What is your version of dancing bears?

This is love—
to stay in this world
not because you want to linger in
your own life that’s become diminished,
feels no longer yours, balancing on bones
that wobble, the once endlessly blue
sky of your mind now clouded
and drifting. No, you hold on because
you want to stay in your beloved’s life,
see your shoes beside hers waiting
at the door, together on this side
of the threshold.

As I write these words in a little notebook, whispering them to myself, to the Christmas tree, to the cats batting dangling bits of silver, this room is quiet enough to hear the erratic breathing of my husband sleeping, carrying him into one more new morning.

I allow the wounding and the wondering of this long goodbye we’re sharing.

Is the spirit whole,
like a salmon at sea,
the muscled body wearing its pearled scales,
waterborne and willful?
Or is the spirit broken,
as light, diffused and docile,
beaming through a prism,
your red to my indigo?

More tea, I need another cup of tea. As I walk into the kitchen, fill the glass kettle, wait for the purling of water, the steam lifting like a thin hope, I inhale, and hold on to it.

Plopping a rich cinnamon tea bag into a tall hot cup, I let it steep as I unwrap a gift I promised was for us. Rude to buy yourself a Christmas gift? In truth, it was for me.

It’s whimsically beautiful and all I can do is cry. It’s a canvas, folk-art-style print of two bears dancing in a kitchen.

Wrapping arms around the print, I hum and spin, feet bare and quiet, the cats running in to watch.

It’s not the print, it’s the memory I’m dancing with.

Decades ago, newly together, so much time still ahead, we danced almost every night in our first kitchen. He’d pull a wooden spoon from the spaghetti sauce he was simmering or grab an open wine bottle or hoist up this odd colander on a long handle he used to have, holding it to his lips, crooning to me.

We’d lift our past cats watching in that kitchen, one for each of us, and we’d spin and howl out a song—my definition of caterwauling, soulful and wild.

As I whirl around our current kitchen, I’m in two places, two times, at once. Thank you, thank you.

I pause and hold the canvas image at arms length, loving the two dancing bears, so happy in their humble bear kitchen.

We’re bear people, my husband and I, nearly always living among bears. It may sound foolish to you, but with the passage of time turning his beard grey and his bouts of bear-ish brusqueness, we’ve even come to call him SilverBear.

When I find the space in the kitchen where I’ll hang this ursine couple, I set the print down and return with tea to my chair by the tree and my notebook.

Death comes in small doses every day—
two day’s ago, as a bird beneath the window,
yesterday, as the memory of her crossed bill
and limp wings, simply gone,
the memory, his, not the bird,
as I’d nestled her under leaves.

Without the memory, did she ever exist?

This is the other reason for him to stay in this world. Who among us wants to be forgotten?

Will he follow all the lost, forgotten birds?

I write these notes as future proof to myself. Yes, he was here. We really did dance in the kitchen.

I have these bears dancing, the paint strokes, the bits of color, the yellow bear kettle on the blue bear stove—an artful map back into that time, so we can keep on dancing, now and now and now.

A Note about the artwork, “Dancing Bears”

When I was shopping over the holidays for others, Etsy’s algorithm already knew about my affection for bears, and brought up this lovely artwork.

The shop is called SchmetzPetz out of Savannah, Georgia, and the artist is Jay Schmetz. If you love this kind of artistry, please visit Jay’s Etsy Shop.

His about page resonated with me, too:

“I met my wife … and worked at her family’s gallery. My wife was already involved in animal rescue of pot belly pigs and dogs, and since then we have rescued so many animals I lost count. My wife went on to become a veterinarian. From the beginning we had a small animal sanctuary on our mini farm were we live and in a sense these rescue animals became a source of inspiration for my paintings, I depict of a world where I see animal as humans.”