We traveled by car. My grandparents left upstate New York and drove the eleven hours to my home in Virginia, where I waited, impatient and seven years old, for them to pick me up and continue the drive to Florida, to Disney World.
I spent the entire journey reading, so immersed in words already that I often didn’t hear my grandmother, grandfather or aunt try to break through with their comments on scenery or questions about hunger or bathroom breaks.
In northern Florida, at least, that’s where I think we were, we stopped to visit some family and attend a reunion of sorts. My seven year old self, anyway, believes this is what it was. Cousins, second cousins, my mother’s aunts – it all dissolved in a haze, much as it does even now at these functions. A confusion of blood, like a flock of birds or a herd of cows.
But there was another young girl there, maybe related to me in some way. She pointed out a bushy, palm-like plant, whose name I still haven’t learned, and warned me away from them, telling me, in her small, six-year-old way, that they would cut me, slice into my flesh and leave welts like paper cuts, stinging and colorless. And she told me her mother was dead.
I had no context yet for this thing, “dead.” We played with her delicate rag doll, sitting by the pebbles that surrounded the landscaping plants in this jungle, this foreign clime. We dug a hole and sang and said childish prayers, before we lay the doll in the sandy earth and covered her with rocks to weigh her down, keep her here for a time, anyway.
This reenactment haunted me. I was already a sensitive child, attracting tragedy like other children collect grass stains and mud. Perhaps I read too much. But I’ve imagined this event many times over the years, pulling it apart for meaning and sense, pictured other children performing the ritual of death with dolls, cars, even the hollow bodies of found insects. I wish I could remember what it meant to me at the time.
Now, of course, having come so close to that place just a year ago, I imagine my own children, their miniature hands placing beloved toys in the dirt and burying them, submerging them in the earth. Singing songs of mourning with no words, praying over a dead mother.
And I fill with something like hope.
Tags: death, depression, loss, Motherhood, suicide
I hide behind beautiful words. I hide truths that are more difficult to wrangle with than even I know, and though I like to think I’m facing things, I know there will be more, more and more things, stacked like cordwood, like bodies, just waiting for me to face them, that is, to put faces [...]
on Jan 26, 2010 in
Writing I used to own this body, like a pair of shoes, like a yo-yo, swung comfortable (falsely) in this flesh, walked with purpose with flair with con-fi-dence. In my bones I knew myself desirable, though my eyes refused to see it, my mouth to voice it. Thigh-high boots, short skirts, leather, zippers, spikes, flowery dresses [...]
on Jan 20, 2010 in
Motherhood,
Writing These are the things no one tells you:
The birthing is easy. It brings you to your knees, of course, if you do it right, and I don’t mean without meds because by god – it’s still a rending. It’s a splitting open, a metamorphosis, leaving the shell of your old self behind. You crawl out [...]
It’s strange to walk into a place and see someone whose words you know, whom you follow in a strictly world 2.0 way.
It makes you hesitant.
Then you consider all the things you put out there, all the soul-emptying smudge of language on the pristine pixels, the things you would never, ever say to someone in [...]
on Jan 9, 2010 in
Poetry,
Uncategorized It could be in
the name…orderly…
tidy beds no
decorative pillows
drapes blinds ties
that could bind.
Every day the trays
come
at the same time.
Droning television mutes
the hum of voices real
and imagined.
There is no one
to care for but myself
so I do -
make bedbrush teethwash hair
every day, even.
What else is there
to do?
Outside
the mind must hold
tenuously
grip the edge hold up the
buttress
of Important Things.
Inside
we’re
Free.
I still have the postcard, buried somewhere in a keepsake box beneath wedding photos, the abstract finger paintings of my children, photographs, ephemera.
On it, a friend’s scribbled writing dashed off hurriedly; I was grateful to receive anything at all from him on this journey across country with his family.
He told me of New York, the [...]
A rerun from last year. Because it’s my favorite.
Ladies, this is the most glorious time of year, the time when you are blessed with a multitude of lovely new sets of pajamas and slippers and wonderfully useful household tools (like, say, a pizza cutter that looks like a shark and a brand new mop head), [...]
You might, one night, find yourself buying a mango outside a bodega in the West Village after a long night spent listening to music with a pianist, in the basement of a bring-your-own bottle jazz club.
Perhaps it is almost dawn, and your favorite food in the world is a mango, and the pianist has never [...]
on Dec 12, 2009 in
Writing I’ve decided to post a tiny excerpt from the story I attempted to write for National Novel Writing Month. I made it to the half-way point at about 25,000 words, but realized my characters and story needed more work, and I needed to step away from them. Frankly, they were irritating me even more than [...]
