Yellow noise of dandelions

Ray Bradbury's book, Dandelion Wine, which I quoted from last week, was a perfect book for me to be reading this week. I talked about Mrs. Bentley, who couldn't convince Jane and Alice that she had ever been young. Mrs. Bentley was a saver, she kept every souvenir from her past and believed that she could keep her youth through her memorabilia.

But of course we know better, right? I have a drawer full of those things, and I could never part with them. I try once in a while. But Mrs. Bentley was so shaken by the girls' disbelief that she wondered what her dead husband would say to her.

"You're saving cocoons." That's what he'd say. "Corsets, in a way, you can never fit in again. So why save them? You can't really prove you were ever young. ... You're not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You're not these these trunks of junk and dust. You're only you, here, now -- the present you."

So Mrs. Bentley gave the girls some things she thought they might like and then burned the rest in a big bonfire in her backyard. The girls and Mrs. Bentley spent quite a bit of time together that summer and became good friends.

"How old are you, Ms. Bentley?"
"Seventy-two."
"How old were you fifty years ago?"
"Seventy-two."
"You weren't ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these?"
"No."
"Have you got a first name?"
"My name is Mrs. Bentley."
"And you've always lived in this house?"
"Always."
"And never were pretty?"
"Never."
"Never in a million trillion years?" The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four o'clock on a summer afternoon.
"Never," said Mrs. Bentley, "in a million trillion years."

 I've been mourning the death of a beautiful eaglet that I watched on the Hornby Eagle cam since March, when the parents began brooding two eggs. He (or she) hatched on April 29, named Phoenix by the cam owners, and on July 14, for some unknown reason, Phoenix died in the nest. The first night was particularly difficult for me, I cried a lot, and I think perhaps the unexpected loss of this life I'd come to care so passionately about has triggered some unfinished grief that I still carry around.

Maybe grief actually never goes away completely, it just fades into the background and adds a certain poignancy to life. I know that I have moments of complete happiness and contentment, and other moments when the slightest thing will open some wellspring and I'm in tears. And the tears don't always feel inappropriate or filled with sadness, just a filling up and emptying out of some unseen reservoir.

I have always loved Emily Dickinson's poetry, and one of her poems has been wafting through my mind during the week. She wrote it in 1864.

Ample make this Bed -
Make this Bed with awe -
In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and Fair.

Be its Mattress straight -
Be its Pillow round -
Let no Sunrise' yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground -

I don't think I'm going to watch any more eagle cams, because I just cannot do anything about the vicissitudes of nature. It's a little amazing to me that thousands of us who peeked into the nest are brokenhearted because we loved this little creature and could do nothing to help. My friend Nancy wrote a wonderful post about this on her blog that she calls "Blissed-Out Grandma."

I am truly enriched by the time I spend on the Internet, surfing around and spying into the nest of wild creatures, listening to the ups and downs of my blogging friends, but it's not without thorns, hidden there among the roses of experience.