I set out for the last time in the fall. I faltered up a mountain in the sunshine. Things hadn’t been right with me for a long time now. Every day my body seemed to fail me a little more. How could I not but accept the nature of my body as I trudged on anyway? After all, I am a small part of the natural order. Just like earthquakes that balance the shifting of the tectonic plates, I had to accept, to embrace, the grief that had unsettled my bones.

I hiked along the Dragon’s Back in the mornings filled with sunshine. The rice harvest had come in. The paddies were little pockets of brown water now, neat and tidy with old rice shoots poking up toward the sun as if they knew their time had come and gone, but still raised themselves toward the last of the warmth. A few, diminutive red dragon flies hovered over the water. I came upon this one and that one carrying baskets up the narrow stone step paths or working on the mountain side. The farther I hiked, the fewer who gave a greeting. We were distant, separate worlds connected in silence and a cool breeze.

It is just now I am remembering that blackness on that mountain. It was creation before sun and shadows. I’d sit out on the sixth floor balcony of the walk-up room over looking the mountains so dark I could barely see their outlines… a darkness like I had never experienced before. In the mornings, I’d find myself in bed. Had the blackness washed me like an ocean into sleep?

I had come to this place for a reason. I wanted to be away from people I might know or people who spoke my native tongue and had secrets I didn’t want to know about. I wanted to be free of everyone’s secrets… even my own. I went to that village and experienced that blackness on that mountain instead. There were no secrets that would be shared with me in that village. There was only me in the walk-up room on the sixth floor in this place made of timber… the taciturn foreign woman who gave a morning’s smile for breakfast and a wave at the end of supper and disappeared into hills and valleys during the day… and there was the comfort of that blackness on that mountain.

Now I remember something else.

There was an Englishman wandering in one of the villages of dyers in a neighboring province. I passed the time of day with him. I had just bought a small bag of candied ginger. It was bright yellow. I offered him a piece, but I guess he would not have wanted it because of the flies. I enjoyed the ginger… the kind of thing you find in an odd place few wanderers know about… bright yellow, a visual treat… sweet with a pungent aftertaste… something not like anything else you have ever experienced in the world… the lingering sense of it as a memory, and, when it is gone, a loss you will never have again.

I will have left China when I’ve awakened my senses again. It is winter in Spain. I claptrap through the cold apartment in woolen socks across the slick, icy marble floors. A homing pigeon… I will always return to the bedroom easy chair and sit near the heater to keep warm. Sometimes I will get up to look out at the gray sea at twilight, but I’ll write until the intimation of a day’s new light stretches along the horizon and the heaviness of my eyes draws me to the bed.  The wind gusts and rattles the doors. Leaves and dried bougainvillea blossoms sail through the door into the foyer. I sweep them up every day. One day I find a colony of ants in the crack between the stoop and the door. Winter must be fading into spring. I’ll have lunch with friends… walk to the store to buy winter pears… bake bread, but I’ll always long to return to the easy chair in the bedroom at the side of the sea so that words create phrases… phrases create paragraphs… until the paragraphs create an emptiness in me that is the sound of the sea and the wind whistling under the door.

It is spring. I am on a street in China next to an antique market. Bicycle carts are parked along the street and farmers from the countryside are selling green coconuts and watermelons. The poplars lining both sides of the street are tall. They sway in the wind. They shed their spring pollen, blossomy snow, in the warm air… one season only just indistinguishable from another. I lift my face. Soon it is covered. I remember another May.

We shall remember once, too late,
This simple happening, so fine,
This very bench where we are seated,
Your burning temple next to mine.

From hazel stamens, cinders fall
White as the poplars that they land on,
Beginnings want to be fecund,
May gives itself with sweet abandon.

The pollen falls on both of us,
Small mountains made of golden ashes
It forms around us, and it falls
On our shoulders and our lashes.

It falls into our mouths when speaking,
On eyes, when we are mute with wonder
And there’s regret, but we don’t know
Why it would tear us both asunder.

We shall remember once, too late,
This simple happening, so fine,
This very bench where we are seated
Your burning temple next to mine.

 In dreams, through longings, we can see –
All latent in the dust of gold
These forests that perhaps could be –
But that will never, ever, grow.

~~May Gives Itself with Sweet Abandon
~~Lucian Blaga

The sea and sky have turned navy blue again. For awhile I want to believe that the pollen from the poplars on that street in China falls upon the sea. Every moment there is less… less of that fairy snow that I had loved in the warm air of spring… that May just before things had changed. One day there is just the navy blue sea… the navy blue sky. I have returned to the place where I began so long ago.

… and that is how I left behind so many years in China.