The Things that Remain

Sydney Lea weighs the transience of life against the staying power of certain memories.

Olga Nefedova/Getty Images

One night in March, a foot and a half of snow veiled the predominantly drab ground we had all winter in Vermont, another dire reminder of climate change. Snow or not, though, I couldn’t account for something I witnessed the next morning: a honeybee, of all things, caught between one of our windows and a screen.    

So what to do about this tiny creature? I thought of the world’s decline in pollinators, which gave me pause. Getting the bee outside would mean its death, as even the daytime temperature would hover around freezing, but to leave it would also be fatal, the sill getting so little warmth from the house. I could bring the bug indoors, but then what? The poor, chilled thing was nearly immobile, its progress slow enough to allow me concentrated inspection. How orderly those three abdominal bands! How like a Valentine’s heart its face! Everything about the bee suddenly seemed prodigious, a synecdoche for the whole, vast realm of nature.

Dumfounded, I escaped for a short hike. When I returned, the bee had disappeared, and I felt disproportionately saddened. The insect’s life under normal circumstances would have been brief; wherever it may have gone, its life now would surely be even more so now. My wife, off visiting a friend, could have had no part in its vanishing.

Of course, at 81, I might pardon myself that the theme of transiency often intrudes on the page despite prior plans. (Wait: what were they?) The theme’s at its most distracting whenever I call up past events or personalities. The longer I live, the more recently every relationship and experience, big or small, seems to have come into my life, just as abruptly to depart, like that little bee. What remains?   

Lately, when I start writing, my recourse to the subject of brevity—now perhaps including the existence of homo sapiens—is almost automatic and may be growing tiresome to my most faithful reader. I can weary of it myself, the refrain leading too often to the sort of mournfulness kicked off by my honeybee episode. And mourning can turn facile, blinding me to how much natural world exists beyond mere lament, and how many people there are to contemplate, execrate, celebrate, and so on. And I have little grounds for lament anyhow: if I’m not the physical specimen of my youth, compared to many of my age, I’m walking along the fabled Easy Street—at least so far—toward my conclusion. Yes, thinking of the world our grandchildren will inherit can keep me sleepless, but my own day-to-day existence would be enviable to many.

Of course, at 81, I might pardon myself that the theme of transiency often intrudes on the page despite prior plans. (Wait: what were they?) The theme’s at its most distracting whenever I call up past events or personalities. The longer I live, the more recently every relationship and experience, big or small, seems to have come into my life, just as abruptly to depart, like that little bee. What remains?   

***

I rarely know what will prompt my reminiscences. It may be because I took my walk with three dogs that I conjure the misery of a tick-borne disease that almost killed me a while back. I likely caught it in those same woods, or maybe one of the dogs passed a bloodsucker on to me. That was eight years ago, the dogs mere pups. My memory of illness stays vivid. One day, feeling only a bit tired, I suddenly fell to the floor, dizzy, short of breath. I lost control of my bowels, was hard put to speak. I stayed in the hospital almost a week, and exhaustion persisted for half a year. My brain wants to tell me this all came to pass three years ago. It was eight.

It’s easy to understand why a sense of the transitory would have a grip on an octogenarian. At 10, say, a year represented a tenth of my lifespan, and time moved differently. I rejoiced when school let out in June, for example, but by mid-August I wanted to go back, the society of my family and one or two neighborhood chums proving too confined. The muggy summer days lasted for ages, as did the nights, when I lay in bed and watched passing cars’ headlights migrate around the walls, fearing the darkness would be interminable. Between the Decembers of 2023 and 2024, on the other hand, I’ll have lived a mere eighty-secondth of my life. No wonder some nights, days, weeks, months seem so brief they’re gone before they start.

Illustrations of time’s quick pace are countless, of course. And so, unbidden, but likely because those dogs came with me on my bushwhack, the memory of my first dog arrives. Biggie, as I dubbed him, thinking myself clever, was an 8th birthday present, a Norwich terrier so small I could fit him into the pouch of my hoodie. He always lay at ease in his confinement, as still as a Buddha there. I delighted in surprising people by fetching him out, when his stubby tail would spin like a motorboat’s propeller.

It’s easy to understand why a sense of the transitory would have a grip on an octogenarian. At 10, say, a year represented a tenth of my lifespan, and time moved differently…Between the Decembers of 2023 and 2024, on the other hand, I’ll have lived a mere eighty-secondth of my life. No wonder some nights, days, weeks, months seem so brief they’re gone before they start.

Biggie lived just past my 17th birthday, but with those teens had come a painful yen for romance. I’m ashamed to admit that I used him for bait. I’d always felt self-doubting and awkward, still do, but once a girl gave my terrier her attention, conversation became at least manageable. To this day, I harbor some guilt over my exploitation, not of the girls, which to my dismay never amounted to much, but of my dog, who died just before I went off to college.

Although I had no other dog from then until my second year of graduate school, my family has owned 24 dogs since. Most have been a delight, but my favorite was an English pointer named Pete. Handsome, biddable, alert, affectionate, he was killed far too young by cancer. Though Biggie lived the same nine short years, he’d been such a perdurable presence that his death seemed unfathomable; when I knelt next to my pointer, on the other hand, watching our vet insert her needle, I wondered how this beloved creature could have been with us so fleetingly. The length of a year hadn’t changed, of course. I had.

It’s evident that my mind runs free by nature. No use apologizing now. I’ve just looked up at a slew of photographs on our refrigerator, mostly of our grandchildren. The snapshots of one boy at 6 and at 8 seem almost of two different beings, one round-featured, shaggy, and blond, the older angular, his dark hair barber-styled. Change! Its velocity! I could ring that trite note about each of the other six boys and girls there, but then I could ring it about everything.

Seven of Sydney Lea’s eight grandchildren. “I have not met no. 8, who arrived on 7/12, because she lives in Montana, but we will be spending a couple weeks with her and her parents at the end of next month.”

Truth is, I resist those photos, as I do all photos of people I’ve loved, especially the young and the gone. At family events, my wife and various others will leaf through albums, cooing, laughing, and joking about the various figures within, their disparate appearances then and now. They’ll try to identify where the pictures were taken, deducing what may have taken them there. Having small choice, I sometimes join in all this, and I feign similar enthusiasm, no matter my truer response, ever stronger, is—right—to weep at the swiftness of time.

Now a sound breaks in on my wool-gathering. Our home lies in remote territory: one traffic light, for example, in the entire county, two hundred boxes in our post office, miles of ambient forest. We live among those woods, and we can’t see another house from here. But railroad tracks run along the river not far to our east, a slow freight making a round trip there four times a day, blowing the whistle I just heard, north of us or south, depending on whether it’s coming or going.

For years, our nearest neighbors here were Tink and Polly Hood, eighth-generation Vermonters, both of whom lived into their mid-90s. One evening early in our friendship, I stood in their dooryard with Tink. When we heard that somber wail upriver, he breathed, “Forty of ‘em come through every day when I was small.” That was at the end of a golden age in rail transport, when trains hereabouts carried passengers as well as cargo and mail. You could travel almost anywhere in the United States by boarding one and making the right connections. Tink remembered people from Boston getting off at our own little depot to pick strawberries, this stretch of river-plain famous for them even now. “Our parents saved our shoes for school,” he told me. “And these city people, all dressed up in jackets and dresses and that-like, why, they’d look at us boys and girls in bare feet, and you could see they felt sorry for us. Then they’d go off in their fancy outfits to pick berries in that heat, and we kind of felt sorry for them.”

At family events, my wife and various others will leaf through albums, cooing, laughing, and joking about the various figures within, their disparate appearances then and now… Having small choice, I sometimes join in all this, and I feign similar enthusiasm, no matter my truer response, ever stronger, is—right—to weep at the swiftness of time.

The whistle is a reminder that Tink and Polly, whom we knew for decades, are gone. My dog Biggie seemed almost a constant presence in my life, and then he was gone too. Likewise, but more importantly, one of my brothers at 34, and our beloved grandmother, who lived well into her 90s like the Hoods. Both suddenly not there. We shared a house with that grandmother and never thought of her as other than a fixture—until, unfathomably, she was not. The same, only more emphatically, for the brother. I’d become a grown man with my own house by the time they both died, but their absences still stunned me. The Hoods now almost seem figures I once imagined. In any case, to remember them is to marvel at how brief our friendship feels. I met them in my 40s, they died when I was in my late 70s, and, by the feel of it, our relation all passed in an eyeblink.

For me, however, the train’s whistle has a wider resonance. In my own boyhood, government policies promoted cars and planes, making rail travel increasingly obsolete. Yet many little towns still had their own stations. I recall how excited I got whenever I’d board a Pullman with my father, especially if I, the oldest of his five children, was the only one on the trip. It didn’t matter where we headed on those outings; I relished everything: the purple plush of the seats, the racket of the iron wheels, the porters in their spotless white jackets and gloves, the brass and pastries and smell of coffee in the dining car, the ever-changing landscape on either side, and above all the benign company of that gentle parent.

Who died at 56.

One scene we beheld together from a railroad car has ineradicably lodged itself. I must have been around 13, but I don’t recall our physical destination. I’m certain, however, of the spiritual, which I’ve visited ever since.

We took that ride in December, I suspect, because by late afternoon it had gotten dark outside. However, a thawed and refrozen coat of snow lay on the ground in those parts, the icy surface intensifying the brightness of a world already drenched in moonbeams.

We crossed some river, and on its far shore, three boulders and the remains of a flatbed truck, which had obviously burned, lay against the bank. Whatever their look in daytime, the shine off these crude shapes, and even more the way they were arranged, robbed my breath. None had a symmetrical relation to the others, yet they somehow showed a perfect congruence, as if some mighty power had placed them just so, understanding how dramatic the charred chassis’ sable against the glittering backdrop would be, and how all this symmetry would somehow chime with the vibrations from the train’s motion. I was transported.

All I’m suggesting as I look at the preceding reverie is that certain images, often equally curious, do remain—through a whole lifespan. Some of them light my way, some blight it, but at least they hint, however minimally, at perpetuity. They somehow remain when others don’t.

As a mere boy, I wouldn’t have meant “transported out of time,” nor for different reasons do I claim as much now. Still, to relive that moment in mind is an option I often can and do choose. There remain additional kinds of recollection, of course, but along with perhaps four or five other visual memories in my long life, that one has fixed itself in my mind’s eye forever.

No, of course not. There is no forever. Or if there is, how might such an experience have portended it? I’ve thought about that for ages, fuzzily, without resolution. All I’m suggesting as I look at the preceding reverie is that certain images, often equally curious, do remain—through a whole lifespan. Some of them light my way, some blight it, but at least they hint, however minimally, at perpetuity. They somehow remain when others don’t.

The tiny, out-of-season honeybee that appeared and vanished this morning may become such a lasting image. I’ll have to live a while to find out, and just now, whatever my age, that seems very much worth doing.