I remember how cold the air was in the lonely hospital garden that Saturday evening in late November. Winter arrives early on the central Iowa plains and the wind played in that empty, manmade canyon, a hollow box of mounded earth and agreeably curved pathways.
Over here, a barren rose garden, there some holly and stickery red barberry. In the center, four nude statues commemorated lives lost in a helicopter accident some decades prior. From ten stories up came the whining sounds of an aircraft turbine. I stared at the statues, bronze nakedness out of place in the cold, as the big-bodied Life Flight helicopter lifted into the winter’s night. Novembers are special things in the upper Midwest and not for the fainthearted. Far beyond the hospital, the sharp-edged silver crescent moon rose in the northeastern skies. A waxing moon, promising hope, presaging change.
Death is a strange thing, simple, unfeeling and leaving uncountable ripples in its cold wake. The days that followed formed a bizarre tapestry of the unthinkable in which I at best merely reacted, stood where I was supposed to stand, wore what was appropriate and could not decide which I least wanted to see — the open casket or the bowers of out-of-place flowers — as I tugged at my brown corduroy vest from the thrift shop. My feet were heavy then, freshly grown to a size 10, weighed down by black Danner work boots. I still hate funeral flowers, and small talk. For the last few short moments of that era, we were a family.
The ripples of change would continue, affecting each of us differently, changing us in ways even we could not see or anticipate. The universe fractured, tenuously held together by a short and overlooked obituary with flat words like "loving mother, grandmother, survived by...." Only the smug can intone loss as though it could be understood by mortals. Modernists committed a crime against us all with their attempted sanitization of death. In attempting to assuage the pain, they instead covered it with soft carpet. Better instead the keening wail of the Scots or the burning ship of the Norse where tragedy was given voice and heart and soul. It is in the wailing fire that the unthinkable finds meaning.
But moons have a soft way of coming and going and coming again. Our worlds were never the same but flowers would bloom in profusion that next spring. I didn't cry at the funeral, and I wore dark aviators and pretended to be grownup in my pallbearer’s suit. That said, the next July, alone and burying one of our barnyard goats who had passed from old age, my hands touched the sun-warmed clay and I bowed my head and sobbed. Soil and air, moon and earth. The circles themselves have life.
Through a series of events only partly understood, those moments conspired and my life collided with the Ozarks. A culture, a dialect, a way of life I thought lost in death and time was — in some way — still alive in the rugged hills so close yet so far away from my Midwestern upbringing. I was only 20 years old then, not yet a graphic artist, not yet a journalist, not yet a magazine editor, and only scarcely a man.
Just the same, it was but four weeks after the death of my grandmother that I came back from the Christmas hills of Missouri knowing one thing for certain: I needed to be connected to the Ozarks for they were the only place left on earth that still felt like home.
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