Shifting

Staring at a blank piece of paper is no different than the hours I’ve spent staring at the eggshell-colored walls in my house. If I could only sleep, then, I’ll know things would work out, and traces of what I’m thinking about won’t show up between my brows: exclamation points, two of them squeezed together.

There’s that beginning, even the end, of every story that goes around and around in your mind—it’s the middle part I’m still stuck in, the part that won’t release me. I become intoxicated—even bored, without the slightest stir in a positive direction. Sometimes, you simply have to find a new font.

House of Ash

We’re driving from Coarsegold to Yosemite where my father had wanted his ashes spread. It’s an early spring day in February and still amongst the remnants of another winter. We are untouchable, like the patches of snow that are drawn high over the earth; sheets of white perfection coat the hillside. Our car winds across the floor of the forest and over the creeks as we make a steady climb in elevation. The sun is breaking through the branches of the sequoias; a confetti of sun specks begin to shimmer through the car window. We, I think, are still alive. I wonder how many of us there really are in the car?

The first month after my father’s death, his ashes were returned in a standard plastic box and sat disguised by a wiry candelabra on the fireplace mantle. One day at my mother’s house over lunch, she told me she couldn’t handle having the ashes in the same room anymore. “He’s in my dresser,” she said, looking down, taking a bite of salad. There he was, sitting in the bottom drawer of the dresser, his essence comingling in the dark with her bras and underwear, only three drawers above. Maybe there’s no place he’d rather be—surrounded by the sweetness of my mother, the softness of her cashmere sweaters tucked around him with traces of her Prada perfume slowly intoxicating his new world—a silence of place, where he’d see how love can be found in small and patient spaces—a place, where nothing could take away this newfound reassurance, as strong as the spiritual, or timeless when you know your god. This is the kind of love we look for our whole lives. This is what it’s really about—these quiet moments, just the two of them, undisturbed by bills, not the sliding stock market, no rotting wooden boats, the NASCAR wheels silent from whining from the television, even cancer.

There’s something so final about spreading ashes. Something, someone, is slipping from your hands, spilling all over the place. A piece of you becomes separated while you watch it return to the earth, and you know you’ll never really get it back, you know things will never quite be the same. And, now, almost a year and half later, I’ll learn one of the most common phrases after the loss of a loved one is: If I could just see them one more time. Clichés around death are foreign to me; yet, there is a bit of sanctity in knowing there are rituals to fall back on. I only learn this after having entered the house of ash. I’m no stranger to grief, so they had no choice, but to let me in.

* * *
I’ve grown so envious of my memories. They carry all the weight, and have taken on a spastic-like personality. They nudge me to remember and remind me of the years past with something so simple, like when I inhale rosemary or thyme. The memories of the last seven years living in the central valley have moved in on me. I have my mother stop the car so I can take a picture of a moss-covered rock wall with a tide pool at the bottom. I know there’s life in there and that’s when I become crowned by nostalgia. She shows me images of myself. I don’t have a chance to be human, to tell you that I don’t like what I see, or what I would have changed, instead, I begin to finally see: I am swimming in the emerald waters of Bass Lake; all around me are the people I love and the conversations I cannot hear inside the boats with their lips parting for another beer; the hawks circling the sun; and the waves of summer finally beginning to feel so near.

Sometimes, we have to believe in the unseen. Today, I’m hoping closure will take form and tell me that everything is alright. That’s all I ever really want to hear. Sometimes, I have to ask the people I love the most to say it to me. I always believe them. Today, I’m not prepared for the memory-linked diversions, like discovering how much I miss the high sierras, a place grown absent in my life after leaving my ex-boyfriend four years ago. But, this is not a sinkhole…only a boxcar of memories that are traveling parallel with us. I think about all the years we shared here—the boating, snow skiing, coffee at the Ahwahnee Hotel and their gift shop, my hands traveling over homemade soaps, malachite bears, crystal bouquets, and how the rose quartz earrings looked held to one of my ears. I begin to snap over forty photographs in the car on the way to the vista point my mother has in mind for the ashes. I don’t want to lose the present tense, so I keep snapping. My ex-boyfriend sneaks in again and floods my senses with the smell of wood and pine, reminding me of the scents I could find at his neck. I find his face in the designs of the bark; everything blurs passed me, now, including you, goodbye, my ex, goodbye. Maybe the pictures I’m taking will provide answers. It’s as if I’m trying to remember something I have forgotten about myself. Maybe closure is another cliché in life we allow ourselves to become easily attached to.

* * *
At the first vista point, handfuls of tourists pose for pictures at the wall’s edge. I guess the greatest compliment you could give Half Dome is to have your back to it. How are we going to spread three-pounds of ashes with all these people around? I’m not going to be able to handle anyone asking, “Whose ashes are those? We’re sorry.” So, we stand there, the bag of ashes in my mother’s left hand, and wait. Eventually, the tourists began to thin out so we make our way to the center of the vista point in direct view of Half Dome. My mother begins to shake my father out of the bag; her arms are outstretched and above her head and gently moving them up and down. She looks like a bird preparing to take flight. Don’t leave me here without you, mom. I can’t do this without you.

“There’s no wind! This isn’t what I wanted for him,” My mother says, turning around and facing at me. Splotches of ash have been riveted to my mother’s hands and wrists, and have smeared down the front of her white parka vest. We lean over the wall and see my father on a dirt ledge; he’s been reduced to a small ant hill of ash. My mother tosses fistfuls of ash into the air in an attempt to get what little wind there is to catch my father and carry him at a greater distance into the canyon below. Meanwhile, I’m snapping pictures, one right after another. Frustrated my camera doesn’t have a motor drive, I try to capture every phase thick ash might go through—from the moment it leaves the bag, to dissolving into the air. Death is a heavy resin and it seems predictable, but it’s not. We can’t talk about it; we might have to face our own mortality. But here, I’m almost convinced that there’s an element of flight after death, or at least there should be. It’s the ones we leave behind who have to become the wings for the silent. It’s almost an insult to the dead if we can’t offer them the opportunity to fly. Even with no wind, we’ve become embraced by ash. My father, now reduced to color of grayish black, is under my mother’s fingernails and twisting out beneath her wedding ring. I stand back and watch, lick my lips, and taste ash.

We decide to find another vista point. I have no idea how my father would have felt changing locations. He might have argued, telling us there’s plenty of wind and to just get it over with. Maybe, unintentionally, this ash ritual is being dragged out. After my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer I watched the fire, an anger that lived in the pit of his belly begin to smolder out and his approach to fatherhood became radically compromised and like two friends catching up, our conversations became mutually interactive while we waited for dinner. I can still see the image of my mother standing behind the flumes of smoke that rose from her skillets, the exhaust fan chewing at the air, and the three of us screaming across the room in efforts to communicate over the blare of the television, exhaust fan, and the fish sizzling itself into an oblivion. But, it’s this constant chaotic oblivion that allowed us to survive, making us a lucky family. We could escape death. Sizzle, sizzle, I say, to the fish!

Sometimes, survival requires one to find the necessary distractions. It became easier to live when the shock wore off when my father was initially diagnosed with only three months to live. He’d go on to live ten more years; together, we dodged his tumors, bone scans, and blood tests revealing a high cancer cell counts. Sometimes the cancer cell count went down and he’d sit in his den and map out trips, sanding and painting the motor home he’d never use. I believed we were tricking death, out-smarting ourselves, giving us time to catch our breath, and relax in the comfort of another subject—anything to distract us from what we really knew lie ahead.

We’re the only ones at the second vista point. My mother leans over the rock wall and pours more of my father over the edge. I sit in the car this time, watching my mother, snapping only a few shots this time. She returns to the car, covered in ash. The smell of my father floods the cabin of the car. My mother asks if I want to spread the remaining of his ashes. I take the bag and pour the last of his ashes over the edge.

I can’t remember what I was looking at as the ashes skipped down the side of the mountain. I remember my dog, Max, who began whimpering in the back seat of the car. It’s as if he could sense my father was near. We were silent once we climbed back into the car and headed home. I don’t know what I was supposed to feel with the ashes gone. What do most people feel after they spread ashes of someone they love. I hear it’s a sense of closure, but I’m nowhere near this. It wasn’t like the way they show it in the movies: the lack of wind, ash on our clothes, face, lips, a crying dog in the back seat, an ex-boyfriend, and old memories floating to the surface. Instead, I feel empty, and I wait for a new emotion to come, and it does. I begin to cry, cry for everything. I’m homesick for something that I’ve lost within myself. I stare at the trees and watch them became smaller and smaller as our car winds down the highway, the elevation dropping by the thousands. On the backseat of my mother’s car, a plastic bag sits, empty with dust.

At This Distance

At this Distance

There’s something methodical about you. I watch the way you parallel park the red truck with an eighteen-foot boat attached. You move back and forth across the dirt with perfection alongside a mammoth Ponderosa Pine. Keeping my distance, I watch you inch forward one more time, and then straighten the wheel. Too impatient for this process, I wait outside the truck.

However, as many times as I’ve seen this from the outside, it won’t grow tired to me. I admire your quiet patience and your large tan hands and how they can grip the steering wheel with such trained accuracy. You’re a captain at his helm. With my arms crossed at my chest I can sense that my face looks angry, for no reason. I will admit, a sweet admiration is beginning to wash over me. Maybe this is my soft side? Maybe this is what I must tell myself because I’m not sure how long this relationship is really going to last, and I should just be happy. I’m already flashing back to you parking and they way you had glanced at me from beneath the bill of your baseball cap. And even with this distance, I know your eyes have already deepened into an indigo blue, the way the sky becomes saturated as it begins to fold itself into evening. Even at this distance, I know your eyelashes have already begun to curl from a day of swimming and sweating on the lake. And now, I’m wondering what you see when you look at me, how I must appear through the windshield: A girl standing in a white skirt and flip-flops, and her hair a lake-tangled mess. I can almost taste the salt on your skin. This is part of our silence.

As the years passed, we learned we don’t always have to speak to one another. We’ve learned to make love and fight—all in a single glance. Right now, I see you under the light of the man that you are: Strong and focused, even with the contradictions you live with, your silent dilemmas, of being with a woman who you’re not in love with. I’ve become a companion and take care of you in ways you’ve come to rely on. I learn to love a man who finds purpose in life by measuring the rain and watching the first days of spring unfold. I observe how you rally towards the “unofficial competitions” between you and your neighbor as to who will do a better job at mowing their half-acre of property. I watch you from the kitchen window. I get glimpses of what it must feel like to be a wife, and I stare at my left hand, gloved in suds, knowing I’m not even wearing a promise ring. You tell me you love me, and I believe it. And I ask myself, isn’t that enough?

Anything important bears a critical distance. I watch you lock the truck and walk around the back of the boat, poking your head between the boat and the tree. You make your way to me. Hand-in-hand, we walk up the hill in the dark to the lakefront restaurant to order our favorite burgers. I don’t like red meat, but I make you uncomfortable when I have too many questions for the waitress about the menu. Tonight, I’ll keep things simple and say, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

* * *

These are the memories, the pauses I take in our relationship that will eventually become ingrained in me, not so much about what our conversations were as we ate our burgers at the counter, in fact, I can’t seem to recall a single subject. Sometimes, I think about how, when we first met, our dinners became disregarded, and how, two grown people could become so content to nibble—the light from the refrigerator illuminating our naked bodies. And I think of the shadows that followed, dancing with us, all the way down the long hallway back to the bedroom. It’s interesting how new love must appear to the other rooms, the ones hardly used, inside the house.

Food was always a subject with us. When we first started dating, you used to take pictures of the meals I made for you: roasted chicken and potatoes, with the smell of fresh thyme traveling through your house. The thyme came from a garden that only measured about seven feet across, growing only thyme. It was those years I lived in the house with you I remember the aromatic waves finding its way into the house and into almost every dish we made together. But, eventually, we began to fight over food. You tried to convince me it was healthy to skip meals. I explained to you the university dietitian told me that when people fast the body stores its next meal into fat. Not knowing who was right, we both finally gave up. Eventually, I learned how to open the cupboard and sneak almonds from the bag, without making a noise, to curb my hunger. Eventually, I began fooling you as to why I was not so hungry at table. Today, I wonder if the woman you married uses fresh thyme when she cooks? Do you photograph her dinners, too?

* * *

Life always moves slower after a burger. We take our time going home, accepting the silence in the cab of the truck. It seems dark inside the cab, like the house we’re coming home to. Sometimes when we do speak on the windy way home, our conversations include what it must be like to live on the lake. You talk about selling your house. I wait for you to ask me what I think. I want to support you, but I’m still young and selfish. I think you can tell that I haven’t a clue about real estate. I smile and say, “That would be great.” When really I’m thinking about how we’ve been together for five years, and I’ve never even asked you for a ring. It seems forced, I say to myself. I remember once at Sam’s Club I asked you to look at a diamond ring in the jewelry case, but you waved your arms in your yellow plastic sailor parka and said, “We didn’t come to Sam’s to look at rings!” Embarrassed, I lost myself, one last time, at a ring in the shape of a flower, its petals saying, sorry, to me. It wasn’t even an engagement ring. Where did you go? I find you, perplexed over what brand of paper towels to buy. You put a twenty-pound bag of rice in the cart and tell me we’re going to make more meals with rice. I nod in agreement. Rice is high in calories, but I say nothing.

I tell you I had too much Diet Coke at the restaurant. You pick up speed with the truck and the boat seems frantic as it bounces over the road. It’s all business now. Our dreams of living at the lake blur past us as we talk about what we still need to do to get ready for Monday. We’re almost home. We’re on the last stretch of the highway now. We’re traveling, like so many times before, and making a gradual climb towards the southern Yosemite foothills. The wind outside my window is warm. I extend my arm out; I’m flying, flying away towards something that I don’t have the words for. I sense you’re looking at me. I pin my soul to the skyline, my whole body feels as if it’s running alongside the truck and I’m no longer with you, and then, I feel your hand reach out for me. We hold hands for the last twenty minutes home. I can tell by strength in the way you hold my hand that I will sleep soundly in your arms tonight. The smell of Irish Spring from the shower you’ll take when we get home will still be sticky sweet when you climb into bed. I imagine my head buried into your damp chest, fresh from the shower. Exhausted, we will interlock and speak using only our feet.

The Way Things Were

The Way Things Were

Coming Home

I arrived from San Francisco to Coarsegold one of the many California gold rush towns that took root between 1848 and 1855, after having lived most of my life in the Bay Area. Coarsegold, originally, “Coarse-Gold Gulch” produced approximately 1.5 million dollars worth of gold during its day. Through the years, and as gold became more difficult to find, the prospectors turned to a more thriving industry of raising livestock and ranching. Very little has changed—almost one hundred and sixty years later, at least the locals would like to think so.

The lifespan of shoes are shortened living in the country. Having not grown up in Coarsegold, the mannerisms of the country life are foreign to me. And it has been years since I have lived under the warmth of the sun. No longer do I need to climb up and down the sparkly steep sidewalks of a city chronically hidden under a canopy of gray. Now I walk across gravel driveways—my high heels being gnawed away by stone teeth. My former San Francisco streets, like Montgomery, Sutter, and California, have been replaced with streets like Long Hollow, Corral, and Wild Stallion.

I’m not used to my new landscape. My car inflates dust clouds as it bounces across uneven dirt roads riddled with stones. A few miles north in elevation, tribes of Ponderosa Pines stretch like silent grandfathers towards the highest point of an aquamarine sky. I am jealous of their beauty. The mountains and sky encase me. I am a dot amongst the fragrant expansiveness: Peaks and valleys hold my memories. Life, as I know it, can never be experienced from a car. I am learning to be still. My survival is no longer dependent on having my time occupied. I point to the clumps of smoky-green mistletoe that drip from the heavy arms of the scrub oaks. What is used to provoke kissing I learn is actually a parasite. In the country, the lines at the local gas station snake out the door so the cashier can catch up with the customers. Squirrels dart from behind the brush and granite boulders, running along side the road and missing my wheels by a thumb’s length. My new neighbors include white egrets that walk ladylike amongst the tall grass beside the still pond. This is the year I discover blue herons. They travel by tiptoe, like thieves, along the unfenced acres of my backyard; they shift the landscape one frame at a time. I want to touch them. I cannot unlock our stares to make the first move. They put a spell on me, and so I write poems about them. Here, the evenings hang thick, hooked with the howling coyotes—their cries growing louder, perhaps to stage an injury and draw their prey closer. By morning, the Yosemite foothills are outlined in frost. The world here waits for the sun.

The Backside of Prayer

Hummingbirds tread air around me. I admire how they can hold their position in space. They watch me for little-bird seconds before sipping from the passionflower I’ve trained to climb up the back porch. Their microcosmic fluorescent bodies bend and transcend towards a grace I’ve only dreamed about, right before they dart behind a velvet curtain of air and disappear.

I’m struggling with what it means to be an urban cowgirl. Now that I live with you, I partake in your seasonal rituals. Dry pine needles stick to the bottom of my socks when I hang the laundry on the line to dry. We agree that clothes smell better with the sun and the wind on them. I remind myself of this by sniffing everything I pull off the line. Your real reason for using the clothesline is to save money.

Timing is everything when it comes to rituals. Even though the nights have grown cold, I am only allowed to bring out the down comforter on the top shelf of your closet on a certain day in November. I can never remember the actual day, and by October, I’m already asking you if we can make an allowance. You tell me to wait, so I put a hat on before going to bed and snuggle into the curve of your back. Your snoring keeps me up. I think I hear a bear at the window. I wake you, but you say, “There are no bears around here.” Still, I hear what sounds like something pawing at the screen to the sliding glass door of the bedroom. I hear the crack of leaves from the footsteps that I suspect are those of the wild animals that only come out at night. I fall asleep with my eyes open and afraid I’ll die in a frozen house.

There are other things I must learn if I want to live in the country, like cooking with your cast iron skillet. I clean the skillet without soap, evicting the water and thoroughly drying it before adding a coin-sized amount of olive oil to keep it well “seasoned.” In the years to come, I repeat this process—exactly the way you had showed me—a year before I moved into your house.

You are twelve years older than I. We are from different generations. People tell us that we make a handsome couple. It makes up for knowing that you’re not in love with me. I look to the patterns we’ve established, and how we’ve weaved them into our life. I use the patterns to predict whether or not we have couple longevity.

I heal from rituals and come to rely on them. With every ritual of yours I join, I wonder if I am closer in making you love me more. Is this even possible? Can rituals create a real bond between people? Does ritual strengthen what already exists between two people? Is your love reinforced through routine? I wonder if I have become unconscious to your ritual courtship. I could have been in the kitchen scrubbing a pot and staring at a cautious deer making its way across the property, or reading poetry to myself in the spare bedroom, where I memorized stanzas about how real love is spontaneous and passionate, while you were trying to court me. What I do know is there’s an unsatisfying hunger, an uncontrollable fire deep inside my belly. I wash out the ash, daily, with Gain detergent, and hang myself on the line to dry. I breathe in the sweet smells, which distract me from the ugliness I encounter in the world, and from the contrast of both the city and the country trying to live inside me.

I plan our dinners, sometimes days in advance. You say I focus too much on food as I rinse the dirt out from of a piece of celery cupped by its body. I say nothing as you tell me I should learn to skip meals once in a while, and how it would be healthy for me. I take the knife and slice the celery down the middle, cutting it in evenly sized pieces and add it to the stockpot for homemade soup. Through time, I learn to ignore your comments, your heart, and how it lives half open. I experiment with new meals and feed you homemade meatloaf with fresh sprigs of thyme cut from the garden. Later, I’ll serve you green tea—this is our peace offering, even if we’re not fighting. I beg you to build a fire, mostly so I can watch.

Your fires start with the sound of the axe splitting wood in the garage. Only a man who’s in love with me would build me a fire. I admire your wintered masculinity, the leather gloves you wear as you carry the bundles of split wood into the house, the focus of fire pressed deep into your eyes, the scent of cold ash that escapes from the open glass door of the wood stove, and the splinters that stick like lint to your sweatshirt. With every fire, you kneel before the wood stove with your back to me: I see the backside of prayer.

In my absurd secrecy, I tell myself to be content, but it will only work for a few years. In the early afternoons, I read my poems aloud to the ancient oak in the back yard—the one with the tree house you built ten years ago. It looks more like a plywood of playing cards, which has forced its branches to grow heavy and unusually low to the ground. Its barky tentacles will spend a lifespan watching its leaves fall, like torn, curled bits of a letter—traveling only inches before settling on the ground.

I will miss the country in ways I never thought possible. A year later, after I’ve left you and the house, I will grieve—thirty-five miles south in Fresno—as if there has been a death; it’s the death of myself. I think about the creek behind the bedroom where we used to sleep. Do you hear the colonies of frogs that inhabit the creek? Do their trance-like songs have the ability to reach your heart amongst your badly balled flannel sheets?

When Things Were Good

You initiate me into the domain of your heart using the natural world. I become intoxicated in this atmosphere from all the fresh air. The days go on, for what seem like forever as I play the piano at my computer keyboard, creating poetry that I let you read. In the graduate poetry workshop, I read my poems about love aloud. My colleagues say “the speaker” in poems appears to be in a strained, or in a sad relationship. Is that what I want to communicate? I am not supposed to talk when being critiqued in the poetry workshop, so I chew the inside of my cheek and stare down, going back and forth between my notebook and the design of simulated wood at the table where we sit. If these love poems were written using sight, then what’s blocking my line of vision? Maybe I should learn to speak. I move my palm away from my mouth, because the class just asked me if I have any questions about their comments. I tell them, no, and smile. It’s just easier this way.

I see hope in the sunrise this morning. We decide to take a drive. You want to show me what you’ve discovered since you’ve lived in the southern Sierra, eleven years prior to me. In secret, I pretend we’re married. No one can see my bare left hand from the road. We travel across forgotten backgrounds: A century-old barn with a broken back, a rusted plow next to Dough Boy pool, miles of barbwire fence, horses, cows, an angry dog that runs the length of a cyclone fence, and a sea of rolling hills impregnated with granite. Finally, we reach the whispering town of Ahwahnee.

Of the many indigenous people to the Yosemite Valley there were the Yosemite Miwoks, or Ahwahneechee, dwellers of Ahwahnee, who settled in the valley approximately 3,500 years ago. The name Ahwahnee means “valley that looks like a gaping mouth.” The creeks in the valley trickle, moving as silent as blood.

In 1848, James Marshall and John Sutter discovered gold along the banks of the American River. Soon, the Sierra Mountains and surrounding areas were overrun with prospectors in pursuit of unclaimed gold. Something had to be compromised. Much of the native landscape and ecosystem was impacted for a gamble at wealth. Eventually the Ahwahneechee, and their Chief Tenaya, were captured and relocated to the Fresno River Reservation. The rest of the Ahwahneechee dispersed throughout the Sierra, even as far as Nevada, becoming a displaced culture in the years that followed.

I sip the coffee you made for our drive. I stare out the window at the clumps of weed that shake their unkempt heads of hair as our truck brushes past. I swallow slowly, allowing the coffee to warm the back of my throat. I want to speak, maybe open my heart or listen to yours, but I say nothing and continue to look out the window. I think about how when a man loves a woman he will do anything to show his love, even groom her. I try to remember the last time you brushed my hair, probably after one of the long days of boating on the lake last summer. Winter is blindsided. I raise the tips of shoes to feel the heat that’s streaming at the floorboard inside the truck. I am content to just be with you right now. I want to preserve this feeling, but I know I can’t. I look at you and smile. You reach for my hand and smile back. Your strong, thick hand covers mine. I feel safe. I wonder if there’s a connection between safety and love. I remind myself that you take care of me, and how only this morning, you brought me a steamy cappuccino in bed. And with my eyes half shut, I smiled and inhaled the vapors of your woodsy good morning kiss with a swirl of sheets and quilts around me. Later, I’d write a poem about your persistence, the way you handed me a cappuccino, every morning, for years. Eventually, my cappuccino poem will be published in a local literary journal. When you read the poem in the journal you say nothing about what you think it means, instead, you say, “it’s nice.” I never tell you that the foam is a metaphor, or that below the surface, feelings of disconnection reside. Generosity from others can trigger one’s own isolation in love.

At the bend in the road we reach a white schoolhouse. I listen to you talk about the history of the town of Ahwahnee and its original schoolhouse. For a Nevadan, you know a lot about California history. You fascinate me with your stories. In the years to come, when we pass the same historical spots, you’ll repeat the stories as if you’re telling me for the first time.

I’m always listening, even when you think I’m not.

The Gertrude School, built in 1913, is one of California’s oldest one-room schoolhouses. Originally the schoolhouse provided an education for the children of the gold miners, who came to the tiny town of Gertrude along the Fresno River in search of gold. The school was named after the wife of a man who ran the Gertrude Mine in the area. Only one year after the schoolhouse was built, America would be launched into The First World War in Europe. Triggered by the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife, Sophie Maria Josephine Albina Chotek, millions of deaths would follow in the efforts to modernize the world. My attention shifts back to Gertrude. Who was she? Her husband had to be in love with her if he named a school and a gold mine after her. It wasn’t uncommon for the early Californians to name cities or their ships after the women who had captured their hearts. Did the early men of California know their courtship would fall short of serving as examples to future generations? History is in everything. When did the art of love or courtship become distressed, antiqued? Where’s my voice?

The Gertrude School, built the same year the American silent film, How It Happened was released, consisting of one reel, and directed by William Duncan. It would be fourteen years later, in1927, before the voice would replace the titles, better known as the “talkies.” The first voice heard through the silver screen would be Al Jolson, in the groundbreaking movie, The Jazz Singer. I’ll never take a music history class in graduate school. Instead, I will attempt to decipher what love is and what love is not.

Miss Jeanie Nichols was the first teacher at Gertrude School. I wonder if Miss Nichols had read John Dewey’s article in 1901 about the importance of toys promoting the psychological needs of the child. What are the psychological needs of the adult, or a writer? A lover? Perhaps the adults, including Miss Nichols, were too busy in their leisure time reading Jack London’s book, The Valley of the Moon. Does the novel bring forth the voice we have not the courage to speak? If I am to distinguish the author’s words, it must begin, not with the eyes, but the ear. Before I can have a voice, I must learn to listen. What if I don’t like what I hear?

I need to break the silence. I open my door and hop out of the truck and trample the across weeds. I need to touch the schoolhouse. I am certain my voice will break the spell of solitude on the schoolhouse. “Hello, schoolhouse,” I sigh.

In 1914, a year after the schoolhouse opened, hundreds of thousands of people lined Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., to watch the women, five to eight thousand of them, mostly wearing white, walk together in efforts to turn the world’s attention towards their cause: women’s rights. Alice Paul and Lacy Burns lead the organization and deliberately planned the event with Woodrow Wilson’s arrival, who was expecting to be met by crowds of people welcoming him for his inauguration as the United States President the following day.

I press my nose against the dusty screen and look inside the main room of the schoolhouse. I imagine the children facing forward with the war on their backs. I envision the rise and fall of Miss Nichols wrist at the blackboard—the simplicity of education scratched with chalk, until the schoolhouse closed in 1968. The soggy front steps have been used as a meeting place for the local artist chapter since 1979. I want to escape into the past, but I can’t, so I settle for feeling the cool wood against the palm of my hand. I am harmless and the schoolhouse knows it. Her frozen stare surrenders to those who visit and simply wonder. I think about the decades of hands that have touched the same spot. Her white petticoat is scratchy and worn, coming apart at the seams. I leave no imprint of my hand and after today, and no one will remember that I’ve stood in this spot, ever.

On our way home we stop at the Black Kid Memorial, a California historical marker to note where a famous bandit robbed several trains and wagons only a hundred yards ahead. Our last stop is Grub Gulch. Here, there used to be saloons, restaurants, and a grocery store. The entire town burned to the ground and nothing is left now but a flattened pulse of red mud. After spinning circles in four-wheel drive the truck climbs back onto the paved road.

The original town members of Grub Gulch were part of the pack who came in search of gold during the California Gold Rush. I think about the depressed wagons that traveled across the same roads we are on today. The original dirt paths are now covered with tar and asphalt, and rubber tires replaced the hoofs. A lot has changed from a hundred years ago, a year ago, even from last week. I see the world split open up and share its memories and catch the light like the center of a geode.

Luna

(An excerpt of this essay has been published in Poetry Midwest.)


Midlife is the old age of youth and the youth of old age. – Proverb.


Our eyes are the last of our senses to evolve. How long does it take for our hearts to form? My younger sister, Krisey, will tell me a year later, during the fifth week of her second pregnancy that her baby is the size of a sesame seed, still a cluster of cells, and it’s during this stage of development the heart will divide into chambers and begin to pump blood. I wondered, in that critical week, if the emotional connections to the heart can be stunted, or if that’s purely an adult thing. I thought about this cluster of cells, a pinpoint of life pushing against the walls of the cell, and what strength and endurance the cells had to have in order to grow, expand—all of who will acquire the ability to store desire and memory in a blind darkness. A pounding coordination had begun in the body, for a body. But that’s not what I am thinking about, as I climb onto the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle for the first time.

My fingers are linked and locked through the belt loops of your jeans—a secure place my hands have discovered after holding on to you too tight and accidentally tickling you out of your motorcycle concentration.

The winged parts of the hipbones, the iliac, expand outward, like a butterfly. This pelvic cavity is designed like a cave to protect the potential life that sleeps deep inside. This winged amphitheatre of bone is one of the six major cavities in the human body. Resting between the expansions of this bone, fallopian flowers still bud in a dark field of my muscle.

My hips hook my pants in place. I touch my stomach and imagine the flatness I know is just beneath a layer of fat, then and rest my hands back on my hips. I am made from an outline of ash and bone, but my mind has the power to be in all places of my body at once. I’m not as robotic as I feel sometimes in this modern world. A robot has neither a heart nor hipbones.

Hipbones are often overlooked and hardly a topic of conversation, unless you become one of the people who’ve become dependent on a walker or cane after a fracture. I read recently that medical experts predict a future epidemic of hip fractures due to the aging U.S. population—what an onslaught of broken butterfly wings!
A thin, faux rawhide braid, no more in width than a pencil, frayed from cheapness and clashes against my new white pants, now, a size too big. I like wearing these pants, especially when I am near you. Suddenly, I am a long-legged exotic bird. My feathers ruffle with the midsummer winds. We stand together in front of your chilled butter colored house. I’ve spent most of my life waiting for this moment…to live carelessly in the grass. You hand me a helmet and tell me it’s expensive. I am afraid I might ruin it, but how, by crashing? Earlier I confessed, motorcycles make me nervous, and now, as you hand me my helmet, I think about how I could damage the whole evening by leaning too hard on a turn and tipping the bike over us. I know it’s possible to lean too far into excitement and pay the price with your life. When I was sixteen, my father told me how to ride on the back of motorcycles. The part I remember most: how passengers on a bike should take curves or turns, “Don’t lean to far or force it. Just relax…follow the bike, Pilar.”

I focus on your smile as you gently adjust the strap so it fits comfortably under my chin. Your fingers are flirting with my neck. I let out a little laugh.

“I trust you Richard with the bike,” I say, awkward in my nervousness, not anymore about riding, but being in kissing distance from you, You reassure me the helmet is European and it’s the best in its class. Suddenly, I can hardly contain my happiness. My fear of riding a motorcycle surrenders to our bodies against one another. There are diamonds, naked to the eye, floating behind the veils that hang above us in the early evening sky.

I ask you, if at forty-one years old, you’ve had a midlife crisis. The older I become, the more I hear about this crisis: divorces, affairs, dating younger people, growing beards or shaving them off, depression, recession, losing hair, getting hair, face lifts, tummy tucks, and random purchases. You say you’ve already had one, the crisis, which happened shortly after your divorce and that’s when you purchased a Harley and BMW cruising bike. You say the only color for a motorcycle is black. Five years later, riding is still important to you, so maybe it wasn’t a phase or crisis, but a germ that outgrew the greenhouse. I need to pay attention to people; I tend to shrivel in a crisis. I wonder what my midlife crisis will be, or if I’ve already it. My heart turned inside out and flattened itself against the earth, listening for anything in my efforts trying to define what love is and what love isn’t for my thesis. I had to live it to understand it. Is there any other way to really understand something? At the time, I would have rather died than lived with my ears and eyes turned away from the truth. I think about the book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wished I had read it—with the rest of the class—years ago at the junior college. I think it’s a book on morals. I wondered if it has helped anyone through a midlife crisis. Now, at the end of my thirties, maybe it’s not too late, just in case the real midlife crisis is around the corner. What I remember most about my English classes in junior college was that I couldn’t keep up with the reading assignments, so I faked it. Everything distracted me off the page, even the sound of my breath. I’d sit in class for weeks, three chapters behind. I didn’t have a clue as to what was being said. A lot can be said for nodding your head while making eye contact with the teacher; it can make a difference in a grade. A year later, I met a teacher, Mr. Farve, at the junior college, who changed my life. “Write in your textbooks. Learn to be an active reader!” He’d passionately shout, sweat rolling down his forehead, as he punched his fist through academic clouds. As soon as I began writing in my textbooks my G.P.A. began to climb towards the honor roll. Suddenly, I love to read again.

I want to know more of you. I do know you’re a romantic: You snap photographs of the world and capture what your hands cannot collect or bring back. You display your travels: photo albums, four-colored pictures framed on your living room walls, smooth river rocks housed in glass boxes from a sidewalk vendor in Mexico. All of it makes me forget where we are. I feel absorbed in the colors of your travels. I have forgotten we’re sitting on your leather couch in a suburban town in California, branded by country-western traditions nestled in the Central Valley. You show me one photo album after album, visually courting my heart. It works. You have the ability to hold my attention, instantly. You store sunsets in your mind I have yet to discover. The bird in me returns. I resume in a V-formation and take the lead; I never look back. I am either a poor leader, or one who knows exactly what she wants. In these windows of flight, my wings rattle open, like quills fresh from a pot of ink.

The stoplight blinks from green to yellow. We ease our way to reach a complete stop. The light flashes to red. The engine from the motorcycle rumbles beneath my body—all other noise is filtered out. We wait. I could hug you from behind forever. My body remains frozen, as not to move the bike, creating a shaky start once the light turns green. With a helmet head, and my peripheral vision now cumbersome, I try to keep my eyes fixed straight ahead.

My helmet bumps against yours when you shift gears. Click! You become so attractive to me by the way your hand moves in coordination to shifting gears. There is something so masculine about this coordination for speed. I apologize into the rushing wind about letting our helmets click, “Sorry.” Sorry, I was hypnotized by your right hand. I think you know what I said, but at the next red light you nicely tell me not to let the helmets hit against each other. Each time you shift gears my neck tenses as I try not to let our helmets touch, or stare too long at your hand. I must stay alert. My eyes peek behind my right shoulder and down at the asphalt blasting past us. We make our way off the city streets and onto a freeway. I forget to tell you that I don’t do freeways on motorcycles. Nothing shields me, except my helmet and your backside. One wrong move and I could be flung like a rag doll, tumbling into mid air, scuff my skin off and face down in a pool of spit and gravel.

We finally exit the freeway and travel through unassigned and sleepy county roads I’ve never been on. We roll to another stop sign. There are no cars in sight, but you still come to a complete stop and look left and right, twice, before we take off. On the road in front of us is a pile of trash: illegal dumping. Someone has set it on fire: a couch, bags of garbage, a headless tree, plastic chairs. It’s a post-domestic bonfire. You tell me whoever set the fire might be watching us from behind the trees. I pretend I am whispering into the curves of your ear, my words slipping, letter by letter drifting forever into your canal, instead I’m trying to speak through the layers of plastic and foam of your helmet, “Let’s get out here.” We leave the burning mess and zigzag up a small mountain in the distance. At the top, we pause to watch the early-evening sky: Blue begins to shift into black and the stars haven’t yet floated to the surface. I think this is how love is supposed to feel. My body is still vibrating from the bike; I can’t tell if it’s a rush or a sense of exhaustion that I feel. The last time I felt this I was standing in Manhattan for the first time. My knees want to buckle. I shift my attention to the five variations of blue in front of us, all of them transforming into new shades the longer we stand before the sky. If this is love, I’m in the center of it, and I wonder, if you’d catch me if I lost my balance and fell backwards into this backdrop of blue.

You point out the moon, saying you take as many photographs of it as you can, sometimes with a tripod. I see worship in your eyes. I want to ask you, do you love what you cannot touch, but I don’t say a word. I wonder if you feel the same way about women. I look at you and smile. I don’t want to scare you by probing into your heart. I can only pay attention to your fascinations…this is what new love likes to do. I wonder if it’s the reflection of the moon that draws you. Do you see the male or female images across the forehead of the moon? There’s a tribe, somewhere in southwestern Africa, who are closely related to the Bushmen that worship the luna, or moon. The word “lunatic” comes from the word luna, aligned with the myth that if someone stared at the moon long enough it would drive them mad. For centuries the moon (and sun) has: held poets and philosophers captive; created superstition; aided in love; worked on the behalf of shapeshifting; aided the weak with the willpower to make life-changing decisions; marriage proposal; influenced the planting and harvesting crops; set chain of reactions amongst individuals to rebel against their virtues, only to blame it on a full moon.

You are luna to me. In the week we’ve been dating, you’ve had the power to hold my attention—all with a simple look. I move from your eyes to your mouth, which always appears to be on the verge of a smile. I soak up your side profile in the remaining light—your forehead, the bridge of your nose, your lips, the way the corners of your smile curl in. You’re a mountainous outline; your rivers are dry, beds of sand outlined with billowy sweet sage. I can almost smell the salt wafting through the air.

I never tell you that we have the same nose, but it’s true. Our nose is neither too big nor small for our face, and when we kiss, passion comfortably secures into place. You turn to me as if you’re about to say something to me—you must have felt me staring at you. Your eyes always seem to hold sweet skepticism. Later I take this behavior as proof that you are really listening to me when I talk. But this time, neither of us are talking; instead, you give me a quick kiss on the lips and turn to walk towards the bike. It’s time for us to go.
We head down the mountain on the bike. By now, we’ve been riding for over an hour and I convince myself that I’m getting used to the bike. But in reality, I am exhausted from having to be so still and alert. My hips are sore and I can’t wait to lie down, decompress. At a stoplight, you reach your left arm back for my shin. You gently squeeze it, as if to tell me I did great on the back of the Harley. I see you smile in your left handlebar mirror. I smile, tugging on your belt loops where my fingers are still looped and locked.

On the way back to your house I think about how I trust you at every intersection, stoplight, pothole, and patch of sand the bike’s wheels roll over. I think about how you were a paramedic for many years, and how today you teach paramedics and emergency medical technicians about safety and updated procedures. You’re a quality assurance manager; you tell me you work for our local ambulance company for over ten years, now at a desk job, which you seem content. So I know if there’s an emergency, I couldn’t be with a better person. And here I am with a delayed response that I agreed to ride on the back of a motorcycle. Could I be a Harley girlfriend? Is this me? I’m not officially your girlfriend. I guess that part has to come first.
Once we arrive to your house we pop off our helmets. Our bodies are alive with vibration. We are sticky and itchy with anticipation for our first beer. Our mouths, clever like serpents, have the power to fold air, as we draw closer, kissing one another’s ear. I find an electric silence with your kiss, until you struggle for breath, and then, I know you’ve lost yourself to the floral garden I’ve planted in my hair.

There is nothing I can say to you now.

Years have passed, we live in separate worlds. You were the boyfriend of five years, the one who explained what I was seeing in the natural world.

Today, I could hear your voice along Highway 41, even before we passed our Mexican restaurant, before the elevation changed as I got closer to Yosemite--where Scrub Oaks begin to morph into Ponderosa Pines--the wild bark wanting to be touched.

As I passed Fish Camp, I remember how you said, this was the spot where the Native American Indians came to clean their fish, a true trading post of the past. Badger Ski Resort is off to the left, only five miles, but the car continues towards Yosemite Village; my mother and me are looking for something, we're not sure, maybe it's just a turn style so we can get on the main road and look for the vista points she remembers.

We pass racing creek beds, swirling with memories, and the lodge where we used to get coffee and eat our sandwiches from the cooler inside your big red truck. These are the days when we opted to kick around, versus skiing.

I realized: If this is compassion I'm feeling then, it might mean I'm finding a way to forgive you. If I forgave you (and myself) it might mean that I'd have to let you go.

As we passed Bridal Falls, I remember your hand leading me to the base of the waterfall, love still young, everywhere the taste of mist.

Sweet Remembrance

Today, I was reminded how short our lives are on earth. Maybe it was my father's ashes on the back seat, or my mother hiding behind big dark sunglasses who drove us to Yosemite to find the vista point where we'd scatter his ashes. I've always admired her strength.

I wrote down a verse I heard in church today which seemed appropriate to read at our destination:

There is no death,

Just sweet remembrance

of greater glory

that's on the way!

At the vista point, I forced the words through my lips--neither of us could understand I was trying to say. I don't know if it was the tourists on each side of us, the pressure to get the ashes to take flight with little wind, or the ash that was collecting on my mother's hands, arms, coat. Half dome loomed in the background. It's majestic power was patient; we are the awkward ones--the ones feeling as if we need to speak. A mountain of sheer perfection, something outside an earthly realm, had begun its role for us to take note.