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.

Mending the Circle




A string of rough wool circles my wrist. It was spun not with a spindle but with my fingers, my intentions. 

October. I plunged my hand into the bag of dirty fibers, an afterthought thrown into the corner of a barn after the shearing of ewes and before the birthing of dozens of soft-limbed lambs. The birthing time of Spring felt like a distant ancestor to this season of red and orange and brown. I pulled out a fistful of the tangled hairs that once marked time with lengths of protein, marked movement with bits of leaves and clumps of mud. 

I teased out strands to make the wool bracelet that would remind me of this day in the barn. Remind me how tired I was from chasing turkeys down a hill when they escaped, how my arms ached from shuttling buckets of grain and water to the broiler chickens in a far off pasture ringed with oaks and maples, how my mind kept spinning with all the different kinds of grass and feed and fowl and four-leggeds to know. How farming is hard and dirty and wonderful. How it is the most necessary skill in the world right now. How much has been forgotten, how much is rooted in remembering.


November. A month has gone by and the wool now on my wrist, spun between my fingers into a long line of dirty white, reminds me of these actions and ideas. It is stretched out and dirtier, soaked with rain of the Northwest and flecked with soil from the garden. It has grown thin in parts. 

As I pull off sweater after sweater, it breaks with the friction of fiber on fiber on skin. I am startled at my sudden anxiety as I hold the once-circle-now-line in my palm. I wonder if I will remember laughing hysterically as we chased turkeys down a hill on an autumn afternoon. I wonder if I can trust my brain to remember anything without visual cues. I wonder if it means that the relationship that helped to weave this circle together is somehow damaged, broken, as if this wool is tied with fate.


As December approaches, I slip the ends around one another, a forced embrace, and loop them again to secure a knot. It is not smooth in this place, there is a visible difference, but everywhere else in the thread is varied, too. I see the circle of relationship, with the world, with a person, within a family: it is a tangled thread that is constantly breaking and being retied, thinning in places, bunching in others. 

What happens when there are so many bunches and knots that the bracelet is no longer a bracelet because it is too broken and knotted and thick to fit around a wrist? It becomes a ring. A promise wrapped several times around (other) flesh and bone to become something new. A something that will always fit, a something that can always be connected, tied, mended over and over. 

This is what we do. This is what we are: knotted and tangled and worn thin in places and always able to wrap ourselves around what we love, what loves us, and go on as a something old and new.