Peeling memories

 

Skin peels like fish scales from my dry palms. Once water-soaked pruney, blistered and bloody they are disrobing their armor, pushing pink newness to the surface: a circus of circles where toughness once lay. 

Bits of torn skin catch on my clothing. 

There is the rub.

With time and without oars muscles once taut soften, recede, ebb. I am flooded with panic and want to re-seed my memory, want to hold onto to all the little motions and thoughts that have been left in the wake behind. I want to wrestle that feeling of Fuck Yeah back into my gut where it happily nested, made my heart chirp in appreciation and spring forward out of my (count the ribs) cage. 

The bird has fluttered and flown and I squint at the horizon searching for signs of feathers and sound.

My legs no longer wonder at the ground before them in weak anticipation of movement. It is I who am moving now, not the sole of the boat. There are no waves pushing plastic and vibrating through every fiber of my body, my soul. When I lie down there is no need to compensate to stay on the bunk. When I place a jar on the counter it stays exactly where I put it. 

This predictability makes me both relieved and unquestionably sad.

A few weeks ago I stood on a dock in Ketchikan in the middle of the night and I knew anything was possible. Not thought it. Knew it. As the days turn to weeks and now a month from leaving Victoria in a rush of horns and paddles, I am struggling not to grasp at memories and feelings of a three-week stretch of the unpredictable, of despair and magic. I find myself pulling at threads of images and trying to tuck them in around me like a Binkie. 

You know Binkie, that vomit-stained blanket you drooled on as a kid and wouldn’t leave home without. It was torn and faded and chewed. It smelled like pee and moldy broccoli with a hint of baby powder. It had seen you through the tough times of crawling and walking and sleeping on your very own for the first time in a dark room in a dark house with space space space all around. But with Binkie you knew all would be OK, that you were safe and courageous. So you held on and cried a lot (and died a little) when it was taken away. 

What now would remind you of your bravery?

My memories of adventures are like that: I don’t see the stains or smell the putridness as I wrap myself in the security of knowing I DID something. I survived. I can do anything. I want to hold on to all that made me come alive out there even if half the time I was out there I was distractedly thinking of back here. 

No matter, when I looked up from the spinning in my head I saw whales and porpoises and sunrises over glassy water. I saw mountains resting their heads on pillows of cloud. I saw double rainbows through whitecaps and stars through darkened shrouds. I felt salt and wind and somehow felt the sky, too. I heard the salmon jumping at sunset and humpbacks crashing ahead of us in the night. I was scared and electrified by joy. I was a spectrum of all I could be when I settled into the moment and enjoyed where I was.

The ocean was my blanket.

Now I see the sunflowers against a backdrop of pine and cedar. I hear the sparrows in the field and the chimes on my porch where I sit and type and breathe in evergreen. I feel the eternal wind that still blows around this earth, that took us from Port Townsend to Ketchikan and that I flew through home. 

As the muscles and memories from adventure fade, as the skin and images flake away, I remind myself that THIS is the adventure. Every minute of every day there is adventure if I can just stay present to it. Burn the Binkie! OK, maybe not burn but don’t be afraid to fold it neatly, place it on a shelf to occasionally pick up, shake out, breathe deeply into the weave but remind myself that I don’t necessarily need a trinket or image to remind me of who I am and what I can do. 

I am a composite of everything I have ever done and may not remember.

I wrap myself in the present moment, whale songs submerged (yet echoing) under the rustling of dry grass and fall asleep on solid shifting ground, safe and brave and sound.

Red and Splinters

A flash of red.

A pile of splintered wood.

A memory of a young girl hidden in the branches, of rough bark and fishing poles, of grasping a finger with tiny ones of her own while stomping over pine needles and dusty trails. 

The smell of burnt pancakes and smokey bacon.

A flash of red, a pile of splinters at the base of a calico-ed tree.

The branches are gone, the heart is soft and tunneled, patches of faded gold naked to the rain.

He said it would kill the tree, all that pecking, as he traced a scar on his cheek.

Afraid to fall apart, fearful of being riddled from without, the core of this one died within.

The woodpecker finds the life inside, chips away at rotting rings, crumbles wood into earth. 

My hand falls from his to cradle the splinters.

And to let them go.

Letting Go of Before This Now

I untie the drawstrings and shake out the dreams (one by one). 

A series of soft thumps on the bedroom floor. 

They look so naked and unkept in their unwrapped state. 
Like baby possums, eyes shining, teeth bared, squirming on the cold tile. 

I pick them up (one by one) cradle them in my hands, sing songs of grief and longing, whisper of love and wonder. Into dust the dreams dissolve (one by one). 
Empty palms, the soft fur of hope and memories falling between outstretched fingers. I inhale, purse my lips, blow into the nothing that was never more than a slippery thought.

I shake out the old promises next (one by one) and they slink away, knowing of my resolve, knowing of their fate. 

I fill the velvety chambers of my heart with the Now and tuck it back in between waiting ribs. 
The room is quiet and empty. 
My mind dons a top hat and lays out a welcome mat for my heart. There is dancing to do in All This Space between the words and sighs, All This Time between the blood beats and synapse firings. 

Can you hear the music? That is my body singing in the elegantly autonomous and forever amorphous edge of the ocean’s arms in the very second where we stand, drawstrings undone and blowing in the salty wind. 
It is all breath and freedom. 
It is all shadow and release.

My Memories Are A Big Rig

I am surrounded by metal and plastic and glass. I am hurled down the highway by the force of my own thoughts, my right foot heavy on the accelerator, my left foot lazy beneath the clutch. Memories are tailgating, clawing at the crooked bumper, undeterred by plumes of exhaust and potholes in this road. I am staring into the sun as it sets, the maples and birches and pines competing for attention (unruly siblings) in colorful swatches along my path. A crisp red brown leaf is stuck under a wiper. It flutters onto asphalt as I pull to a rumbling stop for a cup of coffee, to rub my eyes, to stretch cramped legs.
I am alone.
I am present: in the aches in my body and heaviness of my eyes. With the sight of bare branches above me framing the sliver of the moon rising above a tree-softened hillside. As a slight breeze reminds me of what is outside of my sequestering metal shell. I breathe in this moment of here. Light wells up from my core.

It is cold. I climb back into the car and am reassured by its gravelly mumbling and sighing as I shift gears and steer us onto the misty highway. A carcass of a moth clings to metal at the base of the windshield. Has it been there since Maine? Or did it crawl and heave and expire in the West Virginia night? I breathe into cupped hands and steer with my knees. When the car swerves towards the median I think better of this and lay my palms one at a time on the weak heater vent. I feign controlling my destiny. I glance in the rearview mirror, my eyes focused on what I think I see. The road is empty but the shadows of memories are still close behind.

My thoughts ignore the seasonal patterns, ignore the duck calls and seniors’ winter plans. My thoughts stream back up north despite my protestations. I want to leave the Maine in my head where it is. I want to let go of mussel shell beaches and striped buoys and gardens sidling up to the sea. I want to let the past slip under, let it float downstream and disappear beyond the bend. But the more I resist, the more it floods my head. The more I deny, the stronger the flow. I pull over to the side of the road and the past is upon me. It engulfs the car and I go under. I can do nothing but sit and cry, sit and write, sit and be. I am grateful for the baptism, my own well providing the blessing. For the rebirth of every moment.
All is still.
The night carries on.

I pull back onto the road and don’t bother to check my rearview mirror. I know that the memories are still there, that they may catch up to me once again, that another flood of emotions may pull me over. It is not about shaking the memories, eluding the past. It is realizing that every moment, action, feeling of love hate sadness passion has paved this road I am traveling upon. They are the composite foundation for every future moment, action, emotion.  I am grateful for the moon and stars reflecting on tar and sand.

I keep driving into the muted darkness and trust that this road will lead me home.

My compass is strong. But my belief that there is no wrong direction is (needs to be) stronger.

Fiction: Expanding

She grabbed his hand and led him from room to room, her fingers loosely coupled around his, tension between thumbs and fingertips falling away with each subsequent step.
She wanted him to follow, unled.
He slowed his pace as she raced through the memories of each doorway and plank, every window a story within a story.
She told them all. Like an accordion, the memories expanded in sound and movement. Her voice reverberating and then barely audible down dark hallways and up carpeted stairs. Her free hand fluttered into the past and reimagined the future the house would hold. She touched her belly round and hard. She touched the soft lines around her eye. She stopped and pulled his shoulder towards her chest, kissed his cheek shyly as if his DNA was not swirling within her belly too.
Every day was new with this thing this alien this person forming just inches from her heart. That was why he had to know the history. In case she swelled so large the house didn't recognize her anymore and erased all the memories (of her) in its walls papered with mahogany smoke and gravelly laughter. She had to do it quickly before the inches betrayed them and he too recognized her no longer.
At least he would have the memories of the house to hold him and remind him of the girl he once knew.

Garlic under the knife

I gently brace for the give of the garlic when the knife blade forces it to the board, stainless steel and variegated wood smeared with the lusty scent of dinner. The papery skin lodges under my fingernail as I peel it away from crushed pungent flesh.

I peel and sigh.  A creeping wave of content flows from plant to animal.

The onion is next to be undressed and divided, chopped and sorted. My hands work under me, my eyes shifting from cutting board to pan to sink where a bowl full of dandelion greens, kale, chard soak their green cells. My hips are moving to the music I have turned up on the stereo, my lungs expelling a weeks worth of breath, worry, grief. The onions are not making me cry, the week is not making me cry. I am (finally) smiling a small delicious smile, my fingers moving across living food I am blessing with my careful (yet still imprecise) knifestrokes. And wonder. Wonder! Always wonder at how vegetables grow, who grows them, how we nurture them and they nurture us, how this symbiotic relationship really came to be, how we forget that they are more of our keeper than we are theirs.

Slippery aliums are scooped up into bare hands and released into a sizzling bath of coconut oil and pepper flakes. I fish out my favorite wooden spoon from the jar next to the stove. I stir the chunks of garlic and rectangular slivers of onion until they are pliable and welcoming.
Ginger...
A knob breaks off in my hands. Scraping the brown off yellow the memory-smell of palm trees and squid boats on the horizon and clear aqua seas floods my brain. I chop the fibrous root into tiny fragments and drop them into the melee.
I stir.
My hands dive into cool water, greens dodging my grasp, slipping by dirty fingernails and calloused palms on the first pass. I swirl and grab, hold them tightly in a crunchy bunch, lift and shake, convey them over marbled countertops to the noisy pan. They pop and sizzle and steam. 

I stir.
With my hands and my heart, I stir.
The kale and the garlic, they stir me back.
In this kitchen, in this moment, alone (with this food), I am whole.

(I had forgotten how that happens. The vegetables sought to remind me.)

Sensing land and sea

Magnolias.
No...dogwood?
Wet earth.
Green... the smell of green.
The velvety dampness wraps it's heavy tendrils around me, filling my lungs with the (re)memory of land. Each breath intense and pungent, I wonder how I lived without these smells.
Winding up through the Savannah River after five days at sea, five days without land, without the stability of roots and a fixed sky.
On board the briny air fades into normal, the stink of diesel from the stern or passing container ships or the savory promise of dinner cooked on the diagonal breaking the monotony. The stale, sticky environment below decks, hatches dogged and salty, keeping out waves breaking over the bow, sea mist filtering in through the companionway, the sound of sea birds and mumbled speech on deck.
Keeping in exhaled thoughts, memories of uninterrupted sleep on a horizontal bunk, stomachs twisted and sore.
Where the olfactory ebbs, the auditory flows into the abandoned crevices. Every flap of sail, every halyard whapping vibration down the mast, every strained pitch of the pounding engine becomes an extension of the sailor's body, another corporal system to monitor and alter. For weeks or months to come on land I will jump out of bed if I hear the wind pick up outside, if I hear a truck diesel backfire, if rain threatens to pour through non-existent open hatches. I am positively on edge, in tune with nature and machine.

Up the river, past explosively lit power plants and massive container ships (two bells cap'n), past dredges and tugs, past nuns and cans lit in Christmas colors on a dark n' stormy (goslings rum) sort of night. The city of Savannah lures us with its loom, with the promise of calm water and rest. The muscle memory of the recent battery of 15-foot waves and seafoam spreading wind screaming across our eardrums shakes off our brains and bodies with each bend in the channel. By the time we are tied up on the dock I have forgotten about breathing deep in the dogwood and earth, my eyes and ears distracted by the quiet yet electric stimulation of the sleeping city.

Land and sea, sight and sound, ebb and flow.
Awake and awakening.
The smell of green is now too a memory.