keeping abreast | keeping a breast

The cool Pacific fog rolled over the sandy dunes and tall oat grasses, the ice plants punctuating the hills with their fuchsia and golden blooms. We walked side by side, sharing snippets of our lives. From the verdant Midwest to drought-assailed California. Both of us with a baby, hers in a stroller smiling away and mine nestled closely, heartbeat to heartbeat, in a heavy sleep.

Does anyone ever want to leave the place they love, the place they call home? And what is home anyway, after we emerge from our first homes, blinking at the brightness of the world? Does anyone ever want to believe they will go back, that this is all only temporary? That was the meditation that was blowing in with the fog gusts and in between the pockets of blue sky that peaked through, to remind us what autumn in the Bay Area would bring.

We are the children that live in the city. That left the only homes we knew, to try on another identity, to shape shift from rural girls who played in the fields and conjured up dreams in the golden rain to those savvy women who jay-walk and know the best urban hideouts, or bagels, or ramen, or stairwells, or train cars.

And yet savvy women can sometimes feel like they are merely surviving, untethered to the soil, separated from the creek underfoot because all is paved over. Shading their eyes to look overhead into the light, to see if the birds are moving in unison, one direction or another. Straining their noses to pick up the scent of a changing season, which trees would drop their leaves to continue the cycle of decay and fertilization, which plants would bloom first to signify the shift from cold to mild. It’s hard to discern the passage of time when things bloom all year round here.

And they think, quietly, as they keep walking with long silences, each rocking and bouncing a new life, “there is no one here, alive or buried, who cradled me as a child. Who wiped my tears. Who braided my unruly curls. Who mused at how I loved to dig in the dirt, hoping to find an arrowhead or another buried treasure like a budding archaeologist. Who encouraged me in the ways they knew how.”

They wonder to themselves, volleying the thought back and forth through their glances, “what happened to my childhood bed, that holds the echo of a small body with big dreams. What happened to the rusting swingset, swing still swaying in the breeze, like it would after I jumped off and soared into the air, tumbling into the wet grass on the landing. What happened to the house, does the laughter that once filled it reverberate in the walls that remember, that saw it all, witnessed birth, life and death. And what about the fireflies, who sometimes decide not to blink their lights and broadcast their existence from their corner of the yard, for no real good reason. Or at least no reason that we can understand.”  

Maybe it was my eighth birthday, perhaps seventh. My older brother and I were born on the same day in May, three years apart. Talk about precision. Always having to share a birthday party, a birthday cake, in particular, got old. Well, it was probably very old for Lucas all along, but second grade is the time I really came into consciousness about it. He was into mechanical things and I was into rainbows and unicorns. You can imagine that the cakes were always decorated with split personalities.

But it was this birthday that my mom decided we would separate, at least for the “kid party” as we called it (the family birthday party would always uphold the single cake tradition). She decided we would embrace a spring birthday with flourish. Having a tea party with petit-fours and freshly cut blooms as centerpieces at the ballpark pavilion around the corner. I didn’t know what petit fours were and definitely didn’t know how to spell the concept. But they sounded like something fancy, something fitting for my first independent birthday party.

My mom drove the station wagon, the one with wood panels on the outside, the mile from our house down Reservoir Road out into the country. She pulled over, and we got out. She brought scissors for us, always thinking ahead. And away we cut. And I cut with abandon, like a budding florist, excited to snip away at all the textures and colors that the early May prairie fields and the shaded, damp, adjacent woods had to offer.

The purple violets – our state flower, so petite and rich, with their elusive fragrance. The Jonquils and Daffodils, early risers, already heading out of the season, tagging in the black-eyed Susans that were the mainstays of later summer. Bluebells hidden in the understory of bushes. Buttercups that my grandpa taught me to eat, the delicate yellow buds no bigger than a pinky nail. “Down the hatch,” he’d say. “Like butter!”

Only later would l learn the names of the flowers that are unique to this part of the world:

Dutchmen’s breeches

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Jacob’s ladder

Shooting stars

Mayapple

Prairie trillium

Spring beauty

Bloodroot

False Soloman’s seal

Light blue Woodland phlox

Who even came up with these names, I wonder.

I’d like to say that all of those were in our bouquets, neatly arranged in my grandma’s old mason jars on the picnic tables.

But the only picture I have of that day resides in my mind, nestled in the file of the times I felt special, seen as an important individual in the family, my mother’s daughter, not trailing behind the others, barefoot and still in my nightgown, trying to catch up, get a word in, or get my big brothers’ attention to show them the violet that I found underneath the deck, working its way up through soil, too.

I’ve been around for generations, millennia really. As long as fire was a thing and corn was a thing and people were a thing and people needing to eat corn to live was a thing. Sure, those golden or maroon or blue maize kernels could and were ground down into masa to make porridges and tortillas, starting in Mexico, at least 9000 years ago, then transported in some Christopher Columbus colonizing trade back to Italy in 1492 to kick off the polenta craze. And here we are in 2021. Corn gets a bad rap because GMO corn mostly feeds pigs and cows who can’t digest it properly. Other GMO corn is being turned into plastics and fuel for ethanol powered car engines, vroom vroom. A lot of people just think corn comes in a can, end of story. Or it’s something decorative you put on your porch around Halloween next to a jenky scarecrow and poorly carved pumpkin.

I’m getting off track though.

Right, where was I.

The simplest most delicate and pure way to experience the king corn is popped, over a flame, to airy crispy crunchy perfection. Topped with your drizzle of choice. Butter and salt, mostly, for the masses. Or if you live in San Francisco: truffle salt, furikake, or nutritional yeast.

But how, do you say, does one create this delectable divine devotion of popcorn? What is the golden vessel that it is formed in?

It’s me. Miss Whirly Pop.

Ok, fine. Maybe 9000 years ago I wasn’t called a whirly pop. I was probably a dried-out gourd. Or later a copper bowl hemmed with steady artisanal coppersmith hands, traded along a grease route from Wisconsin west to the Pacific and down to Mexico. But just think – how many people have sat around a fire with their mouth watering, waiting to enjoy the morsels I produce?

Countless.

Oh, the stories I can tell you in my various iterations through time. But from my vantage point on this particular stove, watching this particular family….what a delight it’s been to see this small one, the one they call Celeste, first turn her head sharply towards the sound of the hodgepodge of kernels poured into me, Miss Whirly Pop. And then, as the heat was cranked, oil warmed up, and kernels started dancing, all that pop pop pop sporadically then a steady roar, Celeste’s face opened in a big “O” like a mix of surprise and joy, which is funny because given that this is the first time she’s heard anything of the sort in her whole human experience, who wouldn’t be surprised! And it’s a good sign that she already appears to experience joy around me.

Welcome to the club.

And I sit there and cool down, I get a little misty. Remembering about my first experience with the other one, the mom who is holding her. And the grandma who is encouraging us all to “step way back, away from my hot sides, be careful, don’t touch, very hot, you’ll get burned,” because maybe the memory was all more traumatic for the grandma than for the mom. Yes, you heard that right. Three generations enjoying Miss Whirly Pop at once! Can you believe it?!

But right, the memory. Oh, that mom, she was tiny. Walking yes, tall enough to reach the counter, yes. It was summer because I remember everyone being in their pajamas but the sun was still drooping on the horizon. The windows were open, cicadas doing what they do. What a brilliant idea to dig me out of the basement storage and plug me in (it was the 1980s, open flamed stoves were out of vogue so my then-iteration was a very Suzanne Sommers-inspired popcorn popper, one that plugged in and promised to short out whole electrical panels. Forgive me, please.). And yes, so lucky, we do still have a canister of corn kernels gathering dust in the pantry. Let’s do this, household!

That grandma, who was then just a mom, with the same caution, the same warning. “Step way back, away from my hot sides, be careful, don’t touch, very hot, you’ll get burned…”

And the mom, who was then just a little one, frozen in place in her nightgown, heart beating full of curiosity. What does that feel like? How bad could it really be? How is that magic happening? Let me just get closer, a tiny bit. Just a bit. And touch it “yawwwwwww” she yelled! And her finger, the index one, the pointer one, the important one especially for tomorrow’s piano lesson, blowing up and up and up, the big old blister dwarfing so many other parts of that little thing’s body.

I thought, “Oh dear, oh me, oh my.”

But the then-mom, thinking quick, ran to get the sewing kit and a needle and popped that growing balloon immediately before I, Miss Whirly Pop, had even finished my own spin cycle and the then-child had completely melted down. Brilliant!

Oh, I have many stories to tell. Yes, I do.

“There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground”

-Rumi

I sit here, eyes softened looking at the neighbor’s large tree. Maybe an elm, all its delicate branches dangly and floating in the breeze. Today it started, one leaf, two, then a gust blows more into the yard. But the tree is still green, for the most part. These yellow leaves that have departed it are just on the early side, foreshadowing of a lifecycle that plays out every day in millions of ways. The heartbeat of water from the deep and still flowing Mission creek feeding that tree for over a hundred years now. What has it seen. And what has seen it. Pulsing, pushing, until, it is enough. And the leaf lets go. Or the tree lets go.

My eyes close, only for a few seconds. The city is so still right now, the blanket of fog dampening the evening, quieting the din of bodies moving and toiling and doing and being. I hear my heartbeat, a light rhythm in my ear. I wonder how many times it has beaten in my life. Does the heart beat more when it aches? Or when it’s horizontal, or at 30,000 feet. What about the year and more of chemotherapy, the echocardiograms to check and see if the dosage is having damage, if we should pull back, to keep intact this essential life force? Maye there is too much waste, not enough oxygen and nutrients. Or what does the heart think of the long tail of pills and shots with the nonchalantly-tossed-out risk of arterial calcification?

I think of my Dad and how his imperfect heart saved his life. First draft number called to Vietnam, going away party and all. Only to have a before-silent heart murmur discovered in his physical.

Does the heart beat more when it discovers joy?

My eyes wonder to her, the top of her new head, her soft spot. I see it – the pulse pulse thump thump of her four-chambered heart whooshing the blood around and around her tiny body. I see her fist, opening and clenching, almost in a beat, the size of her own heart.

We first heard her heartbeat on a warm autumn day. All the leaves of the elm tree were long crumbled and gone by then. The whoosh thump swoosh – fainter and louder and fainter again only to come back roaring. They said, the variability is a good sign. You want those ups and downs, crescendos and diminuendos.

In all these ways, I think the heart prepares us for life.

What is the opposite of being alive?

Is it nothing.

Is it returning to dust, to metals, to the canyon walls, to the things that accumulate on my window sill.

Is it being without a body.

Is it being with a soul, the all-seeing eye, the deepest wisdom of understanding.

Is it wind.

Is it a hummingbird or a cardinal or an auspicious being that takes flight.

Is it being reincarnated or mummified or transubstantiated or impermanent or waiting in limbo to make a choice or have a choice made for you.

Is it a little flash of gold light.

Is it a little flash of green light, projecting from the ocean to the shore.

Is it a fire, a pyre, a flame that changes color in its interactions with a medium.

Is it being buried in yellow cedar bark caskets.

Is it having the same dust we’re made of tossed over you in handfuls.

Is it an exhale.

Is it a new beginning, an oasis.

Is it everything.

Is it now.

Deep in the stillness, I can hear you speak.

A long slow exhale.

I can be in right relationship, you and me. Plant and animal. Our tender animal bodies. Animal and earth.

I am looking at sound, sound in water.

Cerulean in a vernal pool.

Michaela said today, “water creates entrainment between us. It’s a powerful tool for shifting energy, shifting vibrations.”

Healing, baptized, cleansed.

We come from water, are born out of water, drawn to take our first breath with the cycle of the moon pulling the tides high and pulling the tides low.

She sings with the whales. The whales sing back to her. A call and response. Recalling the cries and moans and songs and goodbye whispers of the Africans through the Middle Passage.

The whales remember. Only several generations back, the conversation imprinted.

So does the earth.

Because we are a blue line, caught in an angle of song, in a deep ocean.