keeping abreast | keeping a breast

The backyard of my childhood home. Oak trees and Bradford pears, sturdy maples. The weeping cherry tree where the morning dove nested this spring in a perfect cradle. Singing and cooing low into the afternoon. Her beady black eyes staring at me, blinking slowly, judging my movements. The place where the grass is worn down, under the rusted old swingset. Me, my brothers, my nieces, the neighbor kids all too tall now, too big, too adult to fit.

I keep walking, beyond the red shed and upside-down wheelbarrow. Past the row of pampas grass that my dad planted many summers ago. He had a knack for clusters and angles and the rule of 3 when it came to our yard, his yard.

I climb up the slight berm. Stepping over the burn pile. Years and years of leaves fallen to the ground and raked up only to become little skeletons and ashes. Deadheaded daffodils and day lilies and only months later, mums. Sticks from the March winds and the November storms that go from west to east. Odds and ends from the living and breathing earth. All into the fire in an exhale.

I step over a prickly pear cactus, oddly placed and very invasive for a grassland ecosystem. Who knows how it got there. Blown by the wind, a seed dropped by some coyote on the move, or planted by someone wanting to keep people like me out of this space, a warning, the spines a menace to any passerby.

And I ascend just a few steps more onto the tracks. The decrepit tracks. Railroad ties splitting apart or caving in on each other, the rusted spikes being squeezed up from the pressure, looking like they are about to shoot like fireworks into the air, tar bubbling on the decaying wood and black creosote leeching down into the earth, little piles of coal ash like Egyptian pyramids placed between the parallel steel bars.

I walk, gingerly, carefully, knowing that one misstep would twist my ankle for good and my mom – before coming to my side – would first raise her voice asking me why I was walking on this pile of trash.

The pile of trash is my youth. The place where I disappeared. Into my mind, into the creek, into the reeds and rushes, the tadpoles, the trees, the once-in-a-lifetime monarch migration, the hopscotch from tie to tie, waiting for a train to be parked there so I could climb on it and be taken away to some place that was not here. To anywhere, really.

The railroad company still owns this land. The right of way. There hasn’t been a train on it in over a decade, a crew on it even longer. The grass is overgrown, the integrity gone. I read somewhere the company might go bankrupt, maybe a rumor but maybe a reality. The future of rail transport unclear. What then happens to this overgrown berm in my backyard, interrupting the landscape, dividing us, drawing a line? How long does it take for the earth to work her magic – the universe operating in geological time, layers of the earth’s crust blow here and there, subduction and induction, volcanoes and plateaus. Southern Illinois being earthquake prone and the New Madrid fault line could open up and swallow it whole. Or the crisscross mess of coal mines that are subsiding, sometimes multiple feet in just a year, leaving everything a little cracked and unstable. This place will continue to sink and sigh. The narrative that this place is forgotten is hard to un-prove.

I see these tracks, they no longer go any further. But they don’t forget me.

How can a heart break. A muscle, an organ, a lifegiver, a lifetaker. This chamber contracts and that chamber expands. This valve flaps and then that valve flaps. The whirl of the oxygenated blood, rolling like a rich iron river, an infinite river. Like a tide, rushing in and leaving a negative space behind in its wake, a whoosh. Moving from one place to the next, always in a hurry, with every destination in mind but never stopping long. Pushed forward with the thump. The synapses of millions of nerve endings, lighting up like heat lightning in the dark summer night. Silent. Present. Predictable. The multitude of cells, in a chorus, with tenors and altos and sopranos and each in unison, humming. They reverberate into a pulse then, distant, in a wrist, a leg, a temple. Like a drum, echoing around the edges of this body, a whole body. Breaking but not broken.

There’s a fight brewing in my home, in myself. What’s the safest thing to do to be with my family as we turn to the first holiday without my dad, in a global pandemic? Fly, drive, crawl, or stutter and stop. Different people have different opinions, and while they know that I’ll do what I want, I still want them to want what I want.

I want space, time, to get out of this sour mood, to break through to a feeling of joy and clarity. What is that like? To remember what it was like to unknow and unsee. No, that’s not entirely what I want because that ignorance was a congruence I didn’t understand until I understood, and it wasn’t serving anyone. What is the lightness though, do I ever get that again? Does anyone? Did some every get to have it?

I want the miles per hour to match the miles per hour in my mind. I want to figure out what the work is, what staying in my lane means, what happened to us that we have become so hateful where what’s below it is fear and what are we so afraid of anyway? Each other? Breathing? Inhaling and exhaling, our bodies side by side, touching, because they are the same at their core but different at their core? Is it fear about a scrap of the pie, a seat at the table. Who made the pie and who owns the table anyway?

3000 miles probably won’t do these things. Will 6000 though? Maybe it will help, the sun will rise, the sock will be darned, the bone will grow and cover the fracture. It’s a miracle that bones grow again.

36 hours of podcasts. Roadside stands with avocados in California, lavender in New Mexico, art in the Zuni reservation. Canyons and mountains and the flat nothingness and lost prairie grasses of Kansas. Maybe a flat tire to ensure I’m awake. Rising with the sun and pulling over with the dark.

I want to count the Trump signs. The blue lives matter signs. I want to see how many people aren’t wearing masks. I want to stay curious and swallow my own hate. I want to understand how Arizona and Oklahoma are different, and then on the return Colorado and Wyoming. I want to see people again. Believe in them. Hope for them. That they will choose to change and solve problems together. To try doing those things for the first time, because if we don’t have a capacity to learn and grow, then I have lost my faith, which is difficult to do because I’m not sure I ever had it.

I want to pull into the driveway of my childhood home, headlights shining across the bay window, the oak tree just losing its last leaves, the empty tomato boxes waiting out the dark winter, just a lamp on inside, the hum of the refrigerator keeping company, stillness. I want to wrap these memories, the little memories, up in an envelope and tuck them away in the file cabinet so I always have them. This one filed under “grief 2020.” This one filed under “pandemic 2020.” This one filed under “waking up white 2020.” Each object and scent and placement all into an envelope for me, for my doubts, and for my doubting faith.

What is this season.

Is it the fire and smoke season. Or that time of turning, reminiscent of my childhood with crimson leaves and pomegranates. Is it Friday night football games and homecomings. Or an early surprise snowfall just to remind us that everything is fragile, everything is out of our control. Maybe it’s the season of spiders, chasing the shadow of the sun before its angle becomes too low and lean, building their homes in my stairwell and the dark corners of the house, fattening up on moths and ants and waiting for the cold to snap, the frost to arrive, the darker solstice to come.

It is definitely the season of thoughts and prayers. But that’s a year-round thing now.

Cutting through it all is loss. The season of loss. Deep loss and grief, absence, emptiness. He was here and now he’s not. Or a fleeting loss, of wishing something would last longer, lamenting and willing the thing to stretch out its existence, freeze time. Maybe like a cup of tea or the beat of a song or laughing with a friend or holding someone’s hand. Touch. It’s not a flattening the curve kind of loss. It’s one of body cameras and dashboard cameras and iphone cameras and being seen and surveilled so much but never being more in danger and invisible. If someone was never safe to begin with, is their loss compounding, like those integers that are exponential and quickly fill and overflow a room, a house, a city, a country?

Maybe it’s the season of hypocrisy. That moral certitude that they have and I have and through some form of gaslighting, I wonder if I’m on the wrong side of history. How can love be on the wrong side of history. How can heartbreak and a heart broken be headed in the wrong direction, on the wrong path. Who gets to decide that path is better than any other. What do the intuitive and sensitive and artists and poets and caretakers and nurses and teachers and grandmas and those that work the land see. What do I see that others miss.

It most definitely is the season of insecurity. Food insecure, climate insecure, emotionally insecure. Behind the thing is a loss of self, or maybe even that the self never existed, a worry about not being good enough, of your place in line, on the treadmill of capitalistic progress of being left behind and left out and the scrap given to someone else who perhaps is not deserving either because of the melanin in their skin or who they love or their mobility or the money in their bank account or the language that they speak or their zip code, because that’s the diet and narrative we are fed steadily from birth. Go. go. go. Until you cannot go. Then you’re done. We’re done.

Perhaps it’s the season of rage. We seethe in disbelief that another and another and another person is taken, stolen, vanished, disappeared. We know the perpetrator – the virus – better than we know the victim. Because there are victims after victims. Bodies with stories, stories without bodies.

Who tracks them. Who holds these records, these breaths, sacred breaths, in the palm of our hand, cradling them up to the sky, offering them up in a prayer if you can call it that. Maybe just a whisper. Maybe just a shout.

What is this season.

It is round or a square with four sharp 90-degree edges.

It is smooth, like the skin on your forearm or the downy of anything new.

Or rough as a million-year old pebble strewn from some volcanic eruption.

Perfect is a sound, lulling you to sleep, water cascading through a stream of yellow aspens.

Or a cacophony of migrating terns, so loud they outcompete and drowned out any thought.

It is bright or dull. It shines into your eye hitting the back of your blue retina, shimmering itself up into your mind forever.

Or leaves you wondering about shades of grey, beige, muted tones of desert and dusk, dull by any definition but whole in their own right.

It hurts.

Perfect causes pain.

It chases you while you chase it.

Or it brings joy deep into your belly, relaxing the muscles of your throat, to feel that deep diaphragmatic breath that washes over each and every cell.

It is hollow like her singing voice which passes through you and ricochets around, until it is caught on the breeze and fades on an incline.

Or dense, so dense that the bristlecone trees that are 4000 years old twist and turn as they age year upon year and withstand the strongest winds in the world.

It is unstable.

Slick. Black ice in a black night.

And sturdy. Like that trusted pair of running shoes, slipping in those two feet now on the ground and body in the sky, relaxed, heavy and ready.

It is a finger, a finger of smoke in a mountain valley, a finger of fog hovering its way across the bay. 

The low pressure system off the west coast

The denseness of the Arctic’s peatland, trapping generations of exhale

The prayer for a marriage between two hydrogen and one oxygen

The direction of the wind, not four but 360

The birds who choose not to leave

The birds who don’t wake up to sing

The warmth of my hand

The heat of the fire

The thickness of the air

He can’t breathe

The clearing of the boreal forests, for toothpicks

The mountain gorilla boxed in on all sides

The 72 microseasons in Japan, today should be when wagtails are to sing

The whales who arrive on empty stomachs

The sea coming nearer and nearer to me

The incinerator’s spark

The slow viscous oil that blankets the Mauritius coral

The hippos without water

The blasting of a mountaintop for fossils to burn

Say her name

The autumn-summer in Sweden’s Lapland where the reindeer’s coat should begin to thicken

The goldmine leaving behind grand canyons

The monarchs waylayed on their journey to Mexico

The Greenland ice sheet, dripping and dripping

The lead in the bathwater

The Sahara growing feet each day

The pesticides silencing the lightning bugs

The cancers of nuclear fallout

The sea turtle’s stomach full of plastic

The 911 call unanswered

It was my dad’s birthday yesterday. He would have been 72. In between my steady stream of work, I kept a Van Morrison soundtrack on softly in the background. I was Dad’s brown-eyed girl. One of the last times Dad was in San Francisco and feeling well, we went and saw Van Morrison together at the Fox. I can picture my Dad, a wide grin, the widest grin showing his gaps and crowns, as her perched on the edge of the tallboy chair, shaking his left hand like he was playing the drum – singing the lyrics when he knew them. “Smell the sea and feel the sky!” “…everybody feels so determined Not to feel anyone else’s pain.” Dad leans over from time to share a moment. He asked me whether I think Van’s eyes were open behind those dark glasses. I nodded, yes.

When I was sixteen, we were careening down the dark, two-lane road in the big brown truck I later learned to navigate like a pro. Heading to a Friday night high school football game down by the Mississippi in “river rat country,” as my dad affectionately called it. Because us folks further up on the river bottom were not as much rat as we were hayseed. It was fall, crisp, early darkness. A breeze sending cornstalks into the sky. We played this game with the seek button on the radio. Next! He’d push the button and the first person to guess the name AND the song won that round. Mandolin Rain by Bruce Hornsby and the Range! Fortunate Son by Credence Clearwater! Blackbird by The Beatles! Ooh-Child by The Five Stairsteps! And on and on. The more classic rock, the more Mo-Town, the better as far as he was concerned. Maybe he let me win on occasion. He always knew more though, the encyclopedia of records alphabetized behind his own brown eyes.

It’s dark out now. I don’t know if it’s day time or night time. The birds are not singing. No one is singing. What is this darkness, blackness? Maybe death has found me, or I’ve encountered the utterances of loss, destruction and devastation. Maybe it’s a womb.

I reach around and feel nothing, no boundary to it. No shape, no texture.

And I startle forward. I hear the fog horn blow. And I wonder if my dad is coming home.