keeping abreast | keeping a breast

It’s the time of year, green leaves to golden to red then falling down down down to the dry grasses below to be crunched and crumbled together back into the elements. Everything in a race to die or to become something new altogether. Changing a state of being. Loss of light, loss of time, loss. That’s the other definition of autumn.

I first saw the black squirrels when I stepped foot on Notre Dame’s campus one fall, the fall when I cut the cord from home, my attachment to my parents was what I assumed was a thin and tattered and barely-together string. When really it was a string of my decisions to flex my young adulthood and do too many tabs of LSD and smoke too many joints and drink too many mad dog 4040s and drive too freely at the same time.

A week into campus life, I realized – with the sheer might of a life force of ancestors and the great greats to the great to the grandparents to the parents to the child – that I did in fact love my parents. I needed them. And it was unnatural for me to be gone, so far away. In a different time zone no less.

The nun in my dorm, Sister Mary Ann, SMA for short, diagnosed me: homesick. I sat awake each night, on an empty stomach, silent tears running down my face, nostalgic, wanting to be in a time of blurred memories that brought warmth. Not wanting it to end. Wanting to be us and only us.

We weren’t a pride of lions, or pod of orcas or pack of wolves that to prove ourselves had to send the sub-adults off to fend for themselves. After all, I could already do my own laundry and make scrambled eggs.

Last week, as I sat at the hospital and mindlessly scrolled through my news feed, I landed on an article about attachment issues, one of those click-bait articles, an armchair psychologist musing on the matter of children and if they are normal and healthy or if they have big issues. As I read the symptoms of one of those quote “big issues,” I breathed in quickly and set down my coffee cup. Cannot bear to be out of your presence – check. Afraid of you dying – check. Diagnosis: Separation anxiety.

Every night, maybe from 1986 to 1988, my parents would facilitate the bedtime routine – picking out my clothes for the next day, brushing teeth and hair, saying our prayers and naming everyone we loved and could think of, and reading some bedtime books or Shel Silverstein poems. My parents took turns in the slog, smoothing over the fights on which knee socks to wear and keeping the number of books to read under five. Mom or Dad would turn the light out, walk downstairs, and find a moment of solace. Only a moment. Because ten seconds later, I would be trailing behind down the stairs, Strawberry Shortcake or She-Ra or Rainbow Bright nightgown on and my yellow honeycomb baby blanket in tow, announcing that I couldn’t sleep. Big sighs would follow. Some negotiation, maybe a few more tries up in my bed, an attempt at a magical combination of nightlights, and then finally, giving in by letting me crawl into bed between them. Some nights, in my creepier moments, I would stand at the foot of their bed and stare at them, waiting for them to notice, wishing for them to read my mind and startle awake. Then that way, I wouldn’t get an exasperated scolding for tugging on their shoulders and waking them up. They would have just woken up on their own. But mostly, I wanted them to wake up because I thought they were dead. I thought they were going to leave me. I knew that they would leave me.

Which is why fall is so hard for me. And this fall in particular. It’s the going back to school. It’s the transition from one grade to the next, one plane to the next, one treatment to the next. The minutes that turn into hours that turn into days that, we hope, turn to years, that things will never be the same. It feels like loss. The smell of it. The nostalgia swells, expanding my chest and coming up and out of my throat like something I can’t swallow but also cannot speak of. My stomach is empty. And the only sign of life I see from the hospital window are the black squirrels.

The railroad tracks behind my childhood home feature prominently in the tracks of my memory. It had been years though since I spent any significant amount of time on or around them.

Chasing crawdaddies and tadpoles in the pooled water, among the reeds and cattails that back up to the east side of the tracks and their berm of shiny black cinder dust. Skipping over one, two, three tracks in a race to the treehouse. When my brothers finally vacated it for the afternoon. Climbing on the old coal cars and flatbeds with steel pipes, the train often sitting for weeks on end, holding in a flux of supply and demand I would only later learn is economics.

When that train lurched into motion, high pitched creaks and groans, slowly rolling over the pennies on the tracks and once taking my brother a mile down the way to the pipe and tube plant for which he was most definitely grounded. Or taking care to avoid the prickly pear cactus that grew on the west side of the berm. And marveling at the monarchs who labored there and rested on the weeping willows before traveling further north.

So here I am. I’m 39 and the air is humid like summer but the light is angled like autumn and I’m on these tracks. Long ago abandoned by whatever bankrupt railroad company owned them, only to be revisited by the nostalgia of my youth.

Backyard

My parents backyard, my hometown. The two-story farmhouse, yard sandwiched between that and a decrepit railroad tracks that an occasional string of cars parked on, railway screech, high pitched scream, en route to the steel factory, steel on steel. The two pines, stump from the sycamore, remnants of the garden plot, stacks of tomato cages, Bradford pears, hummingbird feeders, the burn pile, Eddie’s fence, the sandbox turned garden plot turned wood pile turned fallow, patchy grass. Generations of our cats buried therein – Firecracker, Fluffy, Petey, Koko, Mittens, Sparkler, Elmo, and Rosetta. Garter snakes. Dragonflies. A rusty swingset. A Single swing on the oak, the branch outgrowing the swing’s tether year by year. The primitive plows in the landscape, wooden handles starting to split, mom’s steel rebar bottle tree tucked between the hostas and flamingos, a joke that was never ended.

Oh patch of yard, what do you have to tell me?

My childhood bedroom faces you, looks down over you.

Did you watch me through the years? From little to big? Yes.

Do you miss me too? Yes.

Do we share memories? Yes.

But different versions of the same story.

I’m overlooked now when once I was the epicenter of a childhood, the whole neighborhood. Days spent in and around me. I even had the white, red, and blue swingset with monkey bars crossing through me. I forgot about that! And all the diggers and Tonka trucks and shovels and mostly cat pee mixed in with my sand. Your dad creating the box with tall 12-inch planks held together by nails.

I wasn’t as big as you remember. You were just small.

Time passed, the sand was more of a nuisance to mow around. No one in diapers or underoos, all those replaced by little league uniforms and bug collections, so the sandbox was taken down. And our first cat firecracker was buried there. You made him a pile of sticks and rocks to celebrate. Dirt filled in. Patches of seed and eventually grass. The nights with Aunt Judy’s musty old Army green and mustard yellow tent on me. Everyone scared of the ghosts roaming the neighborhood.

What’s the other story of this thing

We don’t own places. You don’t own me. But for the last 39 years, short years, you think you do.

Memories are layers, of a specific place, moment, experience in time. these are my memories, my layers.

I was formed when the glaciers of the Last Ice Age pushed and pushed their heaving mass down to create the prairies, leaving no real rocks and pebbles, except for rich brown soil full of organic detritus.

Then years in the making, the flood plain of the Mississippi created ribbons, like an ink pen drawing bigger and bigger circles, never the same size. The alluvial sediment dropping nitrogen and phosphorous and magnesium. Enough for oak and deciduous forests to rise up. To provide – food, shade, shelter, warmth.

To be cleared and homesteaded with a cow and later goats and chickens, then at the edge of a town while once off not-even-a-country road. Families and subdivisions and bicycles and swingsets and lawnmowers later. There you were. Small, the first girl digging into me with all matter of tools. Your dad spending a few days hauling and dumping sand, it must have come from a faraway beach. My cousin or the bottom of the ocean. The sandbox was done.

You kids careened and yelled and threw the sand, crisscrossed the jungle jim that straddled the sandbox. The Tonka trucks, shovels and buckets and dump trucks. The cat pee, too, always made things interesting. Like digging for buried treasure. You got taller. Nathan and Lucas started in Little League uniforms and your bug collection amped up. I was neglected, mostly. But sometimes, before dusk, you’d sit on the lone swing above me, quietly kicking at the grains of sand that hadn’t yet been blown or kicked out. You dad eventually using my wood edges as firewood and bringing in a cover of dirt instead.

This was where you buried Firecracker in me. A small hole for the first family pet. Then, later, strings of hamsters and a bunny Beeper. And all the other cats too – Fluffy, Petey, Sparkler, Koko, Elmo, Mittens, Rosetta.

You made little piles of rocks and sticks to mark the sites. Those mostly got kicked or mowed over by someone with a different relationship to me.

I watch him, tattered stonewash jeans, white threadbare tanktop. His mop of white hair the same since the day I was born. He is so tan, my mom calls him a Native American. I believed her for a season. One step, two step, slowly, purposefully, meditatively across the yard, under the walnut tree, branches sagging with the gifts the squirrels had not yet pilfered. He’s pushing a wheelbarrow. I stand up, from a squat, leaving the arrangement of sticks to organize themselves. Dust off my pants, the cement powder swirling up in my wake and I head straight for him, my Pop. It was summer, that I am sure of. The angle of the sun, the shadows stretching so far they fold back into themselves, that feeling of nostalgia in the pit of my stomach, below my rib cage, the smell of bar soap snapping the world into focus, tightening my throat.

He was laying brick. And I was his assistant.

The cool, substantial feel of the bricks. Their sharp yet crumbly edges. Their earthen red. The smell of mortar, a bitter and salty and elemental taste. The coarse texture of crust on the wooden paddle we use to mix it.

It was like a jigsaw puzzle. Something that was so tangible, a start and a finish. Each piece coming together to make a cohesive whole. Scrape, spread, lift, squash. One by one, they stack, mortar dripping onto the ground next to the dried out worms. The wall we built that week was partly to protect the garden. Sometimes I think it was just to keep busy together. It was an entire thing. A whole memory.

We didn’t talk much. But there was a lot of whistling – he taught me how – and singing songs he heard working in the steel mills, big bands from the 40s, from the War, from the corners of his mind when life was easier, a whole world of possibilities stretching out in front of him. No thorns, only roses. I always wished I could crawl into his mind, curl up with his memories.

I have been thinking of this lately, how often I laid brick when I was little. It came to me when I realize that this memory of me as a 5-year-old is much more vivid, more alive, then things that happened yesterday, last year, 5 years ago. You see, I am having trouble laying down new memories.

What is it?

They say the fog of cancer treatment can last years. They say being in menopause at a young age can put me at risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s. They say that the ongoing trauma, the loss, the pain can interfere with the synapses, the well-worn grooves of the amygdala and the millions of neurons that connect up in some universal yet incredibly individual grey matter to create the picture in my mind’s eye. They say that constant adrenaline keeps a person focused on the here and now, survival, safety, shelter, sustenance. A myopia takes over.

What am I losing, when I feel like the memories I want to create, brick by brick, are gone, may be never were there? If I’m not my mind, what am I? Who am I?

They say good fences make good neighbors. But I’ve fallen out of love, I unlove, our fence.

The fortress on South Van Ness.

Once an old rickety white picket fence, she shuddered when slammed. The winter rains would come, swelling the wood and making us force her double gate shut, with a loud scrape, flecks of white paint scattering like confetti down onto the stoop. I’d twist the knob for good measure just to make sure she was locked. She was thick, no spaces between the picket posts. No one could see in, and I could not see out.

It made for the perfect palette for young graffiti artists trying their hand. Graffiti goes on, the same day we get a warning from the city to clean the art, some might call it. Painted layer after painted layer, in a losing battle with the night and the street.

One day, mother’s day, in my brunch dress, scaling the fence, my wedges sliding down her backside to land in our frontyard. Loud music playing, Mike didn’t heard the raggedy old doorbell on her that sounded like an antiquated, low church organ. We often confused it for a moan coming from the neighbor’s open window.

Days and years goes by, frustrations mount, a saturation point hit. More addicts and encampments outside, I peer over the fence looking down on them. Hopping our fence becomes a sport for those who explore the crevices of the dark night, a break-in here and a man sleeping on our stoop there. The four walls of my house seeming permeable, the fence just a flimsy attempt at a detraction.

We upped the ante. We said goodbye to that picket fence, a quaint attempt to hold back what has started to feel like a war zone. Maybe that’s a disservice to a war zone, or maybe it’s the other way around. The low picket slats an invitation for exploration. It was like trying to stop an avalanche with w toothpick.

We built a defense instead. 10 foot high, steel, horizontal and sturdy. Not rickety.

No swelling in the winter rains, just a sturdy, strident slam when you close it, or maybe it’s a him now, that shutters the whole length of the fence. He makes clanging sounds like a futuristic spaceship in Star-Wars.

His black paint holding on, no graffiti artists trying their hand in the wide parallel bars.

But the addicts and encampments persist.

And now, with air in between, I can see out, and they can see in.

I unlove this fence, I want to dissociate from him, the ties that bind me to him.

I want no fence, I want no wall.

I just want a neighborhood. I want a just neighborhood.

Rats, rats moved in and chewed up our new car engine.

Then a flat tire.

Then a tire sensor broken.

Then a busted, vandalized tail light.

Then a cracked windshield.

And that was just the car problems.

Distracted on the L-platform at Clark and Lake in Chicago, my wallet stolen, ripped right out of my backpack. No shred of ID or credit card or money on me as I headed to the airport.

To fly.

For 6 hours.

To see my family.

Who was on vacation together.

When my dad, went into the hospital with a collapsed lung and heart failure in what’s supposed to be the happiest place on earth.

And then the FDA, a formal letter in the mail. They decided to recall my implant. Too many cases of a secondary cancer of lymphoma. They forgot though that I have 2 of those implants because a double mastectomy was the advice. And now they are banned. What’s my choice.

And Julie is dying, one last treatment an attempt to give her a few months.

And Kay is in hospice.

And Pat is now gone, evaporated into the realm of the universe and the air that I breathe.

The packages stolen from our front porch. My birthday present. The USPS ignored the mailhold.

San Francisco’s investigator calling me, to ask questions, about the structural engineer being investigated by the city, and why, in all the subpoenas, our checks are in there and were they accurate and did we know.

The border, the climate, the shootings of innocents, the corporate greed.

The flight cancelled, the ferry oversold, the taxi credit card machine broken.

And the lines at the DMV to renew my driver’s license. But I had no money to pay because it was somewhere in Chicago in a trashcan.

Where I’d also like to put this Spring 2019.

Red, pinks, chums, springs. They are all congregating, with clarity in their mission to take their last breaths at the head of the watershed, up kilometers of jagged rocks punctuated by gentle sloping sandy beds, with smooth worn pebbles. Past felled trees, slid down the mountain from the winter snowfall. Ceremonial cedars and Sitka spruce and hemlocks, the bark making the water rich with tannins in the eddies, and dropped needles spiraling in the pools. Through rapids and water too dangerous to even wade in. Around the curve and back over the bend and up and up. Clarity in their home place. The place of their conception, birth, and death.

While they are clear, they are also confused. It’s warm, 2 degrees difference than last year, or the year before that, or the 4 years ago when their parents gave their lives on the banks, or the 14,000 years that we can trace their existence back, to the beach, the footprints found, the middens of shells and bones whispering, I was here, I lived, I dreamed of you. As the salmon shimmer under the inky black water, their bodies pure muscle that have been pumping and preparing for this season since they were old enough to swim back down down down to the open ocean. And yet, somehow, in the 3-knot current, they are still. Quiet. Patient. Generous. And I wonder:

What is the genealogy of a salmon?

In a creation story, the raven cast a shadow to create the world, and the people come are transformed from the killer whales. The salmon are the messengers, from stream to stream, tributary to tributary. Carrying life, elements, nutrients with their dying bodies, into the soil and up the trees. For the trees to grow and give the people the air they need to live. And the circle is whole.

We keep moving through the territory. The petroglyph is around the corner in a narrow channel but high up, so high up on a sheer limestone wall. Shades of red and pink. Like the salmon. Sketched with the rocks, minerals, berries, and iron-rich blood of the artist. The drawing on the cliff by all guesses is at least several hundred years old, pre contact. Perched in such an inaccessible way, it has not yet been aged. And it was not burned by the Indian Agent. Or the Roman Catholic Church and its missionaries. If people have been here 14,000 years, that’s 700 generations. The painting – outlines of copper shields, canoes, eagles, and salmon. Maybe it indicates a burial ground where an important chief was laid to rest in a bentwood cedar box. Maybe it tells the story of a battle, or a peace treaty, or of a rich fishing ground, or of survival. Maybe it tells all the stories that have ever been told?

What is light?

And what is darkness? The absence of light.

What is life without salmon?

What is death? The absence of life without salmon.

I peer out the window, neck craning to see if it’s snow, or sand, or the prairie.

The Sierra Nevadas give way to smaller mountain ranges, then rainshadow deserts, the great salt flats. The western Rockies like spikes, unsettled and inconsistent, moving inches every year but where are they moving? Getting older and younger at the same time. So many peaks and crevices it would take many lifetimes to walk every square mile. There are no foothills east of the Rockies. it drops down suddenly, steeply, in a plateau, one of the longest I know. A gradual, gentle slope down down down down towards the Missouri and Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Their collective river basin, the watershed visible from space, ribbons of water threading together into the place that is my cradle. The pulse of summer expanding and the cold of winter contracting.

The patchwork quilt comes into view. Greens of every shade. The chartreuse of the young soybeans, the emerald of the mature corn stalks, the olive of the silty creeks and streams, the jade of the deciduous trees, flaunting their riches, inhaling for the season.

People came to this continent down from the north to the south, and then from west to east. There is a language in eastern Siberia Russian – the Ket language of the Yeniseian language family – that parallels the Hupa language in modern day California and the Apache and Navajo in one in Arizona and New Mexico.

I dream of their journey and then my own homegoing. And how it’s the reverse of the one we’ve been conditioned to think of – go west! 

But the wind, this wind, blows from west to east. It blows me back home.

What they don’t tell you is that a sliver of glass, quietly, stilly sitting on the dirty corner of Mission and 17^th , patiently waiting for you to fall on it, can cut your hand. It can draw blood, dripping in perfect circles, to the subway station. You’re not warned that somehow this will feel like your own doing.

What they don’t tell you is what the sterile exam room is like when someone tells you you might die or you might live. It’s mauve and seafoam green, it seems outdated but smells like fresh paint. The art on the walls – if you can call it that – is a rendition of a field or maybe flowers. You sit, pondering that you’re a statistic and that the art is ugly. And you want to argue back, play the devil’s advocate, be the factually correct one in the room, will yourself that this is not the end of the run, float above your body because only then might the dull low hum banging against your ear drums silence itself. Isn’t it the case that everyone might die or everyone might live?

What they don’t tell you is how many of your friends will die, die young, die younger, die youngest. And those deaths come slow and they come fast. At first you’ll be grief stricken, unable to get out of bed, sobbing into the ether. They don’t tell you that so many people in your life will look away, too pained or afraid or cowardice or culturally neutered to name the grief, the loss, the life well lived. What they don’t tell you is that so many of those women are Black and brown, that they have to fight for the same pain medication you easily get from your oncologist. That their experience in the same four walls could not be more different, on another planet. And then, what they don’t tell you that at some point, the spigot of feelings turns off. A wake of numbness replaces it. You’re not prepared to examine what this means.

What they don’t tell you is the land that you’re on is stolen. Here from the Ohlone and there from the Cahokia, a people assumed to be so extinct that the teachers in my gradeschool only talk about them as if they exist only in the past. Not present or future. There is no recognition or reference or regaling of anything but colonists, settlers, stealers, white, conquesters, storytellers, those who own the version of history that is written, rinsed, and repeated.

What they don’t tell you is that budging against the status quo creates a target on your back. A bullseye. Pushing on the system, pointing out the injustices. A collective unlearning to relearn the facts – not the history. The red circle gets bigger and bigger each day. It draws more blood than a sliver of glass.

What they don’t tell you is that they lied.

What they don’t tell you is that what was hidden from you was there all along.