This is the sixth day of the coldest part of winter in Nashville, and we have no home.  Our landlady says it will be any day now that she will make good on her promise to fix the heater that went out a week ago, but each day we are told one more day still.  Who can account for an ice storm in the south?  Who can predict a city transformed to abandoned cars and wandering zombie hipsters post apocalypticly scattered on every street?

A northerner, dumbasses.

Now we find ourselves huddled under the charitable roof of people who love us while the trees outside bend their tallest branches down in a seeming effort to replant somewhere warmer– like the molten lava we hope is in the center of it all.  A particularly malicious limb has already fallen and impaled the back window of one car, and every crack and rattle outside the tightly sealed front door takes us to the window to ensure another vehicle hasn’t succumbed to a similar end.  We are pacing longer strides as the days stretch, wild as circus tigers, waiting for our proper moment to turn on the ones who are caring for our misplacement.  Here, we are warm, the dog is fed and has friends, we can watch all the Netflix we want, we are fed and have friends… and we just want to go home.

I am the most ungrateful of beggars.

Being tucked away in a haven with enough elbow room for everyone, enough goodwill to go around the city twenty times twice, there is an element I miss more.  It’s not a nostalgia for the heydays of sled riding down Great Uncle Paul’s hill, making last second rolls to keep from oncoming traffic in the persistent neighborhoods of Western PA.  It’s not for hot chocolate or chicken soup from a packet mom added the right amount of hot water to, sipped from Strawberry Shortcake or Keebler Elf mugs printed with our names.  I don’t want to build a snowman or ride my bike around the halls.  I want fewer options.

One day, when the city falls into a coma of ice and danger, I want to heed the mayor’s urging to stay off the roads.  I want to pace less.  I want to not think about what I am missing, how a day of work lost is a bill less paid, how guilty I feel for wanting to spend the day reading.  I want to not think about how few these days are.  I want to not immediately scatter my brain to think of how best to use the time, and when the brain reconvenes, I realize it is 5 o’clock with my hands still wringing.

It seems I am already making a list for next time this happens, as the trees have not even started their dripping thaw.  Who can lay everything down for a day and sit still with the cold on one side of the window and a hot kettle on the other?  Who can stop their pacing long enough to remember the ice storm of 2015 as it is happening, instead of as a hopeful hindsight months down the line?

A southerner, you dumbass.

 

I come from a long, healthy line of mild insomniacs.  My father, alert and awake by– what my mother begrudgingly informs me– 3AM.  4 on good nights.  Not a single hour was left unturned.  Our house, calm and dark and sure of itself on its hilltop perch each night, had the rattle and squirm of a termite infested doll, its eyes asleep while its inhabitants move to push through the seams.  Whether it was my brother on his late night Nintendo 64 addiction, or my father’s just-past-midnight toss-turns-to-WWII-mini-docs on the History Channel, my mother and sisters’ bathroom runs, or my own spark of 2AM inspiration that found me lamp on and awake with the pen and paper I kept religiously by my bed for exactly these divine moments.  I’m not sure a member of my family knew what REM cycles were.  And what we didn’t know may have hurt us, but we didn’t miss it.

The charade of early-to-bed-early-to-rise created a strange sanctity of sleep, more appropriately found in phrases like let-a-sleeping-dog-lie (which, most often, actually referred to our dogs), and don’t-poke-a-sleeping-bear (which always referred to our father snoozing in his La-Z-Boy, the only place other than church he seemed to get good rest).  These paired with mixed messages of you-can-sleep-when-you’re-dead (my adolescence) and you’re-going-to-sleep-your-life-away (my teenage years) birthed the confusing and guilty relationship I currently hold with the nightly slipping of consciousness.

Insomnia accompanied me most of my life, until the introduction of whiskey and Nyquil and late-night-early-mornings.  Never mind the years it had aided in journal scrawlings and half-writ songs and solutions to world hunger and decisions to leave home.  I could squelch that 3AM involuntary wake-up with the clink of a glass or an unproductive evening of late night shows I’m too embarrassed to watch during the day.  Post college, I was nearly ahead of the sleeplessness by several days.  By the time I got married a couple years later, I was sleeping through the night like a Olympic gold medalist of Snooze.

And then, like a good fairy, the night of my wedding, it returned.

When I opened my eyes to the beautiful Western North Carolina B&B at 2AM, my ankle throbbing from an attempt at ironic dancing at my reception, my brand new husband snoring next to me, and hours before a plane to our honeymoon, insomnia reached her thick wisp of a hand around my head.  We have some work to do, she seemed to say.  I had made a terrible mistake.

When the panic subsided, I respectfully submitted to her.  Whether I stayed or went would need to be decided between us, in those quiet moments between midnight and dawn.  She awoke me nearly every night, save those times on the road away from home, for the three years of my tumultuous marriage.  Early on, I was alone.  Even my dog learned to ignore the incessant 2AM pacing and 3AM research on Eva Braun.  I spent the time writing, willing myself to love the life I was in.  Later, the sleeplessness felt more like a defense mechanism, waking at midnight to escort my drunk husband back to bed.  In the last days, she stirred me like a cry from the crow’s nest, opening my eyes in my separate bed to find him hovering over me, angry, and waiting, the tiny room thick with whiskey vapors at 1AM.

When I moved in with my sister shortly after, I slept more than I was awake.  We had made it, and Insomnia moved to someone else’s wide eyes for a change.

I have resumed a very adult idea of sleep since.  I have come to terms that it is necessary, even though a comedy podcast once told me that scientists have no idea why we do it.  That not having enough is inconvenient.  That when she returns on nights like these, I should bitterly turn the pillow to the cooler side and punch it down for dramatic effect, to tell the universe that I am a functional human being that adheres to the natural light-and-dark-means-awake-and-asleep convention.  I tell myself I’ll be miserable in the morning without it.  I down another cap of Nyquil.

Whatever she is trying to tell me can wait til morning, I think.  But the quiet that lets the ears perk inward, that lets the heart tell the brain tell the body tell the heart in the should-be-asleep hours is vampiric in every way, waiting for my invitation and running for cover at the first hint of dawn.  I want to believe there is no healing left to be done in the midnight hour.  And as I kick the old bag out with still another cap of Nyquil or a healthy dose of nicotine, I realize I am ungrateful… but I’ll worry about that after I sleep…

Roy died last Saturday night.

It was Superbowl Eve, as America seems to claim it, but I don’t think Roy gave two shits about a game.  He seemed to make his bets on the sun.  He dared it in the mornings when he would step on his porch, testing the sky with a squint, hands to his hips, and pulling up on his belt in the classic way that old men learn through some sort of private schooling mandatory at age 65+.  Then, “Hey, hey, hey, you two!” he would call over to our porch.  And I would respond with an, “Uh-oh, here’s trouble,” before he would laugh and we would enter into the meandering patter of weather-speak and how-do-you-do’s.  He would end with a prediction of the sun’s next appearance, or insist that we enjoy it if it was already there.  Then he would holler to our big, sunbathing dog who had stopped barking at him within two weeks upon our moving in– her personal best– before politely excusing himself inside while we smoked and enjoyed the sun.  Or waited for it to come when Roy said it would.  Roy always seemed to know when it would.

It was overcast all day last Saturday, and rained all day Sunday.  While the rest of the country was fixed to a screen, my neighbor friend lost his last bet on the sun.

As a kid, I envied the Catholics for their ability to fearlessly enjoy their lives with the knowledge that they were going to rot in Hell at the end of it for not being an Evangelical Protestant like me.  When Roy died, I envied those old Italian Catholic women of my hometown.  They had not only the precise baked rigatoni dish to transition the remaining through their loss, but an abundance of spiritual protocol to keep the spectators from pacing their house and peaking through windows to catch a glimpse of the grieving family next door.  I’ve been lately creeping through Christianity and Catholicism’s windows, looking with the same intention: How is it that you intend to deal with this mess?  I want those beaded necklaces and thick smokey incense and rote prayers I was taught to be afraid of.  The sort of things that make death everyone’s business, and not the heavy undertaking of one family behind closed doors.  Throwing in that damned rigatoni recipe would be helpful, too.

“Grandma’s going to need a lot more help like this,” she said, referring to herself in the third person.  I looked up at her from my place at the foot of her bed, where she had coached me on removing her sheer knee high stockings.  “She’s sick, you know.”  But I didn’t know.  Maybe I had caught the darkness moving in whispers and the bustling appointments my parents were keeping, but this strange announcement solidified in the act of aiding my grandmother with her night gown.  Our roles changed then, and my mornings spent reading her the same chapter in Matthew while I waited for sliced pickles would be transformed into requests for silence by hospice.  I was ten, and it was time to learn how to anoint the sick.

From what little I have gathered on this holy sacrament, I may be the least qualified to grant a clear conscience and good faith into the afterlife.  But I am also afraid we take on the anointment too late.  Maybe this lofty rubbing of oils and feeding of Jesus Christ’s body and blood is the reassurance we need before we fall into a forever sort of sleep.  Or maybe we also need the anointment of our granddaughter to help us get our stockings off our feet because the cancer is keeping us from bending over to do it ourselves.

My ex-husband’s grandmother was getting frail, and may be frailer still, now.  It wasn’t long after my own grandmother asked for that small anointment that she was sung out on the hymns of a hospice nurse’s memory.  Then, on the eve of my future-sister-in-law’s wedding, a tiny grandmother of no relation sat in front of me.  It was me, she decided, who would paint her nails.  I objected.  I complained of my unsteady hands and tomboy nature.  I nominated her daughters and her granddaughters.  But she was a firm, persistent woman, and I sat and painted an old woman’s nails into pearls as she instructed, long even strokes.  She may not remember it, or be alive to remember it, but I can recall her exact delight as she inspected my wobbly work as the-finest-I’ve-ever-had.  This particular anointment brings me one of my few regrets in leaving that marriage behind.  I hope when we recall the ways that others have anointed us when we are sick or unable, that we can forgive long enough to allow that anointment to pass through to whatever awaits us after this.

Maybe the anointment we wait for as we age isn’t something we wait to receive from someone holier than ourselves, but someone even smaller.  Maybe the anointment we need isn’t even something we have to wait for.  Maybe we need to ask for it– sooner, more frequently.  Maybe we make a practice of anointing those who are well on the off chance that they are really sick and not telling their smoking next door neighbors about it.  Maybe all the anointment anyone needs is to tell them when the sun is coming next.

It goes like this:

My dog, same walk every day, and it just takes her.  She breaks into a trot, she turns.  Her wrinkles turn up in the semblance of a smile.

She remembers she is alive.  This is nice, I think.  I will use this.  But I don’t.

muddle.          muddle.          muddle.

That night, I read about love.  My brain creaks.  My boss comes home happily in a Christmas sort of drunk.  Driving home.  Swampy blues on NPR (what?).  Radio crackle.  Nashville appears with its hazy cold lights.

I am alive.

The kind that makes me wish for someone in the passenger’s seat, who I can reach over to and squeeze their leg and say–

We are alive!

And they will put on sunglasses because it is now a bright summer day in January–

and it’ll have a cold tint of an indie movie with the eeriness of Blue Velvet…

And then I think of how to hold this feeling.  And I think and think of it until I think my way out of it, and by five minutes later I am in my driveway and can’t remember what the feeling is or if I had it at all.

Remembering you are alive is not something you can think through.  You lose it, even if you are pretending to do something else but secretly keeping the corner of your eye on it.  The most playful sorts of characters know when they are being watched, no matter how many brown trench coats and floppy hats and 3AM corner diner booths I occupy.

It goes like this:

I am just past the pool’s surface, but not yet consumed.  I hold my breath.  I dart from one end to the other.  I fetch plastic rings of primary colors from the deep end’s thick blue.

I hear nothing.  I examine the bottom of nine feet down.  I look up.  I am alive.  I am eleven and I am alive.

I stay until my lungs give out.

The surface breaks it.  I dive again, but it’s lost down there in a container of plastic and chemicals and a long diving board overseeing.

At twenty-five, I explain to my passenger friend my love of water, the bursting that can be made from just my feet touching it, as we drive down the long winding of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  I recreate it, but it’s lost.  I feel suddenly embarrassed.

If I walk to the pool it began in, I will find nine feet of gravel and concrete filled to the top, metal scraps and spare parts scattered across the surface.  No one needed swimming pools, anymore.  We need work.

It goes like this:

I will go to court in one week to break apart what God or the devil had put together for three long years.  I have traveled to the West and back, complete with sand dunes and kitschy roadside attractions and beaches and Wyoming skies.

Now, in a November backyard in Tennessee, I stand with a someone who will become, in a few months from now, my someone.  We sang our songs.  We greeted our friends.  They listened.  They wrapped in blankets.

This sort of alive does not get fabricated from photographs.  It is not a put upon sort.

The fire is going out, and our gear is packed.  But we wait.  We watch our friends leave in twos.  I turn to my future someone.

They are leaving.  I say, They are going home to their homes where they will remove these heavy blankets quickly and jump into a bed of more heavy blankets.  They may even skip brushing their teeth.  And in the dark, there will be two sets of cold feet touching each other under the blankets.

We stood and watched them go through our own mouths’ steam.

My mother has a way of rolling out bad news as though it were the last thing on the agenda, but the card was gently misplaced.  So cancer gets wedged between really-cold-here and I-had-a-delicious-croissant-for-lunch with the ease and hustle of a 72-year-old waitress at an Old Timey diner affirming your request of extra ketchup while halfway across the diner to her next table during tourist lunch rush.  It’s a skill I’ve taken the effort to nurture, but I am also suspicious of a mutated gene, particularly when I begin to fire off the one about the-string-who-walked-into-a-bar just before delivering the accidental punchline of I-had-a-miscarriage.  The hard wiring of brain-to-heart has a few disconnects that spark to my mouth in a way that I am certain makes my mother question whether the gene pool was poisoned in transit.

As the youngest of four, Saturday mornings not spent in the woods were spent alone with my mother, running errands, then covering the house methodically with Pledge soaked rags made from my father’s torn undershirts.  I captured a certain zen from handling each trinket and picture frame, lopping the dust that settled from the week from each arrangement, and creating an intricate storyline from each tchotchke that bled down with family names and scandals that didn’t exist.  Each item could be sacred, although was likely picked up from Walmart.

I was looking for a rumbling in these later moments.  A time for my mother to explain to me the secret that would explain our being here in this small town in Western Pennsylvania.  But I was more often given her rote responses of I-don’t-know-where-that-came-from or that’s-just-your-great-grandmother.  I needed more.  Something to change the family landscape.

Taking a cue from the old man’s playbook, casting myself into a world even smaller, I asked my mother what she intended to do when dad died.

She stopped dusting jam cabinet my brother had made, back turned.

“Mom?” I pressed.

Dad has been in a hopeless fight against time since his late thirties.  “Forty-five,” he would say, “I don’t plan to live a day past forty-five.” My mother fought his prophecies hard enough with eye rolls and don’t-you-dares that held him here past forty-five.  Then fifty-five.  Now past sixty-five, with cancer past and a couple tips of his fingers sawed off, he begrudges her will to keep him with her indefinitely.  Superstition works itself out to keep those asking to move on stuck here, held by the ones who love them.  It is the craft of having others knock on wood for you, when you are surrounded by nothing but steely reservations.

“Mom?” I reinstated.  “Did you hear me?”  The question didn’t seem unreasonable.  He was planning to go any day now, after all.  She turned around.  She looked lost.

“That’s not going to happen,” she said.

“But he said–” I started, pleading for her realize how understandable my question really was.

“No.” she responded, beginning to cry. “I will choose not to think of that.”

The clever play between death and life is not to be administered with planning and fact.  The roar and ripple are delicately balanced with a blatant mockery of our imminent end.

I took to my father’s defiance of death in my early college life.  Maybe it was the unfathomable spool of time unwinding itself faster and longer than I could bend my brain to that made me rattle out my own prophecy of death by twenty five.  I upped the stakes.  The good die young, I learned from the piano man himself, as I cranked old school jangly pop from my bright yellow truck and imagined the ways in which one person could go from a routine college commute to a horrific car accident.  But tricking death only works if you are surrounded by people who want you to stay.  I siphoned the proper eye rolls and don’t-you-dares to keep me to nearly twenty-nine.  But I’ve stopped my prophecies since.  Between a decade of smoker’s lungs and the long swoops into deep depressions, when it’s time to live, it is important to enjoy it.

Yesterday in a gas station restroom in Kentucky, en route home to Tennessee from a well wishing visit to my mother in Pennsylvania before her procedure to remove the cancer they discovered a few weeks prior, an older woman wobbled in as I was washing my hands.  She took care to steady herself from her husband’s hand to the wall when I turned around.  I aided her to the handicapped stall and retrieved the towels she asked for to clean the seat.  Here, in the grime of humanity’s waste, she begged me to never get old.

“I’m sorry to say,” I responded, “that I seem to have every intention of lasting that long.”

My response startled even me.  The genetic line of hope-to-god-I-die-young disintegrated here.

“Well,” she said, “you are a beautiful young lady.  You look like my granddaughter.  I’m glad I found you.  My husband was hoping I would find someone here to help me, and here you are.”

This is the best case scenario.  We stumble forward in hopes to find an arm to hold on to so that we can perform the basest of human functions.  And when we have the leave that steady arm of the one we love, we hope there will be another.  On the other side of the door, her husband waited to receive her again.

I understood, then, what my mother meant that day I carelessly called out our sobering reality.  I simply did not want to think about a time when he wouldn’t be there.

The sea was going to take my father away.

Never mind that we were mountain people, each Friday spent packing coolers and duck boots for two days of Allegheny mountain living.  Never mind that he had carved us out miles of driveway to the hand built, propane fueled cabin– not a telephone or electric line in sight.  One phone call, and he would be gone.  He was leaving us for the raucous waves that pushed on my childhood security from states away.  And so I accidentally began to pray against my family’s good fortune.

Evening dinners were not mandatory, they were understood.  Assigned seating, round robin grace saying, mum-is-the-word if you don’t like the taste, and no one leaves until the last forkful.  Except, of course, for the cardinal rule of exception for weather.  As an owner of a family line, ditch-digging, commercial project excavation company, my dad was required to excuse himself at the precise moment the Channel 11 weather report chimed in from the adjacent living room’s blaring, wood framed television.  Through the indoor slotted window above the kitchen sink, we would listen to the low grumble of a man who needed, more than anything, for each day’s report to come up sunshine and 72 degrees to keep his family, and the families of each of his men, fed and warm.  In a plot of Pennsylvania that only receives 22 full, cloudless days of sunshine a year, meteorologist Dennis Bowman didn’t stand a chance against the tirade of a tired father-of-four, slandering his poor TV screen face with you-have-to-be-kidding-me’s and bowman-more-like-bonehead’s that could give Statler and Waldorf a run for their money.

When he would return to finish his last bits of mashed potatoes and meatloaf, head still shaking, we could watch the week’s worth of 90’s graphic rain clouds hover over the too-small table until our nightly ice cream course.

Weather was the only exception to leave the table.  Until the ghost ship that never came.

I didn’t quite understand the ins and outs of the business.  I only remember the night he skipped the weather– who needs it?– because his ship was coming in.

“Dad, what ship?  What kind of ship is coming?” I interrupted furiously.  But he just kept shaking his head and smiling with my mother.  A deal… finally a break… his ship is coming…

I never took my dad for a sailor.  I didn’t think he much cared for the lot of cuss-mouthed drinking sons-of-bitches.  But the excitement, the waiting, the new life– they were coming for him, and he wanted it to happen.  As in never before, the business phone– a lower chirp of the not-so-latest technology dual line in our home– would ring past 5PM and be answered.  During dinner.  Because a ship was coming to take my father away to a better life.

The weather ritual resumed the following night– a fluke.  But the new bustle to a ringing business phone was added to the dinner exceptions, accompanied with a holler and a hoot from sparkley-eyed father proclaiming, “This could be it!  Our ship!  It’s coming in!”  By the time he would return to the table, his excitement would be reduced to a simmer– a hopeful glimpse of Christmas from a July evening.  “No, that wasn’t it,” he’d say, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not coming.”

I developed a tasteful indifference to the ocean that year.  Who needed the wild whip of the stupid sandy beaches, the sting of salt, the deep unknown creatures waiting to bite or swallow.  I took special interest in the pines that lined our property.  I snubbed Malibu Barbie.  I prayed for the ship to get a hole in it and fill with water and sink to the bottom with all its rotten treasure and whatever else it had that dad wanted to leave so bad for.  I acted entirely disinterested in my best friend’s vacation photos to Hilton Head.  We are mountain people.  She can sell seashells on some other shore.

What is the way we count time in childhood?  Is it by season?  But at least three winters could pass in a week of cold summer nights.  Birthdays?  But I am sure I grew three years between fifteen and sixteen.  One childhood could last three or four lifetimes, at least.  Any kid who has been in time-out can attest to this.  I used to believe it was my parents, my teachers, the grown-ups, who could accurately report the number of minutes or days between one event and another.  But it seems that the less time they have, the less generous amounts they give to those memories.  Phases I was certain lasted years are reduced to a few weeks in my parents’ memory of me.  Years from now, my two year goth stint may only have lasted a couple days in their recounting.

This elasticity of time stretches my father’s waiting for his ship over the course of years.  And the longer the ship took, the less afraid I became.  The longer the ship took, the less hop-to-it the ring of the phone would jostle him.  The longer the ship took, the less I thought of a crow’s nest and the more I noticed the crow’s feet around his eyes.  “Any day now,” he would snort, “…any day.”

And then, one night, the phone rang, and he said nothing at all.  I had made a terrible mistake.  All my selfishness in trying to keep dad here– I had redirected his ship.  It was my fault.  It wasn’t coming.  And now, my father was devastated.

I reversed my tactic.

“Dad!” I called after him, “Your ship!  It could be your ship!”

A laugh.  “Yeah, maybe so.”

I carried the torch each night after that.  The phone.  “The ship!”  “Yeah, maybe.”

And then, finally, the phone.  “The ship!”

He turned.  He smiled.  He was kind.  “That ship is never coming.  Okay?  That ship has sailed.”

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t have any idea what sort of ship we were looking for, anyway.  I still don’t.

On St. Patrick’s Day,

I stole the peppermint extract.

I shuffled the tiny bottle

between potatoes

and laundry detergent.

I frazzled over coupons,

and fussed with plastic bags.

I practiced my lines

for the getting-caught-scenario.

But I wasn’t caught.

On the following Tuesday,

I turned myself in to you.

You put my shoulders in your hands

and asked me

to never steal

what we can one day afford.

I learned that you are not my Clyde,

You are my cop.

I wasn’t ready to be caught.

On two March’s plus one summer later,

I told you so.

I stole these words.

I stole these ones, too.

I stole the ones I used to love you,

I stole the ones I used to leave you.

I am stealing what I can afford.

On one month shy of St. Patrick’s Day,

two houses gone,

I don’t have you–

I have one small bottle

(minus three drips)

of peppermint extract.

…mind over matter mind over mattermindovermattermindovermatter...

I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I knew that the mantra seemed well equipped to help me press my feet forward with my chin up.  With any success, I would break into a trot before dinner time.  If I had really considered the ordeal, mind over matter would tell me to put on a damn pair of shoes and ride my bike or sidewalk chalk the kid equivalent of cave paintings over the abundance of concrete that rolled between the family compound yards.  But instead, I found myself practicing for the inevitable hostage situation I would one day find myself in, and– thanks to my early diligence– get out of myself.

It was a movie or a book or a comment taken out of context between adults or, likely, a lunch table know-it-all who tipped me off: the first thing taken from a hostage is his shoes.  I was alert to the information, but blase.  It wasn’t my strong sense of security in the world mostly being a good place, or the fact that I had the secret service protection of a divine creator that kept me cool.  I had spent more nights than I had years predicting my future entanglement with danger, where a prominent foreign leader or a years-on-the-lam Chicago mobster zero in on one blonde-headed Western Pennsylvanian girl as the precise victim who, with her teary brown doe eyes, could twist and play the heartstrings of people on a national scale, resulting in a bad man winning a ransom of more emeralds than 30 horses could carry.  Thankfully for the world, however, these masked-gun-slinging-illegal-treasure-seeking schmucks will have preyed on the wrong 9-year-old, what with my carefully planned mind games and keen-escape-route-finding eye and– if necessary, in a real pinch– my powerful tactic of stealing his gun when he accidentally falls asleep to the smooth sounds of my lullaby medley.  After my successful escape and the turning over of one of the world’s most infamous villains, Mr. President would award me and my family half of the emeralds they had to conjure for the ransom, and however many puppies I asked for.

The plan, of course, was flawless.  Kindly pardon my lack of crippling fear in light of this new trivia.  It was going to take a much bigger wrench than a couple of missing shoes to knock into my hostage escape know-how.

Maybe for some lesser experienced adolescent, being barefoot and afraid would be cause to reconsider their precise exit from captivity.  But for me, barefooted-ness was practically an inherited gene.  My mother was regularly pointed out by members of our church to first time visitors in post-Sunday-morning services as the-one-without-any-shoes.  She could be caught hustling from one Sunday school room to another, panty hose lined feet pattering around the red, thick carpet, searching for the simple closed-toed’s she’d abandoned two hours back in favor of freedom.  The message was clear: shoes were for suckers, and mine could be found strewn about with clasps wrenched open in a hustle to run faster and quieter on the third story balcony than my clunky foot-covered pals.

My secret woods witching gave me practice on forest floors and tall grasses, fancying myself a psychic; but my third eye blazed like my Christian conscience, and I promptly returned the shoes to my feet and my apologies to the Lord upon return from these barefooted expeditions.  The huntress-meets-medicine-woman allotted my stamina for cold, as the freezing stream water of the Allegheny River tributary at the foot of our cabin’s property ran across my feet, the thick silty mud oozing between my toes.  I turned rocks slowly from the stream bed, with the least amount of watery rustle, calling on the stillness of my ancient sisters to hold my blue-ing feet down for a few more moments until I spotted the awaited crayfish and scooped it up triumphant into the white 5 gallon bucket.

The bottoms of my un-sandled dogs burned until they calloused in the summer months, as I passed from warm white concrete to the boiling tar of black asphalt on an errand from my mother to my grandmother’s house in back of the compound.  There was also the option to avoid the asphalt and take on the damp, maple-shaded grass of Great Aunt Mildred’s yard in between, but the easier route came at the price of a treacherous 20 foot stretch of thick, gray gravel.  At this point in my barefooted expertise, I was accustomed to the smooth stones of garden beds and the wide rough tops of granite and sandstone, but the cool-cut edges of the gravel ranging from pea to walnut size, replaced before each winter, was an arena I avoided when I couldn’t stand to chicken out with shoes.

One afternoon, while taking the chance on the sharp gray lagoon for the satisfaction of plush green ease, my legs buckling with the jaggedness of the rocks occasional poking into the arch of my feet, it occurred to me: my captors will of course surround the house with gravel.  Why hadn’t I thought of it earlier?  All those country farmhouses and below ground prisons and strip malls where terrible things usually happen are always surrounded with gravel.  My current rate of 10 steps in 20 seconds wouldn’t suffice– I’d be a goner.

No more pussyfooting for me. …mindovermattermindovermatter… and I was practicing the nightly ritual of gravel walking with the sturdy dedication of any paranoid survivalist.  The spastic flail of my arms in reaction to sharp edges on my feet gradually subsided, and within a week I had advanced to a general stoicism as I trudged across the rocks upright and with full, natural motion.  The soles of my feet grew thicker, and my stride faster.  I began to consider a step into fire walking as a potential career path in case circus acrobat/animal handler didn’t work out.  One thing was certain: no mobster was going to keep me hostage for long.

When my mastery of walking over rocks eventually gave way to my obsession with learning my parents exact signature in the event that they might be murdered and I would have to feign their written consent on school permission slips until I could figure out whodunit so that I and my siblings would not somehow be framed, my ability to jaunt from one surface to a varied other came naturally, with no grimace, and with little thought to whether it would be a useful skill should I ever be captured.  In fact, I wasn’t so sure I’d be captured, anymore.  At least not by anyone important enough to gain national recognition.

I became properly obsessed with shoes post college, in deference to my gender stereotype, and have spent most of my adult life wearing them.  I am fastened in and secure for every heels-or-flats occasion.  It is when a summer day permits a quick run to the mailbox and back, the first step to the grass gives me the sensation that I’ve missed something.  The tenderness of my feet is a little alarming– all that training just to be another soft soled, hard hearted victim to an imagination held hostage, and miles of gravel to set it free.

 

 

 

 

I looked for you

yesterday in

the grey-brown geese,

in the plush steer

wandering back

and forth and back

unafraid or

unaware of

his grey-brown fence.

I looked for signs

of your leaving

or your blessing

that I will be

born and dead be-

fore you were born.

Yuma, Arizona

is a waiting jailbreak.

Before, there was Mesa.

After were the sand dunes–

a welcome to a home

you don’t know, anymore.

Nothing’s fit to take from

Yuma, Arizona.

Plastic plates filled with the

Sacred Heart of Jesus–

we scavenged the whole lot.

We never fought there in

Yuma, Arizona,

but should not have taken

that call from your mother

or from my ex-husband.

Yuma, Arizona

is a waiting jailbreak.

We thought we were jailers

And at once prisoners.

We were a pack of dogs,

We were its tumbleweeds.