The Ghosts of Who We Were

A blue-gray morning and the rain is just beginning to fall. I keep the light off and open my kitchen window to listen to the drops landing on the roof, the sill, the street. Water dripping through the heavy air, the mountains lost behind a wall of fog. The sun rising somewhere behind all of these dark clouds. I don’t want to move from this window. I don’t want to boil water or grind coffee beans. Not yet. I want to stay in this twilight haze and listen to the rain. I keep still and expect time to do the same. As if I could stop this moment from rolling forward into the next moment. And the next.

In my grandmother’s old nursing home, many of the elderly women were stuck in a different time period, continually replaying certain events from their lives that had occurred in the distant past. A glitch in their brains kept them locked in moments from long ago. For them, time was static and never moved forward. A woman who had once owned a café thought she was still on the job and was always working in the dining hall, gathering up dirty dishes, trying to take drink orders and looking for menus to place on the tables. Another woman had regressed back to the time period in which she was a young mother. She would constantly wander the nursing home halls searching for her children. Leaning on her cane, inching up and down the hallway in a slow, endless circle. Have you seen my kids? She would ask me every time she crossed my path. They were supposed to be home by now. A very old, frail woman had permanently parked her wheelchair in an empty corner and repeated the same words over and over: Our dog. Our dog. Our dog. Her gaunt cheeks and thin hands. Hollow eyes fixed in a blank stare. Seeing. What was she seeing? Her withering figure motionless beneath a dim overhead bulb, like a ghost lingering in the pale light. The inflections of her voice changing every now and then. Our dog. Our dog. Our dog.

My grandmother also got lost in time. She would often think that she was living on a farm in Minnesota where she had spent a large part of her childhood. We never tried to correct her. It was a relief, really, when her mind took her away from the nursing home and sent her back to her house in Minnesota, where she was surrounded by lakes and mountains and all of her animals.

There are certain moments from my own past that I wouldn’t mind reliving. I wouldn’t mind going back to the time when my sister was pregnant with my niece. It was her first pregnancy, and the doctor had placed her on bed rest for her final trimester so she wouldn’t go into an early labor. Every day, after I finished with my classes at the university, I would leave school and drive over to her tiny house to clean it for her while she slept. I wouldn’t mind going back to those days. Back to the late afternoons spent in her quiet kitchen, washing dishes in the fading sunlight. My hands dipping into the sink filled with soapy water. Plates and cups clinking together in the soft yellow light. Autumn turning into winter. Staying each night with my sister until my brother-in-law came home from the metal foundry where he worked. His exhausted figure climbing up the porch steps, walking slowly through the front doorway. His face and hands covered in a permanent black dust. He would crumple into the bed with my sister and almost immediately drop into a deep sleep. But before he closed his eyes, he would always reach out to hold her hand. I would leave, then, and drive back home in the dark, through snowflakes falling in the empty streets.

I wouldn’t mind going back there again.  

Sometimes, I want time to be static. But it’s not static, it keeps stretching forward. And who we were then is not who we are now.

Now, I stand in a dark kitchen and watch the morning rain. Outside, a trash truck rolls through the alley collecting everyone’s bins. Mud splattered across wheel wells, tires crunching over loose gravel. The low groan of the truck's compactor crushing all of our garbage. Broken glass tinkling against metal. Rain drizzles over the streets of this town, washing away the summer dust from the pavement. Rain water streaking down the window, like transparent veins branching out across the glass. Black birds perch on the Oak tree limbs, their silent figures stock-still among the clusters of leaves dripping rain to the gray cement below. Thin rivulets of water sweeping away yesterday’s ghosts, the ghosts of who we were, from the sidewalks, the porch steps, the doorways, the windowsills.

This moment rolls forward into the next moment. And into the next. We call this Life.

I turn from the window and switch on the light over the kitchen sink. Blue porcelain glowing beneath a fluorescent bulb. Behind me, I hear the rain and a faint wind passing through the leaves. I fill a pan with water and the morning begins.