Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

May 18, 1980

17 May 18, 1980 It’s only three in the afternoon when the sky darkens. On the other side of the state, past Ritzville and Ellensburg, past the rest stops with the Styrofoam cups and the bathroom mirrors so blurry you see only a print of your face, Mount St. Helens is pouring fire down the sides of her body, ash shooting into the sky until it’s gray like the walls of our fireplace after a winter of wood. But here we are playing baseball in the yard, the ball whiter in relief, rotating like the moon. We don’t think this is strange, no stranger than our mother gone to the store while this man stands on the pitcher’s mound, trying to be our father. We don’t wonder why it is night, why the sky has turned thick like a lake, why we don’t go inside. The game isn’t over. If we stay in the yard, we can wait for our mother. We won’t have to drive to the fire station for white masks, won’t have to start the week inside looking out windows at the ash-like snow 18 in the garden, on the roof of the shed, the van, an outline on everything like the tape police use to draw a shadow. ...