August

Our neighbor, tall and blond and vigorous, the mother of
many children, is sick. We did not know she was sick, but
she has come to the fence, walking like a woman who is
balancing a sword inside of her body, and besides that her
long hair is gone, it is short and, suddenly, gray. I don’t
recognize her. It even occurs to me that it might be her
mother. But it’s her own laughter-edged voice, we have
heard it for years over the hedges.

All summer the children, grown now and some of them
with children of their own, come to visit. They swim, they
go for long walks along the harbor, they make dinners for
twelve, for fifteen, for twenty. In the early morning two
daughters come to the garden and slowly go through the
precise and silent gestures of T’ai Chi.

They all smile. Their father smiles too, and builds castles
on the shore with the children, and drives back to the city,
and drives back to the country. A carpenter is hired—a roof
repaired, a porch rebuilt. Everything that can be fixed.

June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I
think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair.
Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his
eyes.