Settling

Landscaping lights illuminating the undercanopy of a willow. An old wisteria vine winding up the front of a house. Robins still foraging in the dim evening light. My redeemable element game was going well. In front of a well-restored Arts and Crafts bungalow painted in shades of brown, I saw a man getting his newspaper. We’d half smiled at each other many times on my walks through Duck Woods, but had never spoken.

“Good evening,” I said.

“Evening,” he replied.

“This house was run down when I was growing up,” I continued, to his surprise. “I used to believe it was haunted.”

“Really?” he said.

“You’ve done a lot of work.”

“We have.”

When I didn’t say anything else, he looked back at his house as if to check. “The painters just finished yesterday, actually.”

A robin, triggered by the streetlight flickering on, began to sing.

“It looks nice,” I said.

“Thank you.” He seemed genuinely happy to hear it.

“Well, have a good night,” I said.

“You, too.”

Rose keeps above her desk a copy of a photograph of French soldiers in World War I standing in front of a small vegetable garden adjacent to their trench. They did not have to build it. They were not ordered to plant a garden. I figured it represented for Rose an image of hope or optimism in the face of odds, but when I asked her, she shook her head. “It reminds me there is beauty in contrast.”

As I walked away from the man in the brown bungalow with the perfect yard, I thought the idea would make no sense to him.

But who knows? I’m tired of judging.

Why do I like gardening? Because I worry I’ve inherited a certain hopelessness, a potentially fatal lack of interest, that I’m diseased with reserve. Making a garden runs counter to all that. You can’t garden without thinking about the future.

It’s odd that Penelope didn’t garden, though I appreciate her lack of interest in decorating. She changes nothing in the house while Odysseus is away, but when he returns, she orders his bed to be moved outside the bedchamber. Odysseus knows the bed can’t be moved because he made it himself and one of the posts is formed from a living tree. In this way she tests his identity. The tree roots them to their house, where they settle once again.

Settle. The word gives me pause. You can settle a dispute and you can settle into a life. In its transitive form it means “to place so as to stay.”

I suppose what you are reading is my attempt to settle. There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell, one about friendship and friends and what place they have in a life, and one I’ve been trying not to tell about my family. Does that make me an unreliable narrator? To a certain extent, aren’t we all? We don’t get to write from scratch the whole story of our lives. We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated. Maybe we settle when we’ve done the best we can.

Is it real? I once asked Amber. What? she said. Your life! The things that happen to you. Is it real or are you just really good at making it all into stories? She said, I don’t understand the difference. —Alice