The elm leaves are talking in this afternoon breeze, whispering unknown things, things sad in the hot autumn sun. Elms are a story of heartbreak and forgotten loss. No one sees great elms anymore, all but a few having been wiped out by disease. Oh, there are still plenty of elms but all are young, untested, mistaken for scrubby undergrowth. Their grandness has been lost, but yet the leaves continue to talk of sad things in the warm air, now, at the end of October, now, at the end of all things.
The sterile white space, the shuttered room, is quiet save for hushed voices and the beeping sounds of foreign equipment in muted notes of mauve and gray. Here, the space is one of last breaths and no second chances. The autumn breeze, the vibrancy of life, the texture of all things good, seem a million miles away, even if only separated by a thick pane of glass and a cheap set of plastic blinds. The world turns in quiet space.
Cold night rain beats hard against the clapboard siding, peeling blue and faded behind autumn-dead hydrangea. The hydrangea was planted decades ago by loving hands and a heart that could not see a future without love. The little shotgun house was once beloved, nurtured, carefully tended in days when a house with three whole rooms and a tiny plot of land was a prize, not a downfall to be escaped. Heat streams through battered old screens, open windows in the cold night. The smell of turkey TV dinner and ramen is on the air. Smiling plastic Jack-o-Lantern gazes over weathered blue astroturf on broken cement porch. Cold rain puddles on the street reflect the smiling orange glow. Despite the angry shouting within, the loving gardener long gone still haunts the front walk. Somewhere, somehow, it is still summer and the hydrangeas bloom blue once more.
Back in the afternoon sun, a little black cur dog with blazing autumn collar stops to sniff the air. Beyond in the cedars the air is blue with strange afternoon mist. The wind picks up again. The veil thins. Christ thorn locust trees bear witness. Ancestors peer forth through the ether, whispers, prayers, soft and loving, questioning, challenging. The little black cur dog bolts past, her tail a blur of happy motion. The veil fades along with faces weathered and wise in the air, faces of the past.
The heavy cotton blanket is soft, hexagonal texture worried between elderly fingers purpled by age and hesitant, picking at the folds, picking over and over again. The room still sterile, still quiet, still unnaturally quiet. All the ages and all the lost hopes are drawn to this final, fitful breath, battle against time, battle before the passing to beyond. There are huddled family tears outside in the too-bright hall. An aide turns way, fighting emotion. Professional duty prevents such a show of humanity. Another life, another death, another little notice in the obit section, and nothing more. The sun and the rain and the wind and the hope and the prayer, eternal regrets and dreams, they all continue, a heartbeat of meaning forever on in witness to those who have gone before.
Outside, a single brown elm leaf falls softly, silently, to the carefully mown and brown October grass.
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