LITMIR.BIZ

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Native Americans gave leaves of the slippery elm to the sick and dying to soothe their dry mouths. They treated boils and sores with poultices and ingested parts of the inner reddish bark to treat colitis and infection. An impressive tree. DJ had only asked its name but listened to my expanded explanation.

      He started toward a deer trail, touching the trunks of trees with alternate hands, identifying the ones he knew: “Sugar maple, black willow, green ash, oak …” Our trail led to the edge of the river, then to the point where we’d had to climb out of the low river bed to cross a bridge back in a neighborhood of houses, cars, and health walkers. A man in 1970-style running shorts walked in front of us smoking a cigarette. DJ quietly laughed at his shorts and his exposed long boiled-egg-white thighs bizarrely antithetical to the long, baggy shorts that were currently the style. The cigarette smoke reached up through my nose to my brain to pull open a file drawer and summon the face of a patient I cared for when I was a new nurse. I’d seen her face hundreds of times. Her hungry eyes searched for a comfort that came only when her breathing stopped. I told DJ about this first patient I ever cared for during a death—how she squeezed my hand, pinching my fingers into a tight bundle as she labored to breathe. Her family smoked in the waiting room, waiting for their matriarch to die of lung cancer. Despite high doses of intravenous analgesic and anti-anxiety medication, my patient struggled through her last breaths. Sitting erect, she reached for air as the cancer nicked off blood vessels and filled each of her alveoli with blood until there were no little air sacs left with a surface that could exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. She drowned in her own blood as she clutched my hand. Seconds before I closed her wide-open eyes, an image of her face filed itself in my head. The smoky smell of the waiting room where I announced her death, labeled the file.

      DJ recognized the anti-smoking agenda in my tale and diverted me with an invitation to play, asking why the guy would put on old running shorts to go out and smoke.

      “Maybe thirty years ago he found love on this parkway. They were both betrothed to others but couldn’t say goodbye. They promised to reunite here today wearing the same clothes so they would recognize each other.”

      DJ looked far ahead searching for the short-short wearer’s beloved, but we only saw a wide man with bulldog legs and two white poodles. He shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”

      I wrinkled my nose and shook my head no.

      DJ countered, “Maybe he’s an alien from a planet that planned his disguise to fit in from watching reruns from the sports channel that show the old classic basketball games.”

      I saw a trail that led away from the sidewalk. “Yeah, that’s probably it.”

      We let the matter drop, although sometimes we can banter until we have dozens of scenarios. Our path took us back into the undeveloped space along the river. A stand of prairie grass on a hill above the river was dotted with sweet pea vines and greeted us with a baby fresh scent so significant to their identity that their Latin name is Lathyrus odoratus, meaning, “fragrant pea.” A soft breeze in seventy-five-degree air atomized the cologne. Daisy fleabane edged the prairie field. They beaconed pollinators with their bull’s eye yellow centers and finely toothed petals that emerged from the capitulum as white. At exactly the halfway point of the petal, their color sharply changed to lavender, conferring the effect of a small target with a lovely color palette. The showy deep red bull thistles towered over the grasses.

      DJ remembered, “Those are the spiny ones.”

      “Let’s stand still for a minute and see if there are goldfinches around.” Goldfinches line their nests with thistle down and eat the long, dark seeds—their favorite food. In less than a minute of stillness, we spotted five bright yellow males and four of the duller females scattered in the grasses and shrubs.

      “Okay, you saw them. You see them in the yard every day. Now, can we move on?”

      “Lead the way,” I told him. I liked the idea that the finches came to visit our yard and feeders every day, and we finally paid an overdue call to their home. July brought our neighborhood a fresh heat that perfused life and death.

      An expanse of mowed grasses between a lagoon and river let us walk abreast. DJ hung his elbow around my shoulder and leaned on me while we walked. I tilted in, trying to make it easy for him to maintain the position that crinkled my neck.

      We walked silently until DJ blurted, “I believe in heaven and, and I think—I hope—we get to live forever.”

      This was my second opportunity to say something deep. “Jesus is our Savior, and because we believe in Him we do have everlasting life.”

      He huffed. My response—too scripted for him. My neck hurt where the crook of his elbow tugged. He said nothing.

      I grew quiet. Thoughts of death lead to God because we must find a way to make peace with the end of life. The minister and writer F. Forrester Church said, “Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.” I’d been exploring Unitarianism and was attracted to the faith’s searching for spiritual truths in Christianity, Judaism, nature, and Eastern religions. I hadn’t decided if my worshiping with Unitarians was an insult to my religious roots or a bridge between Christianity and openness to a spirituality not tied to dogma. The search felt right, even without a conclusion.

      A large gray-blue S caught my eye in the lagoon. We stopped and turned while DJ kept his arm hooked around my neck. The bed of the lagoon heaved with pollywogs and crayfish. A great blue heron stalked: stab, toss, catch, swallow. A graceful maneuver carried out with such adeptness, we waited only a few minutes to see a replay of this death feeding life, judged beautiful.

      On the way home, we stopped at the Burleigh Street Bridge, where five willows along the east side of the river reached for their own apparition. The largest tree tilted its trunk to reach across four white boulders and wept into its own specter and having touched it, had to strain to stay erect as the reflection slowly pulled the willow into the river. A quarter-mile upstream an old willow lay uprooted, stripped, and bleached across the moving water.

      We shared the bridge with the automobile traffic behind us. In front of us and above the river, barn swallows with their red bellies, forked tails, and blue bodies flashed iridescent in the sun as they flew. They swooped and caught insects to feed the giant open beaks of the babies who sat in tidy cups under the bridge. We knew they would soon fledge and keep pace with their parents, who fly up to six hundred miles a day in the swift seasonal winds. The offspring will learn to feed themselves and to fly to Argentina and back, and then they will not need their parents anymore.

      The river ran beneath our feet, the water constantly wandered through our lives, atmosphere, and our bodies. Even my thoughts about this river were connected to others who watched the water move through their own years. Leonardo da Vinci said, “In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.” Two hydrogen atoms join one oxygen atom to create a molecule that is slightly positive at one of the poles and slightly negative on the other. The positive end of one pole weakly attracts the negative pole of another water molecule in an act called polar bonding. A small electric charge gives the water surface tension and the ability to dissolve more substances than any other solvent. Water moves up tree trunks and through veins and rivers. It carries life through time. Those hydrogen and oxygen atoms formed molecules that have been flowing through lives since the beginning of the existence of life on this planet, and not just the elements of water, but this water—the water that moved beneath the willows and bridge and this mother and son. DJ stared out into the river and spoke, “Mom, I do believe in God and life after death. I just don’t know what that life will be.”

      “That’s what faith is—when you don’t understand exactly but believe anyway.”

      “Yeah. It’ll drive you nuts if you think you’ve got to figure it all out, but you still have to think about it some. I don’t know if Grandpa Paul went away to heaven. Sometimes I think I feel him with us.”

      “Do you feel him now?” I asked.

      DJ’s pensive profile showed eyebrows bushier than I remembered. His nose had

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