The trip—and the return—did not go according to plan in small ways and in more dramatic ones. After some discussion my husband and I we had decided to drive one last time the 1600 miles between Houston and Syracuse—and back again with Paul’s belongings. The trip would be all-too familiar: Paul had done it alone several times, Scott and Paul had done it together, and we had done it as a threesome. Sometimes Paul would have his dog, sometimes Scott and I did the Southern part of the trip several times, meeting Paul as he churned his way down to Louisiana or to Tennessee without stopping overnight. None of us had done the whole trip both ways—there was always a car to drop off, and, besides, there was never enough time. This time there would be. Our semester was over; we could submit grades from the road and work in hotel rooms. There would be ample opportunity to stop at sites of interest. 

At the beginning of the fall semester, after office hours, say, or a department meeting, I would walk in the under the trees to the parking lot where the path would give way to concrete shimmering in the heat. By the end of the semester, the same walk would take place at dusk; I would pass lighted windows in the still warm evening air. In the spring the process would reverse as, walking to the car, I would meet the onrush of spring on the wind, the air thick with scent and the pathways with oak pollen.

I am not a gardener. Since I have a garden and spend a lot of time dealing with it, what I must mean is that I am not a good gardener. Part of the problem, it must be said, is Houston. Houston has over 300 growing days, but only a few things grow here. “Grow” is an inadequate word to describe what happens when you find a plant that does not mind the heat and humidity, the sticky clay-y soil that local gardeners somewhat oddly call gumbo, and the wild oscillation of rain and drought, and you place it in a Houston garden.

At intervals during the long day before our appointment, my mother would be quite lucid: she understood, or seemed to understand, that we would be soon be visiting the hospital. In the afternoon she made the connection between the original plan and this new exigency. “I don’t want to be dirty for the doctor,” she said. After weeks of trying, I finally persuaded her to take a “pezzi” bath, a term from our Italian days meaning a bath of parts or pieces. My mother had me take pezzi baths when I was sick so I wouldn’t make my cold or fever worse.

It had been strange living in my mother’s empty apartment, empty even of the scent of her cigarettes and perfume. It was stranger in a way to return with my mother so changed, so shrunken, to feel the withdrawal of her presence to the bedroom and her energy from the chairs and tables she brought to life. The smallish one-bedroom apartment with the walled off dining room suddenly felt enormous, as if her retreat to bed had stretched a cord between us to the point of breaking.

I have found that the death of someone you love takes its place in a chain of deaths, as if separate acts of mourning were one continuous space, entered at key moments but running parallel to and perhaps below the exigencies of daily life. I have pictured that space as a dark thread or a road. Now, perhaps because of Harvey, that dark place is a river always unfolding beneath my feet. The road has many entrances, the river, many points of access.  I visited it when my father died, and then a beloved dog, and then my mother, my uncle, and my aunt. I remember how mourning feels from time to time and from death to death, but each entry into it illuminates past deaths, takes me back against the current one death or two or three.

I wrote to my friend and colleague who had hosted that prior visit to be reminded of the name of the hotel in which University of Tennessee had put me up and to see if she wanted to have dinner. The email exchange required a new and tentative etiquette: “If you are up and about we would love to see you,” I wrote. “But we know you may be distancing.” I asked if she knew of a restaurant with a dog-friendly patio. My friend replied immediately with the hotel name and a list of restaurants. She was less certain about meeting up: “I’m not sure whether I am distancing yet or not. I’m supposed to have spin class tonight.” We did end up having dinner, a delicious meal on a patio overlooking Knoxville’s Market Square. The dogs behaved extremely well, even in the presence of another canine diner. There was shrimp and there was eggplant, and someone served us. I chose between desserts. Had I known what I know now I would have ordered both. I hugged my friend goodbye.

The story I will be telling is an origin story, a favorite genre of mine since reading Just So Stories as a little girl. I am aware that the last sentence was itself an origin story in miniature: a story about how I came to love beginnings but not so much endings. Like other origin stories, it is not perfectly true; it is a cleaned-up version that ignores or subordinates other details, other influences. If influence means “inflow” (etymology is an origin story par excellence) then I am ignoring other tributaries, other streams, other rivers, in my desire to identify where things began.

The idea of walking the 31 miles of this particular Houston “slow river” came to me soon after that river had flooded our home back in 2017. I realized then that this uninvited guest that had turned our house and our lives upside down had a life of its own. I have written two previous posts on the Bayou itself—about the resonance of the word “Bayou,” and the disappointment I experienced every time I crossed or walked along its sluggish waters; and about the anxiety I experienced when those waters swelled to terrifying proportions in Houston’s many recent 100-year floods. I would walk the Bayou to face my fears.

When is a disaster over? How do we know? Three days after the storm that froze Texas, the skies are bright, the ground thawed, and the air has become that wonderful temperature-less temperature that usually belongs to other places—those you might choose to vacation in when all of this is over. Underground, the plants are going about their business, drinking water from the soil; some will die and some will begin to flush green. Yards are covered with sheets and tarps that Houstonians used to wrap around the “more tender” plants, tucking them in along, perhaps, with a with string of Christmas lights as the temperature plummeted. 

But I am not really reading for decorating ideas. The renovations and redecoration, whether they cost $150 or $10,000, are a point of entry and perhaps of exit (note to self: buy more orange pillows) but not what keeps me reading. I think what pulls me in during this endless undifferentiated time of COVID is the idea of “before and after” itself. Like the bodily makeover (I admit also to clicking on videos that are endless loops of older women applying supposedly minimal makeup to achieve a natural glow) the “before and after” of home renovation promises that there will be, that we are actually imaginatively inhabiting, an “after.”

Darcy, like Pemberley is “handsome”; while perhaps not “large,” he can be easily imagined as tall. He is of a higher class than Lizzy and therefore “an eminence” toward which it makes sense to “ascend.” He is also, like the road which leads to the mansion, perhaps regrettably “abrupt”; with his coldness and rigidity, “stone” seems a perfect refection of his character. Although we—and Lizzy—are not used to thinking of Darcy as informal, perhaps the passage is indicating a deeper likeness between house and owner that we have yet to penetrate: Darcy may be stiff and standoffish on the surface, but underneath his clothes (as the A&E “undressed” adaptation makes tantalizingly clear) he is charming and even vulnerable. 

There are decisions to make. You wake up at 5:00 because you heard or felt a little click; it has disturbed your dreams, where you have met your friends, unmasked. As expected, your electricity—as, they say, your power—is off. Last night you remembered to charge all the things that may help keep you informed about what is going on outside your house, and what might happen in it. You knew you would lose power, because you always do; it is the first, and on good days the only, sign of disaster. Because you live in Houston, you do not know where your wool socks, bought long ago when you lived in the Northeast, are hidden.

Lizzy initially visits Pemberley wearing, as it were, three bonnets. As far as her uncle and aunt, who accompany her on the visit, are concerned, they are all simply sightseers, taking advantage of the early 19th-century practice of touring the grounds and sometimes the interiors of stately homes—a practice that endures today  although many such “homes” are now essentially museums owned by the National Trust or similar organizations. Unbeknownst to her relatives, however, Lizzy has also recently—and vehemently-- turned down Darcy’s proposals of marriage. She will cross his threshold in a potentially embarrassing collision of roles: tourist, antagonist, and—inevitably—potential bride.

A little girl sits alone in a waiting room, a lounge, a reception area. “Little” because she is small and thin, whatever her age. All we know is that she is too young to enter the patients’ rooms at the nursing home. It is somewhere between 1969 and 1972 and at this point in history they still call the inhabitants of the nursing home patients. She has just learned the word “denizens” but is unsure how to use it. She is reading a big book—Anna Karenina, perhaps, or War and Peace, or Middlemarch, depending on the month and the year. She has chosen the longest books she can find because she knows she will be spending a long time in waiting rooms, this one and several others, as her mother makes the round of the previous generation.

Since at least the seventeenth century and up to the present moment, the Anglo-American world has been asking a question that takes this form: Is a particular activity (caring for the sick, administering charity, education children, giving birth, doing paid labor) done best in a domestic or an institutional setting? Over that long span of time, the answers have tended to favor institutions like factories, schools, and hospitals although there has been regular and sometimes effective pushback, re-placing activities, for some people, within the walls of individual homes. For decades before the pandemic, new movements arose to re-center home as the appropriate place for life events like birth and death. And, how, of course, it is a privilege to be able to do as much as possible without crossing the domestic threshold.

A woman comes home after a long day of work. This is a sentence that could be written any time, but let us say It is January of 2021, which means that outside her house—but not yet inside it—the pandemic is raging. If she is coming home after her work, she is likely to be an essential worker, although the word “essential” does not mean what you—and she—might think. Mostly what it means is that she is exposed to COVID many times each day. She could be a grocery store worker who implores people to wear masks, or a delivery woman who drops packages, untipped, on porches of those who can afford to stay home. She could be a teacher in a state where the schools are open, praying that her face shield protects her from her students as she stands for hours at the front of a windowless room. She could, of course, be a nurse, so exhausted by the physical and emotional demands of her job that she sometimes doesn’t do a perfect job with her imperfect PPE. 

Another year, another gerund. The “ing” in “decluttering” signals a continual process, something we should always be doing, something, in other words, that never gets done. If my Facebook feed can be believed, however, there is a special time for starting the process decluttering, and it was last week.  The website “Positively Present,” for example, tells told us that “the change of a date on the calendar can be all the inspiration you need to make positive changes.” January is the time for getting rid of many different kinds of things, decluttering sites inform us—from clothing to kitchen appliances to toxic relationships.

There were, however, some exceptions to the monotony of his diaries: we could count, for narrative and indeed for rare expressions of feeling, on Scharf’s inevitable New Year’s diary entries that served as summaries for the year. It was here that his snobbery took even more tangible form as he registered increased intimacies with aristocrats and patrons. It was here that he offered a narrative arc for his evolving professional successes closely tied, of course, to the aforementioned patrons.

You are screaming, in part because no one can hear you over the Christmas music, and in part because you have so much else to do in the way of plating and garnishing cold appetizers, warming hot ones, getting out the green glasses, and finding the napkins you bought on sale a year ago that are just Christmassy enough. “Have you released me as host?” you yell—and then, even louder because your husband does not answer, “Am I the host or are you?”