Footsteps of Fire

We boomers have been around long enough now to have wonderful stories to tell about our discoveries — sometimes they are discoveries of new energies, sometimes of new loves, sometimes of new beauties. Cynthia Fraser Graves discovered enough when she returned to the seaside city of Bar Harbor, Maine, to inspire her new book, Never Count Crow: Love and Loss in Kennebunk, Maine. What she discovered were Footsteps of Fire.

It was blustery and overcast in Bar Harbor, Maine, as are so many late April days on this rugged coast. I was attending a writer’s conference focused on personal memoir, a genre which I should have recognized as the minefield it was at that time. Instead, I took up pen without resistance, fussing with an idea that had surfaced during the drafting session dealing with crows…crows as heralds, crows as objects of premonition, counting crows as a way of predicting events. In my early married years, my mother-in-law recited the litany of crows: “One crow, sorrow, Two crows, joy, Three crows, a letter, Four crows, a boy, Five crows, silver, Six crows, gold, Seven crows, a story that is going to be told.” As I sat in the classroom looking out to sea from the work table, the crows of this round flew in the gusts outside. I was not yet ready to own those crows as harbingers intended for me.

When the morning session broke for lunch, I decided to venture off the craggy sea-edged campus and go into town. Though there were many conference participants who might have accompanied me, I turned from our work without a word, anxious to find some release from the intense language experience, and drove the short distance into the heart of the small village.

On that day, I was a fifty-three year old widow, an English teacher, the mother of two grown children, and, pretty much alone in my life. My beloved husband of twenty-four years had died very suddenly three years prior. The woman I was on that day was in denial of the despair pooling very deep within, kept just at bay by the thin veneer of daily responsibilities and functions that keep all of us busy and distracted in our lives. That facade would begin to erode by the setting of this day’s obscured sun.

Denial is a strange and powerful thing. It is as good a masque as it is a blind. No one would have guessed this day that the woman they saw in the small deli having a tuna sandwich and a coffee was about to be touched by grace. Thousands of these small, undetected conversions take place every minute all over the world. There is great hope that love will overcome, given that these transformations cannot be blocked by will or evasion.

During lunch, as I tried to read and eat my food, something was moving in me, surfacing from my buried thoughts and memories, collecting with the power of a laser beam. Somehow, in this silent gap, the memory of a weekend spent here with my husband became a memory that lived again. From the window of the lunch room, I saw the street outside and remembered it as it had looked on the 4th of July, 1994, when we visited Bar Harbor on a short vacation four days after my fiftieth birthday….. and ten days before my husband’s fatal stroke.

On that day, we had been imprisoned by the annual Fourth of July parade which started just as we were leaving town. Standing outside the window I was looking from now, in the heat of that day, I snapped the final photo of my husband holding his much loved cup of coffee and smiling. It was the last picture ever taken of him. We had no idea death was with us.

A few minutes later, silence progressed with the parade down the street like a shadow over the crowd, and a mock burial was displayed on an open- bed truck before our eyes. Mounted on green artificial grass, a brass carrier held a coffin swaying over an opening. On the truck, people sat in folding chairs around the grave, immersed in sadness. Flags hung around the patriotic tableau in the hot air and a 21 gun salute broke the silence apart sharply.

All of this rushed into my mind as the comfortable forgetfulness dropped away. Somehow, I had arrived here, on this day, in this exact spot almost four years later to receive this memory as the gift it was.

Leaving my uneaten lunch on the table, I paid my bill and stepped out into the street. Memory preserved the place where my husband had stood as if his footsteps had been etched in the concrete that hot Fourth of July day. They lifted out of the gray air around them, shimmering with his energy and inviting me to take the power of this recognition back and use it as a potent force in my going forward.

I stepped into them, just on the edge of the traffic flow, looking defiantly into the faces of the drivers who drove close to my body muttering complaints. I was standing in a different day and didn’t care what they thought about this mad woman. It was early in the tourist season; the cars were few enough to allow me minutes in that holy place. Then, I turned from the glowing prints, mounted the sidewalk behind me, and walked to my car.

Something had happened; something real, felt and understood. Though it would be many years before the profound sorrow lifted and allowed me to squarely face the numbing loss, a little shift had occurred.

I drove out of Bar Harbor toward the afternoon conference session focused on the story that was only mine to tell. Though I had run from the pain its initial cost of recognition, it was my life, indeed, and it was a beautiful thing.