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LAURA HOPE-GILL The Book of the House on the Niagara River The name of the house was spelled out in wrought iron at the front door nobody used. It faced the Niagara River after it flowed over the Falls, still turbulent. A chestnut tree canopied the dirt-and-pebble driveway, and an orchard of cherries and apples perimetered the flower-ripe acre. Under the siding there was a cartouche of hieroglyphs painted there by hobos in the thirties, hobo hieroglyphs of things that matter: a bed, a meal, a bath. The iron word of the house’s name spoke of life, too, this acre of kindness: River Bend. River Bend. Where the river bends. A place of stillness and change. Cherry orchard, the trunks painted white, the bright scent of a broken chestnut I pocketed then forgot. The vast, heaving trunk of the chestnut tree, its green spiked fruit to open. This was the hieroglyph house where I played as a child, hours in the orchard, on the swing of the oak. My child hands traced the iron name where I was hiding: reading it with my body: River Bend. River Bend. Its mythology expanded into an acre I’ve never left. The peony roses, the bean stalks, an acre of garden and rose, a window to watch the chestnut through, curled up like forever was a couch, not a river that pulls the earth along with it and makes a hieroglyph of time. I drive past it every summer and make sure the iron name has not been changed or my grandfather’s orchard. I dream I could, a thief, break in and take the orchard. I dream I could, a thief, into a large sack steal the acre. With a blowtorch and a helmet with a screen, burn the iron back into a word for what the house meant, more than chestnut, more than oak, cherry, apple, family, bend it into a hieroglyph so fixed and changing that it can be read only by the river. Everyone I know says the name of the Niagara River. It is commonplace, a honeymoon miles from the orchard where bones of War of 1812 soldiers sleep their hieroglyph decay. I smell my grandparents’ camphor driving past that acre. I ache at every change, at the sight of the aging chestnut. The only thing that saves me is the name shaped in the iron. River Bend is my hieroglyph on the bank of the river where my blood iron spells my name in the branches of an orchard. This is the acre I place on a shelf carved from a single chestnut. THE NATURAL WORLD ...

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