21
vision
THE CHILD SAID that her eyes were hurting her from looking at everything so hard all the time, so the mother took her to the eye doctor, and the child’s eyes were projected onto a screen. At first they were almond-shaped and looked like a cat’s eyes, obsidian, glittering, but after a few moments, the cat’s eyes vanished and what was behind the eyes was revealed. First the mother saw the retina, and then past the retina, and then to the veins which branched in every direction and then beyond that.
Suddenly the mother was a child again in her backyard in winter at night holding the hand of her own mother, the Grandmother from the North Pole. Who could have imagined that her own child’s eye was lined with the exact trees of her childhood? How strange is the very world we inhabit and call home.
Standing now, on the orb of the child’s eye, the full moon shone brightly and she looked more closely at those bare branches. There were the trees, each one of them: two maples, four birch, then an ash, then another maple, an oak. The mother put her hand to the screen — yes, as a girl she had memorized those trees, and in an instant she was young again and all the brothers were there and baby Inga. Snow covered the ground and the stars were beginning to come out.
The child, off the screen now, tells the eye doctor that more and more, the mother’s eyes turn watery and soft, and the doctor says that it is a natural occurrence at a certain age. One thing naturally begins to blur into the next.
The North Pole Grandmother took her small daughter’s hand and pointed to the Big Dipper and then to the Little Dipper. We orbit the sun, and the moon in turn orbits us. She loved the winter sky: Orion, the North Star, and Cassiopeia’s Chair, and the branches of the trees.
She remembered standing there, looking at the sky the night the Grandmother from the North Pole, who was young and supple, told the mother, that even though she was just a girl, she already held an infinitesimal speck of her own child inside her.
The mother blinked and the Grandmother from the North Pole blinked, and the trees seemed dipped in liquid silver.
THEY HAD TO pass Nine Partners, and Tick Tock Way, and Deer Run, and travel under the Seven Stars Underpass before they got to him — the Boy in the Glen. The boy played a glinting horn and the child thought the boy played exceedingly well. The boy played, and the child danced, and they did not notice that the fox was in the snowy field behind them looking for the chicken. They existed in a magical circle beyond harm. There is something so charmed about a boy in a glen playing a horn while the red fox passes and the child dances.
After a while, it grew dark and the children filled the horn with oil, lit it, and made their way back. When they were together they were protected and had immunity from all the fruitless works of darkness. Making their way to the cottage in the glen, even the boy’s father, touched by the charms of the children and the night, was made powerful and knowing, and without the least hesitation, snatched the chicken at the last minute from the jaws of the fox.
In the distance their alluring music could be heard: a panpipe, bells. Give us the courage to enter the song, the mother thought, looking at the path from which the children would soon materialize.
A CROWN OF winterberry adorned the concrete rabbit’s head. Beside it was an identical rabbit made entirely of snow.
Someone had brought the rabbit a Divinity Basket. Someone else had brought a pair of Hare-Sticks, an auspicious gift, to celebrate the beginning of winter. The child was delighted to find the Hare-Sticks, each about five inches long. She placed them end-to-end so that they looked like a single wand. She then wrapped them in sprigs of wild thyme, club moss, and mountain sage dug from beneath the early snow. She waved the festive hare wands above her head. Winter had finally come.
AT THE WINTER Solstice service, the snow- and fire-lights flickered, and the lost shadows of animals looked monstrous before her on the cave wall. The mother remembered now making a rabbit of snow. A rabbit of snow and ice in winter is more precious than any other kind of rabbit — that is obvious — its long ears shadowed against the firewall. In the flicker, there was a glimpse of something ancient and in motion, and she felt herself to be a part of something elusive and more beautiful than she could understand. Now that winter had arrived, the mother longed to see the wolf again, though in the Valley it was forbidden to even utter the word wolf during the twelve darkest days.
She thought of the bats in the nearby caverns hibernating. Before you knew it, it would be spring, and she would see them again, though she knew that it did not really matter what guise the bat came in. Whether the bat came as a bird, or an angel, or a wolf, or a rabbit made of snow, it scarcely mattered — she would always recognize it.
EVERY YEAR UNCLE Ingmar arrived with the snow, and this year was no exception. He had come from Minnesota and, as usual, would stay for what seemed a very long time, and the mother, as usual, put him up at the local inn. There is no room for you here, Uncle Ingmar, the mother said. While Uncle Ingmar was jolly and gregarious, the mother was non-negotiable and austere. Side by side it would seem impossible that the two were in any way related.
To the child, Uncle Ingmar was all sweetness and folly and light. The only time he ever exhibited his other side was when he first saw the Grandmother from the North Pole’s grandfather clock in the mother’s kitchen. Why should the mother have it? Was he not, by birth, entitled to the clock?
Don’t stay up late at night with Uncle Ingmar, the mother said, and the child nodded. The obedience of the child frightened the mother, but it also consoled her to know that the she would not stay up with the man who is her brother and covets the clock. The mother thinks of love’s unnerving proximity to hate.
If it were up to Uncle Ingmar, they would stay up half the night drinking vodka and hot chocolate and writing poems about the magnificent Swedish clock with its curvaceous body and starry crown.
As it was, Uncle Ingmar and the child had already composed one. They read it aloud:
There was a fancy Swedish clock
It had no tick it had no tock
The brother loved the sister a lot
The sister loved the Swedish clock
And what is foul, looks somehow fair
And what is fair is not tock tock tock.
The mother grimaced looking at the two of them at the early dinner, lit by candles: these were the dark days.
She looked suddenly to the ceiling and remembered during one of Uncle Ingmar’s extended visits at Christmas the child, just a baby at the time, pointing at the hanging circle of holly and candles aflame. It was before she could speak. And Uncle Ingmar there with the silver basin of water. The child never forgot the burning wreath.
UNCLE INGMAR WOULD talk about the “Hour of the Wolf” as he assembled his shadow theater. A flashlight and cutouts. A magic lantern. And there in the night, the wolf towered on the child’s wall.
Where is your mother? Uncle Ingmar has the wolf ask. And the shadow girl whispers in Uncle Ingmar’s girl’s voice: she’s asleep in the snow under a stone.
THE GRANDMOTHER FROM the North Pole was acquiring extra vision in her left eye. It came from years and years of looking at snow and white light, the Grandmother surmised. To her ancestors it had happened, and now it was happening to her, and maybe one day to the child, it would happen again. The doctor agreed that people of Nordic Origin seemed at a certain age predisposed to this darkly illuminated sight, which was sometimes confused with blindness.