Through a glass, darkness

Standing in the kitchen washing dishes, I watch Mom through the window. She walks under the orange tree and out into the yard in front of what was called, before my wife and I bought the property, a guest house. It has been four months since Carol and I agreed we should be certain to call it the Parents’ House. Sometimes we slip.

Mom bends to pick up a fallen orange. She bends slowly, seemingly more thoughtful than infirm. The tendons behind her knees grow taut with her bow. Her thin legs – their shortness once the subject of loving jibes from family – are richly tanned from the hours she spends in the yard, but not evenly. Tanning and aging blend in an indecisive veneer, like the top of a bucket of latte-colored kitchen paint, stirred not long enough to prevent wisps and bubbles of darker tint from regaining the surface.

She considers the orange, enticingly bright but inedibly bitter inside, as are all the others she picks up, at least one every day. She carries today’s orange to the trash can.

Yard work was something she never had to do much of. Her husband and two sons spent hours each week raking and mowing the heavily wooded acre lot of the last house we all lived in together, and she worked as diligently inside. Chores were divided largely by gender; three-to-one, exterior to interior.

Chores in the Parents’ House are also divided, of necessity, by gender. Mom had stepped into the yard ahead of Dad, who was carrying out rugs I remember from the house of my childhood; one even from the house of my grandparents. I watched him go back inside to sweep and mop, and Mom began her rounds.

To the left of my window, Mom is out of my sight now, but I know from the brassy squeak of the wall spigot and hollow splashing that she is filling the watering can. A two-gallon can, she might struggle with it a bit if she filled it, but she never does. I wonder for a moment if there is a line, a mark or memory that consistently tells her when to twist the faucet the other way. I wonder only for a moment.

She walks away from my window, across the patio to the front of her home to water the four shrubs, still scrawny in their newness and from the summer heat that threatens to keep them from becoming anything beyond scrawny and new. It was late in the season to plant them when we did, of course, but before them was only gravel, and we wanted the front of the Parents’ House to be living and welcoming, not stony and dusty.

Mom empties the watering can on the first two plants, and returns to the faucet. Squeak, splatter, squeak, then back across the patio to tip the can over the last pair of plants. Walking back to the faucet past the trash can she notices someone has thrown away an orange. She reaches in, retrieves and studies it, sets it on the patio table.

Squeak. Splatter. Squeak. From behind the window, those and the thud of the can against the wall are the only sounds I hear. I know if I were outside, beside her, I would hear “Good King Wenceslas” – only the third line, beginning on the highest pitch of the song and skipping down the scale. “Brightly shown the moon that night, though the frost was cruel.” It could be an ironic joke in the 100-plus degree Arizona heat if she knew the lyrics, but all she offers is a high, wordless hum of those four bars of melody, always in the same key and programmed in an infinite loop; a neverending commemoration of the Feast of Stephen.

Finished with my dishes, I leave the kitchen. If mine were the kitchen of a restaurant, requiring ministrations at the sink throughout the day, I would witness a corresponding repetition outside the window. The shrubs in front of the Parents’ House might not see their first autumn were it not for the frequent showers they — not the grass of the lawn, not the orange tree — only they receive throughout each day. They wait out the heat in relative comfort, planning new, green leaves and bright blossoms to celebrate their lives that have been spared, even as another above them browns and fades.

I realize I’ve carried the dish towel on my shoulder into the other room. Returning to the kitchen, I see out the window Mom has found an orange on the patio table. She considers it, wondering why someone would have saved such a bitter fruit.

She drops the orange in the trash, and bends to pick up the watering can.