At four o’clock, almost every working day, my phone would ring.
It was Grandma.
The timing was remarkably consistent. I would be finishing whatever needed finishing, gathering my things, and preparing to leave work when she would call. Most days she was sitting outside on her porch. I could hear the ordinary sounds of her world through the phone, but more than anything I remember the wind chimes. They would sound somewhere behind her voice, stirred occasionally by the breeze while she told me about her day, asked about mine, or simply talked because four o’clock was the time she called.
The calls were rarely about anything especially important—the price of potatoes, her daily report on The Price Is Right, what she had seen on the news, a list of things she wanted from the store, and, usually, to tell me she had baked something. It was her way of saying she wanted me to stop by on my way home.
The calls were part of the architecture of everyday life, one of those habits that becomes so ordinary that you hardly recognize it as precious while you are living inside it. Work ended. Grandma called. I drove home. Tomorrow we would do it again.
Until one day we did not.
Today I am sitting on my own porch, and the wind is moving through the chimes around me. They do not ring together so much as answer one another. A low note sounds from one side of the porch, followed by something lighter from another. Then everything becomes quiet for a few seconds before the breeze begins again.
Some of these chimes once hung on Grandma’s porch.
I had bought them for her over the years and replaced them when weather and time finally did what weather and time always do. Her favorite was a set from Woodstock Chimes tuned to “Amazing Grace.” There was something fitting about that particular melody hanging outside her house, even more so because “Amazing Grace” was one of the songs we sang at Grandpa’s funeral. What began as a gift eventually accumulated a history I could never have anticipated when I bought it.
Now the chimes hang here.
When Grandma died, they found their way from her porch to mine. I suppose that is how inheritance often works. We tend to imagine inheritance as the important things people leave behind: property, photographs, jewelry, furniture, documents. But sometimes what survives is much smaller. A coffee cup. A recipe. A phrase someone always used. The knowledge of exactly how a room smelled. Or the sound of wind moving through pieces of metal hanging from a porch roof through a phone.
Friday we will bury Grandma’s ashes beside Grandpa.
There is a finality in writing that sentence that I have not quite felt during the past year. Death itself rarely provides the neat ending that funerals seem designed to promise. People die, arrangements are made, possessions are sorted, papers are signed, and eventually everyone returns to work. The calendar continues advancing with an almost insulting indifference.
Friday will not change that. It will not finish grief or close some invisible door behind me. I know better than that.
But I do think it will provide a kind of closure.
Grandma will be beside Grandpa again, at least in the physical geography we create for the dead. There will be a place where both of their names belong together. For me, that matters. After a year in which her absence has gradually changed from an event into a fact, placing her ashes beside him feels like completing one final obligation of love.
And then life will continue.
That seems especially apparent this week because another school year is approaching. There are rooms to prepare, plans to make, routines to establish, and students who will soon arrive carrying lives and problems entirely their own. The rhythms of work that have structured so much of my adult life are beginning again.
There is something strange about preparing for beginnings while preparing for a burial.
Perhaps, though, that is not strange at all.
Life rarely gives us clean divisions between endings and beginnings. We bury people and go back to work. We grieve while buying groceries. We remember the dead while answering emails. New students arrive while old voices remain somewhere in our heads. We carry what has ended directly into whatever comes next.
I think that is what the wind chimes have become for me.
They are not a monument. I do not sit here pretending that Grandma is somehow speaking through them. The sound is only metal, wood, string, and moving air. But memory does not require anything supernatural to be powerful. The breeze moves through the same chimes that once sounded behind Grandma’s voice at four o’clock in the afternoon, and for a moment two different porches occupy the same space.
I can hear her porch from mine.
Soon the school year will begin. Four o’clock will come again, just as it has thousands of times before. I will finish my work, gather my things, and head home.
My phone will not ring.
That absence will remain.
But perhaps that is one of the quieter lessons of getting older: continuing does not mean leaving people behind. Sometimes continuing means discovering how much of them came with us.
The wind moves again as I sit here, and somewhere above me the chimes begin their lazy conversation.
One note.
Then another.
Then another.
And life, indifferent and beautiful, continues.
Always,
Dave