaments the lower six inches of the screen, from one edge to the other, with an undulant, gauzy trap for miniature forms of life that learn, too late and much to their sorrow, what, exactly, they have gotten themselves into.

Most striking to me is the spider’s immobility. Like some Araneae Zen master, it sits, rinsed of second and minute-hand consciousness, occupying the same spot on the screen no matter when or how often I look. I have seen it move only once, when, jerking abruptly into motion, it traced a zig-zaggy square around its resting place before resuming it. Perhaps that motion was a bit of exercise, an arachnid constitutional to stretch its eight segmented legs and pump some fresh, pale blue blood through its single-chambered heart.

I could easily enough remove the web, and, in fact, did so the first time the spider appeared. By the next morning, however, it had once again “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” And so, I’ve come to view that persistently expressed gossamered tapestry as a form of art, the procreant urge of the spider self unreeled and externalized, its inside made outside and filigreed across the latticed canvas of the screen. Besides, it may be that the spider trains in eight eyes on me as intently as my two eyes monitor it. Perhaps it thinks me a diminished thing, six eyes and six legs short of normal development. Perhaps it watches me sit mostly immobile, in the same place, at the same time, every day, doing the same things, and wonders, bemused, about such a strangely routinized creature. It’s best, I’ve concluded, to let the web remain, removing it only when, toward mid-September, the spider abandons it and retreats deep below the sill to await the next beckoning call of August.

* * * * *

Not long after the storm-window spider has withdrawn, on or about October 7, the wasps arrive. Never in the summer. Only with the serious onset of Fall. Coming home for lunch, I’ll find anywhere from 6 to 10 elegantly slender, narrow-waisted, resonantly buzzing bodies congregated on the living room piano window. I surmise they construct a nest inside the house wall, tucked up near the front-porch soffit, and despite my past attempts to caulk possible ports of entry, I am, finally, unable to discover the crack or crevice by which they get there. I suspect that, roused from their night-chilled torpor by the warming day, they make their determined way down the wall and enter the house through the large double-hung front-room window. My efforts to seal it, though, have proven as unavailing as my outside efforts. They always find a way in. They will not be denied entrance.

I open the piano window to let them find their way back outside. The loiterers I scoop up in a glass or jar, cover it with a piece of paper, then release them outside. My wife Kathy watches, bemused at the futility of my gestures. “They’ll only wind up coming back inside,” she tells me, and I know she’s right. Still, I cannot find it in me to kill them. While I cannot, like Thoreau, feel “complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter,” I can agree with him that they have “never molested me seriously.” They have stung no one but me, and that was once, as I reached under a lampshade to turn on the light, only to dispossess a wasp at its ease on the switch.

No, I cannot kill them, even if they do raise and perplex Robert Frost’s question of what gets walled in, and what, out. They harbor no malevolence, feel no need to beleaguer, have no aforethoughted intent to inflict a stinging wound. They are catalyzed by a cell-deep imperative. They only want out, out to do their pollinating work, out to scavenge, driven by a need for sweets and carbohydrates—a final feast before the coming winter that will mark their end—out, and then back again to nest and colony, back home, a home my home provides.

* * * * *

We are doubly housed, it seems to me. One house, framed with studs, sheathed in a dermis of Tyvek and clapboard, sets a boundary between inside and outside and protects us from the outside by keeping the outside out. And yet, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, given that we are only partially removed from nature, we bring the inside partially out. While we are wonderfully endowed prefrontally cortexed creatures, we yet remain enfleshed biological beings as well. We stand above that in which we are also firmly emplaced. And so, we build decks and front porches and terraces and sun rooms and porticoes and verandas, furnish them with chairs and tables and hammocks and coolers and portable ovens, and use them to eat and snooze and sip iced tea or lemonade or a cold beer and read and write and people-watch and creature-watch and world-go-by watch and, sometimes, maybe often times, just sit and ruminate. Who knows; perhaps some ancestral tug, some savannahed impulse, compels us to return to that from which we originally emerged, but mediated by the indoor we bring outdoor—a hybrid space, a third home. Who knows; perhaps at some level, some profoundly deep level where blood memory lies ineradicably embedded, we feel orphaned, taken by evolution from our original ground of being, and therefore, seeking as much of a reintegration as our new condition allows, we let the wild things in.

* * * * *

But we inhabit another house, bone-studded and skin-sheathed, a SmartHouse, really, powered by the thrumming energy of heart and mind, the churn of consciousness, and to avoid the echo chambering din of our self-reflexive selves, we need to let ourselves out, others in. Nathaniel Hawthorne warns us that “the saddest of all prisons is a [person’s] own heart.” David Foster Wallace warned the 1995 graduates of Kenyon College of the seductive tendency to think themselves “alone at the center of all creation,” lords of their “own tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” But the outreaching gesture of sympathy can be rebuffed, our words can be misconstrued, our intuition can be mistaken, our understanding can falter, the gaze of others, always judgmental, can be withering. Safer, we conclude, to hunker down, dig in, pile up sandbags to thwart threats to our private conceptions of ourselves. And, so, our house has windows to see out, but no door to let in. We monitor our thoughts, our feelings, but find ourselves reluctant to share them. We want to be secure; we want to bond and understand. We linger at the windows, wistful, waiting, yearning to send forth a sticky thread in hopes of making an anchoring contact, but somehow, someway, it falls short. We buzz at the windows, wanting out, wanting out, but never venturing forth beyond the defensive perimeter to engage the could be, the is-there-more, and maybe, just maybe, leave our shackling too-muchness behind.

Leave-Takings

My backyard trees are autumn-adorned, brocaded in deep scarlet, reddish gold, honeyed amber, and sassy yellow—tongues speaking in hued accents a chromatic carnival of color, a retinal assault of beauty so rich, so dense, that, had it mass, its weight on my shoulders would bend my back. I wish it would last, but, of course, I know it won’t. I know it is conjured only to be eclipsed—a requiem, really. I know that its very transience gives it its allure, that we treasure that which is soon to be lost. And even as I gaze, leaves leap from branches, “leaf subsides to leaf,” and I know the rasp and pang of a difficult truth: the change of seasons has pulsed to life biological forces not to be denied, forces that transmit hormones that create abscission cells that cluster at the nexus of stem and branch, gradually unmooring each leaf until a breeze completes the separation. The trees are unleaving. The leaves are leaving, they are leaf-letting-go. The leaves are leave-taking. To gaze, directly and attentively, at something is to become entangled with it. So it is with me as I regard the leaving leaves, watch their fluttering, pinwheeling plummet. I think of leave-takings of my own.

I think of my graduation from college, English majored, degree and teaching license in hand, and my wondering, Have I chosen well? Is teaching meant for me? And I found that I had, that it was. I think of the morning of the day I was getting married, and Mom joining me in the kitchen for coffee and telling me she dreamed that she walked into the family room and saw that the goldfish had disappeared from its bowl. And I said, “Mom, you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know you’re experiencing a version of empty-nest syndrome. I guess we’ll have to call it empty-bowl syndrome. And besides, be glad you didn’t find the fish belly-up. I am.” And she laughed that laugh she had. And I thought of how, many years later, she was carried away into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, where I was just a face without a name, before she finally, mercifully, got her wish and was carried away into a deeper darkness. And I think of Dad’s gradual decline after a punishing fall that left him lying on the hallway floor for more than a day before he was discovered, and the death certificate that gave as cause “Failure to thrive,” and my thinking that whoever wrote that stark sentence did not know my Dad. And I think of my looming retirement, of the colleagues from whom I will take my leave, colleagues who have cared for and inspired me and never, not once, hid their light under a bushel; and students who have gladdened and saddened and maddened me and always, always pushed me, as I pushed them, to know more, to be better.

We are always leave-taking, it seems, always, in ways large and small, saying farewell, goodbye. It’s the way of things, and it’s best not to deny the inevitable. We live through, but we cannot dwell in, or on, a moment, a day, a season. We cannot give ourselves over to pieces of time. We are in them, but not of them. Each moment arrives unfreighted and quickly departs, cargoed perhaps with yearning or joy or penance or rupture or hope. We need to be beside ourselves, to view those shards of time from the outside, to step aside and back and out from them if their relation is to appear. We are on the move, in motion, churning, always churning. We cast a backward look, for that anchors us, but we move onward, for that completes us. We unfold. We go on going on. We make ourselves cohere. We gather the events and experiences and contingencies and set them to a plot, make them into a narrative, continuous and durable, whose revelatory theme is the who that we are.