Knowing and not knowing (2018)

The clothes I wore walking to the emergency room in Boston, the clothes Suzanne held in her lap, I had put on that morning in the same old farmhouse where my parents once planned so many projects—still one of the few houses in that wild, wooded valley but with electricity now (solar) and reliable running water. The road still turns to dirt at the driveway. The town still doesn’t plow past the house. Two or three days can pass when the snow is deep without a single car coming down the road.

My mother has lived there, all by herself, for twenty-five years. Climbing on the roof to shovel off her solar panels. Hauling water to the barn, morning and night, for her horses. Bouncing down a field in her tractor, a chainsaw and a weed whacker in the bucket. Reading stacks of magazines at her kitchen table, annotating each cover with the titles of articles she wants to read again. And taking frequent naps. She is eighty-three years old.

When my father died, I inherited his half of their partnership of projects. If the barn door comes off the hinges, or the front porch has too much snow on the roof, or there isn’t enough wood in the woodshed, she tells me first. The raft has to be put in the pond on Memorial Day and taken out on Labor Day. In June and July, the fields need mowing. Brush always needs cutting somewhere, at any time of the year. And I am often the one cooking, especially breakfast. After the food is gone and before the kids start leaving the table, my mother or one of my sisters will ask, “Doug, what are we doing today?”

We still make maple syrup there together. On the sides of both hills, we lay out small green tubes that run into large black tubes that carry the sap down to the sugarhouse. We usually lay out the tubing around Christmas, a month or more before it is time to start drilling holes in the trees. This is what the lines look like in February after we have tapped.

Getting the tubing to fit around the right trees and then stretch at the right angle in the right direction is like rebuilding a spider web. My mother makes a detailed map with circles for maple trees and sketches of various landmarks.

I am the one who remembers, more or less exactly, where each tube runs. For years, I did a lot of this work alone in the early morning, before coming back to cook breakfast. When we had toddlers and infants, whoever woke up first came with me in a backpack. Once in a while, I had to take the backpack off and stand it in the snow with the child still inside. My oldest, Isabelle, would sit there calmly, her face poking out of her little baby bag, gazing at the trunks of trees and any dogs that had followed us. Our youngest, Caleb, did the same. But Rosalind would yell with indignation as if I might abandon her there—stabbed in the snow on the edge of a swamp, downhill from an old barbed wire fence. Here she is five or six years later, sometime in March, explaining to her second grade class how the evaporator works.

We spent Christmas there this year with both my sisters and their families. Fourteen people. Seven children. Three of them in college. The rest the size of adults. A driveway full of cars.

When we are all there, my mother complains about the boots. “I can’t have fourteen pairs of boots piled up like this in the kitchen.” She is usually on her way out to the barn—coat zipped up, gloves on, hat pulled down over her ears. “The first kid with boots on the bottom will scatter the rest of them in front of the door.”

Then later in the day, as she comes back in the kitchen, “Kids!” Anyone in the kitchen can tell she is going to shout by the deliberate way she shuts the door, bending over the knob. Then she turns around and stands up straight. “Kids! Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” comes some far off voice. None of our children are actually in the kitchen.

“Thank you for moving your boots outside! But when you take your boots off on the porch, can you please not do it right in front of the door? I am old.” She is smiling. “I might trip.”

“Okay, Grandma,” the nearest grandchild answers. “Sorry. Do you want help moving them?”

“No. I already did it.”

The kitchen is like a hallway. Everyone going outside or coming inside passes through there. Anyone moving from one room to another within the house finds a reason to do the same. The stove is on one side of the hallway. The counter is on the other. Getting back and forth between the stove and the counter is like crossing a line of people leaving a subway car. There are also dogs. Five dogs. One, usually the youngest or worst behaved, gets tied to a rope beneath the counter. When anyone cooks, the dog sits at the stove with the rope stretched across the kitchen like a tripwire.

I had been looking forward to this chaos since the end of the summer, when we started losing kids to college again. It’s rare now—not more than once or twice a year—when we are all together, every single one of us. And now we were. We were together there for almost a week.

But I missed most of it. And what I didn’t miss I barely remember. “Doug, what are we going to do today?” someone asked the first morning after breakfast. I felt too sick to do anything at all. There are many pictures of me that week asleep on a couch or asleep in a chair behind a cluster of people debating politics, showing off gifts, or yelling at each other over a board game. Awake, I was often so feverish that I couldn’t follow the conversations around me—shivering and then sweating and then shivering again as the ibuprofen wore off. Simply walking made me short of breath. I avoided climbing stairs.

For the first twenty-four hours, my mother kept waking me up to explain what she needed done. I would fall asleep in the living room and hear her boots on the floor and the rustle of her jacket. “Doug? Where’s Doug? Is he back here?” And there she would be, standing over me at the couch. “Are you sleeping again? You’re not feeling any better?”

“Mom, there are five other adults in this house and three adult children.”

For her, getting things done is what it means to be together. She feels the same way about projects that another grandmother might feel about singing carols on Christmas Eve. It’s not the same without everyone. But on the second day she started letting me sleep. She also started to worry.

We were planning to sugar in February and March, and this year the kids were interested in learning how to lay out the tubing. My vision of Christmas, since September, had been me standing on snowshoes and explaining how this black tube goes on the south side of this hemlock tree, then left of that fence post and right of that boulder, and ties off up there at the base of that other hemlock tree. See? The large one just past the beech sapling? Each evening, I expected to be able to do it tomorrow, but the next day I only felt worse.

On Christmas Eve, Suzanne drove me to an urgent care center. As we left the valley, we passed a project I had done just four months before, in August. I had cleared out an overgrown apple orchard next to the stream. You could see the stream bending around the apple trees now and the apples trees bending over the stream and the field through their branches. There were also two brush piles, each the size of a garden shed.

Usually when I am sick, I might look at a project like this and think, “I can’t imagine doing that today.” But today I had a different thought. “I can’t imagine ever doing that.” And it shocked me. What did I just think? The thought returned. “I can’t imagine ever being able to do that again.” How big is this? I wondered to myself. How big is this really?

“Are you all right?” Suzanne asked, glancing over at me. “What’s wrong?”

My wondering immediately stopped. “I’m fine.”

At the urgent care center, they gave me antibiotics, but they couldn’t do a blood test. It was Sunday, and their lab was closed. Monday was Christmas. The doctor suggested I come back on Tuesday.

But on Tuesday I said, “I might as well wait. It’s a whole afternoon to get there and back. And I want to go out and set up for sugaring with the kids.” I had hardly left the house, except to walk to the driveway, since I arrived. “We can go home tomorrow if I am not feeling better and do a blood test in Boston.” My mother looked even more worried. Suzanne clearly thought this was a bad idea. But I shrugged. “If it’s pneumonia, I am already on antibiotics. If it is something big, like cancer—” They were sitting at the kitchen table. I was leaning against the counter, with my arms folded. “—I can wait another day to find out.”

Wednesday I was clearly worse, much worse, and we went back to Boston. We saw our primary care physician. We drove to what we thought was the emergency room, and I walked to what was actually the emergency room. Suzanne rejoined me, was there for many hours, and finally left about 2:00 in the morning, with my warm winter clothes and my boots. I waited for a bed.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has two campuses. The emergency room is in the West Campus. The Hematology-Oncology unit is in the East Campus, where Suzanne dropped me off. At dawn two EMTs put me in an ambulance and drove me the four blocks I had walked the night before. I remember looking out the back window of the ambulance and asking one EMT whether he thought a four-block ambulance ride was wasteful. He didn’t. Then the camera goes off. It comes on outside a room in the Hematology-Oncology unit, with nurses and doctors around my gurney again.