Swim

The West River in Dummerston is my favorite place to swim, though I'd like to give it some competition by knowing all the best swimming holes in Hampshire County.

But under the covered bridge, if there's been good rainfall, the water gallops by, maybe 5 or 6 feet deep as far out as I go, in waves and turrets and constant motion. It's the wonderful color of shallow rivers--the iron browns and red. I just love it. The rocks are smooth and a little slimy, with enough texture for toes to grab them and brace against the current.

The water was cold today, colder than the Conway pond where I've been swimming, and the current much too fast for tadpoles or newts. I shivered in and then splashed down and floated fast out of my tiny cove. I am still embarrassed by my body, as well as it treats me, so I paddled and scooted back to stay away from the other beach-goers.

Oh, I could have stayed there for hours, swimming with and against the current, floating, kicking, turning into riverwater as much as I could. I did take my hair out of it's bun and let it become mermaid. Then I had to get back in the car to drive home to work out--important, but less magnificent. I'd swim every day, if I could.

real simple contest essay

David wore terrible shoes. And lived in his mother’s basement. And liked his dog more than he liked people. And used a sleeping bag instead of sheets. And hated kale.

“He wears terrible shoes,” I told my friends. “Shiny fake leather car salesman shoes with little tassels over the toes.” I laughed, partly pleased with my own good taste, mostly delighted I was dating someone, anyone, at all.

I never planned to be single for so long. Like tummy flab or credit card debt, it just sort of accumulated, the result of a thousand small decisions, until I looked up and realized I’d passed five romance-free years.

So David—bad shoes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer collection, sweatpants and all—was just right for a first time back in the pond. I enjoyed his misanthropic, passionate Italian company, his lovely legs and gorgeous eyes. Everything with him was fun, strange, and light-hearted, a perfect warm-up before I started looking for a more serious man.

Three weeks after our first date over pulled pork and fries, David called me from the parking lot at the newspaper where we both worked. He asked me to come outside.

“My mom has pancreatic cancer,” he said. We stood next to his silver pick-up truck. “I’m telling you now, I don’t think I’ll have anything to give to a relationship.” He was shaking. He was wearing the tasseled shoes. “If you want to get out, I don’t blame you. If I were you that’s what I’d do.”

David’s mother, Josie, was the hub of his family’s wheel; I knew that and I’d only met her twice. She’d been in severe pain for two years, David had told me, but she still hosted all the annual family celebrations, still taught her daughters-in-law how to make the apple pies her sons loved, still colored with her grandchildren on the living room floor. When David brought me to Josie the first time, her skin was clammy and pale, already shrunken around her cheekbones and eyes; yet her touch felt like a benediction. Around her everything would be tended and safe. For David, she was home.

I put my arms around him. I said, “I’ll hang in there with you.” This was the middle of June.

By September, when Josie had withered into morphine hallucinations and one gaunt working eye, I still cradled David. Deep in the night of September 14, exactly a month before Josie died, he swore and wept that he’d have no family once she was gone. “I’ll be your family now,” I said, and the hidden tectonic plates of my self collided at last. I became the continent of David’s Family Now.

The months lurched past once Josie died: Thanksgiving, Christmas, David’s birthday, the dog’s birthday. Our workdays were split by sudden crying jags, David shaking with sobs he didn’t want the others to hear as we leaned against the building’s brown corrugated walls. I miss her, I miss her, I miss her, he’d weep, in a tiny gasping voice he hated to hear in himself. I know, I know, I'd say, and rub his back in a long, slow arc. I know.

The deeper David collapsed in grief, the closer I drew to him. We were a couple now, inevitable. I had witnessed him in his mother's death and was seeing him through the final gasps of his long adolescence and recovery. I was utterly faithful and encouraging. I paid for therapy sessions. I even, after six months, loved his aloof and growly dog.

But there is no blue ribbon for such self-sacrifice, no safety—no matter how much we are taught as women that the more we give, the more we will be protected and cherished and seen. Or, if there is a prize, it is razor-edged and cuts at the fullness of ourselves, the freedom to be loved without condition, the power to choose yes or no.

David didn't love me. This was the truth I ignored as passionately as I could for an entire year after Josie died, until he said something stupid and cruel enough to smash my hope that he ever would. He appreciated my steadfast care; he was my friend. But he didn't want to kiss me or marry me or read novels aloud in bed to me or plant a garden together. He didn't want to be with me. He didn't want me.

The September night I became David's Family Now was the most important day of my life, and the scariest: out of ignorance and love, I signed myself away. I didn't see any other choice then, with David crying so hard in my arms and the dog yowling along. I couldn’t predict the misery and exhaustion that comes from loving someone at your own expense, believing despite your own good sense that he’ll have to love you back. I didn't understand the fundamental lack of care I showed myself, as I gave my soul to this beautiful wounded man.

For his rejection, I am grateful to the core, though didn't feel it until my second, months-later most important day. I cried a lot in the interim, and hated my body and ate too much as women will do. It was a plain and quiet morning, just me weeding kale and mulling over life in the middle of June, when it hit me so hard I accidentally pulled up half the row. I don't think I'll have much to give to a relationship, he'd said. I remembered how scared and calm he looked, readying for the battle he dreaded and couldn't escape.

He knew himself, and he knew he'd have to devote everything to taking care of that self. I sat back in the garden, landing in a dollop of compost. David hadn’t ever really needed me, or the consolation mother I tried to be. I may have been a comfort or crutch, but he was always, desperately, and only trying to grow into the Josie-shaped emptiness inside him. He was learning to mother himself. I started to cry through the sweat and dirt around my eyes. In never wanting the soul I offered, David loved me better than he knew, because he gave me the chance to take it back.

David and I are still friends; he helped me cope with a scary period of unemployment and I helped him buy new shoes.

I think about dating again. I wonder if it will hurt and teach so much every time. I wonder what I’m still willing to do for another person’s love. I won’t find out until I try.

For now, though, I’m learning to enjoy the passionate, pensive Jewish-Swedish company I wake up with every day. I explore this rediscovered country, tend its flowers, keep it warm. It is important work, curious and open-hearted and strange. I’m laying claiming to the continent of me.

traveler's tale draft 1

I am going for a walk. I clip my iPod to my shirt, tie my white and blue sneakers, head out the door.

I would much rather be watching television. My walking habit is to start thinking--I get bored with the road, bored of the houses--and I start thinking of fights I could have or awards I could win. The walk moves in one small circle, no matter how far I go.

But I need to exercise, so I wait until the sun settles and plug up my ears with music, loud enough so I can't hear my thoughts, even if they begin.

I don't know these roads, which helps. I take the first left turn. I'll listen to half an NPR show, then I'll know to turn around, and so I'll walk an hour, long enough to mean something to my body and not so long I can't watch more TV.

Up, up, the road tilts. A good song comes on, music meant for 4/4 dancing and it gets me up the hill. Then down, down, down, which I'll probably have to go back up.

I turn left again, down a private way. I'm listening to a radio documentary on Midwestern malls. A dog, a German shepherd, barks from his yard. He sniffs my hand and tries to play but he's too big for me so I keep on. On private roads I fear the homeowners will yell from their windows, "Get off my land!" but that's never happened yet.

A trail bolts left and I take it into the woods. A familiar satisfaction fills me--on the trail again, in the woods, covered by leafy canopy. In spiderwebs and mosquitoes. Chipmunks yelling. Deer tracks. Moss. Swamp. All kinds of trees.

The trail ascends steeply and I pull my ear phones off. Thoughts flood--someone could strangle me with this iPod cord, it would be so easy, so neat--but I imagine my escape and the danger passes. The trail seems real and maintained, though you never know; history's old deer trails turned wagon roads turn back into deer paths in this land behind people's new houses.

And so does this one. I notice how the grass thickens and bends in from the edges, how the trail is no longer a straight line, how the opening is just wide enough for 4 skinny legs. I stumble over deadfall--someone logged here once--and I'm graceless as a drunk, loud enough to pass for a bear, scaring even the chipmunks into silence. I don't care. In the woods, there's no one around and when I crack and trip, I just might make no sound. And besides, behind the pricker bushes snagging my loose brown pants are blackberries and raspberries. Ripe.

I stoop and pluck and pop them into my mouth, succulent and small. I know I'm stealing from the bears but right now I'm a bear, too, swarming the hillside with my big paws, berry juice down my chin.

I walk and eat, unsnag and eat. It's so muggy I'm sweating and fogging my own glasses, because as the sun sets I'm staying hotter than the air.

The trail forks up and down. I take up, and it disappears. I should walk faster. It's getting dark. but I can't; there are berries. I am free.

But you're lost. And this, I realize, is also true. I've bushwhacked way past north and south, with hazing cloud covering sunset, and my original trail long gone.

Instinct, instinct. Except, I don't know if I believe in instinct anymore. I wonder if we are only collections of stories we don't even remember and the weight of them tips invisibly to one side, and we think something's bad, or teeters another way, and we think something's good, and we trust this rigged seesaw masquerading as innate wisdom to lead us well.

But try choosing Lamictal over Prozac; try choosing Northampton over Boston; try to love your family and yourself. Try to eat because you're hungry and not because you are scared. Try doing it all alone with your own single mind. Rightness and wrongness crumble then, and everything tastes like ash.

I choose left: the trail disappears. I choose right: the trail disappears. It's getting darker and I'm half scared and half proud and all happy to be here. My best choice, my instincts insist it exists, is to go down.

Crash, slip, slide, hop, shuffle. Glacial rock, swamp, fern. Even if I find a road, how will I know which one it is? A road is no guarantee.

The first fireflies light, little beacons, indifferent. I think I see a rise--a house! How will I explain if they catch me skulking in their yard? I mustn't let them see me. I circle wide and to the right. A horn honks a hundred yards ahead--a road. After the deepest woods, where I could have wandered all night, alone and afraid of what the woods might be, it's lovely to hear. Traffic!

But I wasn't afraid. I have never been afraid out here, in my wilderness. Some people go to Gaspe, or Montana. Either way, the mind is the same. The tent; the sea. I am in infinity in the cross-section of backlot property lines. Give me enough time out here and I'll forget I'm me.

The fireflies light a 1000 different paths through the swamp below the road. Each step is a lost shoe, a snake. I'm slurping through it when two women, 50 yards ahead and 30 feet up, appear, talking about boyfriends. They are fat. And loud. I crouch and freeze. If they are anything like me they'll never look this far into the woods, even as one sharp glance would expose me--Here I am! Watching you! A silent sneak!--but they continue. I wait until their voices fade.

Who is watching me?

My shoe is stuck. My personal trainer will not be pleased. I haul it out and the suction echoes along the little valley. More slurping and I clamber the bank, to the road--which road? My road--I smell the linden blooms and I see the all-square house.

Up, up, up again. I dream of winning money. I dream of radio interviews. When I retie my right show, the mud sloughs off like lace is losing a floppy old skin.

My own skin dries tight, the sickle moon hovers between telephone wires. A woman calls her dog; a cluster of men lean against the open hood of a truck. I am returned. Maybe this is why I don't go for walks--I turn them into adventures. I lose myself. I walk. I get scratched up. Later, I find ticks.

But in the woods, inside me, the fireflies replace the blackberries, and we're light that can't help but flash, tart and sweet and brief.

The Morning Glory Dawn

"Kolya" played tonight on one of the three gajillion channels I enjoy when I stay at the Bogin Mansion.

I always struggle with Eastern European movies (and novels) at first--too grim, too sad, too oppressed. But a cute kid named Kolya and a dad-for-a-while cello-playing old man? It was too much. I was as helpless against the tenderness between the pair as the old man was against the fullness his own unexpected heart.

At the end (yes, a spoiler here), the absent mother returns for Kolya. He is shy with her, then hugs her, and says goodbye to the old man with the simple resiliency of a kid. The redemption for the old man, a scene or so later, is music and love and a child of his own, but it's all so sweet and plain and sad, finished with a shot of high clouds and Kolya's voice singing a psalm, I cried. I cried for the breaking of the old man's first pure heart.

I weep for the loss: this betrays me. I neither feel nor imagine the fresh galaxy of the broken heart, and so it remains unknown.