This Cold Heartbeat

December 27, 2020, Freeport, Maine

It was Solstice.  M and I had come out for a walk, met at the bridge at Wolf Neck Farm.  We stood still and stared.  A man slowed his car, pulled over to the side of the dirt road, rolled down his window.  He too stared.  On his face was the same bemused and astonished look as, I assumed, was on my face and was certainly on my friend M’s.  It was still mid-morning.  An otherworldly fog exhaled over the farm fields, the pine woods, the black visage of Casco Bay just beyond the fields.  The snow was still deep on the ground and the whole palette of the morning was laid out in grays and whites and blacks.  It was the kind of landscape fairies and witches inhabit.  I would not have imagined it would be inhabited by a platoon of unescorted cows, each one massive and hulking in its spotted brown or black coat, all of them marching by us, one behind the other with resolute determination, as if they’d been summoned for an important job and had no time to dawdle beside inconsequential humans.  

Then at some point, with no signal we could see, the whole troop of them turned around and marched back in the opposite direction.  I haven’t stood next to many cows in my life and the experience of being swept up amongst them there on the side of the road was surprisingly mesmerizing.  I had the feeling I wanted to form up with them, join their troop, cross over to their side.  I wanted to be on the loose, burly, unconcerned with the danger of breath, of unplanned contact. 

The man in the car who was watching as we watched, looked our way after they’d passed the second time.  “That’s 2020 for you,” he said before he rolled up the window and drove off. 

We were still chuckling at his comment when a car with the license plate Veg Guy drove up behind the cows, nudged its way to the head of the line.  Nonchalantly, the beasts followed him or the car, I am not sure which, back to the barn, back to their places in the stalls.   “What happened?” we called to Veg Man when we caught up with him standing outside the barn.  “Oh! They got loose.  It happens.”

William Butler Yeats, in 1919, the last time a world pandemic was paired with the rise of anarchy put it this way:

Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

2020 has been that kind of year. That which you couldn’t imagine could happen: happened. Things fell apart. Quickly and with no warning. By June I was exhausted. Spun around. Conversations became loops going nowhere: “Did you hear? Can you believe? Did you hear? Can you believe?”

The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

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In the late afternoon when the tide was high, I drove to the beach at Winslow Park to keep my promise to accompany my friend T. on her annual Solstice dip in the sea.  The sky was still steel gray and all the color drained from the landscape. (Where does blue and red and yellow hide on such days?) I’d learned only this year that it was possible to actually live through a swim in the frigid Maine ocean, not only in August, but in September and even October.  But I had never been in the ocean in late December.  Were it not for the strangeness of this year, I am sure I would never have agreed to this wild caper. 

T. arrived with her tall, winsome young teenage granddaughter whose baby shower I attended many years ago, and her son, who announced he didn’t plan to swim, only to document our feat with his camera.  We were dressed in layers of warm clothes so when we three stood on the beach at the edge of the water and removed our boots, it seemed to take hours to strip down to our suits.  I stood on my thick orange towel to keep my feet warm while I tugged at my clothes.  Then it was time. “Let’s go,” T. said and we ran shrieking into the ocean.

Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

And here’s the revelation from 2020: nothing matters but this. These cold feet on the sand beside yours.  Her granddaughter’s strong shoulder to lean on while I teeter on one foot trying to get my frozen foot back into my boot. This kind of showing up for each other in the teeth of things.  This cold heartbeat shared with yours.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you whose heartbeat you have so generously and kindly, shared with mine.