Wisteria

Behind our house here, the very house we are soon to leave forever, is a large twenty foot by twenty  foot square brick terrace built by my husband fifteen years ago.  When he was finished he erected over it a wooden pergola as a support for wisteria which now has grown up luxuriantly, providing on the one hand a miracle of shade that provides a temperature reduced ten degrees from that outside, and on the other growing so abundantly that trimming back its ever reaching, desperate, needy tendrils is a constant affair.  This morning after only two days I was at it again, busy with shears and various extended cutting tools, and I know that it will require more attention at the end of the weekend.  Why is it that I cannot be content with this and the other garden chores?  I was raised in farm country, learned the rhythm of repetitive work.  And I have seen the women of Sicily standing at the base of a statue of the Virgin ceaselessly running their rosaries through their fingers as they recite.  I remember so well my late sister-in-law working at her embroidery by the hour.  Farm women shelling peas on the back porch when we went to buy eggs.  Why is it that I must cry out "I want something more" when there is nothing more?  And yet I can  sometimes sit for an hour staring at the flowers or at the water cascading from the fountain in our garden with my brain emptied of thought.  The curse of a thinking mind demands a brain crowded with words.  Why do I feel compelled to write?  How is it that I am happiest when I am about to board a plane, going down the passage way and am now longer where I was and not yet where I shall be, in a blissful limbo?  Nothingness is so compelling, yet so terrifying.  Two years ago my dearest friend died at 97, and she was slow in going.  Just like my 89 year old sister a few years before that, very slow indeed, bleeding internally and resisting any effort to stop the process toward her death.  And what is that process of dying?  Well, it is not trimming wisteria, and I must not confuse the two.  Still it were good if I could surrender to the mindlessness of daily life, especially so as I age, and most likely will not have another major project, no new book, no article, even a lecture doubtful.  My dear friend who died at 97 kept complaining in the years leading up to that "I need a project."  She was a printer, who made elegant small books on her own press, and so I wrote an essay for her, that she might make it into a pamphlet.  She loved what I had written and I believed that I knew her well enough, understood her politesse, her lying while making complimenti, to know that she did indeed like it, and so watched from afar with a certain fascinated sorrow as she fumbled about, and I wondered how well she understood she could not take on a project again.