little soul little stray

little drifter

now where will you stay

[hadrian]

Nothing fills me with despair like hearing her toenails click on the hardwood floor at midnight, then two in the morning, then again at three or four or five. Each finger-snap of a footfall echoing in the dark house is an indictment. She is in pain. She is confused. She is not young anymore. I don't know what to do.

The horror movies have it wrong. It is not some grinning demon who fills you with the deepest dread, a malicious spirit or evil presence. It is the shuffle of one you love, perpetually in your wake, the sound of their mindless pursuit. Of what, it's impossible to know. Routine, comfort, help. Help her. But I don't know what to do. 

The pain medication seems to make her even more uncomfortable. She avoids the orthopedic dog bed. She will not eat the food I lay out in front of her until I go through an elaborate series of attempts to make it as palatable as possible, warming up various lunchmeats and shredding them over freeze-dried senior dog food, then switching to wet packets of dog food in a variety of flavors, then wet dog food in the only flavor she favors, then back to the freeze-dried food when she stops eating the wet food. 

Eventually the ants find these rejected offerings, setting off a loop of dumping out bowls when they've been there too long, putting out bowls of broth from our chicken dinner she only looks at long and hard before swinging her doleful gaze back to me. I switch the broth out for sausage, cooked one-handed in a pan while my daughter swipes at the stove, saying Hot, hot. Norah will watch me set this in front of her, with the same unreadable expression. 

I wish I could say I tenderly care for her in her distress, but truly, this gaze has driven me more than once to long for a gun. A slow death shaves you to your core.

Walking alongside those you love as their body disintegrates is a nightmare. They will topple, crumble, bury you under their rubble, and only after you have forgotten every single thing you ever loved about them, only when you are blinded by rage at the very sound of their cough or their footsteps or their tuneless whistling, only then will they leave this earth in a way that will wake you in the night for years afterward, the sadness like wet sand in your chest. 

I remember her fast. I remember her, head and shoulders out my passenger side window, tongue in the wind. I remember her running, muscles in her chest flexing, mouth wide in a dog laugh. I remember her smiling in her sleep. The striped shadows of aspens flashing across her back, slapping her paw in the cradle of my hand for a treat, her happy, happy, happy.

I can't stand this. I can't leave her now. The years of waking up every few hours at night to let her out, then go get her from the yard, as she stands there lost and watching the back fence. The years of trying to coerce her to eat, after her stroke. She is unlike me in every way, most of all in this- that for all the countless times I have shown frustration with her, she has never shown anger or even irritation to me, even though she is the one suffering. 

She deserves a good death. But as far as nature is concerned, a good death is like a good birth- still fucking terrible. The yawning void of the universe is, as always, beautiful and indifferent. Still I beg, Death, come soon, come gently.

Of course, I can do for Norah what was impossible to do for my father. A dog, at least, can be given a gentle death. I know this, but I canceled her first appointment with the vet, then made another, then canceled that one too. This, too, is my fault.

I hate death, for taking those I love, for coming too fast, for coming far too slowly, for revealing my true nature, always, to be one who can't take it. I recoil from the pain of others like a bug splashed with bleach. I avert my eyes from the gnarled toenails I can't bear to trim, the empty eyes I can't stand to meet. Cover my ears against the endless tap, tap, tapping that starts up in the very marrow of midnight, continuing every hour or two until dawn.

This makes me vow things to my small child that I do not now and will never have the courage to follow through on, caught in an endless loop of my own. When I get old, I will step off a canyon ledge, I say, to my disinterested one-year-old. She knows I am full of shit and doesn't even look up from her collection of empty yogurt cups, filched from the recycling bin.

Of course, I won't. I will want to live, despite everything, even up til the last. I think of the way Dad's breathing sounded near the end, his body pushing him to stay here, no matter the cost. 

Last night I couldn't sleep and I rose when I heard Norah, walked to the living room to find her circling aimlessly, a dog about to lie down who has forgotten how. 

As she staggered in an endless loop, and I stood there frozen, unsure what to do, I thought of the earth circling the sun in the long ages in the future when all life has burned away from our planet. Following its route with no one there to see the light come or go. It was never the act of witnessing that set our universe in motion, our bodies in motion, and it was watching dying that proved this to me once and for all. These things began unwatched and will continue, seen or unseen, until they can't. 

But she does have a witness. Maybe Norah isn't quite here anymore, but I am. Cringing, cowardly, raging against what is, but still here. I'm all she has. 

I called the vet back, scheduled the appointment again, apologized. It's okay, she said. It's hard. I get off the phone and lay a hand on her head. She's sleeping so deeply that she doesn't wake, unusual for her, a lifelong light sleeper. 

I check to see if she's still breathing, and of course, she is, her chest rising and falling as the winter sun fades to another night.

Years and years ago-so many years it makes me squint- my dad sent me an email.

K, Just found these John Prine lyrics. Immediately thought of you.

Blow up your T.V., throw away your paper

Go to the country, build you a home

Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches

Try and find Jesus on your own.  

(Naturally, I disagree with him on one point: You should RECYCLE your paper.)

Love, D

Like all of Dad's emails, it was short, sweet, and I saved it without knowing quite why. Hmmm, I thought. There's a good name for a blog in there somewhere.

Not too long after, I started writing here, a tiny corner of the internet I named after a snippet of a song that my father knew I would like. I was nineteen and living abroad for the first time in my life, spending a breathtakingly strange and lonely semester in Paris. It was a place that could not have been more different from the West Texas town I'd grown up in, and every day I felt a little more insubstantial, as I was swept along the metro, breathing the scent of flowers and raw sewage mingling after the rain, tagging along after the chatter of French I never quite caught in time. 

I wanted to feel like I existed again, so I started to write. Sometimes I wrote more, and sometimes I wrote less. There was a really hard year or two where I wrote not at all. But still, eighteen years ago, I planted this small garden, and no matter how overgrown it became, I always returned. Whatever else it was, it was mine.

It's the longest I've ever done anything at all. This blog is older than any job I've had, older than my marriage, older than even my now-ancient dog (to be fair, only by a few months.) I've had it longer than I was ever in school, longer than I've lived in any particular place other than my hometown. This blog has, somehow, even outlived my father. 

Dad once told me, Whatever else you are, you're a writer. It's a blessing and a curse. I've thought about that so many times over the years, how the root of my writing has always been my loneliness. When you can't figure out how to talk with anyone about the things you wonder at, worry over, think about, writing is a conversation that's always waiting for you. 

Only twice have I written for a paycheck, once an accident, the next an act of desperation. After that, I knew I'd never write for anyone else ever again. It's one of the only things I have that's just for me, that I don't have to do the way anyone else thinks I should. It's the only thing in my life that's just for myself. I don't need it to be anything more than that.

This summer, I thought about deleting the blog. My father died years ago, and had forgotten how to find this blog or read anything at all for years before that, and writing it without him has always made me sad in a strange and specific way. Even the idea of a blog seems quaint these days. Over the years, the ones I used to read slowly dropped off or became inactive, or private. Even I only post every month, or two, or three. 

But I just couldn't do it. I didn't realize how much it meant to me until I sat with my finger hovering over the mouse, about to hit delete. It feels like one of the only things I've made that I truly care about.

It's enough for it to just be here. A link from me to him, through time and memory. A link to anyone who ever read it and felt a little less alone. A link to myself at all those other ages, a teenager far away from home, a twenty-something flailing from state to state, a thirty-something mourning and celebrating all the new turns life has taken.

I'd like for it to still be here when I'm forty, and fifty, and beyond. I'm a pretty private person, but this is a small but true window I've given into my inner life, for whatever it's worth. Every time I've found a view into someone else's world, I've treasured it, so maybe this is my way of giving back to the many writers who have shared their lives too. Maybe some element of it will still exist on the eternal internet after I'm gone. A tiny echo of one small, happily lived life, one unruly garden among many.

Who's to say. If you can read this, Dad- I made it. I'm off to write a little, kiss my husband, chase my daughter, walk in the dusk of early winter to point at the last holdouts for Christmas lights. Settle down on the couch to feel my second daughter's small fluttering kicks, run my hand along my old dog's sleek back. I'll dream of summer, when I'll be holding our other little girl, and thinking of more things to write. 

If I'm lucky, there might even be peaches.

novel unbegun

half-loaf rising

lighthouse northward

and anchor south.

[rachel richardson]

It's a perfect afternoon. The second day we know of you. I'm walking home from the art center, pushing your older sister ahead of us. She hefts a crinkled plastic cup up and over the edge of the stroller, chuckles her intoxicating baby laugh, flings the cup up and away. I wheel around, grab the cup, hand it back to her, and we begin again. 

We fly down the sidewalk to the music of her giggling, the late afternoon fall sun dappling the sidewalk, a talon of marigold cutting through the trees to land across her cornsilk hair. I am thinking of you, and thinking of her, wondering how the two of you will be together, trying to imagine the reality of you here with us in just a handful of months, by late spring or early summer. 

The due date calculator I pulled up, still in shock when holding Miriam for a nap and realizing I was late, told me you would be incoming at the end of May, the same month I was born. Maybe early June, if you drag your feet like your sister. A Gemini, to complete our quartet. Your father is a Leo, I am a Taurus, your sister is a cavorting Cancer crab. Fire, earth, water, and now air.

Seeing the second line darken on the test- just a shade deeper than nothing- it mended me. Made me a penitent, a mystic, a prophet feasting on locusts. I was Moses, walking away from the burning bush. I was Joan of Arc, falling to the floor after her vision. I was certain I would never get pregnant without medical intervention, had given up on ever having a surprise this sweet. And here you were anyway, not knowing any of this.

The day we found out about you, your father was in shock. But late that night he wrapped his arms around me, put a hand over you, kissed my belly where you grew, and said We love you, little bug. We would love to meet you. 

Not even my dreams tipped me off to your existence. It was my lack of pain that let me know. I realized that this was the first day I was supposed to be hurting, and baby, I didn't hurt. Your gift to me, your annunciation, bringing the good news of yourself. 

When your father first found out, he said, Here we go again. His eyes widened, nervous. 

I felt only joy. 

The week after my first appointment, I heard the ding on my phone and got up, walked to the kitchen in the predawn dark. I had sworn I would wait til Ivan woke up before opening the lab report, but instead I clicked on it, one last secret to savor in those few minutes alone. I knew already, felt it in my bones the moment I first suspected you were with me, but I smiled anyway when I saw Female. One second daughter recognizing another. 

The day we first found out about you, I drove to your grandmother's house. I wasn't ready to tell anyone yet, but something about a positive pregnancy test pulls you towards your mother like the tide rising toward the moon. 

When we pulled onto her street, I saw a doe leaping lightly off her lawn. I hefted Miriam out of the car and watched her face, thrilled when she pointed. I assumed she was only seeing the deer, but when I looked back I saw the two small fawns just stepping carefully out of the dappled tree-shadow, following her into the light.

See you in the spring, little one. We're waiting for you.

Love, Mom

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 doctor for over forty years, and apparently didn't need to ask what that meant. 

My mother and sister 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 felt like 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 politics and the idiotic stew fed to her by too much television, after another night listening to Mom cry, I'd had it with grandmothers torturing my parents. I called Grandma 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. 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, deep in the fog of dementia, 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 turned over and over. 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. 

When I said goodbye to her at that birthday party she squeezed my hand hard, twice in a row, her knuckles shiny and round like river stones. 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 for the rest of that night and part of the next morning that maybe I should try to find it. I felt such a sudden and sharp longing for this bizarre artifact, 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.