Shoreline, and: Second Growth, and: Black Ice

Shoreline

She brings her father two egg-shaped stones and he keeps them in a cut glass bowl on his nightstand, geologic remnants of a memory about a two-year-old, wading along the water’s edge, remembered by her because he has given it voice for so long, until the moment has been polished by its telling, by wave after wave that roll the words over in the sand, rounding them off. Years later, the father picks up the stones, to carry them back to her. He wades out, deeper this time, balancing one each on his palms, until he loses sight of the shoreline and he is alone in the open water. .

Second Growth

In late July, in northwest lower Michigan, the corn is head high, planted in small plots between swamps and hilltops, more garden than farm. As a child, my father remembers walking all day, over barbed wire, through untended orchards and pastures, by the late ’40s, the abandoned homesteads, beautiful and godforsaken, already given over to second growth and field mice. We crisscross Sherman township for an hour, without locating the cemetery where my father’s family lies buried. If you drive long enough, as we did, the pavement gives way to dirt roads, which give way to two tracks, which disappear into thickets of sumac. You can scatter my ashes there.

Black Ice

The sparrows leave the shelter of the cedars for the litter of seed under the feeder. I sit in my lover’s house and try to remember. The ashes of my mother are cold, her headstone covered in the snow of its first winter. What she will not see now is beautiful. Three crows scatter the sparrows, and scratch through the snow to the black dirt.

In an old photograph, my mother kneels next to a cedar chest, a present for her graduation, the same chest that sits in my father’s basement, still fragrant, storage for nothing but darkness. What remains of my mother is inside another box. In the spring, my father will plant two cedars on either side of my mother’s headstone.

In my atlas of questions, my childhood stories are plotted like maps, reduced to legends. This summer, I will marry Andrea. Just last night, telling me a story about her own childhood, her voice trailed off, as if she were elsewhere and suddenly alone.

When my mother died, her own mother stared at her daughter’s obituary photo, without recognition. Since last night, the snow accumulates. I shovel a narrow path from the front door, but the snow falls throughout the day, and the road is impenetrable. The new year begins in winter, as it always does. I am in love again, and there are questions I can refuse to answer.

Every image is black ice on a windswept pond. Beyond the outer fringes of the cattail stalks and cedars, there is a field of white, featureless, a template . . . .

I remember two stories, both in winter. In one, my mother as a child, too cold and tired to walk, carried home from school on the back of her brother. In the next story, my mother is an adult, her car stuck in the snowdrift, a mile from home. She starts to walk, but is too warm and decides to lie down. A man she had never met finds her there and carries her home. Today, I see footprints in the field of snow on the far side of the swamp. My mother is tired. I decide to let her sleep.