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.

You must know every contour of yr emptiness 

before you can know whom you wish to invite in.

[taisia kitaiskaia]

I'm in another healer's office. I know I shouldn't be. I know that I am about to fork over a hundred and forty bucks for someone uncredentialed who reeks of lemongrass to test the upper limits of my pain tolerance.

These women are different, but always the same in the same ways. Old enough to be my mother, arms like iron, accents that are slight or strong. They hail from somewhere in the Eastern Bloc or central Mexico, and from childhoods spent watching wide-eyed as mothers or grandmothers ushered barren women like me into their homes. 

Is this something that I really want? How does anyone know what they really want? I wish I had someone I could talk to this about, a friend that I wasn't worried about putting off by talking about ambivalence. Nobody wants to hear about ambivalence. And yet. I dream of having a child, and I also really love putting breakable things on low shelves, always have.

Years of insomnia have left me no illusions about how well I function under sleep deprivation, and my fiery desire for codependency would surely seem distasteful even to an infant. My restlessness is the most constant companion of my life. The varicose veins developing on my left inner ankle would swell like balloons with pregnancy. Like balloons! I already Google "varicose vein removal surgery" at least every other week. 

I talk to pregnant people all the time and I know too much: their hair falls out, they have stretch marks like tiger stripes, their teeth loosen in their gums. I am too vain for any of this.

But what I hate even more is that if I have a baby, then one day they will grow up and leave me. A discerning reader might point out that this is exactly the point, and they are right and I don't care.

But these women never ask, How is your temperament? These women never say, You know, most of the childless women I know are very happy. Great legs also.

Are there healers who just sit across from you and let you spew every misanthropic thought you've ever had? No, I'm not talking about a therapist. I don't want another white millennial woman with a chunky scarf and custom glasses in my head. Be honest: has a white millennial woman with a carefully curated, tastefully eccentric wardrobe ever healed you from anything?

I'm talking more like a bog person. I want someone small, bent with age, smelling like soil, who blinks at me through eyebrows that droop like weeping willows, who croaks Of course you're sad. People are terrible and that includes you. It's fine. Who cares. I hate everything too and all I want to do is take naps.

I want someone who says You want to make more people? Why? Just enjoy your naps!

I want someone who isn't broad, strong, confident in her world and her place in it, surrounded by her daughters, taking my cash. I want someone who doesn't know what's going on, doesn't care, and doesn't make me feel like I'm missing out on my own life, and demands for payment a secret I've never told anyone, including myself.

But I have not been able to find any healers like that. Instead I'm here, my abdomen smeared with ointment that is definitely not FDA-approved, trying to Google the Spanish ingredients on the pills the curadora gave me because I (a nurse!) am too embarrassed to ask. I'll feel the bruises for days from the sobada de matriz when I put clothes on or take them off. 

Inflammation, they say. Scar tissue. You shouldn't have gotten your gall bladder removed, it has unbalanced you. Or, It is built up sadness, your body is telling me it has been disrespected (duh! Whose hasn't?) Well, we don't have time to take care of all this today, but we'll do what we can. We will need more sessions.

I think of the childless women I love, with wonderful lives: My beloved aunts. Frida Kahlo. Baba Yaga. 

But then I let myself imagine a baby, an actual person, and I am undone. It's just like that. I don't know why. I have no humorous or snarky response to this. 

I just let myself imagine this thing until it drifts away. I put my shirt on. I hand over the cash and limp out, knowing in my bones that there is no real Baba Yaga out there for me, because something really is wrong and I have to find out what and I'm running out of time. I'm haunted by this image- whether it's true or not- of our baby out there, somewhere, waiting for me to find the path connecting us.

And so, I'll keep my mouth shut. I'll keep my secrets to myself. And I'll be back.

 We don't get a lot of things to really care about.

[pig]

I couldn't sleep that night, so I rose quietly and tiptoed to the study past my mother dreaming her dreams and my father dreaming his. I sat in the creaking wooden chair that was pulled up to the roll-top desk and settled my tailbone right in the middle. There was nothing else to do, so I opened the bottom right drawer and began.

It was all maps, absolutely stuffed full of maps, most of them new even though they weren't. I felt a jarring sensation when I saw several of them, the 2010 one of Flagstaff, the one of Boulder a year or two newer, even one of Paris from the same year I spent a semester abroad there. I was touched to see my special places here alongside all of his, that he'd wanted to understand them too. 

The drawer was impossibly deep, swallowing my arm almost to my shoulder like I was a farmer midwifing a calf, one bag filled with maps to throw away and a small pile next to it of ones to keep. 

What is the strongest force in the universe? he used to say when I was eight, twelve, seventeen, then answer himself before I could crawl out of the bottom of my yawn. Entropy! Everything always breaks down! We have to fight it!

When he said this, it was usually a cue that we were supposed to join him in cleaning the house. Even now, when I watch him on Wednesdays and Sundays, the most common things he does are pushing a broom around the floor or drawing an old hand towel mechanically across a countertop, over and over. I look at the piles of junk in my home and think about how even now, he's fighting it, the thing that has so easily overtaken me.

Were the maps a way to order, understand, and then combat entropy, or were they a symptom of it? So many of them never even cracked open, mailed to him by people with jobs in city halls and tourist centers. I read so many of their typed, attached notes, eager for a feature from a beloved local columnist. Dad's twin emotions of exhaustion and guilt with their requests showed in how they'd been shoved into this neglected corner of an inscrutable filing system, but not thrown away. I read about bluebonnet tours and new restaurant openings from years past, First Fridays and car shows, Historic Route Whatever drives. 

Mom joined me when the sky had just begun to lighten. She didn't say anything, just pulled up a chair and opened the next drawer. There was the typewritten deed to the house, from 1992, for just under $90,000. An envelope with the key to the Renault, the faithless French car, the subject of so many disastrous stories. The actual hospital notes from our births- did the nursing staff just give copies of these to the parents in the eighties, or did Dad ask for them? 

I don't know, and Mom doesn't remember, and both of us are too tired to care, yawning as we trade stacks of yellowed file folders whose labels have nothing to do with their contents. One is labeled Ideas but only has medical receipts stuck in it. Another says The Girls but all I find is a rubber-banded ziplock with mismatched keys in it. It could be an interesting mystery, except we only have about forty-eight more hours to clean out the entire house so it isn't. It hits the discard pile with a hollow thump.

We work, mostly in silence. Old bills go into the shredding pile. Old notes from medical providers about blood pressure, cholesterol levels. It's the detritus of a life, of our lives. Occasionally Mom leans back and laughs while holding something at arm's length to read, or I wave some inscrutable piece of paper and ask for the story. Finally the morning is mostly gone and the desk is empty, the contents sorted into orderly piles on the floor- trash, recycle, shred, keep. Dad has slept right through this dismantling. 

Mom stands and closes the roll top, locks it. Miraculous that for all these years- the desk has to be almost a century old- the key has never been lost. We go to let Dad out of the bedroom. More mornings than not these days we find him standing in the room, hands at his sides, unsure how to use the doorknob to let himself out.

The key is here, against all reason. The desk is empty, for the first time in my life or hers. We may have won this battle, but we both know that entropy- inevitable, irrepressible- has won the war. 

He will walk by his desk today without recognizing it, the site of so much dreaming, the Annie Dillard quote he printed off taped to the side, about our galaxy is a flung thing, loose in the night, our solar system one of many campfires. What shall we sing? he would always finish the quote with a flourish.

This beloved quote. We would write it on the cover of the bulletin for his funeral. It's been stuck to the desk forever. I love that he loved it enough to print it off, carefully cut around it, tape it up where he and we would see it every day. 

I pull at the tape until it comes off. I put it in the pile of things coming home with me to Oregon, along with high school photography projects, old journals, all the things you can't bring yourself to let go of yet. 

It's so strange that life goes on, that someone else lives in your childhood home, that the next time you come to your hometown you have to find an Airbnb because none of your people live there anymore. My memories of home feel like one endless, hot summer- the hum of cicadas rising and falling, my parent's voices calling from another room, school and summer camp and canoe trips and church and college and lying on the floor to write, dog claws clicking, the way the screen door sounds when it slams closed, the way the house itself smells like dust and stucco and our skin. Then it's gone. Did I remember it right? Did it happen at all? 

When I opened the box three years later in the attic, the Annie Dillard quote wasn't there. I looked and I looked, tripping over piles of junk, sweat beading around the band of my headlamp. But I couldn't find it anywhere, a flung thing, loose in the night, one more piece of the past that only exists in memory.