Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

Our Bodies Remember

DANA WILDSMITH 605 live my life twice then: once in the doing, once in telling you. OUR BODIES REMEMBER from Our Bodies Remember (1999) "You don't have a body; you are a body." A Habit ofthe Blood, Lois Battle Sealed and stamped, but now I'm not sure what I wrote or didn't write, so I'm typing your letter over in blank air because fingers remember where they've been sent and will walk their previous walks when we let them. If we don't trip them up with our thoughts, fingers can touch-tone phone numbers our minds can't recall, and my grandmother's piano couldn't care less if I have a brain, so long as my hands step lively. I'm reminded of thirty years back, when therapists tested this notion of body memory as a means to imprint habits of movement on palsied muscles. Their technique, named "patterning," called for a circle of volunteers who would position a patient's arms and legs to one posture of useful motion, and then another- 606 LISTEN HERE choreographing progressive freeze-frames of belief in their power to animate, cell by cell, tissues dulled by a mind's misfires. I remember liking the elegance of patterning's slow pavane, and I thought then how pleasing, in a homey way, must be the patterner's work of tidying a jumbled body, as if straightening bed covers, the sort ofjob where you can see what you've done. But what had been done? I can't recall seeing follow-up stories with photos of birth-harmed children now rooted like willows in a neuron stream, their movements as thoughtless as wind. Does a body refuse to forget its history, even in favor of a gentler now? Many's the time I've watched you flinch from some teasing comment of mine-I who love you, who would no more say you a hurtful word than I would lay a live coal in your ear. Why do you think I rewrite my letters to you, checking each gossips bit for barbs and shafts? Knowing how words have damaged you, I keep an intention of placing my words precisely, like hands to muscle, hoping to heal your troubles, but DANA WILDSMITH 607 there is no healing. My job is not to mend but to soothe. I remind myself how you'll look when you open my letter a few days from now-your legs stretching out as you read, your chair tilting back, and line by line your strict face relaxing, remembering how to grin. FORCE from Alchemy (1995) You'll be a good driver, he'd say, when you know how to take a curve. Just go in to it easy. Keep your foot away from the brake, see, and hold off giving any gas until right when the widening out starts to elbow in. You'll feel it. Lean in to it then. Feed the engine a little, let the curve carry you. Might as well enjoy these twisty roads. HalfWay home to Georgia she lets off on the gas to cruise around another jut of loblolly pines but the car hesitates and her daddy's box of ashes comes sliding across the seat. Too soon, he'd say. You've got to keep gassing it until there's bend enough to maintain the drive. There's more here than just you and the car, Hon. Listen to the road. ...