Yesterday, tired from three days of travel and the consequent catching up on chores around the Farm, we decided to go out for pizza and ignore the restrictions of our respective diets. As we turned the corner from one of the lanes that leads to the Farm to enter the second, we saw, in the hollow ahead of us, a doe and her small fawn standing in the middle of the lane. We stopped the car several yards away to watch them. The doe gazed idly at us, not spooked because our hybrid is silent and we were not moving, and then casually walked into the underbrush surrounding an empty field. The fawn took two steps, sniffed the ground, and then slowly, nonchalantly followed its mother. By the time we reached their point of entry into the heavy brush alongside the road, there was no sign of either.
This was not an unusual sighting around the Farm. In fact, we have seen this doe and this fawn before, as they have become regular visitors and probably live in the field into which they disappeared. The mother is always hovering about the fawn, the fawn still being of small size and not yet wise in the ways of deer etiquette or survival skills. They are not the only deer to live on the Farm or its environs.
The importance to Helen and me of last evening’s encounter was a reminder of the fragility of all life. Deer are beautiful animals, but to look at them is not to be convinced of their sturdiness. Their beauty is in their fragility – the long, thin, stick-like legs, the sharply pointed snout, the slender head, the daintiness of their slower movements as they place each hoof in a place of carefully considered choice, and the speed and grace of their panicked bounding as they run from danger. While this is not an animal that could stand up to anything substantial, their ubiquity says much about their survival skills.
I’ve often wondered whether deer were, in fact, truly corporeal. Helen commented last night as we passed their entry point into the brush that she often wondered how deer found paths through such heavy undergrowth. I countered that I sometimes thought they simply turned and vanished, sifting through the leaves like smoke. In truth, their ability to do so probably lies in their very daintiness, in their ability to high step carefully through any environment.
The beauty of fragility is much on our minds at the moment, for our recent travel was to Ft. Worth, Texas to celebrate Helen’s sister’s birthday with other family members. Mary, Helen’s sister, has been determinedly battling cancer for some months.  She is tired and frail from chemotherapy and the illness, but undaunted in her pursuit of treatment. The indomitability of her spirit is evidenced by the set of her jaw as seen in profile, her lucidity of thought and purpose, and her physical grace and steadfast sense of humor.
On Monday, we walked to a nearby restaurant for a late lunch prior to going to the airport to return home. Mary and her husband Gregg were walking ahead of me in 97 degree heat, a hot wind blowing in each of our faces. Mary was holding Gregg’s arm not as a crutch but perhaps for steadiness, holding his arm proudly as if a woman being escorted to the theater, head held high, back perfectly straight, elegantly dressed, will power evident in her every movement. At that instant she reminded me of someone I was unable to identify, and I began worrying over who it might be.
At home the next morning, I realized that Mary had reminded me of Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond. I am not thinking of Katherine Hepburn as the character she played in the movie, for I cannot even recall her character’s name. I am thinking, instead, of Katherine Hepburn, the person, the person she was at the time On Golden Pond was made – older, physically impaired, the very quality that had always defined her – her voice – wracked, cracked, and tired, but, nonetheless, a beautiful, graceful, proud, indomitable woman, unashamed of being older, determined to play a role that other, less able, actresses of similar stature would likely not have attempted, preferring, instead, to rely upon their previous body of work for their reputation, to stand upon their legacy rather than to try again in such a public display of diminished capacity, to rest upon their laurels.
The movie and play are not masterpieces, but passable, feel good entertainment. It was Katherine Hepburn’s personal qualities at the time that made the movie memorable. It succeeded because of her perseverance and strength of character in the face of her evident fragility, of her obviously diminished capacities; it succeeded because it rendered manifest her qualities as a person, rather than because a fine actress made an otherwise forgettable role believable. It succeeded because she had been stripped down by age to her essence as a real person and as a fine actress, all the fripperies removed to reveal who she truly was underneath.
I realized Mary reminded me of Katherine Hepburn’s character and determination, of her physical and inner beauty. And there was always Hepburn’s smile, a smile I saw successfully imitated by Mary and her sisters on several occasions over the weekend.
I have long thought each of us was inherently fragile in the face of nature. I grew up under a prairie sky, and there is nothing like a prairie sky to remind us of our place in the grand scheme of things. Such a sky is a vast, uninterrupted, god-like thing that stretches from here to there, delimited only by the curvature of the earth. Anywhere you stand under such a sky will be under the midpoint of a set of curving, invisible ridgepoles keeping the sky at bay while allowing it to droop to the horizon in every direction. For such a sky moves with you, moves with the shifting of the horizon; it defines a tented world with you as its center pole.
And under such a sky, we come to realize our place – as a single, identifiable something amid a vast variety of other single, identifiable somethings that need one another for survival. If we were standing on the top of a hill, surveying a valley below us prior to assuming our individual role in the ecosystem lying below, in the massive interdependency on display under an overweening, prairie sky, we would have no choice but to acknowledge our individual fragility in the face of the overwhelming odds on display, the same fragility that is the essence of every living thing seeking to endure. But there is something within us – something shared by every living thing, whether animal or vegetable – that accepts inherently long odds and insists on taking the chance at life.
So fragility seems to be the essence of the beauty of all living things – a beauty shown by the remarkably ugly, fat yellow toad that hopped unexpectedly up the Farm’s driveway last month, by the graceful deer of last evening’s drive down the lane servicing the Farm, by the tiny, acrobatic goldfinches that regularly dine at the thistle feeder placed outside our living room windows, by the remarkable cinematic presence of an ailing Katherine Hepburn, by Mary’s indomitable endurance and grace under fire.
It is a privilege to be in the presence of such beauty – whether among relatives in Ft. Worth on a hot July day, in a crowded movie theater together with dozens of others, or here by ourselves on our Farm in Humptulips County. For their fragility reminds us of ours and teaches us the means of graceful endurance.
