Person on the Page

I move into an old house in Ypsilanti and winter there, braving sub-zero temperatures only to drive to and from work. The rest of the time I’m in bed, swaddling myself in a wool blanket through the twilight days of a Michigan January, shielding myself from the house’s drafts and chills.

Chills haunt me through the winter. I believe that I am very sick, maybe dying. I am enduring a divorce, my children are grown and on their own, and I have moved from the East Coast to the Midwest, where I know no one, to take a new job. I am alone for the first time, inhabiting what feels like an afterlife, imagining other troubled presences asserting themselves in the dark corners of rooms. Other hurting people, perhaps, who have lived and died in this house and somehow remain. Like them, I think, I am a stuck soul aimlessly occupying space. Maybe I imagine their presence so I won’t feel so alone.

Alone, I watch as the leaking roof causes muted brown water marks to bloom and multiply on the living room ceiling. Part of the ceiling in the bathroom collapses, raining chunks of plaster and splinters of broken lath into the bathtub. The rotting back door will eventually have to be replaced, but I give no thought to when.

When spring comes, I decide to survive. The days warm. Outside, the untended lawn begins to green. Signs of a past owner’s passion for perennials appear. Tulips push their wide leaves up through last year’s dander in the front yard’s flowerbeds. Pea shoots climb the fence out back. I awake to birds singing one morning.

One morning, I put on my gardening gloves and go outside. The yard needs work, and I can do that. I can. Being outside in the sun working with my hands will revive me. As a child, I dreamed of someday having a vegetable garden. A portion of the back yard is fenced in and ready to be tended. Though overrun with wild grapevines and burgeoning weeds, the plot can be recovered, restored to order, cultivated to allow food to grow. All it will take is hard work.

Hard work has never frightened me, I tell myself. I open the gate and step into the chaos of overgrowth. A few saplings have taken hold amid the bramble. I will have to dig them out. I pace over the area to get a sense of its size. How many rows of beans will I have? Where will I plant tomatoes? As I step, my right foot sinks into the mouth of a woodchuck tunnel hidden by a tangle of grass. I teeter off balance and pitch backward, landing flat on my back. Suddenly, all I can see is sky, boundless and cloudless. If my foot or ankle is injured, no pain has arrived yet to announce trouble. For a while, I lie there looking up into the distant, insistent blue. And that, for the moment, is enough.