Peach Tree, Late Summer, and: Coming to Love, and: A Gentle Fire

Peach Tree, Late Summer

At the nursery, I ask my daughter,who's two and a half, to choose a sapling.She trips through the spindly trunks inblack plastic buckets, pulls leaves offto study them. She even chews them,spits and wipes her mouth with the backof her hand. Proclaims, finally, Apple twee.

But we're in Mississippi where apples won't grow.Our love affair with winter is short-lived.It often blankets our brown rivervalley with a dusting of overnight snow,a delight given then taken back too soon.Heat muscles in when it shouldn't.

I purchase a peach, because she saysthe leaves are shaped like green bananas,like green half moons, like green sickles,and because she was born in Georgiathe only place we were evera complete family, though she has nomemory of it, and I envy that.

Digging through clay in mid-Septemberis like putting a shovel to concrete.Not young anymore, my knees grind.The old tennis elbow acts up.We wet the ground. She holds the garden hose,and drinks from it though no one's evertaught her how. I replace the uselessorange clay with store-bought soil.We plant the tree, old as she isbut twice as tall, and tamp the earth. Her first lesson in disappointment.That what we want is often neverwhat we can have. Evensecond-best takes leverage, sweat,muscle and bone work. Where we enddoesn't look much differentthan where we began. A treeis still a tree, in the ground or in a pot,and peach will never taste clean like apple.

Coming to Love

My daughter is almost the same agemy baby sister was when she died.

She was thrown, puddled in glass,they say, lost to us on impact,

but I know she squeezed my handas we rode with her in the ambulance

which took too long to find usat that picnic area between a fast river

and a highway. I am carefulto strap my daughter in her car seat,

but she has taken to wriggling her armsfree of the straps. She does not like

to be hemmed in, and my heart emptiesits chambers when I find she's done it.

She's grown to look like her forever-toddleraunt: long shins, chunky thighs,

straight brown hair below her shoulders,lower jaw like a horseshoe.

As her third birthday approaches,I think,What if I lost her, what if she died?

For years, my mother rocked shut,wasn't fully there.

She'd circle me with her dimpled arms,but never long enough, never all in.

When Liv was born, I was drugged.I didn't love her right away. Like adopting

a new dog, it takes time to come to love.I worried her alive, those first months.

Now, I understand restraint,the need to hold on tight, then tighter.

A Gentle Fire

Most of my friends are having secondsand thirds, daughters and sons.I envy their sour nipples, cracked, sore,the heavy breasts, the light sleep,the forgiveness of a soft belly. But I, not wanting any kind of man,give away my store of used baby clothes:the pleated tennis skirts and footedpajamas, the gender-neutral blankets.

I vacation at my mother's homewhen my daughter is with her father.Each morning, I watch my mother,blonder than childhood, fiddlein her rented tropical garden.With a pool net, she lifts frog eggsfrom the koi pond, bangs the net's neckon the trunk of a fruitless coconut:scoop bang, scoop bang, scoop bang.

I ask why she does it, why not let themalone. There are too many already.She points to the fanned East-West palmin the corner of the yard. From itsoutermost limb two grey, petrifiedwebbed legs hang, a body half out,head scissored between the palm's sharp edges.It missed its mark, she...