The presence of absence

Strolling around the yard after my return last night from a week in Michigan, I see the forsythia flowers are gone, the tulips are stripped to stalks, the grass clumps are reaching for the sky. The dandelions have taken the opportunity of my absence to produce puffballs, weeds are making free my garden plots, and....my pear, my tender little pear tree, is defoliated, stripped, denuded by caterpillars. Eggs laid in the fall (probably) hatched into this plague of toothpaste green greedy leaf and bud grinders. The twig ends are blunt or have a few leaf spines protruding. It's painful to compare these bare branches with the billowing buds of a week ago.

My absence was not noted but can be seen now. I'm sure I would have seen the depredations, the first gnawed leaf edges, the holes, and would have removed the worms and given the tiny nascent leaves a chance to unfurl and expand. I could have been protector of my slight, young, vulnerable tree. (Actually, I should have inspected the trunk for egg masses last fall, but...)

Then there's grandson Meja in Michigan, smiling now at whomever has come into take him from his crib, perhaps after some time of quietly talking himself. I will be absent as he is wriggling on the changing table, as he is picking up blueberries from the tray in his high chair, as he runs prancing from room to room, his little elbows tight against his side. Maybe he'll note my (our) absence later in the day as a kind of thinning out of his audience of adoration, but maybe not.

His absence is acute. I couldn't live continually with the red-zone intensity of this visit (we did nothing but make much of him) but the drop to zero feels abrupt and jarring, like an engine seizure in the middle of an auto race.

He will still be taken out for walks and put down for naps; he'll perfect his climbing and descending of stairs; he'll get to work on his fricatives; he'll learn that all birds in picture books aren't 'duck'. I'll go back to English word order, the banter of my colleagues, the Orange line, the latest neighborhood controversy brewing (they want to relocate the bus maintenance facility where?) and all the rest. What will be obviously missing from my life will be that little spark. We'll see him on Skype, but nothing is like the heft of him, the smell of him, the writhe of him. My arms miss him.

Absences, the negative spaces, are factors in all encounters, but sometimes so palpable as to be encounters in their own right. Yet the passage of time and the incessant flow of life progressively estrange us from what is distant and out of touch. The edges of the holes of absence crumble; the holes themselves fill in and smooth over like the surf sand. Absence quickly becomes new norm, not longer other, even noticeable.

If I can't have that boy's presence, I want at least the pang of his absence.