mercuryfern

Sick

For a long time, I've been age inappropriately conscientious of optimizing my health.  Who reads Prevention Magazine when they are twelve?  (Me.)  In middle school, I became a vegetarian, I guess mostly because animals are cuddly, but honestly, I was also very pleased to know that I was significantly reducing my risk of heart disease.  I'm not, and wasn't then, the candy bars and soy burgers sort, either.  Oh, no, baby, I maximize my nutrient density.  Don't even make me talk to you about antioxidants and B vitamins.   When I worked at a greenhouse as a teenager, I refused to apply the pesticides lest I increase my cancer risk.  In college I toted hot herbal tea in a glass jar which usually managed to leak all over something.  No tumblers for me: plastics offgas, especially into hot liquids, and I was concerned about those compound's influence on my long term reproductive health.

All of this does make a little bit of sense when you consider my mother is ill with a chronic immunodeficiency disorder which varies widely in how well it responds to conventional medicine.   Excersizing regularly and eating well are central strategies for managing her health.

I just found out that a dearly beloved friend has terminal cancer, albeit in remission.  This is the woman who taught me to cook.   She is a macrobiotic chef, the most conscientious eater I know.  No one in existence is kinder to their colon than she has been; where does it get off turning on her now?   Another friend, a marathon runner for god's sake, is living with not dying of the same disease.  What the hell is going on, universe?  People who take exemplary care of their bodies are not supposed to get sick like this.  Why else did I spill so much milkthistle tea all over my goddamn books?

I saw the movie Rent a few weeks back and was struck by the line, "living with living with not dying of AIDS"  (Notice how I alluded to it up there.  No, not plagiarized.)   Living with not dying: reminded me at the time of my mom.   True, there are times when she can't get out of bed, when she runs a fever of 105, when she is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery, but most times, she is fine; full of energy and ability.   A stranger wouldn't know that she is sick.  She looks so healthy on her good days that associates resent her nonnegotiable need to cancel superfluous commitments when she has a bad one. 

Turns out I know quite a few people who are living with not dying.  Catastrophic diseases assail our beloveds, without sense, without reason or cause.   It is fucking unfair, and I am enraged almost beyond obscenities.

Even more nonsensically,  these folks get up again to stand blinking in what might be the eye of the storm or it's departure, who knows, and find themselves, of all things, living; maybe with renewed appreciation or wisdom or some other crap, I don't know.  From where I sit, though, it doesn't seem like being sick changes a whole lot one way or the other.  I like this better than imagining disease as a penance or a purifying spiritual journey. 

Living with not dying: it's a possibility, but not an unmanageable one. There is hell to pay, to be sure; I'm not claiming to know from physical pain first hand.   But c'mon, we've all read Buddhist texts during one existential crisis or another: life is suffering, is it not?  Our hearts break of loneliness or rejection or betrayal, our grasp on widely experienced reality crumbles under inexplicable weight, and our bodies fail us in malicious untimely ways.   We are neither damned nor made sacred.  The fates shit on us and we handle it the best we can, which, wouldn't you know it, is the perfect way for us, and all the while, there life is, spectacular and ordinary and profound.   Snow falls beautifully, siblings fight, the light hits the water just so, dinner burns.  God is in the details.   This moment, the only thing we ever own, opens and lasts.  We live with not dying.

My mother's illness, Rheumatoid Arthritis, is hereditary.  Her diagnoses came when she was 24, the same age I am now.  For a few months I've been having mysterious pains in the fingers and wrist of my right hand.  RA can begin this way, aching in the joints of your digits, a weakened ability to make the twisting motion required to open a jar.   I am not fatigued the way she was during that first undiagnosed year, though.  Maybe I have just been typing too much in a bad chair, or riding my bike too long.  Not that it matters.  Being without health insurance means I can neither confirm nor deny  such suspicions.   Splurging out of my own pocket for an appointment won’t even help because if a doctor does find anything, besides not being able to afford treatment, I will then have a preexisting condition on the chance I ever do get insured.   As if a chronic degenerative disorder wasn't occasion enough for warm friendly conversations with one's health management professionals.

I've always assumed I would inherit my mother's disease.  This is slightly irrational, because though I have a greater chance of developing RA than does the general population, the numbers still sound a strong probably not. 

Varying amounts of fear rise to meet the thought of my presumed fate.  Influenza or even a bad head cold can reduce me to incoherent sobs:   I hate body aches I hate them I cannot handle this I cannot handle a lifetime of dull throbbing pain everywhere and constant exhaustion and side effects and the loss of mobility and wheelchairs and hospitals and surgery.  Other times, like now, getting sick is just a card I might be dealt: bad, but inevitable.  There are others in my hand.   I'll live.

Strangers

When I visited my sister the weekend before last, she pointed out a woman and child sitting at the front of the bus into town.

“Those two ride the morning bus with me everyday.   I love to make up stories about them.  The mom is always studying, I think she adopted the child and is trying to learn to speak her language.  See, look, I must be right, the book even has characters on it. I bet she’s studying Chinese.”

The two of then likely would have stood out even if my sister had not informed me of the secret life they live in her head.  This being a university town, every bus rider was between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two but the child, the woman, and technically, myself, though I can pass.  The child, an Asian girl of perhaps seven, looked out the window in obviously self made and very fabulous Halloween costume which may have transformed her into anything from a princess to a sparkly supernatural being, and the woman, thin and wiry, hair streaked with grey, bent over her textbook, seemingly oblivious to the kid at her side.

I make up stories about the strangers I see regularly, too. My sister and I haven't lived to together since she was nine.  Now, as young adults, our shared eccentricities are precious gifts each time I stumble on one.  To suddenly discover this amazing young person who came to many of the same conclusions as I, but from a vastly different path, almost makes up for being absent from her youth. 

At the public library where I do most of my writing, there is an elderly man, maybe in his seventies or eighties, who comes everyday to spend hours on the Internet.  He is dressed up, the way people from that generation insist on being whenever they appear in public: clothes impeccable and dignified without being fancy, shoes shined, shirt pressed.  He brings a briefcase and a newspaper. Times when I have had occasion to eyeball his screen, it appears he is managing a financial portfolio, maybe day trading.  Sometimes he reads the newspaper while sitting in the uncomfortable wooden chair, not touching the keyboard or seeming to glance at the screen for long stretches.

The other day, I came in to sit at the typer all morning before a late shift, and his usual spot sat empty.  Around my second hour of email checking and blog perusing, a bit of worry began to nag at the corners of my mind.  I waited as long as I possibly could, wasting time, hoping he would show before I needed to get to work.  There came a moment when I had to choose between assuaging my curious concern, and fulfilling my duties as an employee.  With a heavy heart I chose the last, put on my coat and headed out the door. 

We crossed paths there.  Eyes fixed ahead and oblivious, as always, to other sentient beings, he did not see the relief wash over my face.

Mary

Among my thirty seven cousins all but three are younger than I.  My father is the oldest of twelve children, so when his own father fled to Sudan in an effort to avoid having to declare bankruptcy, my dad became, at sixteen, the man of the house to his brothers and sisters, some as young as infants.  I spent my elementary school weekends at my uncle’s middle and high school sporting events.  At the frequent family gatherings, I cooed over and was entrusted with the care of newborn cousins.

In everyone’s family, the older relations are forever seeing their own childhoods replayed by the children who surround them.  Occupying, as I did, a gray area between generations at a time of turmoil in my large extended family, I was the recipient of perhaps more of this attention than most children receive.  I basked in it.  Someday, I would tell knowing stories about my younger years.

As a teenager, eating meals with the adults, privy to the women’s discussions of perineal cuts vs tears, taking my cues on the consumption of music and literature and pop culture from my now college aged uncles; I noticed a cousin, the first day old baby I ever saw, do something as a seven year old that I knew I had done, and I told whoever was in the room something I’d heard adults say about me my whole life, something that had always seemed a compliment to both parties, the web that kept us together, established the importance of our extensive collective root system.

“Oh, look at that, Andy is just like me.”

His mother, Mary, my favorite aunt, stopped dead in whatever task she’d been engaged in, looking stricken and horrified, as if I were the evil fairy condemning him to be pricked by a spinning wheel and fall down dead in his youth.

“Don’t ever say that.” 

The best thing about not being a teenager anymore is that it is no longer socially acceptable to treat me like a pariah.  For a few years there, my family could get away with disparaging me as a symbol, as an inheritor of their fathers sickness.  Now they have to pretend to respect me. 

My Aunt Mary has been a dairy farmer for most of the time I can remember.  Her farm was a magical place of refuge during my childhood.  I spent summer weeks and school year weekends there, caring for kittens and babies and cows, admiring the bubbly happiness her life seemed infused with, despite their crushing poverty.  She stands as an example of the joys available when one does work one loves, even underpaid, underappreciated, physically draining, never ending work.  She may be the happiest person I know. 

My extended family was a source of intense joy and pride in my childhood.  Despite the costs and inconveniences, I come home across hundreds of miles for the major holidays, I endure their snide questions, their condescension.  I miss how much they used to love me.

Aunt Mary and I attended a small dinner party at my parent’s home this weekend.  Over the winter, she and her husband sold all their cows and are in the midst of starting up a small scale vertically integrated goat cheese operation.  I did some research at the time on marketing opportunities, put her in touch with some CSAs, told her what I know about how these things have been successful in New England.  We talked a long time then about our hopes and dreams, about the simultaneously abysmal and exciting state of small scale agriculture.  It was the sort of conversation I’d dreamed for years of having with her.

A few days ago, I found out that, having not yet been certified to sell their chevre, my aunt and her husband are pouring gallons of goat milk down the drain everyday.  I told her I would buy whatever she had on hand.  We emptied four gallons in to the containers I bought just or that purpose, though she refused to take money form me in exchange for these fruits of her livelihood. 

Today, angry again at my malfunctioning camera, I am preparing to heat the milk to 185 degrees and add 1 quarter cup vinegar for every gallon.  When the milk seizes into a stringy curd, I will strain it through a cheese cloth for an hour.  Sunlight will hit the dripping whey just so, as the sink is in front of a beautiful window, but you, kind readers, are denied that picture, this time because I dropped the damn camera and an apparently integral piece actually flew off. 

No, in fact, the sun has already moved, as it is wont to do.  By the time I get back from buying the cheesecloth and finish cleaning the kitchen, the spot over the sink will be only indirectly lit.  The queso blanco will not  sparkle as it firms, the image I’ve just painted you will never exist.  It is a perpetual heartbreak, it is the reason I take pictures: the light is always shifting, nothing will ever be the same.

Rides Various and Sundry

Have you ever noticed that blogless rodents come up with the best memes?  Well, they do.

I rode horses first.  In the earliest recesses of my memory, where things are a jumble of contextless sensation, there is the repeated image of two small children in addition to myself piled in to the western saddle of a palomino named Peanut.  The horse belonged to my aunt’s fiancé.  Later that year, she left the man for his best friend.

When horselust hit me at seven my parents (claimed they) couldn’t afford lessons (so what’s with the trips to Cancun?), but they did send me to riding camp for two weeks every summer.  I was the only girl my third year who could jump.  Now matter how I begged my aunt, now a dairy farmer with the husband/best friend, to keep horses that I might fulfill my destiny as a great horsewoman, her stalls stayed empty.

I’ve ridden waves on the Jersey Shore in the days after a hurricane, a rectangle of styrofoam carrying me repeatedly onto the sand too fast too fast; such quantities of seaweed and primordial corpses to contend with.  By the end of each annual week, I fancied myself an expert on reading the undulations, on knowing just when to turn my back and launch.  Getting too far ahead meant that, rather than being propelled forward with all the force of the worlds largest body of water coddling you to a safe thrill, the board would suddenly catch on the fast approaching sand then your stomach, allowing the water to exhaust itself dragging your ten year old face across the high tide line.  For the rest of the summer, strangers stared horrified when I wasn’t looking but cringed from my gaze.  It didn’t heal in time for school pictures.

I’ve ridden a candy mogul’s rollercoasters shouting obscenities with my dearest pierced friends.  It meant less than the annual Catholic High Fair, lasting only a week each June.

I’ve ridden poems like luck dragons late into the night when pubescent rage and an excess of spine kept me from taking any small blue pills.  The words came to me but not from me in a torrent of snot and angry tears to give me resolve.  It would be broken.

When I got out, my grrls took me first thing to our hometown’s annual hosting of itinerant gravity defiance.  We got the bracelets and rode all night.  Danny didn’t come, though I called him.  As he took the phone in his hand, the older brother mumbled that some white girl was on the line.  Waiting for the pirate ship, I ran into a cheerleader who was wont to punish herself with impressive feats of starvation.  She’d gotten out weeks before and hadn’t heard from anyone.  Our posses eyed each other menacingly and declined to borrow lighters across clique lines while we embraced.

I’ve ridden trains two hours each way; pain the tuition myself at fifteen because I wanted to spend my days in a place where my passions could be honed rather than quashed; even if I had to labor at the greenhouse four days weekly; even if there was always a critical mass too busy smoking snorting injecting to revel in learning without coercion.

I’ve ridden in cars; but come to think of it, usually driven when the miles went to three and four digits: back and forth between New England and Amish Country for college and breaks; to the southwest instead of Christmas with our families; fast and sleepless weekend trips, the tiny Geo Metro seats full to the brim with dissidents journeying down the eastern seaboard to register our complaints in crowns of fifty sixty one hundred thousand.  The papers always underestimated.

I’ve ridden my bike through summer traffic in Philadelphia, through all seasons of double decker highways in Austin, through a union organizer's spring in Chicago.  I do not block traffic.  I am traffic.  Live more; drive less.  Cars are coffins, etc etc.

I’ve ridden Navy Pier’s cheap sentimental Ferris Wheel; the city that fired me tiny below the slow peak.  Teenagers jockeyed for romantic position on all sides of us.  I did not cry for the quotas I missed on crutches; shock at the futility of hard work in the face of petty office politics emptied me of any emotion.  People who devote their lives to big causes are as small in their daily interactions as everyone else.

I rode the clumsy circle that night and others, let it spin my injury into knowledge.

Ode to Rickles: 1st movement

Because the protagonist had a plot advancing court appearance today, it seems appropriate to update this story now.

My in-law’s back yard faces a large empty lot, of, say, five acres.  Well, faced.  Twelve houses are being put in as we speak.  The whole family is distraught over this, as the field is very picturesque and features prominently in many childhood memories.  They are also aware that in Midwestern towns with lax zoning laws, when new houses are built, the old ones nearby flood.  The region is flat, you may have heard.

It was a month ago when, as Rickles told me, a sweet little old lady (his words) called him, crying, because trees she had planted long long ago were being cut down by ruffians.  Ever unable to resist the charms of a damsel in distress, Rick marched right over to discuss things with the chainsaw wielders. They explained that the trees were not on the little old lady’s land and needed to be removed so that a road could go in.  Each party asked the other to please go fuck itself.

Rick got to thinking then, and politely asked the guys to wait while he called the mayor.  For some reason the mayor wasn’t immediately available. Apparently, though, the secretary so enjoyed the tirade of obscenities issuing from my father in law's mouth that she did not want to deny her boss the pleasure of hearing them himself.

When you are talking to a government official, it’s a good idea to mention your gun.  If you have the opportunity, it’s best to theorize what activities you might engage in accompanied by said gun.  My father in law begs to differ with the quote attributed to him in both the police record and the newspaper.  Beginning a sentence with "What I should do.."  is entirely different than "What I'm going to do..." when you are talking about defending an oak tree with your deer rifle.

When the cop car pulled in, Rick logically figured the town government had come to see things his way and .  He confidently marched out to meet the cops, and was surprised to find himself subsequently sitting in the back of their car with a sore neck.

Lawyers are not necessary for one so well spoken as our hero, so he had no fears about speaking extensively with both the police and the newspaper.  Interestingly, the newspaper got wind of his little run in with the FBI last year, and felt that story added context to the current goings on.

My father in law’s interest in UFOs leads him to film the night sky and then search the resulting footage for inconsistencies.  Just before the president’s third campaign stop in this tiny town, Rick decided it might be fun to get some footage of Air Force One.  He went to the airport (an office in the middle of a cornfield) and asked if he could stand nearby and film the plane landing.  Permission was denied in a rude tone, to which my father in law replied, “Fine.  I’ll just shoot him from the roof of the hospital.”

Ten FBI agents awaited my father in law at home.  They were searching the house, questioning my mother in law, even restraining the Boston Terrier.  (This last struck Rick as particularly unjust.)  Apparently, my mother in law told the feds at some point, “I’m not bad, I’m good.  He’s the one that’s bad.”

Some of the guys eventually left, but my father in law was closely supervised for the rest of the day, some might have described him being under in house arrest.  My mother in law was escorted to her daughter’s house where she had preexisting plans to baby-sit the grandchildren, (two of whom are accomplished ackronauts.)

Rick has been researching up quite a defense for his tree protecting charges, based mostly on squatter’s rights and personal injury at the hands of the arresting officer.  The cornerstone of his legal strategy is an aggressive letters to the editor campaign.  My husband went with his dad to the hearing today, and managed to convince the judge of the need for more time to bring someone with a law degree onto the team.

Ode to Rickles: Overture

Thomas and I had been dating for maybe two weeks when he went home to watch his father die.  After forty years of near perpetual inebriation, the old man's liver had finally thrown into the towel.  He was released to the care of his wife, who was assisted by hospice in the grizzlier details of comforting him towards departure: diapers, sponge bathes, the whole deal.

And then he got better.  No one expected him to, after scraping by decades of near death obliviously: the car wrecks, the work injuries; but he stopped drinking and waddya know, the liver pepped right up.

A few years later, when Thomas and I were even more impoverished than we are now, we lived with his parents for 13 months.  In case there are any newlyweds listening: Living with your in laws is a Very Bad Idea.  Make friends with your credit card debt the way the rest of America has.

I always appreciated being asked if we would like any lasagna whenever we attempted spousal lovin.  Oh, and my mother in law lecturing me on the *correct* way to boil an egg- whats not to like about that?   How I enjoyed being reminded of her superior egg boiling techniques anytime anyone ate an egg in our presence.  See how easily he's peeling that?  I bet his wife does it just like me.  Remember how I showed you?

So, Rick would have been my favorite relative even if he didn't star in all the best stories.  Thomas and I are the only ones who see the humor in his sighing audibly during long funeral speeches, the ehem, impolite, asides that he falsely thinks no one else can hear.   Is it wrong that I think its hilarious when a grumpy old man offends or embarrasses everyone around him?

Rick is the sort of swing stater that that strategists across the spectrum salivate over: a cynical union member with a strong sense of class consciousness, a conflict wary patriotic veteran, an atheist gun lover.  He hates Bush and opposed the war before it started.  His opinion on our presence in Iraq is now quite nuanced; mostly he feels sorry for the kids who are there.  He thinks a lot about UFOs but thinks the space program should be eliminated.  And he's very worried about West Nile Virus.

Recently, he's been reborn as a vanguard of the revolution.  More on that later.  Right now, the important thing to know is that he was arrested for tree hugging this weekend.

Still No Time: Dusted off and Polished Up

Geographic Promiscuity

(Originally seen by a chosen few in the top secret weblog practice run, March 23, 2005)

The first place to own my heart was my fathers Pennsylvania hometown, where my family has been farming the same piece land of since the 1790's, and if you believe there really is a Susquahanock woman five generations back, well, then, my blood's been there even longer.

My grandmother raised twelve children in the house where we had Thanksgiving. The sprawling six-bedroom ranch was built when the family was briefly wealthy in the 1960's, though the money was long gone by the time I was born. The basement, finished in a once classy black lacquer and bright orange, was a many splendoured Ali Baba’s cave to we cousins. One closet door was adorned with a six-foot mural of the cat in the hat. Opening it revealed shelves lined with nothing but decades old cucumber pickles. They were particularly delicious with wormy apples. Below the stuffed jackolope, a child-sized cabinet begged you to explore the corroded chemistry sets and half-finished paint by numbers. Walking past the sparkly gold wet bar took you to another more inconspicuous closet. This was the home of skies and ice skates in every size, hastily packed boxes of comic books, baseball cards, and stamp collections. Next to the pool table was an eight-track player that hooked up to the house-wide intercom.

In the window wells and behind the untrimmed hedges countless kittens mewed in desperate need of medical care. I would dutifully provide it, wiping the puss from their eyes, stealing eggs and condensed milk from the busy kitchen to try to nurse them back to health. The inevitability of their tiny shaking deaths might have kept another girl from loving them with such abandon.

It was magic, that house, but the whole town too. My teenage aunts would walk me to the corner store and buy me cheap ice cream, layered with primary colored syrup in a clear cup. The owner knew my dad and my grandparents. I always looked like a different distant relative to him. Everyone knew me, it seemed. I was a celebrity; an heir to some throne, my formidable grandmother's oldest's oldest. I would come home to that place someday.

At fourteen I did come home, thinking I would find a lack of pretentiousness, discover my roots, commune with nature. But they hated me. I was an auslander. I befriended the only gay student at school two days before she came out. I would not renounce her, and I would not fuck my second cousin, so the assault began. The notes in my locker, the kicking under tables, the attempted tripping, throwing things at me in class. Then they killed one of the cats by putting a firecracker up its ass, blowing it up. They dug up my grandmother’s rosebushes. Told me about these things later. Threats, sure, but threatening what? I wasn't sure, but I was terrified.

One day I put my backpack down on a chair in the cafeteria, went to get some pizza. Came back and it's contents, three, four, years of journals and poetry, were sprawled across the floor. One of the girls who wrote me those evil notes was sitting in its place. She gave me a haughty look and her friends giggled. Fuming, I crawled around on the floor, picked up every precious scrap, filed them tenderly back in their correct spots. When I was done, I calmly tapped her on her shoulder so she would turn around to face me. The look on her face when I punched her temple was exquisite. My many threatening rings even drew blood in an impressive way. I mean, I'm a pacifist and everything, we should work out our problems through dialog, etc. But my god, she facilitated a cat murder/torture and then disrespected the sanctity of the written word. She needed to be clocked. Admit it.

Oh, that sick little town broke my heart. The small meanness of the kids, the apathy of the adults; even so, it was my first love. For awhile I was homesick everywhere, but now I love towns the way teenagers love sex, urgently and indiscriminately. I call a place home, and mean it, after I've been there a few weeks. Sometimes I look at my list of places lived as another might look at the memories of once lovers. My heart aches for them each acutely. I think of moving back to Philly, to Chicago, to Camden, Austin, Barrington. Pieces of me are scattered all over this country.

The part of me that lives here, in this tiny Ohio town, well, this place is special, the long term relationship that nearly tamed the most infamous high school slut. I've been here two years- a record for this decade. She doesn't know it yet, but I am leaving in August. I have the summer to say goodbye, and I miss her already, I do. I know all my neighbors pets names; the cashiers at the grocery store offer me change if I am short. Listen, if you care for the toddlers in a town of four thousand people, everyone knows and loves you. I wish I could tell you what it means when I ride my bike to work down these straight flat streets, through the passive solar assisted living apartment complex. This will be the third season for my perennials, the centurium and yarrow, the russian sage and lupines; this will be their most glorious summer, when they say good bye to me.

I am hopeful about what New England might bring me a second time. I miss the hills, the rough rocky soil, the skinny close together tall trees. I miss that clean pedigreed air, the brick buildings, the third generation leftists. I miss skinny dipping at night in the plentiful streams, plays and paintings and thesis projects all around. The food, I miss that, too. I miss being nourished by art.

Too many perfect places exist in the world. If I am here, I am not there, always missing something magic somewhere. It pains me to know that beauty lives and dies without my ever knowing it. I try to see as much as I can, to keep my eyes open, to keep moving. There are many profound joys in such a life. Another thought, though, pulls on my sleeve, whispers doubt in my ear, even as I try to push it away: You cannot really be home in a few weeks or months. I can spin myths for myself, I can fall in love with the street theater in Philly, with the glacial lakes in Maine, imagine myself living in those towns forever, having kids, getting old, weaving myself into the fabric of the place.

I always leave, though.

Ten years of that and now I am not from anywhere. There is a depth and breadth trade off in all things; in this I choose to know more places less deeply.

Marta

My sister’s best friend from middle school died of a heroin overdose a few months ago. The girl is twelve in my memory, well scrubbed and giggling.  Such a death for her seems impossible.

When it happened my sister was in France, having a semester abroad, brilliant liberal artist that she is. She couldn’t talk about it with her host family or even any of the Americans there, didn’t want to draw strangers into the complicated unsavoury drama. All their old mutual friends comforted each other an ocean away while my sister sat among foreigners without ears for her sorrow.

Just a few weeks before she came home, only a few weeks after the missed funeral, a letter came from the dead girl. It bounced around my sisters various colligate addresses before settling at our parent’s house. I had to talk my mother down from throwing it away. She wanted to protect my sister from the anguish reading it would certainly bring; wondered, too, if it might contain anger and bitterness.

The two girls had stopped talking years before. My sister left her.

When, at the beginning of your adolescence, you find yourself the token wholesome friend to an aspiring drug addict, you are sure that you can save her. You are her only connection to the deeper real beauty all around us; it only remains to help her remember, to lead her back. What you share is stronger than this poison degrading her. It changes her, though, makes her mean. She tears at you relentlessly, ignores you, angrily levels bizarre accusations. You fail to ease her heavy pain, it is crushing you. Defeated, it is all you can do to limp away crying, having emptied yourself into an abyss to no avail.

None of my Martas have died yet, so there are pieces of my sister’s guilt and pain I cannot fathom. I’ve been expecting one particular call for a couple of years; she may just make it through. I hope she does.

How I’ve been spared the untimely death of a loved one is a mystery to me. I’ve played the unwanted would-be saviour to russian roulette virtuosos for most of my life.  I am a manic risk taker and a depressed self-hater; many of the souls I am bonded to are cut from the same highly flammable cloth.

My sister is the sort of genius blessed with both insight and discipline. She is gifted, but what is that worth? So many of us are. Shleydriel is that rare gem who is also responsible enough to wield her intellect effectively. Good girls are often mistakenly thought sheltered; I have long underestimated this one. If, five years ago, I’d had to guess which of us would be now mourning the death of the person with whom we agonized over our first crushes, I never would have imagined it could be my little sister.

Our mother, who knows a thing or two about pain, tells people when they uselessly offer pity in the face of her own illness: “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.” It is trite and cliche, but such things often justifiably fall into overuse.

Still, that curly haired baby is hurting now in a place where I am powerless to offer solace. My big sister’s heart aches to shield this young woman from every cruelty the world might give, but I know the truths Shleydriel finds walking through sorrow will be served up to the rest of us exquisitely. It is the only justice. Awful things happen, but when we forge art from what hurts us, comfort is given, life has meaning.

Begining with Berries

Walking down Old Spain- (or Back Old Spain, I’ve never been sure which it is or why), I pass the factory my grandfather lost. He put it so close to the house we still live in, so close to the unclearly named dusty road. Swimming in acres of cheap space, buildings in this town huddle together, designed for the feet of horses or people, not eighteen wheels at once. The factory’s awfulness is mostly due to the semi trucks. It consumed the raspberry bushes to ease their travel; it consumed the ancient blight surviving chestnut trees for the same reason. A stone barn that had seen centuries, an orchard planted in my father’s childhood; devoured and paved. We small cousins throw rotting apples and our most vicious playground curses at its ugliness. This angers and embarrasses the adults. Hitting us open handed across our faces must restore some of their dignity; they are grasping for it while the white cinderblocks nibble at our land. Please don’t take the house.

I keep walking. The road hides me in clouds of brown when my feet scrape. There is a recently decapitated chicken on the edge of the cornfield, killed for sport by a well-fed dog. A man is fly-fishing in the shallow spring fed crick. A voice inside my head scolds me when I nearly say creek; Don't be such an auslander. I see his pickup first, catch a glimpse of him casting, hip high rubber waders though the water is not to his knees, and wonder if he will make a meal of what he reels in. I suspect he will. That he, like most people here, doesn’t care to know about the water.

The trees obscure him again as I move towards the mountain. Fields this far have given up trying to yield corn; they are content to nourish riots of blue chicory. Generations ago, maybe also more recently, this tired purple soil was prodded into raising grains, though its richness has been washing towards the Chesapeake for millennia. They say this range was the tallest in the world once.

Old Spain, Back or not, is the name of the mountain, too. The road turns up and I enter its shade. The day after Thanksgiving, we poach Christmas trees here, malnourished college students, prodigal daughters and their new babies, white trash all. Our carols and laugher drown out the siblings’ shame. I alone among three dozen grandchildren keep this memory; the others are too young. Even my brother, only two years my junior, does not know his earliest holiday cheer was criminal.

The spring predictably inspires thirst when I reach it; water gurgling cheerfully from between Thomas Kincaid's moss-covered stones and perfect ferns. A small tin mug sits on one of the idyllic stones, secured to another rock with a delicate chain. My great grandmother's house, the original on the property I’ve walked from, had a mug like this attached to a spring outside the front door. Her oldest grandson’s wife, my mother, finally took that mug away because she couldn’t get her children to stop drinking what flowed so temptingly from the ground. The water is sweet because mercury is tasteless.

Like Tolkien's dwarves, we dug too greedily here. These were some of the earliest mines, this country learned what not to do, how not to build them, in these mountains. Aquifers flow closely with coal underground.  Remove the fuel and the water fills the void, picks up new metals to give you when it comes out in the same place where your grandfathers grandfather stopped for a drink as a boy. The mines, though drying up now after nearly a century, are still some of the best jobs here. No one has their well checked; no one has their blood checked. My second and third cousins walk around with brittle hair and sallow skin, getting colds easily, getting sick from obscure diseases. The quaint clapboard buildings and the old verdant places belie a slow death coming from every faucet in these counties. The residents believe this least of all.

I turn and walk back the way I came, stopping at the edge of woods and field. It is late in the season for strawberries, there may not be any left. I drop to my hands and knees, search for hot rubies among triplet leaves. There is only one, tiny as they all are. Inside my mouth, my tongue memorizes the roughness and diamond shape, sucking a soft film of dust from delicate skin, so little sweetness draws through. I savour this prelude until I can stand it no longer, then press the berry reverently against the roof of my mouth. It does not disappoint, they never do. Sunshine and hope drip to the back of my throat with the rich pectin. I slacken my jaw, allow my teeth their pleasure, gradually. The seeds resist just enough, the texture brings ecstasy, more sugar bleeds from the pulp. One small involuntary moan escapes as I swallow.

My eyes open.

It is over.

But something else is beginning. I don’t care to bother myself with pristine beauty. The loveliest things are full of scars and rust, they are fairytale forests shot through with poison, they are mercury ferns.