damselfly press

Thoughts in the Woods

On my first morning in an isolated cottage in the Appalachian Mountains, I sit on the deck looking into the forest. I look into the higher branches of oaks, tulip trees, sycamores and maples, and through a tiny gap to a distant mountain ridge. I see the rich dark greens of moist deciduous woodland and bright spots of sunlight sprinkled on the green foliage and on the bed of fallen leaves that cover the ground, where brown and cream and dark red fungi and mossy logs and stones tell of damp weather.

The warm air reminds me of Februaries in Brisbane and discomfort of school uniforms – those thick tunics with shirts and wool neckties striped with the school colors, the long socks and later the black cotton stockings and suspender belts, heavy black lace up shoes, the gloves that must be worn in public, the big panama hat. There were heat-wave days when we were allowed to wear our gym tunics in class – square necked green cotton tunic, matching green bloomers, short socks, tennis shoes. I seem to remember that this began after a rash of faintings in morning assembly during a heat wave – hymn, prayers, Old Testament, New Testament, hymn, prayers, announcements. Our teachers remained stockinged, corseted, and high heeled.

And I remember working in Nigeria years later, with a team of entomologists in the forest – counting grasshoppers in the great humid heat, as we tried to figure out their lifestyle, mortality, the causes of their pest status and the best way to manage the problem. Nothing had prepared me for the wall of warm moisture I encountered whenever I walked outside, the air so thick even breathing seemed difficult.

Here in the early morning, as the dew in the tree tops drips noisily onto leaves below, I hear four different bird songs, but cannot see who makes them. Looking onto the leaf litter below my deck, I see a small, deft, brown bird foraging silently. Nearby is a strangely bright patch of orange, the size of a golf ball, and I go down there to look. It is the only flower I have been able to see in the dense woods – a tiger lily, orange petals curled back to meet on top of its drooping head, and underneath, spots on waxy yellow, the long white stamens with brown anthers at their tips. It is a bright jewel in a world of green and brown.

Young saplings, a foot tall with half a dozen big leaves, wait for the time when a large tree falls, allowing them the space and sunlight to make their urgent growth – not wasting an opportunity. By mid morning, groups of cicadas in different parts of the forest sing – within each group the individuals sing in unison. First there is a slow soft noise, rising fast and shrilly to a crescendo, then falling away again to almost quiet. Occasionally there is the sound of a busy woodpecker. Each creature is busy with its reproduction and survival. And I hear drips, moisture accumulated and still finding the ground after a brief light rain shower. Behind me, there is the soft whirring of a fan – otherwise the air feels dense and too heavy to make a breeze.

By midday the cicadas stop and I hear instead the squawking of some distant hidden bird. A dark brown butterfly spends five minutes ambling close by and I notice small dots of light going by – tiny flies whose wings are lit for a few seconds by sunlight. A few large flies land on the railing. With the light above now I see sections of a few bright threads – spider webs across space between tree trunks. A squirrel descends in silence from the top of a tree, running down its trunk to the leaf litter.

The quietness of this nature is imposing. I am a part of it on the deck of my rustic cottage. Along with all the trees of this rich forest, I mature and grow old and die. If I burn, the ashes will become part of the dust that helps create a brilliant sunset. If I decay, the molecules that formed the living body will become part of other living things, and the messages encoded in my DNA will disappear forever. Some of these trees will have passed on their DNA to offspring, but not all of them, and not me either. My time here will end without a biological meaning other than the re-use of constituent parts.

In the heat of early afternoon the silence in the forest is palpable. It could be that there is some persistent very high-pitched insect, though I suspect it is tinnitus. But there is moisture and in the air there is carbon dioxide, and those green leaves obtaining sunlight are busy building complexity. Beneath the apparent lack of activity and in the great silence a huge invisible biochemical industry is in progress, and from those millions of little flat green leaf machines a vast source of potential energy is being created. Most of the leaves are intact. A few have insect damage from earlier in the season. All of them are rich green with only minor differences in hue.

The light in the forest decreases and increases and I know that clouds are building. If there is a breeze somewhere out there it doesn’t penetrate here. Mid afternoon and the sweat begins to drip down my neck in spite of the fan and I get sleepy. My mind goes back to times almost completely forgotten. Queen Elizabeth, young and newly crowned, visited Australia in the summertime. All the Brisbane schools were to take part in a display at the big exhibition grounds – the biggest arena available. The thousands of children would make a huge E.II.R. of bodies, upon which she would gaze in the February heat. I was to be part of one of the dots. I remember playing truant on the practice day in order to go swimming. I remember taking part in the display on the equally hot big day. Dozens of children fainted in the heat. I wonder what the poor Queen made of it all.

I remember Mother ironing with the sweat dripping from her face down onto the clean clothes – I think it was Mondays – seven shirts for my father and five detached starched collars for the weekdays, and twelve or more shirts for my older brother who wanted a clean one for the evening’s courting. My sister and I did our own ironing.

Window screens became popular and my mother scoffed – well, they’ll get no breeze now. Our houses, built on stilts, were supposed to gather what air movement there was, and screens reduced that. So we had air, and a multitude of moths and mosquitoes at the lights fascinated my unschooled brain. We all sat out on the wide veranda on the hottest evenings to get what breeze there was, talking in the dark, with just the red glow of mosquito coils and my parents’ cigarettes. No one had air conditioning then, and I don’t remember fans either. We came into beds under mosquito nets hanging from a circular hoop above the pillow. I remember waking heavy in the head those hot humid days. The first department store to get air conditioning made a killing.

The great humidity eventually brought rain and how wonderful it was to run out and get wet through, to arrive at school so wet we were allowed to remove shoes. Washing remained on the Hills rotary hoist for a day and was then brought in to the washing line under the house, where it sometimes remained for several days to get dry. Mildew grew on the walls of my bedroom, toadstools covered the lawn, moss covered the slate roof, Mother rejoiced that the 40,000 gallon tank was full, Father cursed the amount of mowing and scything, the car skidded on the clay surface of the driveway up the ridge to our house, frogs croaked and the poincianas bloomed, flying foxes enjoyed the palm fruits and grasshoppers ate the acalypha hedge.

But this hot moist green forest is new to me. Though I see leaves drop now, in three months time they will rain down in their millions, and leave the skeletons of trunks and branches. The cottage will be bathed in light, and the brown walls of natural, unpainted wood will be warmed with sunshine through the many windows as the days become colder.

On the north side of my cottage, outside a screened porch, is a flat area covered in moss. Its not easy to tell directions most of the time, but I have a mental map of the area and know that my doorway faces north. I rest here in the splendor of a warm dark forest, exploiting as best I can, all my senses, my memories, my small understandings and my sense of being alive in the world, and know who I am.

- Elizabeth Bernays grew up in Australia, then studied agricultural pests in developing countries. After being a professor of entomology at Berkeley and Regents’ professor at the University of Arizona, she obtained an MFA. She publishes in various literary journals and won several awards including the 2007 X.J. Kennedy prize.

Revelations

I stumble and catch myself before I fall. Not bad for a clumsy middle-aged walker in a foreign landscape on an icy March morning. This rocky path winds through a ranchland of brown hills, tottering fences, and emptiness—except for the nearby country club and surrounding homes.

I’m living a new life as a Congregational minister in the northern Arizona high country where I landed a few months ago at a small church made of local wood and stone. Sacred light comes into the interior through faceted glass placed high in the sanctuary walls. The abstract blues and yellows, reds and greens make patterns on us that change with the movement of clouds. No Christian icons adorn the church walls, except for a brass cross on the gray stone. The air inside feels fresh, crisp—neutral.

“A pagan temple!” some people call our church. “New-age fright!” others say. Gossips tell me the Baptists don’t approve, claiming it looks like a witch’s meetinghouse. I don’t care. The non-traditional building with its peaked roof suits me fine, down to the lone rosebush by the front door.

People have left my church because they distrust a woman in the pulpit. Members tell me my voice doesn’t sound right. Folks wonder if the ceremonies over which I preside are valid, and some male clergy won’t welcome me as a colleague. In a place formerly called ‘Lonesome Valley’ where scorpions lurk, gravel is the paving element of choice, and a Safeway and dime-store comprise the shopping district, I feel like a hothouse flower among cacti. Still, I like it here. Most of the members of the small church—a gentle, forgiving group—circle me with no rancor.

I trudge the Old Chisholm Trail wearing my heavy red jacket and my husband’s blue knitted cap with California Bears on the front. The cold air whips my cheeks. Some mornings I feel this desert is the proper setting for a woman in a pioneering role. I feel strong and capable in this bracing world, a lone crimson cowpuncher. We women ministers forge modern tools, clear old brush, speak new truth. We’re needed to bring fresh ideas into the church to preach liberty to the enslaved and compassion for the poor. This morning I’m just not so sure-footed.

I’ve left a lovely city, San Diego, with its beaches and boats and flowers, a place where I’d been a single mother, a high school teacher, and an actress in local theater. But something drove me into a religious profession. It wasn’t courage. I had no wanderlust. I had no spiritual calls. I’m an ordinary soul with this itch to meet God.

Arizona high country is a place where solitude is visible outside your window. To step into the landscape is to find yourself in a vastness where it’s easy to think, where thinking is required. The air, the clouds, the hawks and desert emptiness teach you to observe. This morning the skies have a pristine clarity and dance with swinging raptors. The surrounding Bradshaw Mountains are bastions of integrity. Hillsides of pine and juniper stand untouched by human development. My walk helps me clarify, discern, and I like to think I stumble toward more truth.

I’d wanted to try ministry on my own for the past five years while I’d worked as an assistant minister in San Diego. With a seminary education in my pocket, a degree in literature, a tour of raising children and high school teaching experience, I felt qualified. Today, in the March cold, I confess: I’m not a traditional believer. I can’t and won’t teach a strict orthodox Christianity using the Bible to proclaim Jesus as savior of the world, the only way to God.

I’m a fraud. A roadrunner darts in front of me with a young snake in its beak. I start. Danger. The pronghorn antelope, grazing on the open desert beyond the fairways, stop their business to stare at my pilgrim’s progress. The atmosphere changes, smells earthy, of pastures and growth. A handsome buck, proud of his magnificent antlers, turns his mighty head to regard my long-legged stride. Being observed with disinterest makes me uncomfortable. The gentleman sees into my heart. He knows how much I doubt myself. I don’t belong in Arizona among the faithful. What have I done? I’d like to sit down and watch the animals, stop the momentum, but I walk on. The antelope goes back to his grazing. The roadrunner hides somewhere with her meal.

Perhaps my questions about Christianity come from my being a woman, an alien in ministry. I question old ideas, but my church members don’t. They haven’t accepted biblical research or scrutinized the stormy contradictions in Christian theology. They like the stories. Questions are beside the point for them, and the point is comfort. My dilemma is whether to let the questions and doubts stay packed away. The effort is getting harder.
I sigh a burst of warm air into the cold March atmosphere and try to keep up a brisk pace. The church members don’t know I have doubts about conventional Christian beliefs. I should have told them the truth during our initial conversations when I applied for the job, but I didn’t. I carry a backpack of guilt on this hike. Only movement gives me energy to keep trying to make sense of my ministry.

My commitment to this vocation came out of a sense that the Christian Church was on to something, and I set myself on a path to figure out what the something was, hoping to meet God in some way. Or maybe I chose ministry to put myself in the presence of people like Dave Palmer, a born again man in the congregation. The man has soul, you could say, eyes that offer his heart. Or maybe it was the role, the robes of clerical authority.

Boulders, pampas grass and cacti are the shrubs of choice in front of the homes lining the street, but a few gardeners have planted burgeoning tulips. The tulip people come from verdant eastern places. They bring in fresh soil and grow tulips to transform our wilderness into Eden. I’m not sure what to make of their effort. Do I want the desert to look like a watered place? Even so, I identify with the tulip, a transplant from another world; I’m not a native species. Like a proud tulip, I can stand up in imposing costumes pretending I belong.

Silence. My feet touch the pavement, but they make no sound. No cars speed by, as if Arizona hasn’t come to accept the wheel yet. There’s something newly born about this setting. I’m the first to touch down.

The emerging tulips and noisy birdsong remind me that Easter is coming. My sermon for Easter Sunday will have to be elegantly Christian. I’m expected to affirm that Jesus is God and will come back to earth after dying for humankind. I should assure my listeners that He awaits them in an afterlife. My faith, however, does not include that scenario, let alone the literal resurrection of Jesus. I walk to overcome worries about being a fraudulent minister unworthy of the trust of believers. I walk so I can stop walking on Easter Sunday and stand alone in front of a faithful congregation.

*

I gave that Easter sermon in the shimmering green and yellow light of Easter morning. I affirmed the rebirth of hope, including the story of a man much like Dave who gave dignity to fishermen, held children in his arms, and fed the hungry. I could do that much, but my sense of displacement and fraud continued to weigh on my conscience as the Easter month turned into a summer of thunder, lightning and downpours. The fall shouted change. Finally, winter. Snow on cactus.

My fitness walks sustained me for another five years while the antelope watched my movements. I spun thoughts about the mysteries of religion and marveled at Arizona high country where unexpected snow fell, tulips appeared in the desert, and nobility drove a pickup truck. But I continued to doubt the comfortable beliefs of church-goers until the stones in my path became boulders. I couldn’t see over them to make my way and realized I was no more connected to the Christians around me than to the antelope. The separation between me and the others grew too wide, and I walked away from ministry aware I was leaving behind spiritual revelations from clean, untamed earth.

- Elaine Greensmith Jordan is a retired minister who lives in Arizona. Her essays have appeared in South Loop Review, New Works Review, The Georgetown Review and other journals and anthologies. An excerpt from her unpublished memoir, “Mrs. Ogg Played the Harp,” won an award from the American PEN Women and the California Writers Club.

Radiant Red Violet

It is the last week of summer, a wicked August afternoon that makes your skin drip just from standing still. Megan and I spend the morning as we do most summer mornings. We walk mindlessly through town and mark our names on the walls of buildings with fat black pens. We sneak through the back lots of shopping centers, take turns pushing one another in wobbly carts and ultimately crash into curbs. We stop into an old-fashioned ice cream shop and drink strawberry malts until we think our brains might freeze. By lunchtime, our t-shirts are wet with perspiration, and our vision blackened with spots of sunshine, so we decide to stop off at the closest place we can find to briefly find refuge from the heat.

The aisles of the beauty supply shop overflow with candy-colored beauty products packaged in plastic and in glass. Rainbows of petite polish bottles line pre-made display racks, rows of color that spread from indigo to burgundy to brown. Megan and I brush our fingertips over the labels of mane & tail shampoo, gallons of mango and cocoa body lotion and jars of lemon cuticle crème. We glide across the floor, as though possessed by the acetone smell that seeps from every crevice of the shop.

Megan pulls off her knit beret and shakes her head. Several thin, red braids fall and frame her face. She strokes one of them between her fingers and lets out a short puff of a sigh.

“I’m ready for a change,” she says and rolls up her eyes to examine the strawberry blonde strands.

We peruse the shelves slowly, icy air blowing across our damp necks, and take our time to shake and sample bottles of glittery polish, dabbing beads of sweat from our faces before we swipe the color across our toes. A twenty-something salesgirl sits at the front counter and eyes us from behind the cover of a glossy magazine. She snaps her gum loudly and twirls a piece of her over-processed hair around her fingertip.

“You girls looking for something?” she says and breathes heavily, exhausted by her efforts.

Megan squeezes a glob of ice blue serum into her palm and runs it through the hair at the nape of her neck. I pose momentarily beside a yellowed mannequin, her fake, plastic head trapped beneath a giant bubble-shaped dryer.

“Nope,” Megan says. “We’ve got everything covered over here.”

She mists coconut body spray into the air and dances beneath the fragrant cloud, as though it is rain.

I follow Megan as she breezes towards a back aisle, waving my hands in front of me to help the fresh polish dry. As I do this, I study Megan’s movements: The way her bag slaps her side each time she takes a step; The way she pouts her lips and tilts her head with wonder while she browses through acrylic nail kits; The way she rests her hand on her hip and pulls a braid across her lips. But mostly, I think about how alone I will feel without her. Next week, high school will begin and, for the first time in our lives, we will be separated. Town lines have marked our fate. She will move to the left and I will move to the right. We will sharpen our pencils each day on opposite ends of town.

I wonder what it will be like to wander through foreign hallways amongst unfamiliar faces. Will anyone notice me without her there? Will people find me interesting when she is not standing beside me? I think about how I’d like a change, too. I’d like to become someone that people notice. Someone that people recognize for more than just her offbeat fashion. I want boys to think I am pretty and ask me to school dances. I want teachers to smile as they describe the success they are certain I will find. But I want these things for her, too. I crave a sense of normalcy for us both.

Megan pauses beside a shelf lined with countertop mirrors, various sized ovals situated across it like a funhouse wall. As she moves forward, her face spreads from mirror to mirror. She narrows her eyes, observes her many reflections and combs her fingers through her hair. My stomach aches as I wonder what it will be like to wander the halls of some new building without her. I swipe my greasy palms down the fronts of my denim cutoffs, leaving behind a faint lotion stain. As I step closer to Megan, she moves away, preoccupied by a display of tortoise shell combs. Now, my reflection multiplies across the shelf. I pause, smile a half smile at myself and slide a tube of ruby red lipstick across my lips.

“Down here,” Megan whispers from the end of the aisle.

Amid paddle brushes and economy-sized cans of aerosol hair spray is row upon row of synthetic hair – coarse, one-inch strips, organized according to color, from silver to platinum to auburn to brown. Megan and I rub the samples between the pads of our fingertips, squat down and press them against our foreheads. We imagine how much more interesting life would be for us as blondes.

Megan crouches and begins to fumble through tubs stacked on the bottom shelves. Unlike the other coloring kits, these tubs do not have colorfully displayed pieces of rough hair, but rather, are concealed in generic, white containers, like some dirty secret the storeowners are ashamed to admit. She unscrews the cap and reveals a thick paste the color of a Caribbean sea. Her eyes widen and she laughs a malicious belly laugh, the sort reserved for occasions like this, when she knows she is about to be up to no good. I lean down beside her and stick my finger into the dye.

“This,” Megan says, “is just the kind of change I’m looking for.”

We swipe the dye across our palms and envision our faces beside wild hair colored in magenta, fuchsia, or lime. One by one, we uncap new jugs, bright hues of electric purple and blue and green that surround us like a piece of pop art. Megan’s eyes glitter with anticipation.

“>“Help me pick out one you like,” she says.

“My mother will murder me if I dye my hair with any of these,” I say.

Megan skims her finger across the backside of one of the tubs.

“No she won’t,” she says. “Not if I do it with you.”

I swirl my pinky through a jar of mutant green and think about the fact that she is right. Each time we pull stunts like this together – purposefully tearing our clothes, or coloring our eyelids ebony, or sneaking off to dingy places to have metal jewelry stabbed through our skin – they seem, to our families, like silly teenage things rather than, what we will later learn, is the deeper, more complex rebellion of my friend.

“I think it’s about time we were devirginized, anyway,” Megan says.

She remains quiet as she waves the open jar beneath my chin.

“So,” she says. “You in?”

I nod. Sure, I think. I’m in.

Megan spins one of her braids like a tiny lasso.

“It’s about time to say goodbye to strawberry blonde,” she says.

We drop two plastic tubs of hot pink dye onto the counter and wait while the saleswoman finishes reading about orgasms and pant hems. She lays the open magazine down with a sigh, examines our purchases and places them into a plastic bag.

“You girls know you need brushes for these, right?” she says and pops her wad of bubblegum with a loud snap.

Megan and I shrug and toss our crumpled singles and coins onto the counter.

“They’re in the back,” the woman says and sighs again. She leans across the counter and points towards the far end of the shop. “They look just like mini paint brushes.”

She looks down at the cover of her magazine, anxious to return to her reading.

“Look. Just go grab one and I’ll pretend I didn’t see anything,” she says and shuts her register drawer. She picks up the magazine and flips to a new page, returning to the glossy world she dreams of.

Megan’s parents are at work for the afternoon so we set up shop in their laundry room, converting the sink into a rinsing station, the dryer lid into a miniature beauty display. I lean my head into the sink and allow Megan to splash my hair, warm water trickling down my jaw line and across my cheeks. My heart races as I think about my mother, and the furious reaction I am certain she will have. But more so, I think about the camaraderie this moment brings to Megan and me. That each time I receive a judgmental stare from a new classmate, I will know that someone, somewhere, is experiencing the same thing.

“My mom’s going to murder me,” I say again.

But Megan pretends not to hear me over the rushing sound of water. Instead, she looks at me with a smirk and massages her fingers into my scalp. When my whole head is damp, she tugs the hair at the nape of my neck and lifts my dripping head from the sink.

Megan scoots herself onto the washing machine and sips warm beer from a can. I stand beside her, waiting like a child on Christmas morning, anxious for her to unscrew the tub and reveal our selection. She uncaps it slowly, full of suspense, and exposes the goopy, pinkish shade. Radiant-Red Violet.

I sit on a folding chair in the center of the room, the floor and my shoulders lined with bath towels. Megan begins to paint small sections of my hair neon pink, while the room fills with a stinging ammonia scent. Once my hair is saturated with chemical color, we switch places. Now, Megan sits in the middle of the room and taps her foot in anticipation.

“You know,” I say. “It’s something like only one in a hundred people who have natural red hair like yours.”

“So what’s your point?” she says and lights a cigarette.

“Are you sure you want to say goodbye to it for good?” I say.

“It’ll grow back,” she says.

“Yeah, but, it will never be exactly the same,” I say. “It’s like when you lose your virginity. You can go a while without having sex, but you’ll never be a virgin again.”

Trust me. I’m ready,” she says. “I want to be a new version of myself. I don’t want to look like me anymore.”

She tosses her lit cigarette into the damp sink.

“I don’t care what the statistics say,” she says. “I’m ready to become someone new.”

I dip the brush into the dye and smear a thick line of pink down her center part.

“Goodbye strawberry blonde,” I whisper to her head and spread the color across her crown.

When the egg timer buzzes, we both rush to the sink, and furiously rub our fingers through our hair, a puddle of red-tinted water swirling near the drain. Megan presses a towel against her head. Her curls fall delicately and frame her face. Even through the dampness, I can see that her natural hair color has been transformed to a rich shade of sultry pink, a candy-colored version of Hollywood red. Instantly, she embraces her new character and seductively shakes her hair the way women do in movies, just before they make love.

“You look like a star,” I say and slip my fingers through her wet strands.

Outside, Megan and I sit like starlets. We dangle our feet over the edge of the pool, half-moon shaped ice jangling in our cocktail tumblers, our eyes covered behind black, oval sunglasses. I swirl my feet through the water, sip my drink, and turn toward Megan. When I do, I catch glimpse of my reflection in her lenses.

I know the moment I walk through my door, my mother will scream and my father will look at me with an expression of disappointment. I know that in just a few days, I will move through the halls of some strange, new building, void of familiar faces, and receive many unwelcome stares. But right now, during this singular moment, as I shift my eyes between my reflection and Megan’s head to observe the similarity in our appearances, I pretend that we are one. Our strengths and our weaknesses combined to create one perfect person. And with this thought, nothing else seems to matter.

I reach out my arm and touch one of Megan’s curls.
“We’ve never looked the same before,” I say and withdraw my hand.

Megan lights two cigarettes and places one between my lips. She fingers a strand of my hair. For what feels like hours, we blow thin streams of smoke toward each other’s faces. And here, beneath the humid August sunlight, we study the striking new resemblance that we share.

- Angela M. Graziano holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, where she teaches writing. To date, her writing has appeared in Apple Valley Review, Ariel, Dislocate, Lost Magazine, Portal Del Sol and Miranda Literary Magazine, among others. “Radiant Red Violet” is excerpted from her recently completed first memoir.

Enough

My uncle’s funeral mass is at my childhood church, a large raspberry colored building that towers over my Catholic elementary school. As I sit in the rigid, oak pew listening to the Gospel of Thessalonians memories flood from the pulpit, seeping into my skin through the incensed air. The playground where I broke my hymen while playing with my first lover, the jungle gym, is behind me; the four-square game where boys looked under my uniform skirt to see my bright white underwear with hot pink X’s and O’s scribbled on them is to my left; and the strip of pavement where my friends and I sat in a circle under a rusting basketball net, trading Bonne Bell makeup, spraying Electric Youth perfume and Aqua Net Hairspray is cattycorner to the freshly painted four square area.

The church smells the same—a mixture of carpet cleaner, incense, sulfur, perfume, and spit up. The forbidding, lifeless, damp atmosphere also endures the test of time. This is where my friends and I would pretend pray to escape frigid winter recesses, which occurred for four months out of the year in rural Pennsylvania. I remember sitting in the pews whispering to my friends and trying to suppress the giggles that were mysteriously more contagious inside these walls than outside of them. One afternoon Mrs. Rodriguez, a stalwart churchgoer, caught us pretend praying and yelled at us for doing it wrong. You are supposed to look at the tabernacle, not the crucifix! she said, her voice bouncing off the surrounding Stations of the Cross enveloping our eleven year old selves. You could never do anything right in this church, in this playground. Regardless of how much Dr. Pepper lip-gloss I painted on my lips I was never pretty enough; no matter how good I tried to be I was born wrapped in the blanket of original sin. I was a young girl; an object to be protected and controlled like the poufy, curled bangs sticking to my tender forehead.

Years pass since the Aqua Net cherry popping elementary school days. My uncle’s body lies in a comfortable looking, cushioned casket, draped in religious cloth, perpendicular to the raised altar. I have not attended mass in a long time and, while I forget to genuflect before entering the pew, I remember all of the hymns. Someone catches my eye in the middle of one of my favorite songs On Eagle’s Wings—a flaxen young girl standing next to the priest. I knew that young women are allowed to be alter servers now, and have been for quite some time, but this is my first time seeing one in action. While I am no longer Catholic, I feel momentarily connected to the church through this little girl. After all, I was once that age, coming here to pray the wrong way.

She stands nervously next to the priest in her baggy, red and white vestment. I wonder how many young girls felt excluded, or not good enough, before she felt included. Seeing her stand shoulder to shoulder with the young boy on the altar should excite a feminist like me. It means progress, right? I close my eyes and try hard to birth some pleasure for my younger sisters and pride for my older ones for our many facets of progress, but I come up empty. It feels superficial, contrived, like Sarah Palin’s Vice Presidential nomination.

I am at a funeral for a man who died too young and too quickly. The spectrum of pain felt in the walls of this church is palpable. The priest comforts our quivering hearts by telling us my uncle is in heaven and none of us should feel sad because we will see him there shortly. He advises us to live for a time when we are with Michael and the Archangels in heaven. Prayer after prayer deflects, defers, and minimizes grief, stuffing the suffocating lump in our throats deeper and deeper within. All of this supposed consolation feels nonsensical. The girl standing on the altar symbolizing progress morphs into a living, breathing contradiction. She learns to control, to protect, and to exist outside of herself before she learns long division, and without the symbolic curled, stiff, lifeless bangs.

I take a few deep breaths while everyone else receives Communion, exhales fighting off the emotional suppression cast off the pulpit. As the mass comes to a close, I process behind my uncle’s casket to the song How Great Thou Art. I remember all the words but I can’t sing because the lump in my throat has traveled to my mouth triggering a hearty sob. I reach for my mom’s hand because she is also crying. I have not held my mother’s hand since I was a little girl, playing jump rope and four square in the nearby playground. Her hand is cold, boney and comforting. My uncle’s death gives me this moment with my mom, which is painfully beautiful. I observe my always stoic Aunt tearfully falling into people’s arms like an imploded building falls to the ground. That, too, is painfully beautiful. In this moment I feel impermanence of life and the myriad ways we fight against fear—we hairspray our beliefs to statues, infuse our future full of hope, and spray perfume to mask to avoid the present. However, hidden below the foreboding layer of fear is a beautiful, broken heart.

I no longer pretend pray, or run away from the cold, or have bangs to spray with Aqua Net. I allow the memories; the pain, the sadness, fear, and joy flow in and out of me constantly, without controlling, questioning, or masking them. I hold the delicate, sharp slices of my shattered heart in my hand and throw them in the air like confetti without piecing them back together or making them look pretty. I watch one piece return to the playground, another to the jungle gym, and others just fly away or fall straight down to the ground. Standing beyond the raspberry walls sitting in the muck of loss, I see beauty just below the surface and I feel grateful for the cuts in my hands and the pieces of my shattered heart exposed, flying away. I feel like I am finally doing something right in doing nothing. I am finally good enough not because I am good, but because I am enough.

- Alisa Guthrie was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania where Catholic nuns taught her more about patriarchy than about the Bible. She graduated from Moravian College with a major in Sociology and Women’s Studies. She currently lives in Florida where she is working on her first book.

Celestial Phenomena

Each year on the eleventh of August the earth splashes through a belt of fractured stones that whirls through our galaxy. I have read that on that one night of the year you can see a shower of meteorites colliding with our atmosphere and burning into dust as they tumble toward earth. You can stand in an ordinary backyard as heavenly pebbles rain down around you, winking into darkness before they touch the ground.

One year I noted the date and persuaded my sighted husband Dick to come outside with me on the porch. I wanted him to tell me what he saw, so I could taste the excitement of this phenomenon through his borrowed perception. After a few minutes of waiting he said he couldn’t see anything special. The city lights were too bright, he explained. It was strange to think that light generated by flimsy mortal beings could overpower the light of the heavens. Perhaps it would be like listening for the chirp of a sparrow above the blaring music at a bar. It seemed I might never experience the meteor shower, even by proxy.

My yearning to experience celestial phenomena traces back to one of my earliest memories. When I was four years old our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Wilson, helped me balance on the top rail of the fence between our yards. “Now,” she said grandly, as I perched at that great height, “if you reached up you could touch the moon!”

I stretched on tiptoe and searched eagerly above my head, but all I found was empty air. Grownups often lifted me up to show me things that were beyond my normal reach–the living-room ceiling, the star at the top of the Christmas tree, an icicle hanging from the rain gutter–but this time there was nothing. Mrs. Wilson said she was only teasing; the moon was very far away. I began to understand that certain things could be seen with the eyes but were forever beyond the reach of my hands.

The sun was far away too, but it was directly accessible. It poured its heat through the front windows in the morning and the kitchen windows by late afternoon. At midday it blazed directly overhead. It shone a thin, welcome warmth on the chill days of January, and burned my nose even on a cloudy day in July.

Experience taught me a lot about the sun, but the stars, the moon, and the planets remained abstractions. At school I pored over diagrams made with raised lines on paper and learned the shapes of Orion’s belt and Cassiopeia’s chair. I read about nebulae and supernovas. In a strange way their remoteness made sense to me. Astronomy was no more unfathomable than that ubiquitous phenomenon known as color that mysteriously tinged every aspect of life. Color, like the universe, was a vast impalpable dimension. Whether I perceived it or not color was real, so why not stars and galaxies?

As a wife and mother, spending summers in the mountains of central Mexico, the wonders of the sky drew a little bit nearer. In San Miguel de Allende human-made lights are few and scattered at night. Sometimes Dick would call our daughter Janna to the flat roof of our rented house and show her the full moon or the Big Dipper. I hurried after them and listened hungrily as they tried to translate their vision into words. The moon I imagined as a warm round stone, big enough to fit snugly into my cupped hands. The stars were hovering dots of heat, so many that their complex patterns were hard to decipher.

In the summer of 1991, when Janna was seven, Mexico looked forward to a total eclipse of the sun. The news crackled with excitement and warnings. Don’t look directly at the eclipse, the public was told again and again. The light can burn up your retinas. Suddenly the threat of blindness loomed over the entire nation. I wondered if people studied me as I passed in the street with my long white cane. Did they think I had ignored advice and gazed at some eye-searing eclipse in el norte? Maybe they told themselves to stay indoors and skip the whole event, lest they should end up like me.

For a small fee Pan Bimbo, Mexico’s biggest commercial bread company, promised safety. At any grocery store you could buy a shoebox-like contraption with a peephole at one end and a mirror at the other. You were supposed to peer into the box and see the eclipse as a reflection. It would be a long step away from the real thing, but safety came first.

We bought a couple of Bimbo boxes and kept them on hand on the kitchen counter. I hoped that Dick and Janna would enjoy the eclipse, but I didn’t understand all the hype. What could be the difference between an eclipse and the sun disappearing behind a cloud?

On the morning of the eclipse Janna’s summer day-camp sent the children home early. She sat in our sunny patio, organizing races with the garden snails, while I worked at my desk. It was a little past noon when Dick gave a shout. “It’s starting!” he cried. “Oh my God! It’s incredible!”

I stepped out into the patio. Only the faintest trace of the sun’s warmth was left, and within moments even that was gone. The air grew chill and strangely quiet, as if some compelling life force had been siphoned away. The swallows that usually filled the sky at twilight swooped and twittered overhead, their daily timepiece unsprung. The crickets under the bougainvillea gave a few tentative scrapes, then broke into their full evening recital. And from every street in the town came a cacophony of barking dogs.

“Wow!” Janna kept exclaiming. “Wow! It’s so cool! I didn’t know it was going to be like this!”

Bimbo boxes forgotten, we clambered up the twisting stairway to the roof, as close to the sky as our human bodies could carry us. Dick said the sun looked like a doughnut–no, it was thinner than that, much much thinner, it was a ring, and in the middle hung a dark spot, the moon, but not a moon he’d ever seen before, it was an emptiness, a not-being. And around the moon that ring, the outline of what the sun ought to be. I thought of the ring the way I thought of the auras some people claim to see over the heads of their friends–a drifting substance light as a fine silk scarf. In the center the moon was a cold vacancy, shapeless and deep.

In less than an hour a bit of sun-warmth slid down to us, and the air seemed to lighten in welcome. The swallows went back to wherever they spent their daytime hours, and the crickets fell silent. The dogs gave a few last yips and were still. We climbed down from the roof into our sunny patio, the early afternoon world fully restored.

Later we trekked up the hill to a friend’s house for a post-eclipse celebration. To my own delight, I found I could take an active part in the recap, describing all the evidence of strangeness that I had perceived. I fully agreed with the others that the eclipse had been a spectacular experience. Most had taken photographs. Janna sat on a bench and made a series of sketches to capture what she had seen. No one, as far as I could tell, had viewed the eclipse through a peephole, and everyone’s retinas seemed intact.

The eclipse was a sensory medley–the sudden chill, the sound of the animals, and for most the sight of the moon and its mystic aura. Yet the event possessed a magic that surpassed description. “Awesome!” people called it. “Utterly amazing!” “Like nothing I ever could have imagined!” And to think I had asked how it would be any different from a passing cloud!

In the days that followed I thought a lot about the crickets. How did they know that the sun had disappeared? The dogs might have looked up and seen the change. I could imagine the swallows noticing strange goings-on above them; after all, the sky was their element. But the crickets hid deep in the tangled shade of the bougainvillea, or crouched in the hollow places under stones. Even on a sunny day they lived in cool darkness. What difference did they perceive?

Maybe the sudden drop in temperature woke them from their silence. But suppose it was something more. The ancient Greeks wrote about the music of the spheres, a faraway harmony sung by the stars and planets as they coursed through space. Might some celestial hum reach the earth at registers beyond human hearing, but within the range of dogs and birds and even insects?

Or perhaps the eclipse caused a shift in the earth’s magnetic field. Maybe the animals were stirred by some deep, visceral tug. Did we feel it too, dimly, far below consciousness? Did that nameless pull add to our sense of wonder?

The summer was over, and we were heading back to Chicago. I realized suddenly that I hadn’t paid attention to the calendar. The eleventh of August had slipped away. In this unlighted country I could have called Dick and Janna up to the roof and shared the delights of the meteor shower at last. I had forgotten all about it, and now it was too late. What surprises might the shower bring — tiny sizzles in the air? Little dots of heat upon my skin? A pitted pebble tumbling to the roof at my feet? Next summer, I promised myself, I’ll remember. Next chance I get, I’m going to find out.

We were packing to leave San Miguel when Janna asked me suddenly, “What would happen if everybody in the world was blind?”

“You mean,” I said, “if everybody went blind all of a sudden, like from staring at an eclipse for too long?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Nobody’d know how to do anything. It’d be totally scary.” She was thoughtful for a moment before she added, “If everybody was born blind, though, that’d be okay. They wouldn’t know any different, so they wouldn’t worry about it.”

As we carried clothes down from the line on the roof we imagined aloud a world in which sight was unknown. Vehicles would run on tracks, like trains and trolleys. Airplanes pilots would navigate using exquisitely precise radio communication. Doctors would read X-rays on a screen with minute tactile points activated to show the form and position of an injury.

“I guess people wouldn’t figure out much about astronomy,” I said. “They wouldn’t know about the moon and the stars.”

“Sure they would!” Janna exclaimed. “They’d want to know what’s over their heads and they’d come up with ways to find out.”

Perhaps one morning, in that hypothetical world, a woman finds a large, rough stone lying on her roof beside the clothesline. The sun has barely risen but the stone is hot to her touch. Where did it come from? And perhaps, on another day, the temperature suddenly plummets, the swallows chatter and the dogs begin to howl. The greatest minds in the land would ponder what had happened. They would ask questions, and somehow, over time, answers would be found.

- In 1978 Deborah Kent published her first young-adult novel, Belonging, which launched her on a thirty-year career as a writer of books for young readers. Now she is exploring other forms of writing, particularly the personal essay. Her most recent book is The Tragedy of the Japanese American Internment, published by Enslow in 2008.

Of all the Things I Could Try on for Size…

The day after Christmas, 2007, C, a guy I barely knew, asked me to marry him, and I said yes. As he slipped the ring on my finger and the restaurant burst into applause, we kissed, trying desperately to keep from laughing.

“We are such bitches,” I hissed as we left holding hands.

He just grinned.

Outside, I gave the ring back and said, “That was fun. We should do it again sometime.”

* * *

At the time of the “engagement,” I’d known C a few months. We’d met at a party the previous summer. As he tells it, the first time he saw me I was standing in the host’s kitchen reciting a poem for some Russian kid we never saw again. Hand a young, hungry poet a glass of wine and she’ll perform anything you like. There was some deep talking about writing and music on the back porch, as it often goes when the few intelligent and/or sober individuals find each other.

We crossed paths at a couple costume parties that fall (Halloween and a Cosby Sweater party), but after he moved to Brooklyn in November (as most of Boston eventually does), we maintained a pen-pal relationship, trading work and ideas, eventually sharing more personal details about the inspirations behind it all. Letter writing has always been my preferred way of getting to know someone. The ability to edit and the distance from the individual I am writing to keep me from giving in to hormones and impulse and doing something I’ll later wish I hadn’t. E-mails are safer for me to exchange than drinks.

Fast forward to December twenty-sixth. Our original plan had been dinner, but several weeks prior, he’d sent an e-mail saying, “I have an idea that maybe you’d be willing to try. We could dress up nice and go to a fancy restaurant, and just before dessert, I’ll get on my knees and propose to you. We’ll get the whole restaurant into the act, and then we’ll eat free desserts, and generally be adored. What do you say?”

Hm. I didn’t know how to take that. I wasn’t ready to own up to how much I looked forward to hearing from him every day (much less the possibility of a mutual attraction—I feared he was even more of a lone wolf than I), so I said, “Hey, performance art, I like it.”

So I found myself in a hookah bar on first avenue between eleventh and twelfth with my pen-pal going over the details of our—I mean, our characters’—imaginary relationship. “He” was a CPA, “I” sold ad space in new media. In that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder what I was doing there. This was the first time we’d ever gone out alone, and here we were, about to get engaged.

I proudly take credit for our “how we met” story. We mistook each other for the respective blind dates we were supposed to be meeting. A similar situation had happened to me in real life, and months later, I’d found myself wishing I’d gone with Mr. Not-My-Date. This was my chance.

Most of the other stuff, C came up with: We’d been together two years. We didn’t live together, but I would soon be leaving Cambridge to move into his one-bedroom in Brooklyn.

“Do we have a cat?” I asked.

“No, but we’re getting one.”

I asked if we could name it Nietzsche or something equally pretentious. He’d realized he wanted to marry me on an April trip to some bed-and-breakfast in the Berkshires. He’d awakened early one morning, wanting to watch the sunrise—I’d been game, thus cementing his vision of me as his adventurous fellow explorer. However, he’d waited to ask for my father’s permission over Christmas. We did not discuss why.

C was a Sagittarius like me (independent types not exactly known for their house-with-a-yard tendencies) and, at twenty-eight, on the other side of the twenty-something spectrum. He claimed not to believe in monogamy, yet had planned out this whole elaborate charade. And I was going along with it.

I’d recently been struggling with the realization that I’d reached the age my mother was when she and my father got engaged, during the winter vacation of her senior year at Fairfield. Here I was, a senior at Emerson, unable to stay more than a few months with someone. This haunted me. My sister was the normal child. I was the promiscuous mad scientist daughter with the sharp tongue, and my parents wholly accepted me as such. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they wanted something different for me. I think they’d imagined me happier, healthier, in love with someone deserving.

My father, as the legend goes, proposed in the car—in a Burger King parking lot. I guess their relationship was the kind of comfortable that meant such a special moment was only enhanced by a Whopper and fries. For me, grade-D meat and processed cheese in the car would be a deal breaker. I’d definitely raise an eyebrow if a lover brought me to Taco Bell (at least in the wooing stage). Mass-produced guacamole? No thanks. I don’t consider myself high-maintenance, just a fan of (subtle yet essential) flavor—and good presentation.

But go figure, my elaborate marriage proposal was a joke. My mom had the love, I had the show. But I did manage to get engaged over winter break my senior year, even if it was, on the surface, just to get a reaction.

I’ll admit, though, I don’t get it. You take two loose ends, and you put them in a softly lit restaurant with wine and chocolate and a stupid little jewelry box. Hand the waitress a camera and ask her to capture it on film, these two Sagittarians in a big city trying to look like they know how to act in a situation they believe is exclusive only to “normal” people. You know, normal people…

He gets on one knee and reads a poem. She blushes and tries to forget that everyone is watching as she feigns shock. Should she stall or just say Yes already? She’s afraid her eyes are going to tear up for real—Why? She blanks out as he stands to kiss her (Why is she so touched he thought to buy a ring guard? How did he remember how small her hands are?), and then she says, “I thought we were going to wait until after we got the cat.”

The restaurant claps. The waitress cries.

* * *

Originally, I’d planned to write the fake proposal story as fiction. One scene I had planned was the moment the girl realized she was in love.

“Do you propose to all your female friends?” she would demand.

The guy would then reply, “Don’t be ridiculous. Only some of them.”

“But that was our thing!” she would cry, something like hunger in her eyes.

Or I imagined her asking him, “How come you never propose to me anymore?”

I don’t know why I assumed the female should be the one to get hurt in the arrangement. Perhaps that shows something about my sexual politics. Or maybe it’s a self-esteem thing. Did I expect to always be left? Violin hips and quick feet, that’s what I’d felt like all through college, a collection of girl-parts and a mind that wasn’t sure what to do with them. I was prone to fits of feeling dangerous—to myself, to others. Was that why I tended to choose freewheeling types with faster feet than mine?

A lot of people preach about self-love. While I think there is definitely something to the notion that you need to love yourself in order to love someone else, it’s the “know thyself” bit that many people seem to wrestle with. Who are we? What do we want? Are we sure? Do our desires and our needs correspond to our images of ourselves?

* * *

In what would have been the future, this act would have become a regular thing, a curious pastime unique to a platonic relationship. Every time Chris and I were in the same city, we’d choose a new restaurant, or eventually something entirely different: an ice-skating rink or a pet shop, a museum. We’d do it in Times Square, just to see if anyone would even stop to watch. Maybe to shake it up, I’d say, No, sometime, or maybe I’d propose to him to show we were a modern pretend-couple.

In the here and now, we don’t talk much about getting engaged anymore. To friends, we cite that first fake proposal as our “first date.” When he kissed me that night, I forgot we were supposed to be in character. I was light-headed for days after, wondering whether I was crazy for thinking there might be something there. I waited a few days for him to set the record straight. No, I wasn’t crazy, just a bit oblivious.

By now, miles have been traveled, hundreds of pages written, old haunts re-explored together. Sometimes as we’re planning our next visit, he’ll say, “I really need to propose to you again soon.” I’ll ask if we should stick with the old characters or make up new ones. And then we forget about it again.

I hate writing about relationships in the present tense. Things last as long as they last; they end when they end. One day I will read this and swallow the ache to fill in the parts of this story I did not know yet. Or maybe I’ll just write the whole story somewhere else and let this piece be what it is.

Little I’d wished for has taken place, not the “girl goes to college and meets nice boy who takes the pain away” scenario, or the “girl swears off boys altogether and pens bestseller” fantasy, not even the “girl-and-boy vagabonds make documentary about marriage proposal performance art” thing. I’d imagined I’d turn this into a fiction, a good story with a neat beginning-middle-end set up. My language would be confident as it clipped along, sure of what was in store.

But what do you know? The charade turned into reality. I found myself cast as one of the characters with no author to tell me what to do. A wrench had been thrown into the plot, and I had to accept that this story was only just beginning, that I couldn’t step back and pin it down or conveniently pack it into a structure yet. I didn’t want to. I was only starting to scratch the surface of C’s real-life character, and, yeah, some things I didn’t know about the corresponding version of myself intrigued me too. I was digging the revelation process.

So I had to wonder if I could get away with blaming the planets for this one. What was going on with Sagittarius, man? Just when I was getting used to this female bachelor thing, Venus had to reach for that ticket stub of a heart I’d been carrying around, and then Saturn and Jupiter got in on it, then Mercury…fuck Mercury.

Maybe it was fate or maybe just that I’d finally realized I was better off making my own damn plans rather than letting alcohol and bravado do the talking. Either way, it was time for a change. I was just surprised. Hell, I still am.

- Jessica Del Balzo is a recent graduate of Emerson College and for now she kisses ass in PR to make rent.

Condolences, You’re Having a Baby

I’d never be able to have my friend Tracie baby-sit. In fact, I figured she’d probably never visit my house once my daughter was born. But I never thought she’d get hives because of my baby shower, especially since the “shower” was more like a co-ed drunken bash where I was everyone’s designated driver. Her reaction wasn’t an allergy to peanuts or shellfish or too much to drink. No, what did her in is the very notion that one of her friends—someone as level-headed as she is about womanhood and autonomy—is having a child. She had to take Benadryl and lie down.

She’d given me a Winnie the Pooh bath set and stuffed toy and proudly proclaimed as I opened the gift, “Every kid should have a Pooh. I tried to find Winnie the Pooh in Latin, but couldn’t and I’m not giving you my copy.” Perhaps this should have shocked me. I’ve known Tracie for three years. She has had so many men, she reminds me of a glamorous nineteen forties woman in a long black Cadillac trolling the hillside in search of her next conquest. She laughs at people with children.

It wasn’t until after the shower was over, after my husband and I had piled mountains of gifts into our car, that she said, “I wanted to get you a sympathy card. I knew you’d get the joke, but didn’t know if any one else would.”

I pondered what a card like this might say: Hey, time to celebrate! Life as you know it is over!

Or Your identity is gone forever—You’re a MOM!

Maybe Condolences. You’re having a baby.

This is how I feel ninety-five percent of the time, so I wonder why Hallmark hasn’t cornered the market on this sentiment. At least so Tracie could have given me a token of how she really feels about my pregnancy.

I’ve never been a woman who liked playing with baby dolls. I was given a Cabbage Patch Kid as a child that I still own, but I never changed his diapers. Poor Fitz just sits atop my bookcase in my writing room, a thin layer of dust covering his bald head. He’s a first edition, something I’m very proud of, and that is the reason why I still have him. Not because of fond baby doll bonding moments (although he did see me through the chicken pox), not because I’m emotionally attached. And not because I want to give him to my own daughter. Hopefully, she’ll be like me and want to play with He-Man action figures.

My sisters, though, loved dolls and everything pink. They made pretend crying noises for their babies, pushed them in strollers, picked out frilly outfits, changed imaginary poopy diapers. It seems that since the ages of three my sisters have known they would be mothers, and for the last nine years they have been. I never saw myself as a mom. In fact, I’m eight and a half months pregnant and still don’t see myself as a mother. My daughter’s room is finished, she has been given two of everything, her name is ready, her feet dig into my ribs, and I still don’t feel like a mother.

When I found out I was pregnant there were no string quartets, no violins, no holy music from on high with a light shining down to bless me with the gift of mother-to-be-ness. Instead, when I went in to see the doctor because of a pain so bad on my left side I thought I had a cyst the size of a grapefruit, and the nurse told me I was pregnant, I didn’t believe her. I wanted her to take the blood test again. When she refused and told me I’d have to have an ultrasound that day, I burst into tears. I was crying so badly, she brought my husband into the exam room. When he saw me the first thing he thought was Cancer not Baby. “You’re so pale,” he said, “Are you going to faint?”

During the ultrasound my doctor confirmed that the pregnancy was not ectopic and we could expect a healthy child the following spring. The following spring, I thought to myself, my life will be over.

This is not melodrama: since I learned about childbirth—by watching a video in ninth grade Health class of a woman giving birth—I’ve been afraid of it. I think it’s going to kill me. I’ll be one of those freak women who hemorrhage or die of a heart murmur or coronary embolism just as my child is springing forth from my womb. I’m serious. My entire life I’ve been afraid this will happen.

Now, I’m more afraid that it won’t.

Four years ago I had surgery. The doctor removed lesions from the ligaments on my uterus, ovaries, and rectum. After the surgery he showed me photographs of my internal organs. Pointing at my ovaries he said, “Just look at all those healthy eggs. I don’t see any reason why you and your husband can’t start a family now.”

I certainly saw reasons. Dozens. I was 27. Married less than six months. I liked that it was just my husband and I. We could travel across the country to visit friends and family, we could live in a cramped apartment, we could spend money on DVDs, restaurants and books. We could save up and go to Italy for a vacation, maybe even to live.

So my doctor prescribed a new birth control pill and life went on as usual.

The real reason I’m pregnant is because of my cat, ZuZu. She’s a little stray I found in a parking lot, huddled under a car hiding from an icy rain. The day before I found her, I’d seen a dog hit by a truck just outside of my apartment. The truck didn’t even stop and the little white dog rolled and rolled into the gutter and then remained still. Three minutes later its owner found it, ran into the road, picked it up and bundled it into her car. I like to think the dog survived. But I know it didn’t.

So when I saw a small white cat under a car, I took it as a sign that I should adopt her. We named her ZuZu from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life because she had a cold and sneezed for the first two weeks we owned her. Although we had two cats already, for some reason I thought ZuZu was mine. She would be my comfort, my baby. I never thought she’d be the reason I’d have a real baby.

Because she wasn’t a kitten when we found her, ZuZu’s a bit feral and likes to scratch. Last summer she swatted me on the side of my right hand—my writing hand, the hand I use so much I forget I have a left—and the wound never healed. I went to the dermatologist who conducted lab tests on the wound and prescribed an antibiotic just in case it was infected. I was to take the pill for fourteen days and stay out of direct sunlight.

Nowhere on the bottle of antibiotics was it printed May cause birth control pills to be ineffective or Do not consume with alcohol because this may cause you to get pregnant, idiot. So my husband and I left for a romantic, drunken vacation in Savannah, Georgia. This was the first real vacation we’d taken in three years of marriage. In the Savannah pictures the dark pink wound can be made out just below my pinkie finger, especially in the photo of me at Churchill’s Pub, downing my second pint of Guinness.

Once we were back from our trip, the dermatologist’s lab results confirmed there was no infection and I could stop taking the antibiotics. I’d have to put a special salve on my wound twice a day. It would take five weeks for the wound to heal. By then—because of ZuZu, and Savannah, and Guinness—I was three weeks pregnant.

ZuZu and I have reconciled. She follows me around the house, squeaking at me, crying when I leave a room. Because she’s so small, she’s the only one of our three cats I cat pick up and snuggle, the only one that can sit on my lap and not put my legs to sleep. I don’t blame her for this pregnancy as much as I do my body. And my stupid brain is at fault too. It didn’t know instinctively that antibiotics and birth control pills don’t mix. Why, in seven years of higher education, did I not know this? Why didn’t anyone in ninth grade Health class tell me this? That horrific birthing video is burned on my brain, so I’m sure I would’ve remembered not to make myself a birth control, antibiotic, Guinness cocktail if I’d ever been told it would land me in the motherhood club.

Since my belly has grown—along with my feet and my ass—perfect strangers approach me in public and ask, “When are you due? Boy or girl?” and they make statements like, “How exciting.” These are people who, if I weren’t pregnant, would walk right by me, perhaps even into me, and never think twice. I want to ask them what is so exciting about eighteen hours of labor, or about the two-week-long period I’m supposed to get after the birth. Or the inability to sleep for the rest of my life.

This morning in bed I turned to my husband and said, “We’ve only got three weeks left of just me and you,” and burst into tears. I’m selfish. I crave his attention and when I don’t get it, I stomp my feet and demand it. A baby will force me to grow up, to quit all of my self-indulgences. I’m not ready for this.

My husband is more level-headed than I. “Don’t you think we’ll still be us? Just us plus one?”

I couldn’t respond. If I said yes then I was just being overly emotional, anxious about the “new path” my life is taking. If I said no I was a heartless bitch, not fit for motherhood.

I stared at the ceiling of our bedroom as he coaxed me and told me how much he loved me and the little girl we’re going to have. How he’ll love me even more because I wasn’t just his wife now, but the mother of his child.

As if being his wife was never enough.

Don’t get me wrong. There are days I’m so proud to be the mother of his child that I cry tears of joy. There are days when I think of him holding her, teaching her to play the guitar, reading to her, that I get choked on tears. These are rarities, hormone driven. And in these fantasies, I’m never around. I don’t see myself teaching her much of anything; I don’t imagine mother-daughter teas, taking her to buy a training bra, listening to her heartbreaks. These are annoyances I barely survived in my own girlhood, I don’t want them rehashed.

Instead, what I see for my future is a huge wall. An enormous wall of old smooth gray stone and chipped mortar built up in front of the life-path I’ve so meticulously created for myself. It’s so high, I can’t see around or above it. It completely blocks the path I’ve set for myself—writer, traveler. I’ve finally finished a manuscript of writing I’m happy with; I’m getting published regularly and don’t feel ashamed to call myself a writer anymore. I’d just begun to think that in a few years I’d finally travel to Italy, to France. Now this path is gone. I have no control over what is going to happen. Maybe I never did, but the thought that I did always comforted me.

Instead, what I see scribbled on that wall is a message in Pepto-pink spray paint. It reads Condolences. You’re having a baby.

Just as Tracie was taking Benadryl at my baby shower, another one of my close friends was coming to terms with the fact that her newlywed husband doesn’t want children. This friend has always imagined her life with a child—she’s saved toys and clothes for a little girl since she was small. She has boxes packed and ready to be opened just as soon as she can. But these boxes will remain sealed, she’s learned, unless she wants to give these things away to children that are not her own.

She says, “My husband and I don’t talk to each other because we’re just talking around the child we won’t have.”

I’m angry that her husband has ruined her hopes, that he’s created for her a wall along the life-path she’s set for herself. I tell her she can spoil my daughter like she would spoil her own. And I know that this is a cheap substitute for her loss. Just as I know that what I’ll be gaining in a few weeks, that thing I’ve been dreading since I could remember, pales in comparison to the void she will feel for the rest of her life.

I think of this little person inside of me and how selfish I’ve become. How selfish to resent her before I’ve even given myself the chance to love her. Or her to love me. How selfish to think that I will be a bad mother just because I’d like to take Benadryl and wake up from my stupor without a baby. How foolish.

My husband is wrong about still being myself after my daughter is born. I won’t be me any longer, nor will she ever know who I was before she came along. For that, I’m grateful. I want her to know me only as the mother who wanted her. Wanted her for so long that I fought my body and my mind just to have her. I hope this lie is enough to sustain me for the rest of my life. And I know—from somewhere ethereal, dare I say maternal—that it will be. It has to be. It has to be enough for me to tear down the wall I’ve put in my path, and instead line the way for her and me with the smooth gray stones.

- J.W. Young has been published recently in Best of the Web 2008, Memoir, and, as well as 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers (Random House).

Failed Secrets

There is no one to whom I can tell this story, Mami. It’s sealed tight, cauterized with thick keloid skin, smooth and impenetrable. So, I tell it, filling in all the blanks, going back to the brief, blessed time when love, trust and safety is the kind embrace of a doting father. But he dies when you are seven, your padre, your saint. And she—beautiful, distracted, who enjoys the company of men more than motherhood—offers no comfort. She remarries quickly.

The potent male likes you, little stick-skinny girl with expressive eyes and vulnerable lips. Was it one of her lovers or a stepfather who violated your core, shattering your belief in love? Did she accuse you of baiting him?

You get skinnier and there’s a campaign initiated to fatten you up; a different type of bean every day, meat run through the grinder, thinner than the air surrounding you. At one point, you are forced to drink fresh calf’s blood to fortify your own, your deep-socketed eyes and jutting cheekbones incriminates them. Then your baby sister’s born colicky, just in time. You can go off to school, and mother doesn’t care that your socks are falling around your ankles and your shoes aren’t brightly polished. She’s just glad you are out of the house so she can put that child down and sleep (you carry the baby every chance you get, soothing her with old songs you remember from Papi; it doesn’t help though it calms you).

You excel in school, higher scores every year; you even win a prize for recitation of a patriot’s nationalist lyric. Some popular girls adopt you, their skinny but almost pretty friend. Many of them plan purposeful lives, university studies. It’s 1943; in Cuba women now can be professionals. You dream of being a doctor; it makes sense. Your grandfather studied medicine (until he was disowned by his family for slumming with la puta negra—dark hussy); your father tried to become a pharmacist. You decide to ask for your patrimony; Grandfather left money, properties.

It goes something like this. One day after school, you approach your mother, who is sitting on the wide front porch in the afternoon breeze.

I want to have my share. I want to go to university, to study medicine.

Did she laugh? Did she pause before she crushed your dream to bits under her stacked heel? Did she turn to her lover and comment on the wastefulness of educating girls?

Was this betrayal worse than the first?

You decide to get away; it takes some doing—girls don’t leave the house unless they’re married. But by then another baby sister and your oldest sister’s children crowd the house. Nineteen, unmarried, you go to live with the eccentric maiden aunt. After all, everyone expects you to follow suit. You work in your father’s family’s pharmacy, mixing tonics, giving injections. You are in heaven all day, until evening when you return to a bare room, bed bug-ridden mattress, peephole reopened every night by the neighbor pervert. In a nightmare, you see yourself tubercular, like your aunt coughing in the next room, living in squalor even while there is means to avoid it, you almost understand the pride and think you can learn to embrace it but in the morning you awake to blood-covered sheets and oozing scabs all over.

You decide to get away again, this time to leave completely. The first leaving was easy, just across the city and without scandal. This time you take a plane to live with a school chum who’s gone to el norte. She lives in a boarding house run by a Spanish matron who has seven sons who need wives, willing to marry them off to Cuban sluts since they are neither handsome nor skilled. You are 22, undereducated but not ignorant, single, speak no English, and have never been anywhere outside of Havana but your passport is a door you intend to step through. The plane lands in Miami; you board a bus to New Jersey and hope Elsa will be there when you arrive. She is and you are finally safe in this new life.

This fight might be difficult at times, your tongue thickens at every attempt in the new brutish language, but it is easier than being back on the island. You get by by taking shitty jobs in factories surrounded by unintelligible Polish and Italian ladies sewing dainties for years, but every night you can go to the movies and listen over and over to the dialogue, deciphering the romance of America. And every night you can go to your own apartment, not a home but your own room, sleep in a clean bed with clean sheets. No peeping toms and no immediate danger.

You order your own life without regard to what others think—those others are left far behind, across the ocean. No one sees what you do or don’t do. If you take English classes at night, go to church everyday, no one will ridicule you. You are expert at economizing, save all your pennies but things are difficult in Cuba and you start to send money, generously acknowledged by your sisters. You feel guilty, not knowing exactly why, but you learn to accept your independence. You learn to be proud of your strength built on such a scrawny frame that shakes sometimes, knocking your no-longer skinny knees together.

You didn’t have to tell me your secrets, you see. They betrayed themselves over the years anyway. But tell me, Mami, what did I miss?

-Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés was born in New Jersey to Cuban parents, and educated in Miami and in New York. These facts contribute in large part to the themes she treats as well as the language she uses. She enjoys writing fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry. Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles, a collection of short stories, will be published by Ig Publishers in May 2009.

The Breathing Place

We’re stuck. Again. In the Kalahari Desert. No one wants to get out and push after the incident with the hitchhiking snake the other day, especially as the sun slides into the sand and the first bats of the night flit across the beam from our one remaining headlight.

“Shit!” Paul says as he rips off his wide-brimmed leather hat, rakes his fingers through his grimy curls, then plops the hat back on.

The Bitch, our topless former military Land Rover, whines in her lowest of eight gears. Moyo, Paul’s assistant, hops out to see how deep we’re buried.

“Not good, Paul,” he calls out.

Paul, our brawny guide, is cranky. Maybe he stayed up too late drinking with his buddy last night in Ghanzi, where we stopped to re-provision. Or maybe he’s tired of us—six Alaskans who’ve been under his skin for the past 12 days.

Shivering, I slip on my fleece shirt as the Kalahari begins its nightly slide from sizzling to freezing. We are headed to the sacred ground of Tsodillo Hills in northern Botswana, where the Bushmen believe all life began and the spirits of the dead return. There, on cliffs and in crevices, the ancestors painted stories whose meanings have been lost. According to ancient protocol visitors must approach the Hills with respect and reverence for the ancestors and shed no animal blood. So far, we’ve encountered no other travelers on the way to this U.N. World Heritage Site.

Paul jumps out and circles the truck.

“Shit,” he repeats, sliding back into his seat.

“Everyone out but you.” He jams his thumb back toward me.

Lacking the coordination to leap back onto a moving vehicle, I don’t have to push. A few months ago, a strange virus attacked my inner ear and wiped out my balance. Since then, after months of physical therapy, I still walk like a drunk.

The Bitch is self-contained and fully loaded: fuel and water strapped to her belly, boxes of wine beneath our seats, food in the rear, sleeping bags, tents, and the rest of our personal gear in a trailer we’re towing behind us.

“Ok, dig out the wheels, and everyone line up in the back to push.”

Moyo digs with our toilet shovel as the others scoop sand with their hands and feet. While digging ourselves out of another sand bog a few days ago, a snake slithered up the wheel well. Moyo yelled, “snake,” and we scattered like cockroaches. Paul, who had already earned our respect as a naturalist, elevated his status a few more notches by coaxing the puff adder onto a stick and gently placing it back into the brush.

“That’s good. Now let’s try to budge her.” Paul orders.

The engine coughs a low groan and the truck moves a few inches then halts with a whine.

“Ok,” Paul yells. “Unhook the trailer. We’re too heavy.”

He crawls out and I follow him. The smooth sand, still bearing the sun’s warmth, caresses my toes. Paul drops the trailer jack onto a stump, then the men wiggle the ball loose from the tongue.

Back in the driver’s seat, Paul yells, “Ready?” Colleen, Maureen, Eric and Stratto take their positions at the Bitch’s flanks. Jim and Moyo each position themselves beside a front wheel. I stand back, beside the trailer. Paul revs the engine amidst a chorus of grunts. The Land Rover inches forward as Paul gives it more gas. She creeps. Sand flies as the vehicle picks up speed.

“Jump!” Paul yells.

One by one the dark shapes of my companions haul themselves onto the back bumper or side running boards of the bouncing Bitch. Her red winking taillights grow smaller and smaller until they finally pause in the distance.

Alone, I think what if they don’t come back? For the second time on the trip I imagine how I’d make some lion an easy, but bony meal. On our first morning in the Kalahari, while camped above Sunday Pan, I ventured into the bush, shovel in hand, to find a safe place to relieve myself. It took me awhile to locate the appropriate tree without thorns and check for snakes and scorpions. Then, heading back to camp everything looked the same—flat, sandy, with scrubby thorn bushes, not the familiar textured landscape of lakes, mountains, and tundra at home. My own tracks had disappeared as had the dry lake bed we overlooked at camp. The wind stole my yells and whistles as I hoisted myself into a tree to gain perspective, slicing my hands and face in the scramble against its upturned thorns. No sign of camp. Then, between gusts of wind a faint whistle drifted by, then louder. I saw a flash of white, and at the crest of a small rise, I spotted my husband Jim. Yelling and waving I shook myself out of the tree. Grabbing his arm and embracing him, I slobbered on his neck with tears of gratitude for being rescued, 20 years of marital grievances dissolved in an instant.

Jackal barks punctuate the low hum of night insects. Human voices rise and fall in the wind and draw closer. Footsteps scuff in the sand, and like a hyena, I rush to greet the returning pack. Paul kicks down the jack as we position ourselves around the overloaded trailer and begin the long shove back to the Land Rover.

Sweet mopane smoke drifts before the orange dots of the village fires come into view. Without clouds or moon, the stars shimmer across a bottomless black ocean. Paul downshifts as we pass livestock kraals and people silhouetted against firelight. How long had it been since visitors passed this way? According to our guidebook, these people newcomers to the area, a tribe that moved down from the north. The Bushman, the fist people of this land, have mostly moved on, forced out by dwindling resources and competition from newer settlers.

The narrow ruts we have been following give way to a tangle of vehicle tracks spreading out chaotically. Paul pauses, yanks on the emergency brake, opens his door, and steps onto the running board for a better look. Unsure of which way to go, he cuts the engine, climbs down, and walks beyond the range of the Bitch’s good eye.

A hot wind swirls the sand, blowing it into our faces. In a brief pause between gusts we hear the breathing: long throaty rasps, like a choir of asthmatics desperately sucking air in, grudgingly letting it out again.

“What is that?” Maureen asks as we scan the shadows.

“What the hell is that?” Eric echoes.

“Screech owls,” Paul calls back as he slides back behind the wheel. “They nest in the hills.”

But these breaths are not the sound of earthly owls.

Against the starlight lies the dark outline of uneven ridge. We’ve reached the first hill. Should we make an offering, say a prayer, stop and prepare ourselves? But what would we do? Paul seems in no mood for spiritual reckoning, so we carry on.

No signs mark this World Heritage site, just a sandy turn-around and a few clearings beneath the thick twisted limbs of old acacia trees. We pitch our canvas tents while Moyo builds a roaring fire. Stumbling by the light of our headlamps, we set up our portable camp table and begin preparing dinner. Colleen, Maureen, and I help Paul slice butternut squash and onions to place with the chicken in the immense cast iron pot. Stratto pops open the South African wine and fills our stained cups. With a few sips, my muscles begin to uncoil and my stomach grumbles. We have food, wine, a warm fire, a place to sleep, we are together. Paul jokes again, all is well.

The trip has been too fast, too much, and too many experiences bunched together. I long for a time to pause, write in my journal, sit still.

After dinner, I leave the warmth of the campfire and my companions and head for my tent. Stacking my smoky layers of clothing beside me, and sliding into my sleeping bag, my toes scrape against grit at the bottom. Fine, suspended sand whirls in the harsh white beam of my headlamp. Clicking off my headlamp and scratching my scalp, tiny pebbles lodge in my fingernails. Windblown sand filters through the mesh roof vent and drifts into my mouth.

Later, I awake sweating to a gust of wind that threatens to rip the tent from its tethers. Metal objects clang—pots and pans rolling in the wind, while trees click and moan. Will the force of the wind topple the tree above our tent and kill us? Is it just the wind or is the whole place trying to rid itself of us?

Then the air shifts, flashes orange, and crackles. Sparks flash across the roof vent above me.

“Fire!” I yell to the wind, yanking the zipper of the tent door and jumping outside in my bare feet.

Outside, our campfire has stolen new life from the wind, gobbling up our abandoned campstools and wood stashed for the breakfast fire. Now it licks at the leafless trees above it.

An imagined headline rushes through my head: Ashes of tourists found at the foot of sacred African hills! Then my mind shouts: Put it out! But with what? Can’t use the water. Doesn’t anyone else know? At that moment, Eric appears in his boxers wielding our folding toilet shovel.

“I smelled smoke,” he yells, heaping dirt on the flames.

Kicking sand on the flames with bare feet is too slow and dangerous, so I search for some sort of scoop, Beside the overturned table our long-handled metal cooking spoon lies in the dirt. Grabbing it, I join Eric in flinging sand upon the flames like dogs digging a hole. Then, as the dust mingles with the last puff of smoke, we stop and face each other. Sweat trickles down my belly and I realize I’m standing in my tee shirt and panties facing Eric, the person I know and like least in our group.

“Well, I guess we did it,” Eric says.

“Yeah. What about the others?”

“Too much wine.”

I nod. “Thanks, Eric.”

“Yeah. Good thing we woke up.”

“Right.” I set the filthy spoon against the table and turn toward my tent. I glance back at Eric. Smiling and waving, he looks different—boy-like and gentle.

In the cool dawn of the next morning our camp is nestled against the thigh of the Male Hill. The table sits upright with pots and pans stacked neatly on top and thick black coffee steaming in the French press. Grabbing my upside down metal cup on the table I wipe out grit with my shirt and fill it with coffee. Was last night a dream? Moyo, stirring the fire, smiles and points to the charred skeleton of a camp stool.

“Fire,” he says.

Slowly, the others empty their tents one by one, muttering in dull, hung-over tones. Over breakfast Eric and I tell our story. No one thanks us for appeasing the ancestors last night.

Above us, the men’s voices tumble down the rocks as the women climb the Male Hill together. Colleen leads, with me in the middle and Maureen close behind in case I fall or freeze in place. A normal reasonably fit person would scramble up these vibrantly striated boulders in not time. Unsure of my connection to the earth, I crawl up the surface, planting each sweaty palm and each shaky footstep with care. Determined to reach the top to see the landscape we have traveled for so many days, this is a test I must pass to prove I can recover my balance. Out on the exposed rock, the sun bakes my back and sweat drips down from beneath my hat band and into my eyes. A few breaths from freezing in place, I cannot stop thinking about falling.

Finally, relinquishing my pride, I beg, “Maureen, could you spot me here?”

“Sure.”

Maureen perches below me as I inch up the hill. Soon we reach a clump of acacia brush offering firm but prickly handholds near the top of the hill.

“Thanks for helping me,” I gasp as I feel the whisper of a breeze cooling my face.

“No problem,” Maureen replies.

Air rushes over the top of the hill, cooling the insect bites on my legs, raising bumps on my arms, causing me to shiver, from the breeze, from the effort, from the exhilaration of reaching the top. The sky, brushed with faint wisps of white, stretches out to meet the flat red plains below. Clumps of dusty green bushes scatter an utterly flat earth as far as our eyes can see. Behind us, out of sight, like the Female Hill, the Child, and the lonely first wife.

Now, we follow a path through a gap in the Female Hill, scrambling over rocks, descending to the sandy floor of a narrow valley, sprigs of lush green brushing against our calves, air thick with the scent of wet earth. Deeper into the valley, the walls open, the sky expands, and we reach a murky pool at the bottom of a wide, muddy depression undulating with hundreds of butterflies—turquoise, gold, white, brown—and wasps with iridescent green wings. Giggles pop out of our mouths, as Maureen whispers a long “ooohhh.” Jim clicks his shutter and a flicker of multi-colored wings erupts like a toss of confetti, then scatters around us, falling back to the earth to settle once more into a collective slurp of the damp ground. Each click of Jim’s camera renews the winged dance of the dizzying life swirling around us. Suddenly, a flock of quelea, tiny brown birds that fly as one like a school of fish, circle us, like a twittering cloud of dust, then vanish behind the rocks.

Paul motions us closer to him, stoops to the mud, and whispers the names of animals that have left their tracks near the dark water. As we band around him, faint murmurings of other voices spill from the rocks, crescendoing into two young men in shorts and broad-brimmed hats coming our way. The fluttering display repeats as they halt their steps in silence. Paul stands up, nods to the newcomers and leads off back to camp, leaving them to marvel at the stirring of so much life. Walking beside Jim, I list a bit to the left, correcting, steering straight, straying, correcting, and finally easing into a slow, lop-sided rhythm, soles of my feet thumping against the damp earth.

-Susan Pope, a lifelong Alaskan, explores wild places ranging from the woods behind her house, to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Kalahari Desert, and the dunes of Namibia.  She has published essays in Pilgrimage, Alaska Woman Magazine, and the upcoming anthology Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment.

Accepting Impermanence

Strapped to the woman’s back — head bobbing slightly to one side, peacefully dozing in the sun and the shade of the canyon, and the soft rush of water as it pours down the rocky creek bed — is a child. A child with dark eyes that round with wonder so often at the newness of the world, because she is actually seeing all of this for the first time. Eyes that still flutter to sleep so easily, because letting in all of this beauty is exhausting.

The woman and the child are alone in the canyon except for the canyon wren, which sends its call down from the high cliff walls, and for the small beings that rustle and rustle in the undergrowth. The woman does not know what exactly they are: chickadees, perhaps small rodents. Either way she likes the company. Her hiking boots crick on the sandy trail. She notices that she is much more careful with her footing now. The metal and canvas backpack creaks a little when the woman eases herself down long steps, or when the child shifts; her legs are beginning to hang lower over the sides of the pack.

The world greets these two in reds—the canyon, and greens—the creek banks thick with trees. It’s early autumn and the sun shines with a golden slant. It’s warm but the mornings have begun to promise coolness. The woman feels there is no possibility that the day could be any more perfect. She has this canyon and the sun; she has her child strapped to her own straight and strong body.

She and the child arrive at an overhang in the rock. The National Park Service has erected signs to announce its significance—they’ve named this place the “Deluge Shelter.” The signs inform the woman that archeologists believe early people passing through this canyon used this spot to get out of the rain. She knows how heavy rains can be in the desert, especially in late July when the heat builds up the storm clouds, when the dry air becomes heavy with moist expectation, and finally thunder cracks and rain pours forth. She is glad today is sunny.

The woman imagines arriving at this spot with her child with a different kind of knowledge. She knows that no matter how wet or cold she and the child get, a car with a heater is only an hour hike away. She knows a warm shower is only another hour of driving. But other women of another time would know something quite different. She wonders how the other women felt when they traversed these canyon trails, carrying their own children; whether the children felt dearer because death was more of a possibility.

The woman senses the cold finger of fear rise up and travel along her spine from lower back to the nape of her neck. She feels the now familiar tingle along the bottom of her jaw line. The sensation is new since the child.

She feels the child stirring now, swinging her legs which hang out of the backpack. So the woman takes off the pack, allowing the child to get down and totter around on the sandy trail. The canyon walls streaked with black desert varnish rise sheer above them.

Pictures painted on the red rock display themselves on the canyon wall. The Park Service has put up a barrier in hopes of keeping the pictures from being vandalized. A spiral sun, a man with a square body and triangle head, a square-bodied animal with curving horns—a big horn sheep. Why were these images important? The woman thinks of the pictures she draws for her own daughter. Already the child recognizes a spiral; the idea of circling back while expanding is sacred to the woman and she draws the shape on the child’s papers regularly. Soon the child will draw her own spirals. What did this square man represent? What about the sheep? The woman wants to trace the curve of the horns with her finger, but she respects the Park Service barrier. She understands the hope of permanence.

How long through history had women stood where she stands while their children tottered in the sand? How many hunkered under the overhang holding their children close to keep them dry? The Park signs say archeologists have found pottery and grinding tools here. The woman thinks of her and her daughter’s breakfast of oatmeal flavored with almonds and raisins. She sits down on a low stone, suddenly overwhelmed. In this moment she feels the tie binding her through the centuries to all the mothers who have inhabited this place. It is a strange and exhilarating pull; the grandmothers reaching through time, joining her to them.

What does the child feel? As usual she simply appears amazed to be in this bright and colorful moment. The woman realizes that all children have felt this way. But she has been a child herself, and is not a stranger to amazement. It is the terror of motherhood she wants to learn about.

A child pares you to essentials. It gets hungry, you feed it. It gets cold, you cover it. Each breath she takes reminds you of how much you have to miss if she is gone. But life has always done that and you’d forgotten. Each time you see the white path of the full moon in the lake water, or realize the aspen trunks appear chalky against the snow, or hear the far, sad cry of the passing cranes. You’ve always known how much there is to miss in this world. The terror is knowing how much you want to hold on to what cannot be held on to. How could you ever leave this river? This shaft of sunlight warming your sandaled feet? And this child with her dark hair plastered to one side of her face where she fell asleep?

Here in the canyon something has happened. Despite the closer presence of death, another woman performed mundane tasks here, grinding grain, finding food, waiting out a storm. Even after she dropped what she was doing to watch the heartbreaking beauty of her child, dancing in the golden autumn sunlight, knowing the moment was even more fleeting than the quick brush of colors in the aspen leaves before they fell for winter. Even after this, she was able to pick up her tools and keep living.

-Jamie Barber was born in rural northeastern Utah. She currently resides in central Pennsylvania where she is finishing up her MFA in creative nonfiction at Penn State University.