How Fast Do Clouds Move?

Are People Tired of Hearing About My Grief?

There is an irreducible mystery at the center of things.

The other day I was sitting at the kitchen counter drinking coffee and sorting through the mail when I noticed what appeared to be a strange kind of winged ant carrying a dead spider up the back door. The spider was considerably larger than the ant. Some of you have had the audacity to accuse me of exaggerating when it comes to the size of the spiders I write about. Still, the ant appeared to be carrying an enormous burden.

I got up from the kitchen counter to get a closer look, to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. The ant would move a few inches, stop, adjust its grip, and continue on its way. The back door is painted with a glossy paint, so the surface is smooth. I had questions. How? Does it have suction cups on its feet? Was it taking the spider home to eat? Bringing brunch back for the colony? Is this even an ant? Do ants have wings?

I hollered for my dad to come look. We both stood there with our coffee, staring at it, talking but not really talking.

After the excitement was over I sat back down to finish my coffee and get some answers. Winged ants are real. They are the reproductive members of the colony. They don’t have suction cups. They have tiny hooked claws and adhesive pads that let them climb smooth surfaces. They can carry many times their own body weight.

I told my dad what I’d learned, and he pulled out a photograph of my mom that he’d come across. That’s how it often happens now. We’ll be in the middle of lunch, halfway through a movie, talking about something completely unrelated, and suddenly he’s holding a picture of her or telling me their origin story again or reminding me, for the thousandth time, that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. There usually isn’t a transition. Grief doesn’t work like that.

It was a more recent picture of her. I don’t remember seeing it before. She was sitting in her wheelchair with one of her granddaughters dressed for prom standing beside her and my dad standing proudly on the other side. What caught me off guard was my mom’s beaming smile.

My mom rarely smiled for photographs. But when she did, it transformed her whole face. The moment I saw it I could feel my heart throw up the hand. Not now. I knew what would happen if I kept looking. Ever since writing about that in my last post, I’ve realized how often I avoid things that remind me of her. I sat there anyway holding the picture in my hand. I let myself look until looking turned into crying. My dad started crying too. Neither of us said much after that, and I cleaned up the dishes leftover from breakfast.

I still think about her a thousand times a day. I still catch myself wanting to call her on the drive home from the grocery store or tell her that dad made it through another doctor’s appointment. I still hear her voice. I still want her to be here.

Lately I’ve been trying to write about other things. I worry that I’ve written too much about my mom, too much about grief. Sometimes it feels like everyone else has moved on and I’m still standing in the same place. Sometimes I wonder if people are tired of hearing about it. I wonder if I should keep those parts in my journal and write about winged ants or other curious things that capture my attention instead. My attention and my grief don’t seem to exist separately. I can’t seem to follow one without running into the other.

Which is probably why I haven’t published anything in a couple of weeks.

On the way home from picking up new hearing aids for my dad, the clouds were impossible to ignore. Towering white columns, dark wisps, and long streaks stretched across the far sky that looked more like galaxies than weather. We started guessing how fast they were moving. Thirty miles an hour? Fifty? Eighty? Turns out some clouds can move up to 150 miles an hour.

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