Still Reeling

First published in the print column, The Nature of Things

The season of the tumbleweeds is upon us.

Big, spindly weed skeletons wheel across the fields, bump over roads, bunch up, elbow to elbow in the fence rows, crowding in like spectators at a hanging.

As I bounce down the country roads of western Nebraska running my mail route, I stand witness to hundreds of these cartwheeling carcasses making their determined migration to who knows where.

These days though, they are a comforting sight.

There’s an old Louis L’Amour book entitled, Conagher,  in which a lonely pioneer widow pours out her sadness in prose and poems she ties to tumbleweeds and releases into the wind. For some reason, I always found the idea of that appealing. Not so much for the purpose of landing a husband, as the lonely widow manages to accomplish, but putting a thought down in writing  lends a form of permanence to the sentiment, the capturing of a moment. And tying it to a tumbleweed, to roll at random wherever the wind may blow, just seems an appropriate way to distribute something as transient and adrift as a human thought.

With the recent passing of my mother I’ve been confronted with a bevy of emotions I’ve not known where to put or how to handle—my own internal crop of tumbleweeds. Ours was a complicated relationship, and after the excruciating process of wringing words out to compose her obituary, I have never felt so inept as a writer, or a daughter. How does one summarize a person’s life in a few digestible paragraphs, reduced to the highlights: achievements, places and people presumably most important? There’s so much more to a life than that. And there was so much more to who she was to me than what I could say in that space.

But then…the tumbleweeds.

This season, they are my own. All of them. Symbolically, they mirror my grieving thoughts: randomly reeling; chaotic and wild; a thorny bramble too sharp to touch.

I watch the tumbleweeds as they pass along, their journey so much like our own unwieldy trek through life. With all former verdancy spent, they wend their way homeward, making a grand and graceful departure to some unknown place.

And then just like that, they’re gone.