EDINBURGH — The window overlooks a neglected backyard where a few shrubs grow with their backs to the wall. Under the washing lines, grasses heavy with seed pods all incline slightly southward, and among the grasses a lone yellow plant, maybe a ragwort.
It’s evening. From time to time the grasses move in the breeze. Now a feather comes wafting down, a pigeon or a herring gull’s. It’s cloud-gray, as though plucked from a cloud.
A century-old backyard, walled in on three sides by tenements four stories high and stacked with other folks’ windows, other folks’ lives, their ages and stages, their phone wires and drainpipes, slate roofs and all the disused chimneys above the roofs near silhouetted against a sky that’s glowing white between grayish clouds. The opalescent northern sky: It is late summer.
You’re watching the grasses move, and the way the telephone cables serving the apartments radiate from a common pole, planted out there in the back green, and how the wires divide the air into segments. You’re watching the chimneys darken and that cool sky as it intensifies in the last light, a cold glow. Just looking out the window. That near-white sky. Hadn’t you seen the same shine and tone earlier in the day? Yes, it was the pendant your daughter was wearing, an oval stone set in a silver rim, on a silver chain, the stone just the size of a thumbnail. A pendant she often wore, cool and calm, that changed in the light between cream and pale gray.
You’d been shopping, and had bought some kitchenware for the life she was about to embark on as a student in another city. You noticed the pendant against the neck of her terra-cotta-colored top the moment before she turned away. Shopping done, she was off to meet friends, leaving you standing on the street in late midlife holding a bag containing a colander and two tea towels. “You can take these for me, Mum. Bye!”
Put it another way: For a long moment the sky above the ranks of disused chimneys was the hue of a polished stone worn by a young woman as she walked away up the street into her own life. You watch her go — long hair, skinny jeans — thinking, what? Thinking: May she be spared. Thinking: O.K., what now? You go home. The evening is your own. Having put the colander and tea towels in her room along with her other new things, bedsheets and plates, you spend a long moment looking out of the window as the light changes, thinking: O.K., then, what now?
Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and professor of creative writing at the University of Stirling and the author of the forthcoming “Surfacing,” from which this essay is adapted.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | It’s Evening. It’s Late Summer. What Now?
Opinion | It’s Evening. It’s Late Summer. What Now?
EDINBURGH — The window overlooks a neglected backyard where a few shrubs grow with their backs to the wall. Under the washing lines, grasses heavy with seed pods all incline slightly southward, and among the grasses a lone yellow plant, maybe a ragwort.
It’s evening. From time to time the grasses move in the breeze. Now a feather comes wafting down, a pigeon or a herring gull’s. It’s cloud-gray, as though plucked from a cloud.
A century-old backyard, walled in on three sides by tenements four stories high and stacked with other folks’ windows, other folks’ lives, their ages and stages, their phone wires and drainpipes, slate roofs and all the disused chimneys above the roofs near silhouetted against a sky that’s glowing white between grayish clouds. The opalescent northern sky: It is late summer.
You’re watching the grasses move, and the way the telephone cables serving the apartments radiate from a common pole, planted out there in the back green, and how the wires divide the air into segments. You’re watching the chimneys darken and that cool sky as it intensifies in the last light, a cold glow. Just looking out the window. That near-white sky. Hadn’t you seen the same shine and tone earlier in the day? Yes, it was the pendant your daughter was wearing, an oval stone set in a silver rim, on a silver chain, the stone just the size of a thumbnail. A pendant she often wore, cool and calm, that changed in the light between cream and pale gray.
You’d been shopping, and had bought some kitchenware for the life she was about to embark on as a student in another city. You noticed the pendant against the neck of her terra-cotta-colored top the moment before she turned away. Shopping done, she was off to meet friends, leaving you standing on the street in late midlife holding a bag containing a colander and two tea towels. “You can take these for me, Mum. Bye!”
Put it another way: For a long moment the sky above the ranks of disused chimneys was the hue of a polished stone worn by a young woman as she walked away up the street into her own life. You watch her go — long hair, skinny jeans — thinking, what? Thinking: May she be spared. Thinking: O.K., what now? You go home. The evening is your own. Having put the colander and tea towels in her room along with her other new things, bedsheets and plates, you spend a long moment looking out of the window as the light changes, thinking: O.K., then, what now?
Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and professor of creative writing at the University of Stirling and the author of the forthcoming “Surfacing,” from which this essay is adapted.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article