A few decades ago, my grandmother left the city life for the forest. Before she was able to settle in the thicket she yearned for, she had to spend a rather long time living in a doghouse while her proper residence was being built, turning her into a growling guardian of her own dreams. Fending off the disapproval of her near and dear ones, she persistently urged the builders forward, skillfully willing them to turn the forest pines into suitable logs, and the logs – into yet a new structure – that of a home – all the while drawing strength from a river that flowed behind the woods. She prevailed: a barking watchdog gradually turned back into a triumphant sixty-year-old lady, who had gotten her way. Ever since then Grandma has lived in a spacious house in the middle of the woods, with patches of tamed wilderness gradually sprouting up – a greenhouse, a vegetable plot, a flower garden, all there to attest to her victory.

For the past few years, Grandma hasn’t been living alone: the house quivered with the vibrating presence of a bat colony that had suddenly moved in, from where no one knew. At dusk, the sky would be blanketed by these ultrasonic flying mice pouring out from under the rafters, their little snouts greedily sucking up the swirling gnat soup. Any bat unfortunate enough to flutter into the house would meet the sad fate of a cornered moth: Grandma was prone to implement a strict pushback policy against even the most incidental immigrant creatures violating her threshold. And so, as the night fell, all windows would be shut, leaving the bats to feast in the twilight, and the lady of the house to suffer through oxygen-deprived darkness, hardly able to see the stars. In addition, this neighbourhood of upside-down hanging creatures necessitated more frequent cleaning of the said windows (to be able to see her car properly), as well as of the house façade. However, as I write these lines, the house stands squeaky clean and vibrates no more: the bats have gone, moving away to yet another unknown location. Grandma will soon turn 85.

I haven’t mentioned this yet – my grandmother lost a kidney during a car accident in her youth, though this hasn’t put any fear into her or prevented her from getting behind the steering wheel. Recently, she sold her car for parts and got a new one, faster than she is, so she could drive up to the nearby town for seeds, sprouts, and saplings, run her errands, and continue an active life.

Speaking of thresholds, and of the principal larger inhabitants of this frontier, Grandma would feed her three cats and a little dog routinely; yet she’d instruct them to eat in a designated area – further away from the house, not on the porch (like the common ants or spiders) – without crossing the threshold. When I say, ‘a little dog’, I have three of them in mind (and that is not counting the initial parallel between a dog and my grandmother). The dog would rotate out, on average, every five years. Causes of rotation: car wheels, pack heat-induced dog fights, and other or unknown incidents. Venturing into the woods is not nearly as fun without the company of a dog.

(No one to knock over the blueberry jar, no one to stretch out right across the entire field of wild strawberries and become a cuddle-craving carpet, no one to hunt down the mushrooms or the does stirring in the thicket. Without anyone to chase them, the does have spread – so much so that when you’d turn on the kitchen tap, the engine crouching at the bottom of the well (a common feature of rural engineering) would spout out their tears. The does were indeed euphoric with tears at this unprecedented opportunity to live on and be fruitful and numerous.)

The cats – mother and daughter – were a constant at the frontier. The third kitty – son of the elder cat – would be, like the dog, regularly killed and constantly reborn with every new litter. Finally, the mother cat’s reproductive capacity to propagate her sequels petered out and it was just the two of them: the tabby mother-daughter duet sticking it out together.

One night, not so long ago, some creature snuck into the yard at night and bit the throat of the younger cat. Upon discovering her frail little body, Grandma laid it down by the barn, along with her grief. Yet, while she went looking for a shovel, the deceased was swiftly carried away by another, most likely a starving impatient being. The cat was interred in the digestive tract of another mammal, with gastric secretions and peristaltic moves holding the funerary rites. The tabby daughter, ever slightly distant and resentful, has likely spread out through the forest floor, nourishing it with minerals.

And what of my grandmother – what is she going to become?

I ask Grandma how she pictures death. She says, ‘I don’t’, she doesn’t show the slightest care of what is to come, she feels at peace. It is only fire she longs for  – she wouldn’t want to rot in the earth, eaten by insects and decomposed by fungi.

In this latitude, the fire is kept busiest during the winter. In preparation for the cold season, the forest glades are expanded, with heavy transport moving in to pick up the freshly felled trunks that are to become firewood, as well as the rotting old trees that had served as homes to myriads of the unseen. The invisible organisms to be consumed by fire are crying their hearts out, joined in their weeping by the suddenly homeless birds deprived of their hollows. Their tears – the tree-less clearings – mean there’s more of the lush greenery, coming full circle, back to the well of joy for the doe population. This also brings us to the matter of ticks, which, fed and carried by the ungulates, are free to spread wide. Along with the ticks come sneaky infections. But let us turn back to the elder cat.

This cat was never to become a grandmother. These days Grandma lets her sleep on the porch. She has a little house and is never far from it.

‘What does she do there?’

‘On and on she sleeps.’

Upon waking she stumbles around, has a bite of the raw kidneys, purrs, and returns to her dream, not seeing or hearing a thing. Every day brings her closer to the one when she will not come forth for that bite.

‘What does she dream of?’

‘We can only guess. Perhaps of her children? Of mice? Of gold?’

‘Explain’ (the first two options seem rather obvious and predictable)

‘OK. The children we’ve covered already. The mice – there are more and more of them around, with the growing number of empty homesteads in this area. Old age has moved the neighbors out into the soil, or towards the interchange of a nursing home. From there the journey will eventually take them into the ground anyway, save for the elderly folks with grandchildren, who might take an interest in their last wishes and be ready to fulfil the wish to be taken by the fire. The mice have much to nibble on in the house of ghosts, and the cat is way too old to make it out to them, she only dreams of the chase. Mice also carry ticks, the ticks are glad to feast on the blood of ungulates and rodents – it is only people that are ever fewer, and so the dreadful viruses and bacteria get stuck in but a few species, gradually stagnating. And the gold – it comes from stars that exploded once upon a time, from the asteroids that hit the earth. Gold is not produced by earthworms or peat, it is not shaped by pressure or by underground gasses, magma doesn’t turn to gold, neither do the moles – those tunnelling experts. Gold is a limited resource – just like the ovaries of a newborn girl that contain a finite number of ova. It all decays over time, depending on user intensity. If you wish to strike gold, you need special equipment to take you into the depths of the Earth. Failing that, a dream will do. A dream of an old cat.’

‘Or money?’

Grandma has a few teeth crowned in gold that no fire could get to – greedy dentists or relatives could, or, if the kin show no greed, the crowns would be left to stand alone in the ashes. Ashes in an urn. An urn could be gilded, dusted with gold, an echo of the stars that had exploded once upon a time.

After the bats have left, there is no need to wash the windows as often, and one can see the stars just fine. The transparent glass allows the stars to stay in touch with the crowned teeth. They will surely talk to the urn too, if it’s gilded, and gilded it shall be if the near and dear ones are well off. The fuel – black gold sloshing around in the tank of the car – also talks to the stars and the crowned teeth: it is only natural for these relatives to long for connection.

‘Will the tank dry up once the urn takes its turn? When there is no one to fill it up, to turn on the engine, to drive?’

‘Isn’t gasoline a biogenic urn, a testament to the prehistoric times of organisms from the depths of the ocean? Grandma drives out to buy some saplings fueled by the distant Paleozoic Era.’

The cat did have children, but their semblance is gone, hunted out by a variety of circumstances in the passing days; she had no grandchildren. Grandma has a granddaughter, who is still around,^* hunting down words. Words multiply progressively with every comma – just like the glades and disproportionate populations.

Everything everywhere is the offspring of Earth, the Great Mother and Grandmother, forever: the forest, its fellers, Borrelia burgdorferi, Grandma, the ocean, the bats, the oil and its derivatives, cucumbers from that greenhouse, the stars, you and I, that starving being, the dogs, the cats, and all the possible fauna, cobwebs, the water, the sprouts, the fire, all the macro and microflora …

… if I start to name the obvious incarnations of nature, I shall forfeit the balance in the thickets of these syntactic constructs. So, I might just as well stop here: may there be two kidneys inside Grandmother Earth – a harmonious flow, a circle, a balanced star into whose soil I’d be happy and safe to return.

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^* Some ova become fruitful and numerous, others turn into granddaughters or under-chased does or words, and live on until the sparkle of an urn.