GRANDFATHER GREYBEARD

[This photo courtesy of Robert Baxter]

I got an email yesterday, telling me of another friend, an older woman in Jacksonville, whose health has taken a turn for the worst. It seems I have so many sick and dying friends--and my friends who aren't sick also report they have sick and dying friends. Is it our age?

I first saw the Grandfather Greybeard tree behind the Alachua house with the yellow pine floors--in my own backyard in spring, 1976. That was my first spring in the house built in 1926 that had only two owners before me. The second owner was wild for plants and she'd been there fifty years: Professor Sargent and Pink Perfection camellias, walls of azaleas, red and pink roses and 50 square feet of white Cherokee, the climbing rose. Come spring, this tree of white beards appeared in the far back corner of the property. When my Gainesville boyfriend originally viewed the house and I asked what he thought I should do first, he replied, "Cut down this forest back here." I grew to love it, but I sold the place in 1990.

I didn't know how young I was in 1990, but I know now. I didn't know when I sold the Alachua house and moved to MS, that my mother would go right downhill and get a cancer diagnosis within the year. That's what the Jax friend has--cancer, and I think like Mother she's not going to fight it. I'm told that when her doctor informed my mother that if she didn't have surgery, the cancer would kill her, Mother stuck to her original "no," shook her head, and remarked, "Everybody's got to die of something." She was 86.

Just yesterday I decided to push my own estimated point of departure to 90 in order to finish these manuscripts. Until yesterday I thought I'd go at 86; I don't know which is more difficult, the knowledge my own death is coming at me, faster and faster, or the goodbyes I'm constantly saying to friends, falling fast, like today's bits of oak pollen flying through the air.



Yesterday I saw many smaller specimens of Grandfather Greybeard, dappling the newly-green woods on either side of the entrance to Suwannee Springs Park near Live Oak. There's also one a hundred yards upriver I have to lean out from the deck to see.

This morning I saw a huge (4-1/2")yellow and black butterfly sail past the kitchen window, got out binoculars, and identified it as the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, Papilio glaucus. The weather's been cool since our Big Rain two days ago that brought the river's water level up.


I believe tomorrow's prediction puts the high temp somewhere in the 80s; I hope we get a breeze along with it. And maybe I'll see some more Greybeards on my way to the reading at South Georgia Regional Library in Valdosta. I think I"ll count how many because I know they won't be with me long.