Charlotte’s Web

A few Saturdays ago Grace and I finished reading Charlotte’s Web.  We had been making our slow way through it for more than a month.  When Grace found the book on her shelf and asked if I would read it to her, I told her that it was a book for older children, and that we would wait and read it later, when she was 6 or maybe 7.  But she asked please, please, could we read just a little bit, just one or two pages, just this once?  And thinking that she would quickly lose interest, I read her the first chapter.  And the second.  And then the third.

There are so many things I want to say about the book, about how quietly perfect it is, how its lessons on kindness and loyalty and the inevitability of loss will make you want to  read it to your child over and over again because it can teach them far more about being alive than you ever could.  I want to tell you all sorts of things like that, but I’m afraid of not getting it right.  I’m afraid of ruining it for you.  I will just tell you one thing, in case you have forgotten:  Charlotte makes four webs for Wilbur, and in those webs are the words that she believes will save Wilbur’s life.   Some Pig.  Terrific.  Radiant.  Humble.

*     *     *

I don’t like the fall.  I want to, I want to love the flaming trees and the dry air and the light, I especially want to love the light, but I can’t.  It’s too sharp, all of it, and it punctures me.  I miss everything and everyone in the fall, and this year a deeper loneliness came over me that is only now beginning to lift.

In fall there is so much beauty and the summer hasn’t quite yet slipped between your fingers and so you think you can hold it,  you think you can have the sun and the leaves and –just this once!– the winter won’t come and the baby won’t cry when you put her down in her crib and you won’t have to send your other baby to a school that she can’t possibly be old enough to love the way she does.    But you know, you know the truth whose current runs just below the surface of your wishing, you know the baby won’t put herself to sleep until she is ready, and you know that one morning you will wake to a hard frost and everything except the bittersweet berries will have died and dropped from their vine and winter will be here.  And you know that the other baby is a girl now, and she is the best kind of girl, and that her school is the best kind of school.

And now winter is almost here.  It is cold in the morning and sometimes even in the afternoon.  And now the baby must be rocked to sleep, and rocked to sleep again a few minutes later because she can’t settle herself.  Once again, sheer force of will was not enough to alter the weather, inside or out.   It is cold and the baby does not sleep, but at least I know that these things are true and that they won’t be true forever, and so they do not frighten me.

*     *     *

On the Sunday after we finished Charlotte’s Web I took the girls to the open studio of a long-married pair of artists we know.  We ate our lunch in the field across the road from their house, a field filled with tall metal sculptures with long sweeping arms that bumped against each other in the wind and smaller, quiet sculptures that were more like shelters or huts made of old wood and steel.  The inside wall of each one was carved with a few lines of poetry or scripture and as we came to each one Gracie sat down and I read the lines to her.  And because words have suddenly entered her consciousness in a way I don’t completely understand, when I finished reading the quote she would point to the author’s name which was carved slightly below the lines and ask “And those words?”  Because somehow she knew that I had not read them, even though she cannot read herself.

Later we went across the road and into the barn to see their new work.  It is hard to talk about what I feel like when I see art, but I can say that what I saw in that barn made me want to stand and look and think for a long time.  It made me want to be alone.  It made me want to write.  But that was not the time for any of those things.  So we left the barn and went across the yard to the porch where Gracie ate half a brownie and I ate a dozen corn chips dipped in salsa that tasted like dinner in the Arizona desert.  We sat on the porch and I looked around at what seemed to me a nearly perfect existence, like Ghost Ranch crossed with Orchard House, and I remembered that last winter one of these artists leaned across a church pew to put her hand on my overdue belly and tell me that nearly 40 years ago she sat outside an Emergency Room in California drinking Castor oil to induce the labor of her second child because they were poor and had no insurance and could not be admitted to the hospital until she became an emergency.   I watched Gracie clean the chocolate frosting off her fingers and thought about how very very long it can take to create your own nearly perfect existence.

On our way back to collect our picnic things we stopped at one of the shelters.  There was a black spider climbing the slant of its metal roof.  “Look at that,”  I said, pointing.  “Do you think it’s one of Charlotte’s daughters?  Do you think it’s Joy, or maybe Nellie?”

Grace shielded her eyes from the sun and squinted up at the spider.  “Joy,” she said.  “It’s definitely Joy.”