Birds' bones
Poetry
Here’s Ada Limón’s “The Conditional.”
Journeying
We would never have labeled it “catastrophic thinking.” We believed we were being careful, double checking, making sure. We couldn’t see that the threat of violence and tragedy was as much a part of our anatomy as water. Why would we recognize it as anything other than ourselves? And for good reason: fathers and husbands went away, taking with them a gallon jug of water and the camping gear, then never returned; step-fathers liked it when you ran your fingers through their hair and then told you to hug them more because it would help; mothers cried and said they couldn’t leave the step-fathers because God wanted them to stay; car doors fell off if you didn’t hold them tight and lean in around corners; and the heat and lights didn’t come on unless you put wood in the stove and kerosene in the lamps.
As an adult, when I called my mother unexpectedly, she’d answer with a breathless “what’s wrong?!” Later, she learned to temper her response to a controlled and falsely cheery, “everything o.k.?” This is the way we spent our lives, breathless and falsely cheery, with our hands on a door that could fly open and dump us onto the road the moment we relaxed our grip.
The weather was hot for late September. My daughter and I stood in the busy vendors’ hall of the local artists’ fair, perusing a selection of cards and prints hand made on a letterpress in Lincoln, Nebraska. I noticed a map of Iowa that depicted the state’s watershed. I had an immediate desire to buy it for our new house in Iowa City. The one we think we’ll purchase and move into next summer. The print’s eventual place in that home felt important, an acknowledgement of the land and our dependence on it. But, almost as quickly, a familiar caution appeared alongside desire, a warning and a reminder not to be careless with my heart. After all, we might not be able to move. My husband might not get his contract renewed. I might have to stay in Omaha and continue the trek to see him every few weeks. We might lose our home due to unemployment and have no place to live. Or, worse case scenario, the country’s political situation might become so inflammatory that we will be forced to leave the country. Then what would I do with my purchase? It would be a marker not of hope but of a hasty and badly made decision. One that would, in the end, cause pain. I listened to this familiar, care-taking voice make its case as if my life depended on it. Then I bought the print.
My family lacked the skills to see abandonment, unchecked impulse, victimhood, and poverty as the true threat and also a wound. So we manufactured catastrophe to give us a sense of control. We imagined death over and over in order to avoid it because it terrified us. We didn’t know how to feel our fear so, we deflected it, bent it like a lens does light, into imagined scenarios. But you don’t escape fear this way, you just wait until it bounces back, then you create another scenario to defer it again. And the truth is catastrophes do happen, all the time, everywhere, on a scale from global to personal. The truth is everyone and everything will die.
The print sits on my dining room table wrapped in its protective plastic sleeve, waiting to be packed into a box. In my imagination, other less tangible objects collect alongside it: a small, unassuming house in a neighborhood close to downtown; a wood stove; a candle burning in a dark, early morning kitchen; a bountiful overgrown garden; the absence of ambulance sirens. This dreamed future isn’t catastrophic; it’s livable. It’s a place I want to inhabit, so I hold it with care, a feather in my cupped hand. I don’t want it to blow away, but I don’t want to crush it either. A breeze ruffles the edges.
I’m going to die. I don’t know when. Between now and then, horrible things could happen to me; some difficult and painful things, no doubt, will. I can’t plan for them. I will never be able to imagine their exact unfolding. In the meantime, I watch the feather in my hand. It’s fragile, the leavings of a creature who’s bones are filled with air.
Gardening and Making/Mending
We got our first frost this week. It covered the grass at our neighborhood park but didn’t touch the nasturtiums that have poured out of their bed and begun to move across the backyard. We’ve had so little rain in the last month that the zinnias in the front yard look like dried flowers ready for arrangements. I’ve given up watering everything but the last tomatoes and peppers (although those are very heavily mulched and hold up pretty well during dry spells) and the numerous shrubs I’ve planted in the last few years. This weekend, my sons will be home to help with yard clean up as we prepare to sell both houses in the spring. I’ve thought about whether or not I would like to take a plant or two with me to our new house. I’m not sure. Of course, this depends partly on the garden space at the next home. When I leave one place for another, I do not like to bring along reminders. I don’t like to look back. If I had to choose a plant to relocate, though, it would be the witch hazel I planted two years ago, with it’s tiny, spidery yellow flowers that bloom in February. But it’s too big to transport now. I will miss it.
If only my finicky fingers could keep up with the amount of knitting I’d like to do right now. But they can’t. A muscle in my left thumb gets irritated when I knit too much and particularly if I knit anything heavy. During a couple of days spent resting on the couch after my first shingles vaccine, I took up my husband’s long neglected spinach colored sweater and resolved to finish it this winter. Then I remembered that my knitting friend B. had to finish the final sleeve on the last sweater I knit for my partner because my thumb had quit working. I lowered my expectations and decided to work on the sweater consistently, as I’m able. The shawl is growing (with many more rows to go), and I’m thinking about ripping out the beginnings of a sock for my daughter in favor of a pattern that does not require me to think. As the days get shorter and colder, I find myself wanting to welcome what’s simple and easy.
Your car door reference reflected The Glass Castle for me. It also made me want to read YOUR memoir, Emily, as soon as you write it!
This was a beautiful read, Emily. I’m holding that vision of your future home in mind for you and sending good vibes for whatever comes next. 💙