St. Louis, Quiet

For about a decade, from roughly 1783 to 1793, I was content.

I want to be precise about this because it is the only decade I can say it of with certainty, across all the years, and precision in such matters seems to me important.

We lived near the river, which had not yet decided whether it belonged to the Americans or the Spanish or the French, since all three were making the claim with some confidence and the river was ignoring all of them. We fed when we needed to feed. We did not build anything or manage anything or play any role in particular. Sings moved through the forest and I sat on the riverbank and watched the water and did not plan.

It is very difficult to describe a decade of peace to someone who has not had one. I had not understood until then that peace is a kind of wealth; that the absence of the thing-to-survive is itself a gift that most people spend their entire lives without recognizing for what it is.

Sings taught me in those years how she prayed. Not Puritan prayer; not the formal address to an authority who keeps accounts and settles debts. The other kind: the kind that is not speech but attention, the practice of being present to what is there rather than the thing you are waiting for. I was not good at it. I am still not good at it. I am a woman of projects and plans and leverage; patience without an object is not my natural condition.

But I learned to sit still. I learned that the river did not require anything of me. I learned that an evening could pass without any event worth noting and still be worth having been present for.

I have not had another decade like it. I do not expect one.

There are years, sometimes, when I think about the river. What it looked like before the cities arrived on its banks. Sings moving through the trees. Me sitting still, doing nothing, imperfectly.

I was not good at nothing. I would give a great deal to be bad at it again.

The continent was starting to move west. I could feel it even then, the way you feel the tide coming before it arrives: a pressure at the edges of things, a direction everything was beginning to take. We could not stay at the river forever.

I knew this. I let us stay anyway, for as long as staying was possible.

That was, I think now, one of the wiser things I have ever done.