Clarity →

Baby no longer in my arms, I step closer to the hole. I cannot see the ground below. I hold the hem of my skirt and put a flip-flopped foot onto a cinderblock jutting out of the concrete wall and start to descend. The smell of damp earth and rotting wood grows stronger with each step down. 

One two three four five six. 

I can hear my baby babbling in my cousin-in-law’s arms in the room I just lowered myself from. I whimper.

I do not want to bring her down here.

I won’t bring her down here.

A week ago I would have brought her down here.

A week ago when all the phones in the vacation rental started blaring I’d assumed it was an Amber Alert. Child abduction on Kauai? Where are they going to go on this two-lane highway?

I picked up my phone and stared at the screen. The message was not about an old Chevy pickup with a child inside. It was about a missile heading for Hawaii. Seek shelter immediately. This is not a drill.

Was this a joke? 

Baby in my arms, the rest of the family out on the deck watching the enormous waves crash against the lava rock shore, I didn’t want to wait to find out. I walked past the wall of floor to ceiling windows and onto the deck, face pale, baby nestled in my arms. I interrupted sips of coffee and sighs about the beauty of clear blue sky to tell them about the alert. I looked up at the sky wondering if we would see it coming. If somehow a missile would create a contrail in reverse to warn us of its path.

Everyone got up to check phones, check TVs, disbelief the initial response. I wanted to be comforted by this disbelief but I wasn’t. Even if it was most likely untrue there was a chance it was true, especially in the current political (insane) climate.

I went back inside to get ready. Get ready? How does one get ready for a ballistic missile attack? Baby in my arms, baby in my arms, baby in my arms. Holding her close and I whispered I love you in her tiny ear over and over. 

In our guest room our luggage vomited its contents onto the floor: clothes, bathing suits, baby books. I fished my wallet out of my bag and put my ID in my pocket. I pulled the comforter off the bed and wrapped my baby in the downy warmth. She wasn’t cold; it was 70 degrees outside but somehow it seemed like a good thing to do. I had to protect her (from shrapnel? Radiation? Sonic boom?) and it was the only way I could think of how to do it.

I tried to get everyone into the windowless garage. My sister-in-law told everyone to put their shoes on. My husband shuffled bottles of water,

a bunch of bananas

and boxes of food, into the garage.

I wondered if I should move the ping-pong table or move away from the rack of snorkeling gear? What happens when a ballistic missile hits a place? Do we simply evaporate or is it like a big earthquake? 

I’d let my daughter out of the blanket to crawl on the garage floor but scooped her up again with these thoughts. How long do we have? My sister-in-law said she wasn’t ready, she was too young to die and wanted more time. I texted my mom and sisters in California about what was going on. I hope its not true, I wrote. I love you, I wrote.

What do you think about when you may be blown up? About all the other people in the world that go through this daily? About what you will leave behind? About what matters most? I stopped my husband from his stocking up and said, “If this is it, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I love you so much.” We held our baby between us and kissed gently and smiled one of those not quite joyous but not quite defeated smiles. 

Such a mix of gratitude and fear. Love and sadness. Disbelief and knowing. 

I sat down and held my baby close as realizations flashed across my brain. My catering business doesn’t matter. Publishing my book doesn’t matter. Leaving a legacy doesn’t matter, whatever the hell that means. Not that those things are bad, they just don’t matter as much as I once thought. What matters? Love. Family. Community. If we didn’t blow up, I wanted to work on our farm, become more self-sufficient and interdependent with our community. Be with my husband and my child. Learn from her about love and curiosity, teach her about empathy and opening our hearts instead of shutting them down to the point where missiles are even a choice.

My husband, baby, and sister-in-law sat in the garage and waited as minutes ticked by. My other in-laws searched Fox news and CNN in the house. Nothing. My husband searched for news on his phone. He found a twitter post saying it was a fluke. My sister texted me updates about her search. False alarm, she said.

False alarm.

Exhale.

Inhale the dankness of this hole in the ground a week later. This is where my new extended family huddled under their house when they got the alert. Underground. Baby in arms and a nine year old sobbing that all the things she loved were OUT THERE, above ground, in the world.

I do not want to bring my baby down here. I will not bring my baby down here or a place like here.

Not this time. Hopefully never. 

I climb out after a few minutes of sweeping a flashlight from corner to corner and shivering at the thought. I hold my baby in my arms again and don’t have to think about what is important. I know what is important as her heart still beats against mine and the birds still sing outside in the world.

Lost in the Woods

The salal is thick and covers the contours of the land. Fallen trees decorated with moss and turkey tail mushrooms are ladders through this curvy bramble, this cemented puzzle of branches and leaves, but their bodies only reach so far before returning me to entanglement. The sky, barely visible through waves of trees, is slowly crumbling into darkness. 

Being lost in the woods in a park surrounded by roads and houses on an island surrounded by water isn’t as dangerous as being lost in true wilderness, but at the time my mind cannot differentiate between the two kinds of Lost. I’d hopped off the trail to avoid a puddle of slushy icy mud and reasoned if I just walked a bit this way and that I’d come to the trail again. With less than a half hour until sunset and temperatures dropping below freezing, all I can think is Walk Faster.

I navigate in stars, wheels, a splayed body of radial arms testing out trails that lead to tangles I must push through. My mind says “That will take too long! Try another way!” My heart creeps up into my throat, pounds in my ears so that I can barely hear the rip slip slide of branches against my down jacket. I know this feeling of panic and I know it won’t help me find the trail. I breathe into my belly and my belly responds with kicks and flutters. She is here with me and I say, “We will be OK.” I hope it to be true. 

I come to an opening in the dense forest. My eye is following the blackness creeping from the ground and up the trees. Lightening? I wonder. In the charred clearing I find a small fuel container, melted plastic bottles, a white shirt (unburned) hanging on the end of a downed trunk. Then I see the camp. The shelter is made of tree limbs and there is something inside, a green suitcase of somesort but being the polite (anxious) person that I am I do not investigate the contents of the dwelling. I don’t want to go anywhere near it. I feel like I’ve stumbled into someone’s living room and although I am pretty sure there is no one around I can’t help but feel like it was my fault I ended up here, as if I was being nosy. Am I being watched, tracked, lured somehow? I think I see a movement in the camp. 

I don’t turn back to see if it is a man, a fluttering cloth, a bird.

I scramble up the hill.

I want to find a trail, any trail, and go home. Just walk in a straight line, I tell myself. Stop doubling back, I chide. Asphalt roads on two sides, trails on the other two, I can break out of this box. Walk. Keep walking.

Kicks in the belly.

I need to keep us safe. 

I push through bushes and climb over nurse trees towards the remnants of sunset. There is a break in the bushes. The trail was less than a hundred feet away from the camp! I walk. My vision blurs in the dusk and I turn around quickly to find shadows hiding in the hollowed out curves of the trail. There is no one following me.

We are OK.

I let my mind wander and it soon outpaces me. My hands gravitate to my belly and the wanderer within. I think of all the women who are forced to walk on trails that were not loops in parks, to be forced off onto paths or through thickets they never imagined they’d face, through woods that were not leading them back to a warm home. Women whose bodies swell with the ocean inside as they cross the sea in leaky rafts and over-burdened fishing boats. I imagine them rubbing their bellies and telling the babies inside that they will be OK, we will be OK, and wanting to believe it is true as the water washes over the deck and pale, drawn faces search the horizon for shore. And once they are on shore they walk, they stumble, they rely on whatever they can find to nourish the life inside. They find camps and perhaps worry about their safety among a bramble of strangers. They search for a trail to lead them away from the camp in offices designated for refugees where they hope to find a country to take them in. Somewhere they can create a new home. Somewhere their baby can be born and thrive. Out of the woods, out of the danger of forced transience.

I walk faster as the forest gives way to a clearing I know means I am just a car ride from Home. I am tired and grateful and tell myself that next time I will pack a headlamp, food, water, one of those foil blankets, because who knows what can happen in the woods when you go off the path. Or stay on it. Nothing is certain. I am grateful for this life I have, this life I am holding within me. I am in awe of those women who hold chaos, grief, and loss with the other few possessions on their back as their bellies swell with life and hope in a bittersweet counterbalance.

We are Lost

You came up the canyon, taillights from the freeway a sea of flashing red below, your backpack heavy as you scaled the brush-covered hill. You ended up on a lawn next to the swimming pool, the view of the valley spreading to the distant mountains. 

There is no street, no way to the city, just grass and gates and the semi-darkness of sprawling urbanity. There is a Christmas tree in a window and a light in the kitchen. You knock. 

I hear a knock at the backdoor. I look at my brother-in-law mid-conversation and wonder why one of my sisters has gone outside at ten at night when I thought they were both in bed. I wonder if the door is still locked. I wonder who the hell it could be. I go to the door and look out the window. There is a pale young guy in a hoodie and cap, a backpack, a nervous sway. 

There is a baby in the house, my sisters and mom. I call to my brother-in-law R. and tell him there’s a guy out there. He thinks I am joking. He thinks it is one of his friends fucking around. Then he sees my face. I back away as he grabs a knife from the drawer (a steak knife. He laughs about it after. Not during. During he just wants something sharp and he cannot find a chef’s knife so he grabs a tiny, proper, serrated steak knife. As if.)

I call 911. There is a man at the door and a baby in the house and it is night and that is what you do in the night when someone strange knocks on your backdoor, right?

I am on the phone when R. opens the door, his fierce don’t-fuck-with-my-family fearlessness kicking in  and growls, "What are you doing?" (get back inside, I yell to him) The guy in the hoodie stands a few feet away and asks, “Is that your tree with the light?” R. is as confused as the guy in the hoodie seems to be. What tree? What light? Why the fuck are you in the backyard? This is not said. Nothing is said.

(Baby in the house, R’s baby in the house, R’s wife in the house with the baby.)

The conversation does not continue in the dark.

“We’re calling the cops.”

I am calling 911 as the guy in the hoodie runs away. I do not know this yet. I just know he’s in the backyard and I have just spent the last five days admonishing my family for constantly locking the doors behind them, for locking me out when I go to get the mail at the end of the drive, for living in fear. I tell them of the house I live in up in Washington where we don’t even carry keys for the front door; its always unlocked. I leave my car keys in the cup-holder of my car parked in the driveway. If something moves outside my window I assume it is a deer or heron. If someone comes to the door (there is only a front door), we may welcome them in, ask if they want a cup of tea, assume that they are friendly even if a little odd (aren’t we all). But maybe it would be different at 10pm.

So I am shaking, on the phone with the 911 dispatcher saying there is a man in the backyard who may be trying to get in and telling them to send a cop. I almost say, “This is a private, gated community,” but I hold myself back because I am startled by the impulse to say this. I am embarrassed by this privilege. Sickened by the assumption that we should feel safer behind the gates and fences, that we are somehow exempt from disturbing interactions with other human beings that we think should not have access to this land. Disgusted with myself for holding beliefs that I outwardly disdain and speak against.

The cops show up. They are almost blatantly exasperated with us. They picked up the guy in the hoodie across the street. As in, he was standing in the sidewalk-less street across from our house, confused about where he was, where to go. He’s a transient, they said. Most likely harmless, they said. He’s not from here and was looking for a main street, they said. They would drop him off somewhere else, outside of the gates and fences, unless he gave them a reason to take him to jail, they said.

R. said the cops gave him a look like, Really dude, you’re bigger than this guy, why the hell did you call us?

Baby, wife, family.

Baby, wife, family.

Baby.

Claro.

And I wonder if I would’ve called if there wasn’t a baby in the house.

Probably.

If there hadn’t been a man in the house.

Yes. (I hate admitting this, but its true)

This bothers me, this fear.

I consider what I would do if I was at my old place at the beach or at the house I lived in in North Park. Most probably I would have answered the knock on the door or just ignored it and waited for him to leave. If there was someone camped out on the patio maybe I would have asked him what he was doing, maybe yelled for him to go away if he seemed out of it. I wouldn’t have called the cops if he ran away. I may have felt a little weird about such an interaction but wouldn’t have felt such a sense of vulnerability as I do in this big house on a hill behind the gates and security station, where you rarely see your neighbors as you overlook the lights of thousands of houses full of tens of thousands of people in the valley.

I wonder how much of this fear is perpetuated by the gates and fences and security patrols.

From what are we being kept safe? Why are we hiding? Why do we think it is so bad ‘out there?’ Who are the dangerous ones?

You were lost and I immediately assumed the worst.

You were lost and a gate slammed down around my heart, a fence obscured my eyes.

You were lost and you could’ve been dangerous and I didn’t know but maybe you weren't.

I fall asleep on the couch in this house I grew up in.

I am not sorry I called 911 last night, but I am uncomfortable with what it means about me.

I am embarrassed by perceived privilege and the isolation it can bring.

I am disturbed that this sense of Otherness is my deeply ingrained default. 

I cannot discount the impulse to stay safe; that is human. 

But I can work to connect more, rein in my assumptions, be present in a world full of people and lights and trees and confusion and kindness.

Maybe I’m naïve, but I would prefer naivety (hope?) over constant fear. 

I want to find/be the balance. Is it too late for me?

You are not the only lost one in this struggle to find a safe path, to find your way. 

Thank you for this reminder that we are all transient, all of this earth, all just looking for a way through a locked gate.

  

Bodie

You were born in a heat wave.

Burnt red and brown orange leaves crisped and fell to the warm sidewalks.
In downtown Campbell where we shuffled towards food, Friday night dates wrapped themselves around each other (not in sweaters like on other October evenings).
A summery breeze blew through the valley shaking persimmons from dry branches.

You were born to a waxing moon; another being forming and growing and bellying out into the world, just about reaching full term.

Before you were born, we ate Blue Line pizza and salad and garlic bread and waited for your descent. We gathered on the bed next to you (in there) and watched nature videos and laughed and sewed and told you it was time.
But you had your own clock to follow.
We rushed to the hospital. The nurse on call said to settle in for a long night. I said, I think it will be a quick delivery. I forgot to knock on wood or throw salt over my shoulder or spin around three times. We came home when you stretched out arms and legs in protest but the body around you was still quivering.

We waited and slept and ate almond chicken and red rice, summer vegetables and Caesar salad. We toasted you with wine (and water for you), we asked you to show your tiny face.

A fury of sharpness, of muscle and electric impulses: a commitment (on your part) to the process. Your calisthenics for arrival increased in intensity. Will this be it?

We crossed lanes and towns to the hospital once more, hoping this was for real, hoping it would be quick. I forgot to offer Neptune the wine or sage the room or pray to the quick labor god.

You would not be rushed.

36 to 43 to 52. Hours. Later.

You decided to maybe contemplate kind of perhaps coming out.

I stood in the shower with your mama kneeled on the floor. She was breathing rough, tears mixing with the warm water I sprayed onto her body, your daddy pressing his hands onto her hips and soothing her with soft words.
Every ounce of my being screamed, You are wasting water in a drought! I fought the impulse to shut the faucet off and watched the water hit her taut back, stream down her swollen belly where you squirmed, watched that liquid relief swirl down the drain.
She needed a reprieve. I needed some perspective.

A thin tube snaked next to her spine offered respite from the agony. I knew it would be painful, this process of birthing, this sacred act of one body becoming two and then one again, but I didn’t realize what it would be to witness such pain. It was not your fault, this is how it worked, but she was exhausted and anxious about your arrival; she did not know at that time how beautiful you would be, how muscular and alert and stormy-ocean eyed.

Her legs tingled, she relaxed into fits of sleep.

Her veins filled with oxytocin- a little fluid text message of love and welcome.

Hour 56, you felt it was time. You took the dive.

Pushing and breathing and pushing some more and out you came purple (your mama’s favorite color in childhood) and dark haired and bloody and totally perfect. Onto her chest you went as you cried and sniffled and squirmed. She took you into her arms as if you had always been in her arms, calling you lovey, cooing and smiling and unable to take her eyes off you.
You blinked and settled in to this new life. Outside.

You were born in an October heat wave.

You were born under a gibbous moon.

You were born into breath and tears and love.
 

You have changed this world already with your voice.

I look forward to you telling me (babbling, screeching, mumbling, forming words and dreams) more of your long, twisting, beautiful story in the many years to come.

We Wait

Waiting for a storm of muscles and blood and bone. 

A hurricane of life in ten little fingers, ten toes, a snuffling nose, a tiny heartbeat. 

We wait and breathe and pace. 
I put my shoes on, ready my bag, down a cup of coffee. 

I take my shoes off and wait for the squalls to condense, the fury to magnify. 

Departure is soon, the delivery imminent: a language I can understand. 
She scrunches her face and watches the clock. 

We wait for the word. The car is packed.

I have my camera ready but don’t know when the moment is right. 

We drive into the night, white streetlights streaming behind.

They check, they monitor, they leave. They check, they ask, we leave.

Not ready, they say. 

We get home at 4am and sleep.

I have never wished for someone’s pain to increase, to joyfully anticipate another’s grimace- until now. 

I hope it builds and rounds out, that the momentum continues, that your son is born tonight.

We wait and you drink Coke and we walk around the block, your belly huge under a too-small tank top.

We wonder what the neighbors will say on our second lap in the middle of the street in the moonlight.

We wait and walk and wish for you to cringe in welcome.

Pain and life and joy has never been so apparent, so intermingled, so embraced.

We wait. 

Another (totally different) Passage

Signal Flags

The grab bags are packed and ready by the bunk: water, granola bars, blankets.
She is listing hard. The ballast is deep but the weight rolls and shifts and kicks within her. She hasn’t yet left the dock, the lines (blood and flesh) still hold her.
She will soon be righted.

I am anxious as I go through the aisles of Trader Joe's on this familiar game of passage-making preparation. Who knows how long the passage will be? What should I expect? I provision heavily. Dinner one: bacon wrapped pork tenderloin with mashed taters and sauteed apples. Dinner two: stuffed turkey breast with roasted fennel and onions. Dinner three: portobello mushrooms stacked with roasted peppers, spinach, and goat cheese.
Nothing spicy, nothing too acidic. Don't make anyone sick.

I think on all those evenings gazing up at the emerging stars as a warm bowl of pasta sits on my foul weather geared lap, salt spray seasoning my food. I think of the nights I have been too tired to enjoy eating but needed the companionship a meal provides. I think of the nights held by the water, the sloshing fluid my home and the thumping of the bow through the waves a reassuring heartbeat.

This will be different. The city lights blur out the stars and moon. This roof will be my universe.

How many casseroles should I make? How much freezer space will I have? Will any of us be hungry or too exhausted to eat? I know one of us will be a drinker. It doesn’t worry me. I hope he drinks a lot actually. And sleeps through the night.

He’s not on watch this time with the rest of us.

He is the reason for the watch.

The passage will begin with cramps and contractions and a ride to the hospital. There will be storms with lots of cussing and lulls with hand holding and sweet words. There will be blood and poop and life and joy.

This is a new passage with my listing, rolling, very pregnant sister.

All I can do is cook and clean and feed and support: my usual role, in a very different setting. These cupboards aren’t on the diagonal, these onesies don’t need to be waterproofed, this passage has no set destination.

It is time to throw off the docklines little one! 

(but wait til next week, I hear my sister saying)

You will be our captain, no doubt about it.

I'm ecstatic and terrified and overjoyed for this (your) delivery.

Fair winds and following seas until we meet!