Heartbreak Salad

-Lettuce
-Tomatoes
-Cucumbers
-Carrots
-Chopped almonds
-Craisins

First, Dad is going to pull the lettuce from the salad drawer in the fridge, the one that sticks. He'll unwrap it, wash it, and pull it apart. The heart of  it crunches and crisps as it breaks.

Then, he'll rinse a couple waxy tomatoes, glowing like embers. Dad will place them on a pink, glass plate, scratched from use. He'll cut them, the seeds squirting here and there. But the wedges are small and perfect.

Next, he'll peel the cucumbers, filling the sink with green confetti. Translucent, bare-as-baby cucumber halves will leave the kitchen smelling like spring and cut grass and maybe mint.

Soon, Dad'll select two or three brilliant carrots. He'll peel them too so that their rough skins stick to the sides of the stainless steel kitchen sink, curling like ribbon, making a party of the cucumber peels.

When he tosses it all together, he'll sprinkle chopped almonds and craisins on top. He'll be the first to eat salad, the first to offer it to the rest of us. All the while, he'll lean forward and raise his eyebrows with each bite. He loves earth, food, life.



He did so much that when the salad sits on the kitchen table now, untouched, my heart lurches. Hiccups. I want to devour the entire thing, but I don't. I leave it for lunch tomorrow instead, when it won't taste so strongly of loss drenched in a dressing of brimming eyes and aching chest.

Undo

I wanted to undo, unstitch, unweave. I wanted to unchop a tree or unsay a word or unpass an hour. I wanted to un…nothing. There’s nothing to undo. There’s nothing I could have done to save Dad or Mom or myself or my brother. I’ve done nothing wrong, nothing to ask forgiveness for. And I hate it. Dad is simply gone. No do-over for us or for him. No way to resurrect that tree or breathe back that word or respool that hour. 

So, I lie here in my backyard. I’ve gone back for the first time for myself. When I squint against the sunlight, I’m centimeters away from a dandelion stalk, its fuzzy, fragile fronds are gone too. It sways in the breeze though it has nothing left to give. It is spent. Above me, my tulip poplar is new, and it shivers in its childish joy. When the wind whispers, its dried seed pods float lazily away. Suddenly, I am seeing the sun through a rainy windshield, all beaded and glittery and out of focus. 

Suddenly I am seeing clearly. I cannot undo, and I really shouldn’t anyway. Perhaps it is what I wish to redo that haunts me. I want to go for a walk with him again and stop at every tree and bush and flower the way I just did this morning as I walked by myself. I have taken his curiosity with me. I want to glance out the window and see him push the lawn mower across my yard again. I want to wrap my arms around him one last time, his ribs too pronounced, but my head fitting perfectly within the little hollow beneath his shoulder. More than anything, I want to hear his laugh. It rolled from him, from somewhere deep and full, a secret well. It used to. 

I cannot undo or redo, though, so I slowly stand up, brush off my jeans, run a hand through my long black hair, and walk away.

Heavenly

A cardinal splits the almost-white sky like a wound in soft flesh. He shoots by, and I stop in my tracks. I didn’t expect him here at the end of the road. Immediately, I think of Dad. I remember him stopping in his tracks too for a cardinal or an eagle or just a gingko tree. For an instant, I feel him again. But can he feel me? Unbidden, questions scuttle through my mind. Wherever he is, does he hear me? See me? Ever, ever think of me? Does nature here indeed reflect Heaven, or do we just imagine that it does because the thought comforts us, allows us to sleep on nights when the other side of the bed is empty?

Golden streets, we imagine. Rushing, crystal water. Lush gardens. An endless sun (Son?) in a sky with no curling edges. Our pets scampering about. Rolling fields where children play. Flowers more brilliant than our eyes can stand. Snowflakes for no good reason. Is that the way it is?

I imagine that he has a garden. Here, he said he wasn’t creative enough to design a garden plan. Maybe he wasn’t, but if Heaven is perfect, does he create endlessly there? Maybe it was all mapped out there, ready for him. Maybe all he does now is stroll along pebbled paths and breathe deeply of some sweet air I have never known.

I imagine he has a window with wooden shutters. They’re chipped and peeling (not because they wear out, but because God designed them that way). I want to believe that, sometimes, on those afternoons when my lack presses on my chest and begs, he feels me. I hope he walks softly to that one window, unlatches the shutters, and peers down at me for a moment. I want him to see me because I see him everywhere.

But that cardinal is long gone by now, crimson wings fluttering in some tree in the deep  woods. I have stood here for long enough, so I begin to walk back. I remember tip-toeing down the yellow line in the middle of the road. I remember Dad stopping in the middle of a long stride to examine the earth. I imagine a window and hope, hope, hope that he sees me. 

New Places (blog prompt 7)

At first, I looked for Dad. I looked for a scrap of his flannel shirt, for an imprint the size of his shoulders on the forest floor. I searched, scared of finding him, but even more frightened that I wouldn’t. At first, my eyes were drawn to the woods in our backyard like a terrible magnet, yet I couldn’t quite go further than my tulip poplar. I felt him just out of reach, just beyond my fingertips. He haunted my woods, my house, my heart. 

Dad and I on our balcony in the backyard on Easter, 2010

But then I stepped into those woods, and they have lost some of their darkness and fear. I can’t say I gaze at them comfortably and with great joy, though their beauty and little bursts of life lift me even on the worst days.  I look into my own backyard now, and still my chest aches at the thought of him. Something in my rib cage hollows out for a moment. Yet, I am quicker to notice the way the sun falls through the branches and the tilt of the most familiar trees. I look down, beneath my feet, and find tiny flowers of purple and violet and blue and white and yellow so sunny it’s almost orange. I am drawn to the greens sprouting in my flower beds, and the birds hiding among the still-sparse bush in my front lawn. 

Then, I leave my house, and there it is all around me: nature. The kind that flowers and tweets, and whistles. The kind that shimmers and rushes and trickles. The kind that laughs and talks and hopes. It’s difficult to ignore, really. Once I found it at home, I found it at the mall and in the city and along the suburban sidewalks. I found it in the park and in a meadow, along a stream, and in other woods. I found it in me, too, because I thought I wasn’t a nature girl at all until I realized nature isn’t about escaping to a remote place. It’s actually about finding it where you are and acknowledging its “otherness” in your own garden, if you must. 

Now, the trees outside my bedroom window are waving gently in a breeze, and I can’t figure out how I ever overlooked them. But I have a feeling that, although home is a part of me and always will be, there are other things I need to see. There are other places to go. When I leave for Peru next month, I will take a notebook with me so I can record the misty drizzle and the heavy, humid air. I want to capture the sound of a different shore and a different language. I want to take pictures of the strangest, two-toned flowers I have ever seen and the banana trees that casually line some streets. I want to tell a story of the way an entirely new continent can actually be home, too.

Let It Be (place entry 7)

This morning, even before 9AM, I sit beneath my tulip poplar and watch the sunlight flicker through the branches. It flirts here and there with the breeze. Even the lowest weeds seem to garner its lovely face as it lights the forest so that the woods become a cathedral. I hear birds trilling, and I see dandelions beginning to pop up. The trees are no longer flowering, though. They have blossomed to leaves, still curled in their infancy, or fruits blushing and twirling away at the attention of the coy sunshine. I sit here still.

            

 What to make of this? What deep meaning can I find in all of this while the forest resurrects whether I am here to see it or not? I try very hard to come up with something to write, something important to say. But I come up empty and end up just looking instead. I am silent in the wake of the wind that has been so insistent these last few days. So, nearby I notice new weeds. They are flowering with blooms so feathery that when I reach out my fingers, I almost don’t feel anything. They are little pink clouds, a substance I can see but barely touch, and I believe they exist. 

 Then, I wander, finding a path that is unobstructed, finding it like second nature the way I knew these woods when I was a child. I don’t fight thorns this time. I just take what the woods will hand to me and meander along, snapping photos as I go. I don’t fight anything anymore. Not dark thoughts, not the idea of my father lying here or here or here. Instead, I begin to wonder what he would have seen. I notice the wood nailed to a tree to form a ladder where our tree house used to perch. I stand beneath tangled bushes turning emerald and look up at the sky beyond. I notice little rosy leaves poking through the forest floor. I peak at the meadow I can no longer reach and breathe, knowing that it does not need me. 

             

And just like that, I know, too, that Dad probably didn’t look for meaning here. He probably didn’t examine a plant and philosophize or create metaphors. He didn’t look for any of these things because meaning came to him unbidden. “This is amazing,” I imagine him thinking. “For all of this life to rise from a tiny seed. Doesn’t it prove the presence of God? Doesn’t it show His wonder?” Then, he would have left it alone because nature, like God, does not need us to become important or meaningful or deep. Perhaps, in the midst of his doubt and hurt, he stepped into nature and knew exactly what he needed to know: God is. Maybe, here, he was simply able to let it be. 

I will too. 

I Am a Little Girl (blog prompt 6)

            I am a little girl. Well, not so little, really. I’m 12, and for pity sake, I can’t believe my parents are just barely allowing me to walk down to the end of my road all by myself! The whole world is large here. The trees look like huge stalks of broccoli waving against that cathedral blue sky. And there’s a trail I just have to explore. Two, actually. One splits off to the left. It’s beyond the end of the road, behind the logs and the metal fence that never kept any one of us out. This trail rolls off into the distance. There are telephone poles every so often, standing forlornly against the full forest. Why are there telephone poles down here? Are there cabins in the woods in need of connection? The other path is cut through tall, tall grass. It’s almost obscured, really, but I can just make it out as I push through the weeds and the lady bugs and the ticks. It disappears into the woods where a more certain trail takes over soon. It winds past whispering springs and is interrupted by fallen logs that I hop over or crawl under or play balance beam on. Yeah, the whole world is big back here. It doesn’t stop. It is endlessly possible, and I am free in it, finally allowed to explore on my own where the little flowers, close to the ground, are the beauties that catch my eye. 

 I am not a little girl anymore. Well, I’m not supposed to be. I am 22, and this is the last place of refuge I can think of. It is the day after…well, just the day after. The house is full of well-wishers and sympathy-givers and “If you need anything, just call.” I almost run, I am so desperate, so hurt, so empty and angry and scared. And when I find these two trails again, the ones I used to think held the entire world between them, the tears come. They spill over my eye lashes and drip down the side of my nose, into my hair at my temples, fall into my collar, and this, the end of my road, is suddenly the smallest and most confined place behind all the blur. I take the trail with the telephone poles. I walk and then run and then stop mid-stride, and something tiny and warbling escapes my throat. It is a whimper, a plea just before it becomes a howl, a long, loud, high, “NOOOOO!” It turns into, “Where the hell were You?” and “How could you leave us?” and “What if I turn out like this?” and “I love you.” It spends me until I am crouched low amidst the tall weeds and the odd, ugly bits of dead leaves. I spread my fingers over the dirt and press down into the ground that will soon hold him. 

I am a little girl again, reduced. The world is huge and cold, and I am small in it.