Floorboards

The floorboards have given their grain to women on knees, scrub brush in hand, skirts dragging and tripping toddlers. I can hear the humming of chore songs as I sweep carrot tops and chard stems into a dustpan, into the bucket, into the garden. There is history in each fallen fiber, each worn plank speaking stories of pioneers, of fishermen and farmers on an island in the Sound. 

I can feel ridges of time when I sweep.

The kitchen slopes to the west and I know I am at home (for now, for now), my galley sloping towards the fields instead of the sea but listing nonetheless. The wainscoting up a narrow flight of stairs twisting into the wooden shoulders of the little pale green house takes me to Maine, takes me to memories forgotten under quilts and jelly jars. The sandy soil of the backyard garden sifts through my hands like it did in San Diego. 

I am made up of places, stacks of maps build my body, oceans run through my heart and veins. This place collates the corporal remembrance into a home of all the places I’ve ever been and will ever be. All the generations that I have been, the stars of the universe falling as dust onto the swollen grain swept back and forth, back and forth, handles manipulating bristling scotch broom or plastic. 

I am on my knees, sweeping and scrubbing and wondering how these pieces fit together. I am wondering if the women in their long skirts and pale torsos, bonnets and rough hands, if they ever dreamed of being back on the wagon train. 

I wonder if they woke in the night with the movement of wooden wheels underneath scratchy boards long after the wheels had ceased spinning and dissolved into the front yard under the apple trees. 

I wonder if they stared into the sky and remembered long days of nothing but motion toward a home they had yet to build, one that filled up their dream space with longing and hope for warmth and comfort. 

I wonder if they laughed to themselves in their disillusionment or sighed with contentment, grounded and growing. 

I imagine her standing at the doorway, staring at the rising sun to the east, figuring what to cellar for the winter, retracing paths taken years prior through prairies and rivers and night. 

I sweep the stars into the dustpan and walk through the vibrant weeds to the compost pile. I catch glimpses of my garden where arugula sprout tender half moons and the peas will soon need to be trellised. 

I have arrived out west and made a home. The floorboards are swept and lovely.

And yet I can’t seem to stop them wheels from turning even when there is nowhere west to go but the ocean.

(And then there’s that.)

Shall I take up my skirts and run into the waves or take the wheel?  

Or go with the grain and sink my seeds into the earth, one by one, day by day, love by love until the tugging ceases to pull me west?

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.

  

Coming Home

I can feel the quiet seep into my bones, muscles aching from a day in trains and buses and planes and shuttles and cabs. The damp green smell of the woods and earth, the light shining on the porch to greet me. I climb the stairs to my room as the house sleeps. Six weeks isn’t long but long enough to forget details and invent a whole other life. I hadn’t thought about my room in weeks, about the driftwood whales and shells on an alter and the tree that scratches hello at my window that had green leaves and whispered of summer when I left and is now an orchestra of brown pods shaking in the autumnal wind. But in the night I couldn’t even see the tree. 

In my big bed I dream of orcas. It was if they were welcoming me back to the northwest, reminding me of my place and my blessed vulnerability when I float quiet and still, orca jaws rubbing and nipping at my side. They swim in the wide deep expanses that consume my mind with shadows and multi-toned movement, consume this land and create a shore licked with cold salty tongues.

I wake to soft conversations and the smell of onions and eggs in hot oil. I shake free of fins and waves. I stare at the trees outside until I throw off the quilts and stretch in the coolness of my room. The smell of cooking mingles with coffee and fades. The conversations below cease as days in the wider world begin, doors open and shut, I imagine boots slipped quietly onto wool-socked feet. I walk onto the landing and catch my breath at the outer beauty of the old barn in the soft gray of a cloudy morning. All I can hear are frogs and birds and a brushing of motion that could be tree or car or water but I cannot tell and do not need to know. 

Downstairs a guitar rests upon a wall as if ready to be picked up and strummed, an avocado sits half eaten on the counter, coffee is still warm in the press. Signs of life and simplicity that I have missed. Tables tumble forth with eggplant and onions, apples and garlic. The abundance of this place! I can’t help but smile as I brew my tea and suddenly hear the songs and words that have been stoppered by city fences break lose into the foreground of my mind. Oh that’s right. They need space, too. The space I had briefly forgotten exists, like the spiderwebbed cracks in the wall of my room. It is like waking up from a dream with the relief and knowing that even if both worlds are real (orcas (taxi cabs? A city life?) nipping at your heart), this is the one that feels good and true and alive.   

This is the Home I have missed and craved and fear and love. And now all I have to do is actually Be Here. That’s all. And that is simply the most difficult part for me. I am slowly realizing that my success lay not in the achievement of some outwardly goal like the city (entrenched in my brain) wants me to believe, wants me to stay busy running after, but in the act of allowing myself to Be Here Right Now. 
This is what the space allows. This is my challenge of finding Home. Finding me. 

I melt into the quiet as the fog lifts and I breathe in the Now, sigh out the Then.

And breathe in again.

Beets on the Asphalt

The beet hit the asphalt and rolled just a little. It was still (barely!) attached to the bleeding red stems and wilted leaves that had left marks on my shirt. The beet was fine. I was not. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream Fuck This Shit into the hollows between metal and glass and dirty ground otherwise known as Jersey City. When the bag that was carrying my groceries broke in the middle of the street, it seemed like too much. My arms were getting bruised from attempting to carry five overflowing shopping bags from the downtown Manhattan Whole Foods to a marina in Jersey City. 

Technically it was only 1.8 miles. 

Technically I could have walked this is 30 minutes. 

But technically I was across a major river, in a different state really, and about 30 pounds heavier with beets and organic milk and bottles of champagne vinegar (the latter of which bounced and cracked on the street). 

I plodded along for 15 minutes to the ferry from the store where the cashier had asked if I was getting a car and I had mumbled Or Something.  Blocks of concrete and avenues with cars and sidewalks with people looking at me like I was crazy. I felt crazy. One guy commented, “You got a strong back lady, a Strong back!” I took it as a compliment and huffed on. Crazy and determined and strong, that’s me. 

On the ferry, across the river, off the ferry, into the streets of JC, back aching. Crazy and not so determined and tired, that’s me. Fuck this, I’m getting a cab, I thought. But there was no cab in sight. I started stumbling towards the light rail hoping there would be more traffic. 

That’s when the bag broke in the middle of the street, beets rolling, glass cracking, me swallowing back tears. I just let the bag drop as I walked to the corner to put the other bags down. A man on a cell phone stopped and shuffled the beets and bottles back into the torn bag as he chatted about his weekend in the Hamptons to whomever it was who was on the line. He didn’t get off the phone or really look up but he did in fact ask if I needed any more help. Which I appreciated. And at the same time in my frustration I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself for not getting off the goddamn phone. Was that wrong? Misdirected anger? Projecting on him as a product of the city where people generally ignore one another and food comes in little plastic packages in brightly lit aisles and there is no way of knowing where it came from or who the farmers are or how much they are paid or whether the drought is affecting them this year or if the Begradas have finally moved north or do they use worm castings in their fields? This was not the man’s fault. He was connecting with Someone on the phone. He might have visited a farm stand himself out on Long Island that weekend. How was I to know? Even if he had been off of his cell phone I might not have asked him anything because I was so angry. 

Feeding the disconnection.

I want to feed the opposite. I know that cities can be amazing places to connect with people, with art, with food. But all these connections feel to me as manufactured and out of reach as a high-couture gown, me in my stained shorts and salty Converse. There are processes and barriers and some invisible scale on which we (I) compare one another and All This Stuff. This art, this conversation, this packaged and plated food. This yacht life feeds right into this weighted world that feels so foreign and plastic-wrapped. I want to step off the scale and just enjoy what I have. I can appreciate the effort and ambition and I also know that right now in my life I crave the simple. I want to shed all the pretense and drop down into the basic. Ground myself in place and community and converse about how we survive. I mean really soulfully survive. I want to make art in a falling down barn with the swallows flittering overhead. I want to go into the garden and pull out onions and carrots that I planted and watered and weeded, brush the dirt off their living backs and chop and cook and devour with gratitude, no plastic wrappers in sight. At home I have a chest freezer full of a cow I passed on the road everyday on my way into town. At home I eat eggs from chickens down the street. At home I have a closet full of dresses that have mud on the hems and I have shelves of dog-eared books on farming and soul. 

(And I am calling it Home! That is new. That is real. That is a connection I want to feed and nurture.)  

I also want to appreciate the now and all that this now is teaching me about what I actually want in this lifetime. All that this yachtie life and the city and its people can teach me. Absorb all the art and music and passion that I know is here. And then be grateful for the opportunity to choose my environment, to choose what and where I call home.

I rip off the bleeding stems of the beets and leave them as an offering to the lamppost on the corner. The concrete is simply sand and dirt and water. The city is a living thing, too, worthy of nourishment and gratitude for all it has been, all that lies beneath, all that will become of it as grass grows in the cracks of the sidewalk. 
Life doesn’t end, it is just the energy that changes form. 
The beet goes on.

Ocean Wings

Ocean stretches salty paws to the horizon, a fur of seaweed and sunken shells deep in the hide. 
Land growls in the absence and claws at my back, drawing my thoughts to marshy fields and jagged tree trunks searching for blue sky through a tangled pelt of clouds. 

Time twists and breaks, flexes like the bow of this pummeled boat. 
I strain my dreams through the sieve of stars overhead and what falls remains to be slumbered upon. 

Here in my hands the wings of a fish tremble and push, a curve pressing into the palms behind bloody knuckles as translucent bones shift and spread. A gasp and release, a shriek and a sigh. Into the water into the night we move forward together in leaps and glides and a jauntiness I never knew I held. You teach me well. 

I wipe the sun streaks from my eyes and let the moon wash over me its secret language of reflection, illumination from source unseen. The song has just begun in the quiet of the dark and I hold the notes between waves, between screaming gusts, between fingers that can no longer grasp this place. 

We understand each other: the dive and flight, the relinquishment of time and holding of grace. Fins and feet, whale jaws and rhubarb roots. None of it makes sense until I stand (swim) in the middle of it all and let it go. You (I) tumble back into the blackness, trusting whatever is after you (me) drives us forward and calls us to the slippery descent back Home.  

Among the Giants

  

I wander over frost-crunchy meadows and marvel at maple leaves like snowflakes frozen in their gorgeous rust-colored decay.

Quietness settles over the valley as I weave towards the shore. 

The mountains shake with sunlight and stretch their dreams into the still blue sky. 

I pull my scarf more tightly around my chin, pull my hat down over my ears; I have not tasted winter in many years. But it is not yet winter, it is still the fall and I have a long descent ahead of me: nights of clouds obscuring those bright memories of light overhead, mist snaking through the dying grass, murders of crows screeching behind a curtain of early sunset. 

My breath comes in fogbanks, my laugh a blast of warning to those off my weaving bow. 

I see Tahoma on the horizon, a watery chasm between us, drift wood reaching spindly arms for the snowy peaks encircling this island. 

I walk these beaches, through these woods, through my door knowing I am Home. 

For now, forever, for as long as the island wants me, I am here and I am grateful.

Just Float

I am.

Waterlogged.

I cling to scratchy branches, seeping wounds in bark, splintered trunks, attempting to stay afloat. 

I thrash and gasp and scramble atop my unwilling (unneeded?) raft.

I was the one who cut down these trees.

I lose my grasp and go under time and again, fighting for breath, fighting for words, fighting to know Why. 

The river is winning. 

I kick my legs and flail my arms and add to the (self generated?) turbulence, white wash, din.

The sky is blue and calm above the chaos. 

There is water in my eyes and I look down, trying to find the stones in my path.

I don't see above.

When I decide to let go of these trees and float down this river, 

(surrender?)

I will see that infinite calm clearly.

I will see the land on either side.

I will swim to shore and set up my tent and roast a marshmallow (crispy burnt!) and smile.

I will wonder what all the fighting was for as I wring out my jeans, pull silvery fish from jacket pockets.

I will dance naked under the flickering stars, wet hair slithering down my back to remind me of the struggle (until the fight evaporates from my skull). 

I will lay with the water rushing by my toes, the land singing me to sleep.

The logs will keep moving until...(I stop cutting them down)