Bloody January Again

The Highest Cauldron

by Anita Sullivan

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—1/16/11—January is the month for two things: Getting Organized (because once the year gets really cranked up, you won’t have another chance), and Obsessing (because it’s dark and wet and cold outside).

Which brings me to a dialogue I’ve been having with the past several Januaries, about my mother’s ashes. This year’s January voice takes on an ominous monotone as it says: You promised you would scatter them over the Blue Ridge Mountains, which she loved so much. It’s been FIVE YEARS, Dearie; what are you waiting for?

I know, I know. But I live in Oregon—in western Oregon. I don’t have the money, I’m tired, the world situation is getting me down . . . responsibilities, husband’s health problems . . . .

The voice continues (in a Brooklyn accent this time): Blah, blah, blah! You keep procrastinating, Dearie and, guess what, your kids will end up just having to dump your ashes in with hers and scatter them together. Is that where you want to end up, back in South Carolina again? (A smug silence ensues).

What kind of logic can you expect from a month?

But no, I don’t particularly want my remains, shabby and inconsequential though they will be, to be carried back to a place I no longer belong. Although I don’t belong here, either, and there’s the rub.

I’m a creature of the High Desert. When I was 12 and my parents drove with four kids from Southern California to Clemson, South Carolina for my father’s new job at the university there, I left a good chunk of my soul under a rock somewhere in New Mexico, facing the Sangre de Cristos at sunset.

Many years later I went back and dug it up again, and we were briefly re-united. Then I lost other pieces in various parts of Greece, too numerous to catalogue, and they remain there still.

Do souls grow back again? Secretly, I believe they do, but not the same as before. So it’s risky to go scattering bits of your own here and there with complete abandon.

One way of looking at it is that every place you live kills you little by little, but the “you” part changes. Here in Western Oregon, where I’ve been happily dwelling for 30 years, I’m sure that important aspects of my “self” have gradually atrophied for lack of stimulation—or, more likely, leached away in the winter rain, leaving less and less every year.  All the more reason you should have moved back and looked after your mother in her old age (says a familiar voice). The winters are much nicer . . . .

But she never asked me to. Whenever I would call her up in the nursing home those last couple of years and ask “How are you, Mom?” she would say “Oh, I’m free-spiriting right along!” This was from a woman with almost no memory, who barely recognized my brother and me and my two sons when we visited, who danced regularly with the delighted nurses in the carpeted hallways while humming Hungarian folk melodies, but who never asked or expected anybody to take care of her.

Me, all my life I’ve wanted to live in a village near the sky-eating mountains, in an adobe house with many rooms, with enormous windows letting in the light. All the people I love best in the world would be alive and well, and would live in the village, too, and we would meet for coffee, wine or dinner and carry on long conversations into the wee hours. This would be in a place rather like Greece, rather like New Mexico, rather like western Oregon, and even somewhat like western South Carolina, but not quite any of these.

Right now, though, in January—while working out the details of my ideal village again—I’m trying to talk my mother into letting me scatter her ashes right here in the Coast Range, not too far from the Pacific Ocean, a place she never saw in her lifetime. It might be just rationalizing, but I have a feeling, despite what January might say, that she’d regard the prospect as high adventure.

"Mountains at Smith Rock State Park, Central Oregon" (Photo by Anita Sullivan)