Apokatastasis
A blue afternoon. A clear blue sky, paling to white at the horizon, cloudless; a March sky, though it's still December. No more snow since that first big storm after Thanksgiving. If we don't get more snow soon, it's mean drought come summer. Dust in the air will mean topsoil blowing away before rain or young shoots can hold it down. It's easy to feel hopeless. The light coming through the bare branches of the oaks seems to filter to brown as it passes through the ghosts of acorns and turning leaves. Come sunset, everything will seem gold and amber and brass, painted mellow by the sun's tilting lantern.
We stagger into the radiation treatment center at the hospital; my father is going to get shot five more times with fast protons, and high-energy hadrons. They take more x-rays, to center the targeted region, a little lump that grew on that spur that sticks out to the side of the spine, the lump that grew larger all through months of chemo. They call that a mixed result. Blues crosshairs are painted on his torso, alignments for the accelerator's aim. The radiation oncologist says to my father, after today's session, Our goal is to make sure you die of something other than cancer. That's a successful treatment, nowadays, for an old man who's dying anyway. It doesn't keep from us from sleepless nights and worry, but it's the most hopeful thing any doctor has said to us in months. We can try to choose our deaths, our times to die. We can still struggle to try to control our fates: our liberations.
I drive home while Dad naps. The light is getting that gold tinge. The sun skates through bare orchards on the horizon. The land here is flat and gently rolling, with lines of trees along the roads, at the edges of fields. Tall machineries mark territory and home boundaries, insectlike. Crows fly from silo to silo, searching for loose grain, fossil corn, something the barn-dwellers missed. We are silent. Perhaps I can sleep, tonight; finally. Near the rim of a bowl-shaped sink, not really a valley, deer move slowly from out of the trees, turning blue with final dusk.
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This is the second installment of Art Durkee's work featured in M&C's Original Writing. Arthur Durkee is an award-winning musician, visual artist, photographer and writer. He currently devotes his full-time efforts to his creative work, and and his new DVD movie and music business featuring on his nature photography. Visit his blog at http://artdurkee.blogspot.com/
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