Coyotes

If you live in the country, you know the sound: the high, frantic yipping and yowling of coyotes working themselves into a frenzy around a kill.  Last night, the yelps jolted me out of a sound sleep, heart pounding. Gracie already had her nose to the open bedroom window, on high alert.  Steve, wide awake too, took my hand, and we listened in tense silence as the wild dogs went at it, the unearthly, piercing calls rising and falling and rising again in the field just below our house.  Later, after the racket had stopped, I lay awake for a long time, shaken by this stark reminder that the world is multi-layered, more complicated and perilous than I like to admit to myself by light of day.

The flags are flying at half-mast here in our small town, though we are hundreds of miles from Fort Hood.  Driving up to Agway to buy a bag of birdseed, I look at that lowered flag, and it hits me again: life is fragile; it turns on a dime. For any of us, at any time,  tragedy may be no more than a heartbeat away.  There’s no way to know, nothing to be done either, other than be grateful for every good moment we’re blessed to have, even as we carry those who suffer in our hearts.  This week, it seems to me that death is just a little more present than usual.

A mile from our house, on a road I travel every day, a car crossed the center line in broad daylight, hit a pick-up truck head-on, killing the driver instantly. This morning, Steve called from the office with news that one of his best friends has died suddenly, unexpectedly, alone in a hotel room. I turn on the computer and see a headline first: “Swine flu has killed 540 children.” And I pause to allow the statistic to assume meaning, knowing that behind the number are parents, sibliings, friends, whose lives are irreparably changed. Meanwhile, my mother sits with her dying sister in Florida, trying to figure out how, after seventy-four years, you say good-bye to someone who arrived on the planet before you did and has always been right there, across the hall or at the end of a phone line, since the day you were born.

The coyotes’ eerie yelps have echoed in my mind as I’ve gone about my business today, pondering death and carrying on with life, as people always do.   Watering the houseplants, answering emails, changing the bed, I was also aware, in a way I rarely am, of the fleetingness of things.  What if a meaningful life is simply one in which the person doing the living is really paying attention?

More attuned than usual to the fact that all our days are numbered, I find myself seeking to somehow make sure I truly honor this one.  And so I stop in the parking lot at Agway, before the lowered flag, and say a prayer for the Fort Hood families, small and insignificant as that gesture feels.  I buckle my seat belt, even to drive the two miles into town, and slow the car to look at the spot where a stranger died a few days ago, just because he glanced down for a second, or answered his cell phone, or turned away from the road to watch a flock of geese heading south.  I stand at the kicthen sink, and remember Marshall dancing at our wedding twenty-one years ago.  I talk to my mom on the phone, and then think back to an autumn picnic just two Octobers ago, when my mother and I, and my cousin and my aunt, all sat together on the banks of Norway Pond sharing sandwiches from the Hancock store. We knew even then that the cancer wasn’t going to go away, that sometime in the future we would look back and savor the memory of that day.

Somehow, we humans have to live knowing that we will die.  And so we count on the little things–which aren’t so little after all– to hold us in place and give us some perspective: love, memory, hope, and faith.  We reach out to embrace the present moment, imperfect as it is.  And we project ourselves into the future, making plans, imagining possible scenarios, and then setting about to realize them.

“I have a bit of a girlfriend these days,” one son confided today, surprising me.

“I think I did pretty well on my big test,” the other reports over the phone.

My husband comes home, we feed the dog, pour a glass of wine, light a fire. I bring dinner to the table, and we start talking things over.  Life feels precious.  It is.