Rapunzel

I forgot

I forgot that you don't steal from the witch's garden and 

I stole from the witch's garden

There were dreams I'd had before but never remembered- 

The one where my father chased me around the side of the house and I fell, waking as he reached for me

The one where I found a three-posted door and inside was my perfect life

The one where a beast lived in the backyard and no one knew its name but me.

And still further back. 

Blood-smell, the chittering of rat laughter, the shape of not-yet things. I couldn't look at those. 

I ducked under their tangles and dusted the earth from my knees

And further back still-

Right up against the edge of her house, under the window where she waits and watches, was what I craved. Was all I wanted. 

That is what I took. 

In the dream I ate my fill and when I awoke, I knew.

But the witch knows too.

She knows.

I hear her tapping a finger on my window when I wake in the middle of the night

She says The child is mine in a voice darker and heavier than grave dirt 

Her nature is never to lie

Every child is hers, both the living and the dead 

She bellows like the ocean must have at the very beginning of the world 

She tells me the name of what I stole, over and over again, 

until it begins to sound like my name too

to forget time

to forgive life

to be at peace.

[oscar wilde]

My grandmother died in the early hours of my birthday, just after the middle of the night. Given another month and a half, she would have turned a hundred and two years old. It was not a good death, said the nursing assistant when she called my uncle in the morning. He'd been a surgeon for over forty years, and apparently didn't need to ask what that meant. 

Mom and Anne and I were having lunch together when Mom got the call. Afterwards, we kept eating, quietly. It was tricky. Mom didn't cry, and neither did we. It just felt the way it feels when you close a hollow core door with a little too much force. You think it should weigh more, but it just doesn't.

On my grandmother's hundred and first birthday, my daughter was born. They never knew each other but shared almost one full year together, a wondrous thing for three generations of women who had daughters well into their thirties. Four generations of late bloomers, briefly under the same sky. 

The funeral was on on my mother's birthday. We flew to my sister's and my hometown in the heart of West Texas, then drove further west to my mother's hometown, then drove even further west to my grandmother's hometown, little more than an abandoned fort next to the rolling San Saba River. 

I knew her so little. I knew her mother was the postmaster at Fort McKavett. I knew she had a stillbirth, a child who would have been younger than my uncle and my mother. I knew she liked to brew whole pots of coffee or tea, or both, and drink them down over the course of a day, reveling in her stack of library books, windows and doors closed against the blazing Texas heat outside. I knew she liked a clean house but never had one during my lifetime, mostly due to my wild dogpile of cousins and their affection for animals of all sorts, including reptiles and roosters, which they happily sneaked inside behind her back.

I think she was often lonely, but she never seemed sad when we all tumbled out her door and she waved us off from the porch. She loved her peace and quiet. Grandpa died twenty-five years before she did, and even though they were married for fifty years, she lived so long that she was technically single longer than she was bound to him, or anyone. She was a creature of solitude at her core. 

She appeared frail, but time would eventually reveal the truth- that she was stronger than almost everyone, the last one standing out of all the others who shared her world. 

She lost her eye in an accident as a child and she wore a glass one almost her whole life, which I never got used to. It was hard to remember which one to look at. The only way you could tell was the false one never looked at you, but that didn't help because her real one was usually never looking at you either. Her eyes, both the real and the not-real, were brown.

She was tall, and had great style once, and had a whip-quick sense of humor, but all her long years didn't seem to give her compassion or much wisdom, or not as far as I could tell. She was genial to strangers but brutal in combat with family. I remember some of the things she said to my mother's face, right in front of me, and they still make me angry. She needed Mom desperately as she grew old and infirm and couldn't seem to stop punishing her for it. 

My other grandmother had lobbed similar insults at my father while I was growing up. His weight and his receding hairline were favorite targets, so-called friendly fire that he sat through quietly. I knew those were the two things he was most devastated about, the Rogaine in the bathroom cabinet, the days he went without eating anything but a single Clif bar in the middle of the day. I imagined telling her that it wasn't funny, but I knew I would be the only one in trouble afterwards. 

Once, after my grandmother had picked yet another fight with Mom about Trump and politics and the idiotic stew fed to her by Fox News, after another night listening to Mom cry, I'd had it with grandmothers torturing my parents. I called her and told her I would not permit her to speak to my mother like that again. I never forgot how her voice changed. You're the one who makes her sad, she hissed. You moved home, and now she has to take care of you, too. You should be ashamed. 

Jesus. When I hung up the phone, I thought back to the time I looked up what her name, Edith, meant. Prosperous in war. 

Maybe it's too much to expect someone to be exceptionally strong and also kind. Maybe it took everything she had to just survive, her suffering and forbearance paving the way for gentler generations.

The day my daughter was born was my grandmother's last birthday. On an odd impulse, I saved their horoscope from that Sunday, for two women born exactly one hundred and one years apart. It said those born on that day would meet an interesting stranger in the coming year. 

I wonder what Grandma thought of in that last span of months, weeks, minutes. The porch of her mother's house at Fort McKavett, the lazy San Saba winding, those days when she was a willowy girl riding horses. Her first night away at college in Alpine, when she leaned over to blow out the electric lamp at her bedside table and her roommates never let her forget it. Her beloved youngest brother, who died of AIDS in the eighties. The way my grandfather called her Baby. She blamed herself for his dying, even though that made no sense, even though she never seemed to blame herself for much else. 

Did she ever think of the little one she'd lost? Did she ever wonder if she would see them, on the other side? 

My last memory of her was from her hundredth birthday party in Fort Worth. I had a whole conversation with her and was still reflecting on how nice it had been when I heard her turn to my mother and loudly whisper Who is that?

It's your granddaughter, Mom said, which must have been the strangest thing in the world to hear, the absolute last thing she would expect the answer to be. In that moment I thought of my father, his polite bewilderment when I reached for his hand to help guide it through his shirt sleeve. 

I hope she met an interesting stranger in the end. I didn't see her that last year, so it wouldn't have been me. I kept gnawing on this while we flew through the sky and the forests gave way to desert, a koan I couldn't solve or slake. Was it God? Her baby who didn't make it? Maybe as she flew past dying stars exploding, she only met herself. 

I'll never know that or much else, other than how the towels in her house smelled kind of musty in a nice way, the way the plum tree out back withered from neglect in the years after Grandpa died. All I have of her was what I gleaned from the ground, the pieces she forgot to pick up and tuck away. She never told me a thing. 

The last time I saw her she was a hundred years old and a day, the oldest person I'd ever known. Out of habit, I glanced from one eye to the other, then back again, trying to see which one tracked me and which one stayed still, but it was no use. By that time she was blind in both, tracking nothing at all, and it shouldn't have mattered, but it haunted me anyway. How I never knew what parts she could see, and which parts she couldn't. How there had never been a day in my whole life when I could tell the real from the not-real. 

I asked Mom late one night if the eye would have been cremated with her, or if it was somewhere else, and if so, where, and Mom said good Lord, who knows, and I thought wildly that maybe I should try to find it. I felt such a sudden and sharp longing for it, the part of her I could finally have a handle on, the part I could know best, the part I could know for certain wasn't real, which made it the realest piece of her I would ever have. 

You're like a little wild thing

that was never sent to school.

[mary oliver]

You turned sixteen today. The only person in my life who does not know this is you. 

When we walk to the park, people pause to pet you, and I blurt out She's sixteen! I bring it up out of nowhere with coworkers, with people standing next to me in the line at the coffee shop, with family at brunch. 

I texted it to the friend group chat, I wrote it in my journal, I whispered it to my eleven-month-old daughter when she tried to pull your ears. I say it mostly just to hear it said out loud. It shocks me every time.

I remember the day we met. I needed some volunteer hours for my job at the time, so I went to the Coconino Humane Association with my now-husband but then-friend. When we walked through the doors, it smelled like ammonia, dog food, distress. I made him swear not to let me leave with an animal of any kind. 

Then, I saw you. First cage to the right. 

How is it possible that the thread tying our futures together was that thin? I could have just as easily not gone. The thought makes me shiver.

The file pinned to the front of your kennel just said you were a rez dog, that your name was Claire. But when I bent to reach into your cage and you laid your head in my hand, your name came to me clear as day. When Mom was young, she had Eleanor. And now I had you. Your real name was Norah, and your real life was going to be with me. 

On the car ride home, you were so afraid you peed in the passenger seat. When we got to the apartment, everything was so quiet. During the hubbub earlier in the day this hadn't seemed to matter, but all the sudden it was obvious that you didn't know me, and I didn't know you, and yet, now we lived together. 

I knew that things had happened that only you would ever know about. That one of your ribs felt like it had been broken, then healed, jutting out at a strange angle. That you were terrified of men, of trash cans, of people laughing or running. You wouldn't eat from your bowl unless I was in front of you with my back turned, so you could watch my every move without me watching you.

That night, I fluffed up your bed while you circled three times and slowly lowered yourself to the ground across the room, warily watching me until I turned out the light. I could see the streetlamps reflected in your eyes. When the train keened its long lonely whistle, I heard you get up and stand still, listening.

In my room, I sat cross-legged in my bed with my head in my hands. What had I done? I knew nothing about what my life would look like in a month, let alone in a year, five years, ten. All I now knew was that whatever happened, you would be there too. I will still have this dog when I am in my mid-thirties! I remember thinking wildly. I couldn't fathom such a thing.

And somehow, here we are. You and me.

Now, we're like an old married couple. I know how you like your breakfast, which paths through the park are your favorite, that you prefer chin scratches to back strokes. Do you think she loves me? I asked my husband once. He thought for a moment, then said, I think she'd be lost without you. 

You are the one who taught me how to nurture someone who depends on me. The futility of trying to control one that you love. How to live in the moment and let time pass without forever looking over my shoulder, watching it unspool.  

But most of all, you are the truest friend I've known. Part wild thing, part home. We know how each other smells in the morning. We don't flinch when we touch accidentally. You have witnessed such private despair, so many small joys. You have definitely seen me naked more than anyone else. 

And the best times in your life- I remember them, store them up against the long years when you won't be here. The time we lived in Boulder with a woman who had a stable, how you loved to fling horse manure straight up in the air and snap at the clods as they broke apart and rained on your head. Hikes where you blew past me, ran like the wind, mouth wide open in a dog laugh. The white flag of your tail bobbing before me just at the edge of my headlamp as we scouted for a campsite in the dark. The time you found that dead bird on the Oregon coast and I thought your small sturdy heart would explode from the sheer joy of it. 

What a singular intimacy. My mother, my husband, my sister, even these people have been close or far at different times since I was twenty-one, but not you. We have been together, no matter what. Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Oregon. Young, then young-ish, then older. Then older still.

The best things in my life have all come to me by chance, I heard a woman say once, and what I thought about was you. Little mystery, little stranger, who knows me better than anyone.

Happy birthday, old friend. I'd be lost without you.  

For what is happiness but growth in peace.

[may sarton]

You're two months old as of one week ago. I counted in my head while rocking you to sleep early this morning, in the silent lull between crickets and birdsong.

We are well acquainted with the night, you and I. The sounds, the shades, the precise hour when the heat from the late summer day turns to true cool, the way the stars look from every vantage point in our yard. You are serene and bundled in my arms as I carry you through the dark house, like some kind of penitent. When I put you back in your crib I palm your head and your rump, holding my breath as I lay you down oh so slowly. Half the time you kick and open your eyes and we begin again.

Somehow you slipped from one stage to the next. At the beginning we knew exactly how many weeks and days you were, always, because there were so few of them and each one mattered so much- it meant the difference between needing one ounce of milk or two, needing to be up every two hours instead of three or four. Now, we sleep and trust you'll wake us up when you need something, feed you and trust you'll stop when you're full, and you do. 

You're so sturdy now compared to when you were newly born. When people comment on how tiny you are I almost look around for who they mean. It couldn't be this strapping child, almost fourteen pounds, the whole length of my arm.

Earlier in the summer it rained, the first rain in months, and Ivan bundled you up and took you out on the porch. An Oregon baptism! he proclaimed, and walked into the scattered shower for several moments before ducking back inside. You looked surprised more than anything, the drops melting into your hairline as we dabbed at your face. 

Several nights ago our group of friends passed you around, everyone wanting to hold you while we ate and laughed and talked outside. When we were all back home I pressed my nose against the top of your head and you smelled like campfire smoke for the very first time. Another baptism. 

The film festival was a week ago, or was it two? I held you and walked away from the group when you let loose several piercing cries. I held you in the middle of the street and we whirled and spun to the music, the black lace shadows of the trees above us patterning your upturned face, you watching the stars and the moon. 

Last night was the first time you laughed in your sleep. I couldn't believe the magic of it. What were you dreaming of? You've smiled since you were a week old, and you began laughing just over the past couple of weeks, but the only thing that makes you laugh is looking at our faces. Were you dreaming of us?

During the day I hold you and we walk through the house, through the yard. These are the dear familiar gods of home. You are so much more alert now, straining to hold your head high, watching the world. You are not interested in the dog and she is not interested in you, but everything else passes under your careful eyes- the changing light through the windows, the collection of ceramic mugs on the shelf in the kitchen, the leaves of the monstera plant. But none of these delight you like our faces do.

We huddled over you last night while you looked up at us, laid on your little sleeper on the kitchen table. Your muddled seafloor eyes, every color and no color at the same time. The raw matter of creation. You smiled and chortled, raised eyebrows and pursed your lips, while we cavorted for you. 

These are the first fruits of your life, the necessary baptisms. The prayer we say a hundred times a day, silently, aloud, with our smiles, with our bodies, with our hearts. May you be well, may you be happy. may you grow in peace.

 Places choose you.

[margaret atwood]

Cicadas hum. It's the end of the day, maybe the tail of the afternoon. The light is golden, its harshness only just tapered off. There's a caliche road. Battered mesquite trees writhe themselves into knots. The cactus is everywhere, beginning to encroach on the trail. The smell of heat on dirt, heat on metal, heat on skin. The cicadas pick up the volume, rising to a drone, driving to distraction, then suddenly dropping off. 

I smell the sun on my scalp. The backs of my hands are starting to burn. I think I'm a child, or maybe I'm just ageless, what I'll be most of my time here, just hot earth under the sun. In the silence just after the cicadas I can almost hear the heat itself, waves pulsing from the cracked ground.

When I was small, I remember a fire. My great-grandparents were burning some belongings in a trash heap. There was a birdcage, black as pitch, and I'd never wanted anything so much but I couldn't have it. The fire is behind me, off to my right. I keep walking.

There's the old pickup truck from my grandparent's farm. I don't see it, or turn to look at it, but I know it's there anyway. There's a beehive embedded in the springs of the rotted seats. I could never see it through the cracked windows, but I can feel them humming in my teeth.

The heat, most of all. It smells like hair just about to burn, the flat non-scent of dead dirt. It smells like hell. The heat beams relentlessly from above but I feel most of it under me, rising. If I was only a little lighter I'd spiral into the sun, like ashes flying up toward the night sky over a bonfire. 

It's so flat here, broken only by mesquite shrub and distant mesas. The sky is almost everything there is, like it must have been at the very beginning. Nowhere to hide. The cicadas start up again. 

Why do I have this dream? Nothing happens. It stretches the way dreams do, untethered, pointless, languid. It releases me gradually into the cool grey before waking, gripped by a homesickness I understand not at all.