That which stands tall, that which frays

I have no exoskeleton. I have no bottom underneath. I remind myself of the helpers. Right on cue, one appears.

The man understands instantly that all is not well. He comes bearing a soothing voice and all manner of assistance. I was not expecting the bouquet but after the first smack of surprise, I realize it is just what I need.

The bouquet is not a professional floral arrangement. It’s Queen Ann’s Lace, those tiny blue flowers I don’t know the name of, dandelions plump and yellow. Best of all are sprigs of lavender. I fill a canning jar with water, snip the bottoms of everything and put the gift on my table, stems splaying at angles, others upright. I breathe in the grassy smells and especially the lavender.

Other helpers come because they are called, I go out to meet others. They arrive in the form of words or provisions. It’s alright, all of it. How many times, have I, in fact, been the helper? Too many times to count? Yes.

For days upon days, the flowers brighten and refuse to fade. Blooms I didn’t notice when the bouquet arrived unfurl and blossom. I know it won’t last forever, this flower show in the midst of it all. It went on longer than I thought it would. That’s important to mention.

Slowly, then quickly the inevitable transpires. Eventually it all ends up in the garbage. The memories carry me a little, until they don’t.

I make a phone call to the man who brought the kind eyes, the bouquet. I can’t expect him to read my mind even if he did do so that one time.

He is scattered, sorry I am not well, but his voice is too brusque for patience. When I mention the bouquet and gather my resources to ask for another, he finds this funny. You can’t depend on flowers! That is not what they are for! The idea of him keeping me supplied with bouquets strikes him as ludicrous. He’s still laughing when I say a hasty goodbye. Someone is at the door, I lie.

I realize that the man has empathy that flits on and off like a faulty wire.

I vent about it to the others. It amuses me. But I am still unwell.

Somebody suggests I learn to sit with anger, learn to tolerate the discomfort. This I cannot do.

It is winter, there are no flowers in the park even if I could justify picking them. The weeds nobody cares about are dead. There is no money for the florist even if I like what they have, which I don’t.

I rifle around for leftovers, anything to be put to use. A rainbow of construction paper, a stash of pipe cleaners, tissue paper, yarn. The YouTube videos are too crafty, too calculated. I am left with myself. I make my own damned bouquet, stick it in a proper vase, then tape some individual flowers, all misfits, to the walls.

He shows up some days or weeks later, everything blends together now. He brings wisdom he thinks I want and some books of advice. He means well.

What’s the matter, he finally asks, brows furrowed. He can’t figure this out. Nothing, I say.

From the archives:
Pegboard
Hospitality
Check Back With Me Later

Everywhere is sacred but if it’s not there’s always someplace else

Before you drop everything for the romance of the Pacific Crest Trail. Here’s a book about dirt and stink and calloused skin, of shriveled, freeze-dried food, of snow in summer, and things held dear dropped over steep ravines.

Tornados ravage the flatlands, turning love to dust but catch yourself and hold on tight before getting smug about it because the undulating hills you live on has folks so crammed up against each other that sickness gets passed among you faster than a game of telephone. 

Earthquakes or floods, droughts or out in the middle of nowhere and nobody helps, or stuck in a city and still nobody helps. 

There’s so many ways of staying where you are but the choice to leave could be so good that everybody who knows you says you’re a different person in a good way, not that they didn’t like you before. Or it could be shoes that refuse to fit and a tail between your legs. The roots you lay down are a sad sack sorry life but just as easy it could be brick by brick reaching all the way to heaven. 

Before you even think of moving to central New York where an intricate meandering fixer upper enough for a family of twenty awaits you for so little coin it’s ridiculous not to do it, read every single one of Joyce Carol Oates volumes including the ones that don’t have that place etched in its pages and I’m sorry she’s so prolific. Before you pack up your stuff, either by yourself or with hired hands, I’m going to ask you to do the same, no matter where you’re going, the only reason why is because I said so. 

If you read what I did in the last six weeks then you’ve seen Harlem, Norway, Germany, the inside of a mobile home, rooms in a hospital, a pig farm, an undisclosed location, another place so specific I started skimming just to get to the end of it. This won’t help you at all, not in any business-like way you’re maybe asking for, and I sense I’m so far off track as to have gone the other way and start making sense, but in either case  it bears mentioning anyway.

From the archives:
Best Case Scenario
The sun it did rise again
To mend 

Pegboard

First comes the intention.

The place on the wall that will eat up two junk drawers and a broken toolbox. The stuff squirreled away in closets that we keep forgetting we have. The desire to make our home neater, lovelier better. To make ourselves all of these things, too. 

The measuring tape binds us to what can and can never be. We have this much wall space and no more. A hardware store smelling of wood grain and eggshell paint. A slab of hope and ambition in the form of plywood with almost infinite numbers of  tiny holes. A choice not to paint our cut-to-order purchase. A pegboard allowed to be itself.

A level. A drill dusted off and loudly employed. Hardware in five different sizes lined up and waiting. Minimalism will soon become a jumble of sizes, colors, patinas, new, and well-used. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

One by one, we examine what used to live in the dark. Most things go up easily. Like with like, clustered together in more or less sensical fashion. 

One item remains. It won’t hang from a neat loop, it won’t balance between two hooks. It’s too big, unweildly, irregular. It’s not useful. It doesn’t match the array on the pegboard, nor does it belong with anything else. We’d throw it away, but neither one of us can bring ourselves to do it. The reasons are too numerous and complicated to go into now.

Alone on a shelf, unhoused, singleton.
Trash or jewel, not everything fits. 

From the archives:
Five Minutes
Picture Edit
The very second you lost me

Hospitality

There’s a hierarchy of vessels in every kitchen. I am not even eyeing the huge soup pots or mixing bowls. That would be selfish.

The pitchers are what I have in mind. They’re lined up, pretty and gleaming on your shelves. But the ladle sticking out of the jug would be just fine. 

All of this discussion of containers is because you’ve concocted something I want. 

What I ask for and what I get are two different things. You come over with an offering balanced in a measuring spoon. It’s hard to imagine a smaller pittance.

I’m allotted a tablespoon of something precious and there are a dozen mason jars holding the rest. You earmark those for yourself and other people. 

I sip and swallow what I am given. I expect a heady sweetness that leaves me bereft and wanting more. What I taste is unbearable bitterness. The honey you added at the end does not disguise what this is or who you are. The sudden clarity burns my throat. I don’t even say thank you. 

If you notice my departure you don’t let on. 

Everything I really need is within my own four walls. I develop tunnel vision and try that on for size. It suits me. I grow extra arms and legs.

I make a lot of something out of nothing. Everything’s arranged in the pantry and empty sections of the cupboards. What can’t be tucked away there graces the countertops and table. 

I’ve built the land of plenty with these sensible hands. A full larder makes zero sense if I never eat anything. I partake with no thought of scarcity. Hoarders be damned, there’s no problem with sharing either. 

With all of that said, with eyes wide open and gratitude coursing through my veins, I still want shallow bowls as big around as dinner plates. 

From the archives:
Tweak
I suffered for their art
Hydration 

Memoir

You throw open your front door wide in invitation, but soon I’ll come in the side entrance. Everyone knows who is company and who can just go around the back. 

You’re generous with yourself. You show me around. You don’t apologize for the piles of dirty laundry on the floor, or the baskets of clean, unfolded clothes waiting at the base of the staircase. 

Things are lived in but there are moments of exquisiteness. Photographs on the walls, unframed works in progress curling at the edges. The teapot you pour from passed down through generations. There’s a story for each of these things. You tell me the stories.

The soft sciences advise us that self-disclosure creates intimacy. There is something disarming about you. I’m intoxicated by your candor. Your command of language is breathless if a bit audacious. You are a page turner except when you’re not.

Occasionally, you get mired in the details. You look deeply into yourself, your heritage, your process. Even less frequently, you forget that my eyes, ears, self are still here. 

During these times, I look at you full on. You don’t mind my staring the way most people would. You have the kind of wide set eyes and cheekbones which invite words like breeding and society. Your folks have been here longer than mine.

There is no denying this lineage, not in the serviceable overalls you wear for comfort, the handcrafted farm table your husband made himself, a ferile, unladylike manner, age creeping about your eyes. The paint spattered, broken-in loafers you wear around the house cost you a pretty penny thirty years ago.

Because you married above your station, your offspring are even more finely drawn, their countenance begging for the artist, even - especially - luminous while just being messy, insolent children.

You engage me once more, knitting your story together. You connect all back to you spanning land, time, elders. You do this directly but also hold back with intention, allowing me to fill in the blanks. There is absolutely nothing reciprocal going on here. 

Still, I am rapt. I participate by noticing the uncanny, the apples not falling far from the tree, an apt metaphor with an orchard blooming right outside.

My own story, told in drips and drabs for a tiny audience, if you can even call it that, is held in suspension. With you, it’s clear who is who, who is the teller and who is the recipient. This is not a conversation. 

A familiar unease takes up residence in me. You serve up one picture, one report card, one remembrance too many. I soldier on. I finish what I start. 

Unlike some people with a pinnacled purpose, wanting to teach something or help the world, you hold no such elevation. Here is what you’d say, if you talked about it at all. This is about me and mine and nobody else. The applause and prizes serve as buttresses and for the time being, hold you up. 

Our visits have an arc, and like all things, come to an end. It’s been a sprawling, weighty chunk of time. I’ll fill in the hole you leave behind with more of the same, but cut from a different cloth. Somehow, there will be less talent but more grace. One of your brethren will have an expanse of story paired with economy of words, a balm for my own exhausted, not charmed life.

From the archives:
Before, now, then wide open
The Book
Rations

Accelerant

I never actually wanted to build a campfire.

But I’m on a beach with the air getting cold. There’s a rough hewn circle with a few logs. I have a lighter. All the kindling I need is up for grabs, in the woods. 

As if in a dream I build the fire. I’d been resistant to the idea but the ease is almost shocking. Soon I’m sitting in the warm glow, as the night grows darker. It’s a tidy fire, but the heat and smoky, woodsy aromas are real.  

You see me sitting there, tending my little fire. You don’t want to put it out. You don’t walk away either. You don’t join me in my quest to keep my fire contained.

You spend some time fanning the flames. You pour some gasoline on there. It’s scary but also beautiful. I don’t know what you will do next.

All I can really do is watch. I’m frozen. I watch you and I watch myself watch you. 

After all that effort you bring buckets of water over. Things turn grey and acrid. The ground becomes boggy under our feet.

By the time you leave, nothing is left of the glade. It’s scorched earth. In the end, water won, but not before you burned down the trees and blackened everything surrounding them. Thick smoke rises into the sky. Whatever this was, it’s over. 

I’m wearing flannel but feel naked. My hair smells bitter. It will take many shampoos to wash this night away, and even then, there will be a tinge.

Slowly, without Interface from me, the rectangle of earth will replenish itself. Seeds will blow over from trees unscathed by you. Hardy, adaptable plants will sprout here and there. Soon there will be lush overgrowth.

I’ll plant some trees to move it along. Some things will be the same as before, but most of it will be different. The collaboration between myself and regeneration will not be for nought. I don’t have to worry about you doing this again. It’s clear you aren’t coming back, and my belief in that is full and whole.

From the archives:
The Book
Rending
Take This Inspiration And Shove It