They’ll chew the wires and burn down your house, some one says. They carry diseases, someone says. No one says which diseases. But there is plenty of advice: poison that makes them so thirsty they’ll flee, looking for water but finding instead a place to die; humane catch-and-release traps; humane traps that kill instantly. I don’t want to cut a hole in my house to set a trap, and I don’t want to kill them—or, worse, turn them into a slow, stumbling poison-delivery system for owls and hawks. I don’t want to catch them at all. I want them to move away.
Sometimes I don’t even want them to move away. I lie in bed before light and listen to the sound of their feet skittering across my ceiling, and the sound of the acorns they’re rolling across it, storing food for winter. They are old friends. Their busy life above my dark room is a lullaby.
Faith
BIRMINGHAM, 1970
In church, under incandescent lights that make the brass candlesticks take on a golden luster, that make the polished pews gleam as though fashioned of marble, I sit between my mother and my great-grandmother, heavy bored by incense and holy water and the swishing of the priest’s vestments and the clicking of his hard shoes on the hard floor. “Truly, I say to you,” he intones from the ambo, “whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.”
I take my mother’s hand and point it toward the lights. I twist it to make the light catch each facet of the diamond on fire. It is an absurd ring for someone like my mother, someone living in an apartment where the rent is paid in exchange for her trouble—for calling the plumber or the electrician whenever another tenant complains, for scheduling the grass cutters, for testing the chlorine level in the pool. The ring belonged to my father’s mother, the grandmother I am named for but never met, the one my mother never met, but it has always been on her hand, and I have always played with it in church under a hundred blazing lights.
My great-grandmother’s ring is not nearly so grand or so gleaming, but there is another game I play in church with Mother Ollie’s hand. I take it in my own and pat it smooth, running my finger across its impossible softness, marveling at the way it ripples under my finger, as yielding as water. My great-grandmother’s skin is an echo of her old Bible, the pages tissue-thin, the corners worn to soft felt. I gently pinch the skin above her middle knuckle, and then I let it go. I count to myself, checking to see how many seconds it can stand upright, like a mountain ridge made by a glacier in an age long before mine. Slowly, slowly it disappears. Slowly, slowly it throws itself into the sea.
River Light
I try to imagine what it must have been like for the first human beings who moved through this dark forest: to glimpse a flare of light on moving water, to step out of the shadows of the close trees and see the sun flashing on a broad river. To see air and water and light conjoined in a magnificent blaze. That first instant must have felt the way waking into darkness feels—not knowing at first if your eyes are open or closed.
In that instant, the river is not a life-giving source of water and fish and passage. In that instant, it is not the roiling fury that can swallow whole any land-walking, air-breathing creature. It is only itself, unlike any other thing. It was here long before we were here, and it will be here after we are gone. It will erase all trace of us—without malice, without even recognition. And when we are gone to ground and all our structures have crumbled back to dust, the river will become again just the place where light and water and sky find each other among the trees.
Red Dirt Roads
LOWER ALABAMA, 1972
I was eleven, my brother and our cousin ten, and we were old enough to go anywhere our legs could take us: the pecan orchard, the blackberry patch, the cemetery next to the church, the community house next to the cemetery, the store with the gas pump outside and the penny candy display just within its swinging doors. If the adults were worried about the bull a neighbor sometimes pastured among the pecan trees, or the rattlesnakes coiled under the blackberry canes, or the fire ant mounds dotting the cemetery like miniature monuments to another natural order, no one said a word to us, even though my cousin’s other grandfather was killed by a rattlesnake decades before we were all born.
Surely someone gave us boundaries of some kind, marked out the territory where our wanderings had to end, but if anyone did I have no recollection of it. I don’t remember whose idea it was to turn down a red dirt road between two of our grandfather’s fields, a road we’d never been down before, not on foot or on the neighbor’s horses. I don’t remember how we decided just how far to walk before turning around and heading back to the blacktop road where our grandparents lived. Perhaps it was only the monotony of the peanuts, row after row after row. Maybe we were hot and tired, or maybe that vast, silent expanse of agriculture—uniform, blank, impersonal—began to feel alien and unwelcoming to us. We knew all the varieties of pecans by name, could gather and sort them for market unerringly, ten cents a pound, but we’d not had any hand in the peanut harvest and felt no connection to those fields.
We had already turned around, were already on the way back to our grandparents’ house, when the gun appeared. That much we all agree on; that much we all remember the same way. I don’t remember the feel of dust in my throat. I don’t remember the red sand ringing my toenails, ground into the cuticles, though surely it must have been, for we were always barefoot—it was too hot for shoes, and sandals were useless in the actual sand. But I remember, just as my brother and my cousin remember, the sound of a truck careening down the road behind us in the silence.
Without any sense of trepidation, we moved to the side of the road to let the truck pass. I was in front, my cousin and my brother single file just behind me, though they both stepped farther off the road and drifted to my right when the truck slowed to an idle. Even before I saw the shotgun resting on the frame of the open passenger window, before I realized it was pointed straight at my head, I saw the woman’s angry face peering at me from the cab. My brother and my cousin must have seen the gun first. Or perhaps they saw only the baying dogs in the bed of the truck—dogs who could have been over that tailgate in an instant.
“You got no business here,” the woman said. “You got no business hanging around this road with my menfolk so close by.”
I stopped walking and turned toward her. My brother or my cousin, one of them, tried to push me forward, to make me keep walking, to make me pick up speed. “This is our granddaddy’s land,” I said. “We got as much business here as anybody. More than you.”
“I’ll not have no city girls stealing my menfolk,” she said.
I laughed out loud. Stealing her menfolk?
Did we hear her cock the shotgun, or did we only imagine the sound? Did I stop talking then? When my brother and my cousin tell this story, they remember being afraid my back talk would get us all shot, but I don’t remember a feeling of fear. I only remember thinking it was so funny, the very idea that three children—one of them a boy, though it was the 1970s, and his hair was collar length—might pose a threat to anyone old enough to drive a car or shoot a gun unsupervised.
That’s what I remember: the comedy of it, the ludicrous mismatch between the visible reality of the world and some crazy grown-up’s inexplicable fears.
Somehow it ended, and the woman roared off in a shower of red dirt, the dogs lurching in the truck bed before finding their footing again.
When we got home we said nothing. We only turned back to hose off our feet when Eola pointed toward the door. No one got shot. No one got bitten by a rattlesnake or gored by a bull. No harm ever came to us, though we were patently in harm’s way. It was years before I understood that I was never safe, not even there.
Different
The autumnal equinox comes and goes, but you would never know it by the weather in Tennessee. Most years the temperatures remain in the nineties. The English daisies, which normally bloo
m in spring, come back for a second, more subdued round of greetings. My mother carried daisies in her bridal bouquet, and when they bloom I always think of her lifelong joy in their sunny faces.
One fall, a daisy sent up a bloom unlike all the others. Instead of a golden disk surrounded by an array of white petals opened mostly flat and facing toward the sun, the flower had a globe-shaped center, and the petals ringing it were perpendicular to the ground. The bees showed no preference for the ordinary daisies in my garden that year, but we humans are acutely attuned to difference and tend to prize any rare variation from the norm. We believe a four-leaf clover brings good luck. A wild crow adopts an abandoned kitten, and the video goes viral. For us, an oddly shaped daisy is cause for surprise, and then for investigation, and ultimately for delight.
With other human beings, though, we aren’t so understanding. Children with any sort of physical or cognitive or emotional difference are invariably bullied, and mental illness carries such a stigma that my mother would never speak of her bouts of depression, even after I’d wrestled with depression myself.
And yet, despite our capacity for brutality, human beings are an empathetic species. In 2007, the fossil remains of a severely disabled prehistoric man were uncovered in what is now Vietnam. The skeleton revealed the fused vertebrae and weak bones characteristic of a congenital disease called Klippel-Feil syndrome. The man was a quadriplegic, unable to feed himself or keep himself clean, and yet he survived to adulthood—during the Stone Age, mind you—because others in his community took care of him.
In 1988, during one stop on our honeymoon, my husband and I visited the San Diego Museum of Man. On display at the time was an exhibit of ancient clay figures. The human figures were all visibly different in some way: people with dwarfism, people missing a limb, people with severely curved spines or extra fingers. An informational placard explained that these figures had been fashioned by members of a tribe who revered physical difference. What we call a disability they had considered a blessing: God had entrusted to the care of their community a rare treasure, and even in their art they strove to be worthy of that trust.
Be a Weed
Sometimes, when I haven’t slept or the news of the world, already bad, suddenly becomes much worse, the weight of belonging here is a heaviness I can’t shake. But then I think of the glister of a particular morning in springtime. I think of standing in the sunshine and watering the butterfly garden, which is mostly cultivated weeds punctuated by the uncultivated kind that come back despite my pinching and tugging. I think of the caterpillars on the milkweed plants, unperturbed by the overspray, and the resident red-tailed hawk gliding overhead, chased by a mockingbird and three angry crows, and the bluebird standing on the top of the nest box protecting his mate, who is inside laying an egg. I think of that morning—not even a morning, not even an hour—and I say to myself, Be an egg. Be a mockingbird. Be a weed.
The Imperfect-Family Beatitudes
BIRMINGHAM, 1972
Blessed is the weary mother who rises before daybreak for no project or prayer book, for no reason but the solace of a sleeping house and a tepid cup of instant coffee and a fat dog curled on her lap. Hers is the fleeting kingdom of heaven.
Blessed is the suburban father whose camping gear includes two hundred yards of orange extension cord and a box fan, a pancake griddle, a weather radio, a miniature grainy-screened TV with full-sized rabbit ears, and another box fan. He shall keep peace in the menopausal marriage.
Blessed is the farm-born mother, gripped by a longing for homegrown tomatoes, who nails old roller skates to the bottom of a wooden pallet, installs barrels of soil and seeds on top, and twice a day tows it through the grass to the bright spots, following slivers of sun across the shady yard. She shall taste God.
Blessed is the fatherless father who surrenders his Saturdays to papier-mâché models of the Saturn V rocket or sugar-cube igloos or Popsicle-stick replicas of Fort Ticonderoga, and always to scale. In comforting he shall be comforted.
Blessed is the mother whose laugh is a carillon, a choir, an intoxication filling every room in the house and every dollar-movie theater and every school-play performance, even when no one else gets the joke. She will be called a child of God.
Blessed is the winking father who each day delivers his children to Catholic school with a kiss and the same advice: “Give ’em hell!” He will be summoned to few teacher conferences.
Blessed is the braless mother who arrives at the school pickup line wearing pink plastic curlers and stained house shoes, and who won’t hesitate to get out of the car if she must. She will never be kept waiting.
Blessed are the parents whose final words on leaving—the house, the car, the least consequential phone call—are always “I love you.” They will leave behind children who are lost and still found, broken and, somehow, still whole.
Night Walk
It’s a crazy cartoon of a moon, over the top even by Hollywood standards. No one would ever believe this moon on a movie screen: the outrageous roundness of it, the deep gold hue, the way it’s settled in the center of a soft nest of light against a warm black sky, above stark black branches. Gray clouds are rushing across it in a wind so high the moon winks and recovers as quickly as it would in a time-lapse film.
What a rebuke this weather has been to my own frequent claims that fall and spring are the seasons of change, that nothing much happens in winter. The last days have brought balmy, shirtsleeves sun and brutal, bone-tightening cold and this tree-bending wind. And now the wind is bearing in a cold rain, already sputtering down in horizontal pellets.
When the moon no longer emerges from the clouds and the rain picks up, the dark world closes. The screen goes black, and now the soundtrack is all that matters. A neighbor’s wind chimes jangle, and then another’s. A clatter of bare sycamore branches and a lighter rattle of seedpods in the dried trumpet vines climbing a power pole. The snapping fabric of a flag. A castanet of stiff leaves in an ancient magnolia standing unperturbed in the rush of air. Maple leaves scudding down the rough asphalt. A train whistle. A siren. A wary greeting from the three-legged dog behind her fence, warning me to come no closer in the dark.
Every Time We Say Goodbye
BIRMINGHAM, 1973
“Every time we say goodbye, I die a little,” Ella Fitzgerald is singing while my parents dance on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. My mother is barefoot. My father is wearing his work shoes, but my mother’s toes are in no danger. These steps are as familiar to them as their own heartbeats. As familiar as the words of this song.
I stand in the doorway and watch, embarrassed by something I can’t even name. My father’s arm is around my mother’s waist. My mother is on tiptoe, her arm across his shoulders, her head tucked beneath his cheekbone. Their other hands are intertwined, held between their hearts. Their steps are so practiced, so perfectly in sync, not a single inch opens between them as they spin.
Gall
At a dinner party, I ran into another writer whose subject is often backyard nature—a writer who lives in the same town, though we’d never met in real life before. “So you’re a trained naturalist?” she asked. I had to confess I’m more of a Googler. I grew up playing in the woods, and all my life I’ve turned to woodland paths when the world is too much with me, but I am no scientist. It took a lot of nerve for someone so ignorant of true wilderness to fashion herself as a nature writer, but the flip side of ignorance is astonishment, and I am good at astonishment.
One spring I was standing at our bedroom window with my camera, using the zoom lens to search for a house wren I could hear but couldn’t see, when I noticed something odd on a branch of the oak tree that grows just outside the window. A spongy white pod, about the size of a golf ball, protruded from the very tip of a thin branch. I had never seen one before and couldn’t guess what it was. A cancerous growth? A cocoon? The seedpod of a parasitic plant? And what search-engine terms could possibly yield an answer?
“Puffy white ba
ll on the end of an oak twig” finally turned up an image that matched the object on my own oak tree. It was a growth called a gall. There are many different kinds of galls, but this one was made by the wool sower gall wasp, a small black insect that lays its eggs in winter at the tender ends of young branches. The eggs hatch in springtime, just as the twig begins to put on new growth. Then the larvae produce a chemical secretion that forces the tree to form a gall, a protective woolly home where they can live until they are ready to take to the air.
The transformation of any sort of grub into any sort of winged being is a metamorphosis I will rearrange my life to witness, so I checked on the woolly gall every day, many times a day, hoping to be on hand the precise moment the young wasps emerged into the light of springtime.
The oak, meanwhile, was not ready to surrender its own purposes: instead of wool sower gall wasps, what emerged from the gall was a pair of perfectly formed but apparently dwarfed leaves. In time these leaves began to stretch out languidly, not exactly like but also not entirely unlike a typical oak leaf. The gall was taking on the appearance of something pregnant with an alien life-form, and that alien fully intended to hatch.
More than a month passed with no sign of the wasps. I continued to peer at the gall through my bedroom window, if less and less often throughout the day. By the time another month passed, the gall had begun to shrivel and collapse in on itself. Clearly, I had missed the emergence of the wasps, but I kept going to the window to look at the gall anyway, out of a vague remaining curiosity, and possibly out of habit, too.
What I wanted, I think, was some sort of closure, some reckoning of what it means when a thing in nature makes what it needs from only what it has on hand. But as with all other matters in nature and in life, I entered this story in medias res: unaware of its beginning and owed no right to witness its end.
Late Migrations Page 5