Rolly poley farm

On hands and knees. 

Heads down, close to the dirt on the sidewalk. They sift through compost and perlite, peat moss and concrete dust. "Help us look for rolly-poleys," they say. 

I smile and join in, my fingernails far dirtier than theirs. 

I am happy to abandon the activity I had planned. It involved making planters: newspaper rolled around a can, taped up, sharpi-ed with a name of a child, the name of a vegetable.

They dug soil out of an orange bucket. One of the kids had found plastic spoons to use. I said they could use their hands. They didn't want to get dirty, they said. Kids not wanting to get dirty? I told them I loved getting dirty, that soil is good, that that is where all our food comes from. They spooned the soil into the little planters, chose their popcorn or squash seeds, beans or radishes. They made more planters, planted more seeds. They drowned their seeds in water, put them in the sun to grow.

A small boy with a mohawk checked on his seeds every twenty minutes to see if they were growing yet. I told him it might take a week. How long a week is to a kid! I miss that feeling of endless time on hot summer days playing in the bushes and trees in the front yard, doves declaring summer evenings, the smell of Eucalyptus and chlorine and barbecued chicken. A week was a lifetime away.

But the seed would probably grow in a few days if he watered it, I said. He could plant it in his yard. "I don't have a yard." Plant it in someone else's yard, I said, but knew this wasn't a good answer. I knew the roots would become bound, the paper disintegrate if he wasn't able to find a home for it in a couple of weeks. Would that discourage him from growing anything else in his life? Was I setting these apartment-bound kids up for traumatic plant-killing experiences instead of welcoming them to the fascinating world of gardening? Was I being classist and inconsiderate? Whoa farmer, I thought. Hopefully the adults in their life will step in and find a bigger planter, find a spot in the sun, nourish and encourage and grow. I can help plant the seed but I can't farm everyone, right? Besides, with all the hula hooping and glitter and bead art projects this afternoon, the chances of him remembering his little planters could be slim. But maybe he'd plant a seed again some day with this memory kicking around in the back of his little head.

My favorite part of the afternoon was not rolling and taping and filling and seeding. It was when the kids plunged their hands into the dirt looking for rolly-poleys, when they filled a plastic bottle with dirt and leaves for their rolly-poley farm and deposited found bugs in their new home. Should we poke holes so they can breathe? they asked, concerned for the wellbeing of their new pets. When digging in the bucket seemed ineffective they asked if they could dump out the dirt on the sidewalk. 

They seemed to expect me to say no, it would be too messy. 

I said sure, lets do it. 

We'll clean up the mess, they said without me saying anything about it. 

I smiled. "I like messes."

Dirty elbows and knees, kids looking through the dirt, asking other kids to come help. 

I love nothing more than getting kids dirty. I rarely see it. These city kids are told to stay clean. So many are scared of the earth that feeds them because their parents are too. So I tell them to get dirty, smell the soil, taste the chocolate mint and rosemary that sits on the table nearby. 

I think it is my job. But they teach me too. They give the bugs names and push around the soil and are earnest in their pursuit, totally in the moment. They are not thinking about climate change or where their dinner will come from. They stay until the hula hoops or glitter wands call to them and then they focus on gyrating and gluing glitter strewn beads to paper.

I smile and am happy in this moment, in this dirt, a water bottle full of rolly-poleys at my feet.

Coffee for dinner

The coffee is stirring within me.

A pen sits silently in my hand, wobbling over tender fingers tired from rubbing at red eyes. I blink and the thoughts clank and creep past the gray folds and blood vessels and nothing quite makes sense at this hour. It is the hour of dreams even when I am too wide awake, wishing for sleep or coherent thought but achieving neither.

I am not really a dog person but the thought of a mutt at my feet, furry belly curled around my toes, warm breath at my ankles, it makes me reach down to pet the ghost of a late night domestic desire.

My arms are covered in blisters from an allergy I didn't know I had. Pink crests form over the pale and freckles, fill with water from my inland/inskin reservoir. I marvel and scratch at my newly acquired forms. How quickly we change! How malleable and delicate we are!
I wonder which soldiers in my body are calling war on my flesh. Our flesh.

I have dirt under my fingernails (what's new) but I am reminded of the most influential lesson I learned from my farming mentors: Take action. If something isn't growing, replant. If something is sick or rotting, notice what is happening, maybe try to save it or else replant with something else. But no matter what, take action. Don't wait. The bed won't get better with procrastination.
Do something.


It is hot in this room. There is a palm tree and an elephant lamp and a red glass rooster. There are photographs of who I was seven years ago (a whole other person! literally- these cells are not the same. I should have another name now decided by the collective conscious of all these organisms calling this swirling mass (my body) home). There are random blankets and tents perfect for a fort but instead just sitting next to a proper bed, sheets stubbly with beach sand and farm dirt. It is hot because it is summer and there is not a breeze or a breath of AC.

I think of summer in India, girls in the hostel stripped down to underwear in the afternoon heat, laying under fans on beds dumping water too warm to be refreshing on dirt streaked limbs. That is when I started sleeping with arms overhead, a diamond around my skull.

It is not that way here, except I still sleep sometimes with arms up, pins and needles waking me at dawn. It is not even that way now. It is simply 3:30 am in July in San Diego and I am awake and you are (most likely) not.

A universal schoolyard

I am tethered.

I am the scuffed white ball at the end of the string. The faster I spin, an attempt to flee, to forget, smacked by hardened palms and youthful grunts, the faster I wrap myself around the pole lodged in the earth. I hit the weather worn metal with a hollow thud. I am suspended for a second kissing the gray, thankfully still… then I fall away, unravel myself from my destiny, wait for the next throw and punch.

I expect it. So far that is the only way I’ve known to stop the spinning, the constant motion circling that pseudo silence within every continuously acrobatic atom.  I think that if enough beings push me I can attain my goal. Instead, what if I withdrew, stopped begging for the nudges and slams? What if I just lay still? A memory flits past fibers, remembering how stillness feels every so often between the back forth back.  

I am (will be) still tethered (to the ocean, farming, my writing) but I am not tangled up in it, always trying to be simultaneously free and closer. I am not (will not be) twisted and pulled and smashed into the gray (of gloriously squally sunset-less evenings, no land in sight. Of the rocks and slug underbellies and spider eggs in gossamer sacs. Of black words and white paper fusing into one). 

If I resign myself to stillness, to the quiet of disengagement, then I simply lay against my desires, my string straight and unstrained, my body able to re-inflate those bruised spots and enjoy the emanating warmth of earthly minerals nestled up next to me, whispering, “Isn’t this better?”

The kids will still want to play, prove their strength, I know this too.
But the intervals can shift, I can be less attractive to battle. Like the ships the Native Americans didn’t see, I will be out of context to tangles and strikes. I will melt into the gray with my scuff marks and dirt and age and the string won’t even be necessary anymore.

Naturally tethered, the struggle dissolved, the hard fists no where to be seen, felt, imagined.

They live underneath the surface

"Which are worse, crocodiles or sharks?" she pondered as she snipped off a long blond lock of my hair. It fell to the floor and dissipated into the furry mat now forming at the base of the swivel chair.
"I think crocodiles," I answered, trying not to wince, to reason that my memories of the islands, boats, love, do not lie in strands of bleached tangled keratin. "Because at least you can see sharks right? I think crocodiles are sneakier. And they have bigger jaws. Unless you're talking Great Whites and then you're just fucked."
I stared into my face in the mirror. My hair was getting shorter, my face rounder than it had been on the boat. My eyes were red, my eyelids squishy with allergies and lack of sleep.
I wanted to cry. But instead I conversed.
"I mean, I went swimming every day when I could," I said. "I didn't want to hear about sharks or crocodiles lurking about. Even small fish would freak me out sometimes. I had one nipping at me one time. It chased me all the way to the boat!"
She laughed. Her comb was caught in a knot that once was salty dry or drenched in smoky coconut oil for weeks at a time. She cut. I continued.
"There was one time I was swimming near the boat and heard whales singing in the distance.."
She looked up. "Yeah, see, there are so many things in there. I don't like it. I mean I saw online about all the weird looking things, alien looking things, at the bottom of the ocean." She shivered.
"Yeah, they're all just looking up at us and laughing." I said, a little too darkly.

I looked around the room in the mirror. Vintage desks and lights, a half empty wine bottle on a shelf, a hairdryer in a holster. I felt my eyes tear up. It was that sort of day. Therapy had been great, I felt myself growing, realizing, feeling. I knew I needed to let out the roiling anger and grief. But there was so much more underneath that I wasn't even aware of yet. So many creatures in the depths with funny looking snouts and no eyes to see in the inky blackness. Sure, the sharks of fear, the crocodiles of sadness (blah blah) were fairly easy to spot, to name, to avoid or face head on when you couldn't swim fast enough away, make up enough excuses not even to dive into the water.
But now that I am finally making friends with my foes, allowing them to tear my vulnerability apart in order to reveal the underpinnings of my sturdy soul, I find myself simultaneously curious and terrified of what is further below. What lurks in the depths that I can't even imagine? How horrible will the hunters get?
But maybe even if it looks funny or strange or hasn't seen the surface in its lifespan, it might not be so deadly or horrible. It could even be beautiful, like that shimmering pseudopod in The Abyss, all light and liquid. Without fins or snapping jaws to alert my attention, will I ever know these bottom dwellers? Is it worth fearing something you will never hold, never see?

 My blond ends mostly gone, my honey brown healthy waves down my back (a bit shorter but still a light pressure against my scapula), I brush off the remaining strands clinging to my arm.
"There's a lot under the surface, for sure." I agreed.
And for some reason, I had the overwhelming desire to swim, flounder, become strong among all the creatures trolling these unseen depths. It was the therapy talking, that courage to face the depths after intentionally mining them with a skilled fisherman. Intentionally trolling, spearing passing words for meaning, sighs for signs. Gutting and examining the gullets of all that we find.

Wasabi for your thoughts, anyone?

A beach walk

The sand squeaks with each step.  Closer.
Into the ocean I run, my dress wet, my legs sandy, my mouth open to salt and wind and smiling.
The sun sets, the surfers stare into waves diminishing in the dusk.
We take pictures because we want to remember this moment, this peace.
We retreat back through the squeaky sand to our drier homes and dream of seaweed between our ankles.
 

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.

Giving back

He was shot in the head ten years ago.
Today he is pulling weeds from the tangled beds.
He is sifting compost with strong arms, strong back.
He is clearing pathways and unearthing wilting chard to be turned into soil.
He is grasping a trowel and bucket in his hands and marching through the farm saying to no one in particular and the world, "Yehaw! I am giving back! I'm doing something! Finally!"
After ten years of recovery, disability leave, short term memory loss and frustration, he is getting involved, getting active in his community, giving instead of taking, he says.
I tear up and laugh and smile, thankful for sunglasses to hide damp eyes.

He, and everyone else who has a story (of healing, memories, love- so yeah, everyone), that is why I'm here. We grow, we learn, we take bites of nectarines and give back our time and sweat. The line blurs and it is unclear whom is giving back to whom and it is a wonderful feeling to be in that blurry symbiotic space.

We can heal in the fellowship of the dirt.