Red Rocks, Green Grapefruits
You are somewhere inside your head in a space without walls, a space nevertheless confining because you are confused about how you got there and feel trapped. It is a place where you seem to be searching for a memory or perhaps a dream. Whatever it is, it wants your attention, demands it, requires it. At first it appears as a vague outline consisting of misty filaments refusing to take definitive shape. Perhaps it is only an idea then, not really a memory or dream returning. And just as quickly as it has emerged, luring you with the tantalizing possibility of its actually being realized, it dissolves or rather dissipates. Dissolves… dissipates… which word best captures how it seems to vanish within this place inside your head? No matter, it is gone.
What was it I was thinking, you ask yourself. What did it want from me?
Try to remember. Make it return. Go back to the place.
The outline begins to take form again; the filaments become a whole landscape. You begin to see a red rock desert with imposing mesas stretching across the horizon and the blue bowl of sky above it. It is a memory that begins somewhere in the American Southwest--Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona perhaps? Good, here is a start.
Now the filaments swirl into the shape of citrus trees--lemons, oranges and grapefruits—planted in a recently watered garden in a gated community with small stucco houses, one after another, all with adobe red tile roofs, and lawns made of landscape rocks instead of grass. A retirement “city” for seniors. And the people who live there are old, some very old, some not. In the backyards are citrus trees with shiny green leaves--lemon, orange and grapefruit trees emerging from cream and pink pebbled lawns, and this here is the house with its garden of citrus trees where you live now.
And then I told them not to pick the grapefruits outside. I said, They’re still green.
Green grapefruits. They had wanted to pick the grapefruits during their visit that winter. They had never picked citrus fruit from a backyard tree before. But the fruit was not yet ripe.
And then they said, So this is Arizona. Red rocks and green grapefruits.
And they left laughing to catch a flight back East laughed and it was a long time before they came to visit again. The girl and her friend. No, not the girl. You know the girl is not a girl anymore. You know she is a grown woman now, but for you she will always be the girl with dark brown hair and wavy curls that you would brush away from her face. She was your first, not like the second or the third. Your first child—the independent “me-do” girl. It is comforting to remember her as a child, even though you know she is a grown woman whose hair is starting to turn grey.
You told them to go up to Sedona, the girl and her friend, to see the red rocks because that was something to do and they wanted to do some sight-seeing. They thought a day trip might be nice. So you told them about Sedona, and they hiked up Cathedral Rock and when they returned, they said they had discovered a power vortex. They believed in all those “New Age” Age” stories people told about Sedona.
Whatever makes you happy, you said, trying to please.
The first year you moved here you drove with him to Wickenburg, then to Prescott, and finally Sedona because the neighbors kept saying that you must see the red rocks of Sedona. This was after he had the bypass surgery and was still trying to recover. The surgery had aged him ten years, and he was not the same, would never be the same. From the car you could see the red rocks in the distance. Pretty, you said, as you pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. Let’s have lunch and go home, he said. I’m tired.
Go back to the other place now. There is something pulling at you, something you must remember if only you can stay there longer and let the outline of what it is return. Perhaps you should open your eyes and look at the notepad on the night table next to the bed you lie in. Perhaps you wrote it down last night before you went to bed. Perhaps there is a clue. But you know you did not write it down. It is something you cannot forget--and now you’ve forgotten what it is. Go back to the place and don’t be afraid. Eventually something will form, the outline will take shape and you will be able to make sense of it all.
In the place a fountain forms. Or is it a memorial? No, not a fountain. A large stone, a plaque with six blue lamps growing up from the white stone below. Yes, you tell yourself, it’s a memorial. That’s what it is. And there is something about a butterfly. A yellow butterfly. Did you see it when you were there? The yellow butterfly?
No, not in this place. Somewhere else. Long ago when you were young and there were butterflies-- hundreds of them—everywhere. In the fields. Yellow like the sun. There was sun, dandelions, and the butterflies. Yellow. So bright. It was all so bright—and pretty.
But you’re wrong. There was only one butterfly, the last butterfly. And then no more butterflies, no more light, only darkness, so much darkness.
The place is empty again. Whatever it was that wanted you needed to remember is no longer there. And there is this emptiness and it hurts. The hurt is like a pebble in a shoe, a hurt that must be removed before one can go any further. Just a pebble.
Now you remember--there were pebbles in the place with the fountain that wasn’t a really a fountain but was a memorial to the dead. And you remind yourself that it is tradition to place pebbles on a grave when you visit. Always, Papa said. To let the dead know that you were there, although some from the old country still believe it will keep them from returning to haunt us and there may be some truth in that.
And there is this emptiness and it hurts.
And there were pebbles at the base of the fountain that was really a memorial and took some and placed them elsewhere on the plaque in the ground ten feet away. Such a small pile of pebbles. No flowers, flowers wilt and die, but little stones survive. So there were pebbles to mark this visit. Pebbles to remember. Pebbles to survive.
The girl, the daughter said, When I got home I went out into my garden and he was there. I know it sounds crazy, but I could feel him there. And suddenly a butterfly appeared and kept swirling around me. It was not a monarch butterfly or like anything I had ever seen in the garden or even a conservatory. It was all black except for some white spots and these brilliant blue spots on the back of its wings. And it kept circling around me, and I knew it was him saying goodbye, departing the earth, as they say, his soul in the form of a butterfly. But he was making one last visit to me to say goodbye. And I’ve never seen a black swallowtail in my garden again.
Black swallowtail. That is the name she gave for the black butterfly with the brilliant blue spots on its wings. But it was not like the yellow ones swirling in the fields that you are remembered this morning. Hundreds and hundreds of yellow butterflies swirling in the fields. Hundreds of souls leaving the earth. And then there was only one and then it was gone and then the darkness came. You remember that butterflies are symbols for the soul. The Greek word for butterfly is psyche or soul. In the old country so very long ago, the world that was filled with the yellow butterflies, Papa showed you a picture book. In your mind’s eye, you can still see beautiful Psyche, a woman with butterfly wings in love with the winged god Eros. But now you are remembering another word for “butterfly”. The language of youth returns. In Russian a “butterfly” is “baboshka”—a grandmother, old woman. So now you, too, have become a butterfly, a babushka—an old woman.
You can leave the place if you want to. Only lately you want stay longer each time. You are actually beginning to enjoy being here, searching for what it is that has lured you into the place—whatever dream or memory appears dimly at first, the mere outline of something that once was, not anything that really is. And you welcome the voices, too, voices that you have lived with most of your life and are beginning to fade. How can you hold on to them?
You can hear him now--that gruff, deep, reassuring voice. So what are our plans for the day? He asks this of you now, just the way he always did, every morning you have been here.
You turn over in bed to answer him, but there is no one there and you are frightened once again because there is so much emptiness here, next to you, not just inside your head where there is a place for dreams and memories and voices that aren’t really there. So you turn back, try to sit up, and reach for the metal walker next to the bed. If you concentrate enough, you can swing one leg over the side of the bed and try to get up. It’s time to get up, time to leave the place.
Yes, it hurts to get out of the bed. Your right knee is now just bone on bone. Yesterday you drove to the store and went through the stop sign at the corner of the street because you could not bring your foot off the accelerator pedal to brake in time. Soon you will have to stop driving altogether, sell the car and ask for rides. Or just stay inside, lie down and retreat to the place more than you really need or want to.
You manage to pull yourself up and stand. You place each swollen foot into the light blue slippers that do not hurt your feet. Gripping the metal walker you move slowly, deliberately from the bedroom to the living room. The air conditioner hums quietly.
Butterfly…babushka…old woman.
Outside it will be hot—maybe more than 100 degrees. Arizona gets like that in the summer. Better to stay inside. Arizona is hot, very hot, and yes, the girl and her friend were right. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. You smile at the silliness of the thought and move to the patio window, draw back the curtains and look outside at the backyard with its citrus trees. A family of quail dart past busily searching for something to peck at amidst the pebbled backyards of the houses. Where is the grass? No grass, only pebbles and citrus trees. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. Saying it again makes you laugh to yourself.
When he came home in the evening from work in the city, you would give him half a grapefruit before the main meal, a half grapefruit carefully cut around the edges, each half slice separated from the center so he could easily spoon it out. You used a special knife for that, the double-bladed one made especially for cutting grapefruit. You brought it here, for his grapefruits, to cut them the way you always did.
That first year, he discovered that they grew on trees right in the backyard. Green grapefruits that ripened into yellow, thick-skinned fruit so much sweeter than those you bought in the stores. He was so happy to have fruit he could pick in the morning, and he would place them in a bowl on the table. Sometimes he would have one for breakfast or lunch in the long days that followed the move out West after the retirement and the bankruptcy.
Today it will be one year and you will go and place pebbles on the plaque that marks where he rests. Next to it is another plaque, still only a marker with your name and birth date engraved on it. When you both moved here, you sold your jewelry and purchased these spaces side by. After all, what did you need all that jewelry for now? Such a deal! Two for the price of one! In life and in planning for death, he was always looking for a deal or gambling away what little you had
So what are our plans for the day? His last words. This is what you had to remember.
Enough. Tonight you will light a yahrzeit candle to remember him by. Soon you will join him not only in the place inside your head, but there in the quiet place across from the fountain as well.
No, not a fountain. A memorial to those who vanished, six million of them, but there are so many more. You will join them as well—the butterflies.
You remember butterflies, so many butterflies, so many souls.
Butterfly, babushka, old woman-- soul.
You are somewhere inside your head in a space without walls, a space nevertheless confining because you are confused about how you got there and feel trapped. It is a place where you seem to be searching for a memory or perhaps a dream. Whatever it is, it wants your attention, demands it, requires it. At first it appears as a vague outline consisting of misty filaments refusing to take definitive shape. Perhaps it is only an idea then, not really a memory or dream returning. And just as quickly as it has emerged, luring you with the tantalizing possibility of its actually being realized, it dissolves or rather dissipates. Dissolves… dissipates… which word best captures how it seems to vanish within this place inside your head? No matter, it is gone.
What was it I was thinking, you ask yourself. What did it want from me?
Try to remember. Make it return. Go back to the place.
The outline begins to take form again; the filaments become a whole landscape. You begin to see a red rock desert with imposing mesas stretching across the horizon and the blue bowl of sky above it. It is a memory that begins somewhere in the American Southwest--Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona perhaps? Good, here is a start.
Now the filaments swirl into the shape of citrus trees--lemons, oranges and grapefruits—planted in a recently watered garden in a gated community with small stucco houses, one after another, all with adobe red tile roofs, and lawns made of landscape rocks instead of grass. A retirement “city” for seniors. And the people who live there are old, some very old, some not. In the backyards are citrus trees with shiny green leaves--lemon, orange and grapefruit trees emerging from cream and pink pebbled lawns, and this here is the house with its garden of citrus trees where you live now.
And then I told them not to pick the grapefruits outside. I said, They’re still green.
Green grapefruits. They had wanted to pick the grapefruits during their visit that winter. They had never picked citrus fruit from a backyard tree before. But the fruit was not yet ripe.
And then they said, So this is Arizona. Red rocks and green grapefruits.
And they left laughing to catch a flight back East laughed and it was a long time before they came to visit again. The girl and her friend. No, not the girl. You know the girl is not a girl anymore. You know she is a grown woman now, but for you she will always be the girl with dark brown hair and wavy curls that you would brush away from her face. She was your first, not like the second or the third. Your first child—the independent “me-do” girl. It is comforting to remember her as a child, even though you know she is a grown woman whose hair is starting to turn grey.
You told them to go up to Sedona, the girl and her friend, to see the red rocks because that was something to do and they wanted to do some sight-seeing. They thought a day trip might be nice. So you told them about Sedona, and they hiked up Cathedral Rock and when they returned, they said they had discovered a power vortex. They believed in all those “New Age” Age” stories people told about Sedona.
Whatever makes you happy, you said, trying to please.
The first year you moved here you drove with him to Wickenburg, then to Prescott, and finally Sedona because the neighbors kept saying that you must see the red rocks of Sedona. This was after he had the bypass surgery and was still trying to recover. The surgery had aged him ten years, and he was not the same, would never be the same. From the car you could see the red rocks in the distance. Pretty, you said, as you pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. Let’s have lunch and go home, he said. I’m tired.
Go back to the other place now. There is something pulling at you, something you must remember if only you can stay there longer and let the outline of what it is return. Perhaps you should open your eyes and look at the notepad on the night table next to the bed you lie in. Perhaps you wrote it down last night before you went to bed. Perhaps there is a clue. But you know you did not write it down. It is something you cannot forget--and now you’ve forgotten what it is. Go back to the place and don’t be afraid. Eventually something will form, the outline will take shape and you will be able to make sense of it all.
In the place a fountain forms. Or is it a memorial? No, not a fountain. A large stone, a plaque with six blue lamps growing up from the white stone below. Yes, you tell yourself, it’s a memorial. That’s what it is. And there is something about a butterfly. A yellow butterfly. Did you see it when you were there? The yellow butterfly?
No, not in this place. Somewhere else. Long ago when you were young and there were butterflies-- hundreds of them—everywhere. In the fields. Yellow like the sun. There was sun, dandelions, and the butterflies. Yellow. So bright. It was all so bright—and pretty.
But you’re wrong. There was only one butterfly, the last butterfly. And then no more butterflies, no more light, only darkness, so much darkness.
The place is empty again. Whatever it was that wanted you needed to remember is no longer there. And there is this emptiness and it hurts. The hurt is like a pebble in a shoe, a hurt that must be removed before one can go any further. Just a pebble.
Now you remember--there were pebbles in the place with the fountain that wasn’t a really a fountain but was a memorial to the dead. And you remind yourself that it is tradition to place pebbles on a grave when you visit. Always, Papa said. To let the dead know that you were there, although some from the old country still believe it will keep them from returning to haunt us and there may be some truth in that.
And there is this emptiness and it hurts.
And there were pebbles at the base of the fountain that was really a memorial and took some and placed them elsewhere on the plaque in the ground ten feet away. Such a small pile of pebbles. No flowers, flowers wilt and die, but little stones survive. So there were pebbles to mark this visit. Pebbles to remember. Pebbles to survive.
The girl, the daughter said, When I got home I went out into my garden and he was there. I know it sounds crazy, but I could feel him there. And suddenly a butterfly appeared and kept swirling around me. It was not a monarch butterfly or like anything I had ever seen in the garden or even a conservatory. It was all black except for some white spots and these brilliant blue spots on the back of its wings. And it kept circling around me, and I knew it was him saying goodbye, departing the earth, as they say, his soul in the form of a butterfly. But he was making one last visit to me to say goodbye. And I’ve never seen a black swallowtail in my garden again.
Black swallowtail. That is the name she gave for the black butterfly with the brilliant blue spots on its wings. But it was not like the yellow ones swirling in the fields that you are remembered this morning. Hundreds and hundreds of yellow butterflies swirling in the fields. Hundreds of souls leaving the earth. And then there was only one and then it was gone and then the darkness came. You remember that butterflies are symbols for the soul. The Greek word for butterfly is psyche or soul. In the old country so very long ago, the world that was filled with the yellow butterflies, Papa showed you a picture book. In your mind’s eye, you can still see beautiful Psyche, a woman with butterfly wings in love with the winged god Eros. But now you are remembering another word for “butterfly”. The language of youth returns. In Russian a “butterfly” is “baboshka”—a grandmother, old woman. So now you, too, have become a butterfly, a babushka—an old woman.
You can leave the place if you want to. Only lately you want stay longer each time. You are actually beginning to enjoy being here, searching for what it is that has lured you into the place—whatever dream or memory appears dimly at first, the mere outline of something that once was, not anything that really is. And you welcome the voices, too, voices that you have lived with most of your life and are beginning to fade. How can you hold on to them?
You can hear him now--that gruff, deep, reassuring voice. So what are our plans for the day? He asks this of you now, just the way he always did, every morning you have been here.
You turn over in bed to answer him, but there is no one there and you are frightened once again because there is so much emptiness here, next to you, not just inside your head where there is a place for dreams and memories and voices that aren’t really there. So you turn back, try to sit up, and reach for the metal walker next to the bed. If you concentrate enough, you can swing one leg over the side of the bed and try to get up. It’s time to get up, time to leave the place.
Yes, it hurts to get out of the bed. Your right knee is now just bone on bone. Yesterday you drove to the store and went through the stop sign at the corner of the street because you could not bring your foot off the accelerator pedal to brake in time. Soon you will have to stop driving altogether, sell the car and ask for rides. Or just stay inside, lie down and retreat to the place more than you really need or want to.
You manage to pull yourself up and stand. You place each swollen foot into the light blue slippers that do not hurt your feet. Gripping the metal walker you move slowly, deliberately from the bedroom to the living room. The air conditioner hums quietly.
Butterfly…babushka…old woman.
Outside it will be hot—maybe more than 100 degrees. Arizona gets like that in the summer. Better to stay inside. Arizona is hot, very hot, and yes, the girl and her friend were right. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. You smile at the silliness of the thought and move to the patio window, draw back the curtains and look outside at the backyard with its citrus trees. A family of quail dart past busily searching for something to peck at amidst the pebbled backyards of the houses. Where is the grass? No grass, only pebbles and citrus trees. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. Saying it again makes you laugh to yourself.
When he came home in the evening from work in the city, you would give him half a grapefruit before the main meal, a half grapefruit carefully cut around the edges, each half slice separated from the center so he could easily spoon it out. You used a special knife for that, the double-bladed one made especially for cutting grapefruit. You brought it here, for his grapefruits, to cut them the way you always did.
That first year, he discovered that they grew on trees right in the backyard. Green grapefruits that ripened into yellow, thick-skinned fruit so much sweeter than those you bought in the stores. He was so happy to have fruit he could pick in the morning, and he would place them in a bowl on the table. Sometimes he would have one for breakfast or lunch in the long days that followed the move out West after the retirement and the bankruptcy.
Today it will be one year and you will go and place pebbles on the plaque that marks where he rests. Next to it is another plaque, still only a marker with your name and birth date engraved on it. When you both moved here, you sold your jewelry and purchased these spaces side by. After all, what did you need all that jewelry for now? Such a deal! Two for the price of one! In life and in planning for death, he was always looking for a deal or gambling away what little you had
So what are our plans for the day? His last words. This is what you had to remember.
Enough. Tonight you will light a yahrzeit candle to remember him by. Soon you will join him not only in the place inside your head, but there in the quiet place across from the fountain as well.
No, not a fountain. A memorial to those who vanished, six million of them, but there are so many more. You will join them as well—the butterflies.
You remember butterflies, so many butterflies, so many souls.
Butterfly, babushka, old woman-- soul.
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