burying ground

one day pretty far back, historically speaking, the good folks of the city of new york looked around and realized the wells they'd dug and the rivers and springs on their skinny island were browner and dirtier and more full of typhoid and the like than they'd been before. they'd been making do with beer and whiskey and tea, but that will only go so far. you can't have a big city without any fresh water and a city on an island in the ocean doesn't have as many choices as it might if it found itself elsewhere. so the city did what must have seemed like a reasonable thing at the time. it began a process of impounding water from on up the way, up in the mountains of the mainland where the city didn't think too many people were using it. after all, who on earth would want to live up in the middle of nowhere when they could live in a fancy city on an island? especially when you factor in all that whiskey.

impounding is basically the lassoing of water into big piles in one place for quick and easy use in another place. because water is water, these piles came about when the city built dams along parts of the upland rivers, creating spectacular snaky lakes sitting high above the valleys originally carved by those slithers of water. the first damming happened more than a hundred and fifty years ago and the most recent happened four years before i was born. the water reached up and stretched out tendrilly fingers all over the land in valleys, smoothing out the lowlands and reflecting the mountains pretty enough the city folks even began to be proud of themselves for creating a resort scene up there where there had only been cows and bears before.

but you have to know that all those lassoed and harnessed wild waters surely had little towns snuggled all up against them, dot after tiny dot along the ribbony valleys before the waters rose up. and when the city decided how tall they'd need the water to be in each valley, they took away all the towns sitting below the line they decided on. that's right. took them right off the maps. some towns relocated whole and entire up on the banks of the new water. some didn't. but at the edges of the water where the towns used to be there are signs. former site of olive. former site of arena. and before they left, the folks in all those tiny places had to dig up their buried ancestors and take them to higher ground. there are things you just don't think about until you're in the middle of them.

whole groups of dead and buried folks, alone and clustered by name, were packed up and moved from every one of those little towns. arena, brewer, cannonsville, cat hollow, duffy, edgett, granton, old arena, rock rift, rock royal,  shavertown, union grove, wakeman. the water came up and buried the land and the trees and the roads to where things used to be. and a whole bunch of those dead whose families could not be found were carted off to a hillside just north of the water, west of the shavertown bridge, settled back again by what family they had with them underground at the time, and then town by town they were replotted, remapped.

you can see the history of the valleys right there on that hillside. the names of people that have given themselves over to be the names of towns. lamb after lamb across the stones of child after child living and then quickly dying in a time when a cough could mean losing half a family. masons and farmers and soldiers from the civil war. some stones weathered away to nothing because people had been living in those valleys so long and quietly burying their dead near enough by to visit from time to time. a few stones are set into the earth facing backward to all the others in their rows. there are small plugs of cement with metal signs skewered into the ground above the empty grass in some places with names typed onto white paper encased in plastic.

and those stones, markers for boxes of dust and bones, sit there on the side of the mountain. you can stand there in the middle of all of them and look out onto that valley below. you can't see it from where you stand at the edge of the clean lawn, but just beneath those trees is that lake glittering with impounded water.

the somethingth of july

photos and video generously supplied by the baby sister. 

 it would be easiest to blame the parents because they are the ones who handed us our first explosives and the small crumbling bits of burning wand for lighting them. i do not recall when i was not allowed to set fire to wads of gunpowder wrapped in bright paper although i am sure there must have been such a time. maybe, because i am the oldest, when i was two or so. maybe three. but the middle child was born breathing brimstone and her own child is steeped in it, too. it is his birthright to throw fire into the sky.

so it is only fair that when we figure out we can make it out to the homeland for a few days, we call the child to tell him first. the sweetie asks the child about his fourth of july plans and the child goes over them halfheartedly, insisting it can't really be much without us there. now, what he means is without the sweetie. because the sweetie will strap a rocket to a styrofoam plane. he will light a whole box of ladyfingers at once. he will run out into that delicious smoke to light fuse after fuse after fuse. i hear the sweetie ask if the child thinks he could put off the fourth for a few days so we could join him. there is a scream from the other end of the phone. the sweetie has to hold the phone away from his ear and i can hear the screaming from across the room. the child will postpone the fourth of july.

i miss a call from the child while we are in maine. the message says he is hoping to do facetime on the phones so we can go with him to choose fireworks. instead, he sends a picture of himself with some sort of monstrous paper-wrapped cardboard tube. so we will know he's getting the right stuff.  his mother says he has started a countdown, how many days until we will be where he is. how many days until the sky goes sparkly.

when the smaller child hears we're coming, he puts his own spin on things. this is the child who speaks to the dog endlessly on the phone. dog language. child language. but his take on the visit is that the dog will be arriving on his own. by subway. to visit him. when he talks to me on the phone, a rarity since i am not the dog and therefore not who he really wants to talk to, he tells me he is waiting. he tells me about all the toys in his basement he is ready to share with the dog. he tells me, with great pride, about his yard, about all the grass there for the dog to pee on. he tells the dog. he tells me. he tells me to tell the dog.

my own mother starts her phone conversation asking me what her son in law will be wanting to eat. this is important. she will make anything he puts on the list. and because he lives a quasi-gluten-free lifestyle, he starts with bread pudding. because my own dear mother makes better bread pudding than anyone around. he says pineapple upside down cake. he says carrot cake. this is not just because he does not have these things at home. my mother's versions of them have ruined people for eating lesser attempts. not just my lesser attempts. the attempts of real cooks. he asks for meatloaf. my mother does not even pretend to feign interest in what i might like to eat. they will all be happy enough to see me but this is because i bring what they really want. the sweetie. the dog. the general wildness.

and so on a very hot evening some time well after the fourth, we eat a good meal where there is meat loaf on a platter and creamed peas with new potatoes in a bowl and where there is a gluten-free (and unsurprisingly delicious) pineapple upside down cake. and then we stand on the middle sister's deck, wrapped in bug spray and oppressive air, waiting. the sweetie straps the rocket to the styrofoam plane. he leans his tall self out over the corner of the deck. the middle sister lights the fuse. the smaller nephew says the single word fly. and it does. the plane slips smoothly out of the sweetie's hand trailing sparks and glides out over the yard. it hesitates just a second.  it shoots up, arcs over and turns into a shower of stars.

possum of destruction

the word possum refers to a beady-eyed, thumb-footed, stink-flavored american marsupial with no clear redeeming value. for much of my childhood i did not know that an o existed in the beginning of the word and to this day i do not know a soul who pronounces it. that o is a waste of time, just like the animal it's stuck on.

and now, our drama unfolds:

pretty new fig leaves emerging above poop-smothered ones

i head to the kitchen window because beyond it is the farm. two feet square on a third floor fire escape. the tomato plants are grumbling so excessively about water that even though the sky is threatening golf ball sized rain, i fill up my grandma's iced tea glass and head over to give them a sip. they remain wilted, ungrateful. the basil sits below the two plants, giggling that good smell out onto everything. the feathery carrots are ready to thin. the beets are still unsure about being so high up. they slide out one leaf at a time, tentative and small. the cucumbers are reaching out to the fire escape rails, plotting to take over everything with those still not yet tendrils. and my fig tree, lovely thing given to me by a favorite waitress at our favorite diner, has been putting on serious, lush leaves after a near death experience involving pigeon poop. the fig tree is the fanciest thing on the farm, the thing i love most.

stump of sorrow

i lean out to check those new ruffly leaves. i scan the farm but cannot find the tree anywhere. it is not likely the tree moved by itself and there have been no winds to speak of, nothing that would take one tree in the middle of a whole farm. there is an uncomfortable rustling among the other plants. the sullen sky squeezes two more shades of dark into itself before my eyes finally fall on the pot. and the stump. a four inch fig tree stump sticking out of the pot, sheared off clean at the skyward end. there is a frantic moment where i look around for the top of the severed tree, thinking foolishly that if i find it i can put everything back together with duct tape. or gaffer's tape. it comes in many pretty colors including, i am sure, trunk and leaf.

i cannot at first imagine what sort of monster would assassinate a baby fig tree like this but then i recall that fourth floor fire escape raccoon last month and also the rabid raccoon i saw in the park a week later. i begin to think hateful things about raccoons. i also begin to worry if somehow my plants are contaminated with rabies and how rabies might manifest itself in plants (hint: it does not. they are plants). i am imagining all sorts of ways i might meet up with and destroy this frothy mouthed murderer with the support of what i expect will be my now sentient and justice-seeking garden, when the part of my brain that actually does the real thinking taps me on the shoulder and starts listing off reasons a rabid raccoon wouldn't do this. mostly, it tells me, raccoons don't eat trees. and a rabid raccoon wouldn't be able to get all the way up to the farm. rabies makes legs into the enemy.

so i call my mother to lament the loss of my fig tree and she suggests a possum because of its hideous gnawing skills. there is some evidence to suggest she may have had past negative experiences with possums. she is very careful to mention, more than twice, that i should not approach said creature if i see it. i think a bit of how terrifying my childhood must have been for her if, more than thirty years after the fact, she still feels compelled to warn me not to touch a gnaw-mouthed slab of stink and hatefulness. and although i am careful to reassure her that i will in no manner engage any possum i might find poaching plants on my fire escape, i am already envisioning myself, looking strikingly like teddy roosevelt, engaged in a battle to the death with this freakish trainwreck of nature, north america's only marsupial, who has no business living the way he does, walking around on sidewalks, gnawing off people's fig trees when it's pretty obvious to anyone around that those fig trees are the centerpieces of people's fire escape farms.

brave sweet potato, a friend to fig trees

i am pretty sure vengeance killing of possums is not yet legal in brooklyn and i am absolutely sure that if i attempt to stage the beast's death to look like i acted in self defense i would somehow end up knocking myself off the fire escape, securing my own hideous end. so i am forced to wait, steeping in my sorrow. the sweetie and i go away for two weeks. we visit both families. i water the farm plenty before we leave even though i know what i am doing will have amounted to very little when we return. i expect nothing.

valiant possum-defying fig tree

when we get back i see the indoor lavender is withered as are the pothos scattered around the apartment. i hesitate to look out the window. it is a scene of ugliness. the cucumbers have given up their fight entirely, tiny tendrils still clutching at scorching fire escape rails. tomatoes and basil are brittle sticks, brown and ugly, smelling like nothing but a dusty car heater. there is a lone beet plant, a late growing shoot, peering up at the afternoon sky. and a fat pot of carrots is wilty but still entirely alive. i reach out to grab one of the two leafing sweet potato plants i set into the dirt of my dead fig tree. this is when i see it. a tight cluster of ruffly, dark green leaves. and they look unbearably like those little clusters of leaves on the broken trees in my own homeland. i am glad now i was too heartsick to toss out that stump of fig tree before we left but the ugliness is not over. there will be more to face. pigeons. possums. boll weevils. fire breathing robots. there is work to do.

postcards from maine

i'm trying out a new format. it's a little bit reckless. i might have got carried away.

i took about five million photos of sunsets. i am working on the theory that i can store them up for use when i am back in brooklyn and cannot see the sky unless i am standing directly in the middle of the street.

the sunsets here were relentless. we got one every single day!

sunday evening. diving platform.

monday, maybe. lance and stephanie in the kayak.

this sunset had a few islands thrown in for atmosphere.

wednesday's sunset from the window seat in our bedroom.
 

 we woke up one morning to three luna moths on the screens of the porch. they didn't say much, but they were pretty, anyway. they have those crazy yellow feather antennae that look like they would be very soft. i wouldn't mind having a room full of luna moths to walk through when i'm feeling mean.

fishing, golden oreos optional

there was some fishing from the little dock by the house. as i understand it a very old, wise, bearded fish lives under the dock. even though he swims with a cane because of tailfin arthritis, he is still the most powerful fish in the lake. the sweetie caught him once, i think, but after a pleasant chat, the two parted ways on friendly terms. one of those sunsets accidentally got into this photo. i think i mentioned they are relentless things. and they're everywhere!

what began as a quiet attempt to overcome a fear of whirlpools, lightning and lake monsters evolved into an epic battle of good over evil. or something. kayak wars: the rise of the kayak! except in the case of the sweetie, whose kayak, according to his brother, sailed along like the monitor. look it up. you'll get it when you see the pictures. it's an ironclad.

the monitor is the ship on your left.

maine is what we in missouri would call a dry state in terms of fireworks. although the sweetie and i are adorers of massive explosions, we figured the loons would be happier with a smaller scale celebration and so we decided to obey the law for a change. besides, we had a promise from a ten year old of a late fireworks extravaganza waiting for us in missouri. we played it extra safe by standing on the dock, surrounded by lake. bring on the sparklers!

here there be pirates, matey. or something

we spent an afternoon in bar harbor. there are plenty of fancy ships and tons of touristy shops. there are lobster versions of almost everything and you can get blueberries in syrup form, chocolate form, lotion form and soap form. a good shopper will find the moose helmets. there are three styles to fit all your moose needs, both nosed and nose-free.

 here you can see the mysterious ice cream lobster in its natural habitat- a sidewalk in maine. i think that may be the ice cream lobster's personal bodyguard there beside him on the right. you can't be too careful when you're an ice cream lobster, i suppose.

can you see it? it's that red light between lance and stephanie.

we are, all of us, a lighthouse adoring people. we figured the only lighthouse on mount desert island ought to be something awe inspiring. turns out it's a stubby little dachshund-ish thing painted white and stuck onto the low side of a bluff. being taller than the light is not really a challenge. secretly, though, i thought it was cute enough to hug. but i didn't. maine needs some serious lighthouse action because of its rocky coastline. in brooklyn, you could steer a ship right up onto the smooth beach. your only danger might be one of those syringe fish or condom fish that prowl the shallows around coney island. in maine, giant stabby rocks lurk just below the surface, waiting to gut any ship foolish enough to wander by. so thank you tiny lighthouse. you are a hero to all. 

sweetie on the rocks

one of grandma's sofa paintings

even though the coast isn't what most folks would call swimmable, it's pretty impressive in its rocky wildness. i am already missing it and am plotting how to get back there again for one of the next hot seasons. because in the summer, in maine, the 83 degree afternoon we had was described on every news channel in great detail as a dangerous heat wave.

our last evening together we went out to eat lobster at a local place. some of us had lobster and some of us didn't, but there was pie and cake and creme brulee at the end. and we all had what we had together. we sat out on a big porch with a view of a pretty river. afterward, a stranger offered to take a family photo. we took quite a few, but i think this one captures us best.

homeland security

i have lost my bearings. this is a selfish thing to say, considering. considering what all everyone else here has lost. cars and homes and trees, for some. people- children, grandparents, whole families, sometimes. photo albums. love letters. wedding dresses. baby shoes. we are at 26th and maiden lane. looking left i can see the shell of the hospital where my sisters were born, where my grandpa survived his first heart attack, where i wandered the halls of four west, filling up styrofoam pitchers with ice and water, where my grandparents used to go for dinner because they liked the food at the cafeteria and could visit so many friends at once. looking right i see flatness but i know it was cunningham park. i know there is an l-shaped pool with a pale blue floor where i learned to swim just beyond the rise in the land. i know over beyond the hospital were our pediatrician's offices, the waiting room divided into a well side and a sick side. the only part of any of that still understandable as something close to what it was is the hospital. the rest of the world spins loosely around it, unmoored, undirected.

time here is marked in terms of before the tornado or since the tornado by everyone, whether they lost anything or not. because everyone lost something. when we first drive into town there are signs everywhere, both handwritten and the sort you see on highways used by the d.o.t. they provide clear and helpful directions for volunteers. because a month and a half later, volunteers are still coming. at the edges of town there are fields piled with wreckage. i try to recall whether they were farm fields but i can't tell. i think about whether it would be feasible to pile all that brokenness into the strip pits at the edges of town. the rubble is sorted and there are specific drop sites for specific items. hazmat. nonhazmat. the trees, skinned and pale, with fat branches split and splintered, seem not to know they should be dying. they are putting on new, dark green and stubby growth at the trunks. they are shameless in their desire to do something. i remember that we spent our first night as married folks in a b&b here filled with f.e.m.a. folks assessing damage from the last tornado, a few weeks before our wedding. they are here again, in larger numbers, trying to figure out how to get money spent.

every truck in town is hauling twisted metal or shattered cinder blocks or withered trees. there is a large sign in front of what was a church on fifteen that encourages folks to come out and worship with the congregation at the holiday inn. every vacant building houses a relief center with offers of food and shelter and help. it is not possible to drive a full block along the scarred path of the tornado without seeing blue tarps and reddened men on roofs in clusters or in the skeletons of houses. we are here in 100+ degree temperatures and still they work all day, every day, fixing, their skin glowing brighter and brighter. they stop to sleep and to eat big breakfasts in groups of four or five. then they work again. they carry gallons and gallons of water in their trucks.

the three burger kings the town boasted were all blown away but the tornado slide in front of the one on rangeline is, shockingly, still standing. the red lobster toward what was the edge of town when i lived here is intact, but the red has been blown right off the lobster sign and the white words below it are empty of neon or glass. my beloved fred 'n reds sits like an angry toad, unscathed in the middle of chaos. taco bell is broken says my sister when the smaller nephew wants to go to his (and my) favorite fast food place. his little face falls as he remembers he already knows this and will likely continue to be reminded for a while. but the suggestion here is that taco bell can, and will, be fixed. that we will return to a world in which taco bell is right where it should be, on the corner of 26th and main. and this is what is everywhere. a promise to stick around, to fix things. and i mean this literally. large chain stores and small stores alike have printed or scrawled notes on banner plastic or cardboard or on slabs of what was once part of something else. we are here. we are not going anywhere. we are here. like those whos on that dust speck. we are here.

it is not the brokenness that is heartbreaking, not the skinned trees or bare concrete slabs or bumpers and other bits of twisted metal still in branches. it is not the words about survivors and insurance spraypainted onto the sides of walls that were once attached to other walls. it is not even seeing my aunt mary's house foundation, house chunks collapsed in on the tiny footprint of a place i knew to be grand and elegant. it is this insistence on reassuring one another. on promising, as a community, something it's difficult enough to get just two folks at a time to do. especially after news crews have gone home. we are here. we are not going anywhere.

the home depot that was destroyed is open under a massive tent, keeping the town supplied in the building materials it is so quickly snapping up. they would be fools to do anything else. there are pharmacies open on former drug store parking lots, little trailers equipped with everything from blood pressure medicine to prozac. walgreen's has its building nearly rebuilt already. displaced doctors have set up in memorial hall. i overhear one man say to another that he used to work at southtown bait. i know he is local because he calls it southtown bait instead of southtown sporting goods, which is what the building's sign has been saying up until the end of may. the store is on 31st and main street and all my life there has been a giant bass leaping out of the pavement at the corner of the parking lot. the fish is maybe twenty feet long and spectacular in its own right, even more beautiful because passing it always meant we were a block from the glory of anderson's ice cream. before the roof fell in, the man adds softly. he pauses. i still work there, he says. yeah, i do.

water

part one of several entries about the big vacation.

the week after school ends we find ourselves in maine. it is just after six thirty a.m. and the sweetie and his brother stand on the dock while i stare dubiously at the blue kayak. i do not know how to operate such a thing, but for months now, since the sweetie's parents sent word that the place we'd all spend a week together would be perched on the side of a hill overlooking a place called loon cove at the end of a long, island-studded lake, i've been drooling over the kayaks they mentioned would be waiting. i know how to paddle a canoe and i know how to row my own fine jon boat back at my own lake, but rowing is not at all like paddling. i am sure of it. i put on a life vest that is not at all like my own at home and i am sure i will die of strangulation before i ever get myself into the kayak.

i have seen fools in whitewater rolling over in these tiny plastic boats and friends have tried to explain what to do when the boat eventually spits me out into the water. because everyone, including me, is sure this is what will happen. eventually. i settle into the kayak and the sweetie hands me the paddle. it is surprisingly familiar. i paddle around the dock a bit and head out into the lake. the dizziness and questionable balance i drag around on land slides off me and the blue boat noses smoothly across the early morning water. there is a little island out a bit into the lake and i head for it, free of the land, free of the board of education of the city of new york, free of 90+ degree weather, free of subways and buses with angry drunks at noon.

but i am not a particularly good judge of distance and my six thirty a.m. self is not awake enough to consider that a first attempt at kayaking probably shouldn't include traveling a great distance across very deep water. i paddle about three quarters of the way over to the island before i am awake enough to think of this. i stop for a minute and look around me. i can no longer see the sweetie or his brother there on the dock. i can see a few houses on the shore but they are not any of them the house i came from. i consider that i might somehow die out here in this little boat because of lightning or whirlpool or deadly lake monster. none of these seems as likely as they usually do. i paddle toward the island. there is nobody there. birds and fish and water lilies, but no people. there is a small cove ringed with massive boulders and i glide in around them, watching the loons and terns watch me.

it occurs to me, more than half a mile from my version of the civilized world, that i have no water or food and there might be breakfast waiting back at that house i can't see. i paddle back in the direction i think i came from and catch sight of a fish hatcheries building i know is a few docks over from the sweetie and his family and breakfast. i am halfway back before i see the dock with tiny versions of the sweetie and his brother. when i paddle up the sweetie is waiting to help me back onto the dock, back onto the world.

there is breakfast and then there is sitting on the screened porch, looking out at the lake and the island. this is the first time in a very long time i have tried something new without being terrified. tried something new by myself, just because it seemed interesting. it is a small, small step in a line of other small steps. it feels good to be moving forward.