Sometimes a few words, a line, a phrase, a sentence, just floats into the mind like a dandelion seedling, like a few petals of apple blossom. These similes are appropriate for it was that time of year, it was spring in Latvia. Trees were thick with apple blossom; the dandelions were still yellow, whole lanes and lines and fields of yellow. They would change all at once, go from bright yellow petals to dusky white, silver white balls of seeds, spread out over the grass. All at once, later in May. In the evening, the grass would shine with them as if every puff ball of seeds was made up of tiny lights. Perhaps they were.
The phrase floated into my mind, death and decay among the dandelions. My critical mind thought that was maybe just a little negative. But it described what I was seeing and experiencing, the graveyards, the decaying empty houses, the lanes of dandelions bordering the paths I walked every day, and spreading out across the fields. I defended the realness of it, the gift of it. When I got home I started with that phrase, only slightly changed, and wrote to see where it would lead me.
This is a story of loss and decay among the dandelions
In Sabile’s main street, opposite the church grounds, there’s a splendid house, long and low with wooden window frames; they are painted pale green, at least in places where the paint has not flaked off – a wooden sign still on the front – a workshop as well as house? Who knows? Who is going to make an inventory of all the names and vanishings, all the splintered boards, all the dust-covered staircases, all the graves, some so overgrown with moss and grasses that they’ve become a raised garden, a raised platform for wild violets.
Graves, cemeteries, deaths and burials, they are the themes for this year’s calender. Dust and dandelions. Ashes and art. There are other living creatures – storks and violets, pine trees and jasmine blossom, deer and hare, they give back to the earth and nourish it. It is just us humans it seems, who make lists and cannot reconcile ourselves to the relentless, ongoing nature of all change. Forever trying to scoop up the forms of energy that please us, hold them like the 3-bowl sculpture, open to the heavens. The three kingdoms or the three constellations, the 3 bowls of belonging. I pass them every day, when I walk – on the way there and on the way back. 
Today I went along the top path, past the flowering jasmine trees – past the empty house, now my familiar friend, and downhill to the river. Then go through the shady grounds beside the church with benches and on, up to the second hill. It’s hot this afternoon and I wonder if I’ll make it. The heat pulls at my shoulders, slows down my feet. But I go up the hill, back to the graveyard with the rusted iron gates, the large cross, the 3 graves – one very small – that have names and dates on them, that have a gravel path around them, that have a bench beside them so the tired wayfarer such as myself can sit awhile, can linger in the company of old memories and count – regrets? Or the times of plenitude and eating in the open air, the roast chickens and the squashes and the onions, the polenta and the paprika, the lemons squeezed over the grilled fish.
It is possible that in those times I was thinking of something else entirely and because of that I lost the scent of roasting ham, I lost the memory in a morass of details that I can’t remember, but now it comes back, now it’s not so much I want to say things I forgot to say then or there wasn’t time or – it seemed so obvious there was no need – but more, in the recollection, I would like to hold them close to me, these beloved departed, because their presences were like passing days, sequential, days that followed, one would come after the next, that was the nature of their being, that’s what days did, but the presence that I am regretting now, that I would like to hold close once again, stepped out of the sequence and I haven’t quite – or have not at all – forgiven what failed to follow in due order, what fell out of line, and I still don’t know exactly what it was – a note in music that you tripped up on, a shoe that you had left carelessly and misaligned close to the kitchen door, that tripped you up, or maybe the guitar strings, when you changed them, perfecting the tuning, ready for the next day’s concert – you tightened them too much, one snapped and you snapped too – tripped or snapped or snagged or burst, whatever failed, the concert and the heart was cancelled .......
and here I am, sitting by the graves of others who I never knew, but in this tumbling foliage of grass and moss, violets and dandelions, one absence so it seems links to another and though the names are individual and the memories, it’s as if a tunnel underground links every loss and through the flower stems and the petals, the scents, the air currents, the storks in flight, all the littered caskets that hold the jewels of stars at night, there is a boat and a beneficence that holds you all. I raise a glass to you and to the cavalcade of music that holds every one of you.
I get up from the bench, walk past the pine trees with the scent of warm pine needles. I come back down, to the valley and the river, follow the river, (always follow the river), climb the last hill, pass the 3 cups and the stone boulders that they rest on, follow the path of stones with the axis mundi on my right, through the iron portal which clangs softly in the wind, and home.
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| Part of the axis mundi sculpture |
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