July 2021 – Earth and Midnight

Cross Purpose

I don’t know about you, but whenever I see a bridge, I want to walk across to the other side.

There’s something about the idea that the place the bridge leads must be important or worthwhile, since someone spent the time, effort, and money to build a bridge to get there. And, by the same logic, the place you’re starting from, at the other end of the bridge, must hold some significance, too.

It’s not only about wanting to see where the bridge leads. The bridge itself establishes an awareness and even a sense of grandeur for the transition from one area to another. It’s a place to stop, take in the view, and contemplate your transition.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a steel behemoth spanning the width of a river, a pedestrian bridge in a mall, or a tiny wooden bridge in a rock garden. The feeling is the same: something special is about to happen.

the folds in my shirt are creased with sweat
in the blaring sun, the lawn glows like green molten lava
a haze seems to grow out of the hayfield

thunder tumbles over the hill
cloud cover crowds the sky
the air lifts and cools

a breeze tap dances in feathery wisps
the sky becomes a dove grey bird
right before it starts to sing

Changing the Subject

I started out wearing pants and a shirt every day to my old office job. Then, for about a year, I wore only dresses. I developed a reputation. People I’d worked with for several years made comments like, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in slacks.” Of course, I knew they had- but they didn’t remember. Then I phased out dresses and switched back to wearing pants. A while later, a long-time coworker commented that she couldn’t imagine me in a dress, since I “never” wore them.

What I learned from that experience is that, if you’re consistent, you can change your reputation. I know that the outfits I wore don’t exactly compare to shady behaviors like lying, stealing from people, or taking advantage of them. My clothes probably didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings or make them angry. (I hope not!)

But, for anyone out there who is trying to turn their life around, I’m inclined to reassure you that change is possible. People might even be inspired to forget the past.

Wrong Number

Periodically, I get mail addressed to other people at an apartment number that doesn’t exist within my apartment complex. The other day, after finding seven of these letters in my mailbox, I started feeling a little angry that the post office shoves this mail onto me, and then it becomes my responsibility to do something with it. I wrote a note to the postal carrier, shoved it in the outgoing mail, then walked the letters to the leasing office so they could get passed on to the correct tenants.

Instead of following the sidewalks back to my apartment, I cut across the lawn and took a more scenic stroll. Next to the apartments is a church, and next to that is a plot of land with nothing built on it. I spent a few minutes exploring and discovered a couple small piles of dried cement, a pile of rocks, a weathered log, and some deep ruts formed by tire tracks, now overgrown with weeds. A spring azure fluttered across my path. Bees curlicued through a tangle of Queen Anne’s lace, clover, crown vetch, and scrubby trees. The searing peal of locusts crescendoed in a soundtrack for the baking sun.

A smattering of red dots caught my eye, and I moved closer, interested to identify a new plant in this mountainous region whose flora is still unfamiliar to me. The red spots turned out to be unripened blackberries. Luckily, they clung next to gleaming dark purple ones. What is more summery than feasting on berries right off the bush? They tasted tart and bitter, with no hint of sweetness, but wild and real. What is more satisfying than authenticity?

I’ve lived here for two and a half summers, and this is the first time I’ve ever noticed blackberry canes nearby. If I hadn’t received those wrongly addressed letters, I doubt I would have found those berry bushes. What started out as a resentful chore turned into the highlight of my day! The lesson I learned is to respect even the irritants in your life because you don’t know what pearl may form around them.

Taking the Field

When we were kids, my grandma would periodically take my brother and I to feed wild ducks by the river that runs through the town she lived in.

My grandparents kept a metal trash can in their garage filled to the top with dried corn kernels. Grandma would dip a plastic bucket for each of us into the trash can. Then she drove us a mile or so to the river- back then, it seemed a lot farther.

We’d park near the same patch of grass each time, the ducks waddling toward us before we even got out of the car. What a thrill, flinging handfuls of corn to rain down on our fanbase! They devoured it and baby stepped toward us, chattering, emboldened by greed.

Later, when I was a teenager, my grandma once again scooped kernels into buckets in preparation for another visit to the river. I asked where she got the corn, wondering if it came in fifty-pound bags the way other birdseed did. She gestured toward the farm kitty-corner to their block. The cornfield.

“You stole it?!” I asked with astonished eyes. I hadn’t thought of my grandma as a thief.

She flinched at the ugly word, as if it were a wasp flying straight for her face. “You don’t steal it,” she said defensively. “You just…take it.”

I was at a loss for how to respond.

Incidentally, I’m currently rereading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Huck talks about “borrowing” melons and other produce from farm fields while he’s on the run. His dad told him that it isn’t stealing if you intend to pay the farmers back someday, which, of course, he doesn’t.

In the last story [here], I mentioned my great-grandma picking corn from someone else’s farm field. So maybe yoinking crops was in my grandma’s DNA. Her perspective could’ve also been shaped by her parents, who had been farmers. Maybe they were generous with their own produce and assumed other growers held a similar attitude. Or maybe they were cheap and self-centered. Mother and daughter had both lived through the Great Depression, when people may have had to bend the rules to survive.

As for the ducks, there are now signs posted by the river saying not to feed the animals. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out the signs were posted back then, too, seeing how my grandma made her own rules.

A jar of iced tea
shines like Excalibur
Light slices through concrete
bleeding sharp yellow points
Delivers a postcard
of the rising sun

A Field Day

Here’s another idea for anyone interested in family history: field trip!

In May, I visited my family in Illinois. My dad showed me some of his keepsakes: the stamp collection he started as a kid, arrowheads collected by his grandpa (who was a farmer and found them as he plowed the field), the watch his parents gave him as a high school graduation present, drawings made by his grandfather (when his grandfather was 10). Then there’s the ring that used to be his uncle’s. My dad doesn’t wear jewelry and rarely dresses up, so it always cracks me up when he models the ring. It’s so out of character.

The town my dad grew up in (that I was also born in) is about a 35-minute drive from where he currently lives. He took my brother and I on a tour of houses he used to live in, places he went to school, parks he played at, where he worked in summers during college, where my grandma worked before she had kids.

If you get a chance to go on- or lead- a guided tour like this, I recommend it. Even though the area looked different than it did when he was a kid, seeing the places my dad inhabited gave me a greater understanding of what life may have been like for his family than I had from just hearing stories about it.

As a kid, one of the places my dad lived was near an A&W restaurant with a gravel parking lot- the kind of restaurant where you park your car and the waitstaff comes to your car to take your order and deliver your food. He used to go there when the restaurant was closed and look for coins on the ground. Then he’d take his findings to a mom-and-pop store a block from there and buy bubblegum.

Sitting in the car outside of one of the houses, my dad described how he kept rabbits in a hutch behind the garage. That’s the first time I remember hearing about him having pet rabbits. These stories seem to have come up only because we drove past the old house and the lot where A&W used to be.

We saw the field of corn where my great-grandma used to gather young ears of field corn [grown to feed livestock] and boil them for her family for dinner. When I first heard the story, I wondered if she had to slink to the field after dark so she wasn’t seen by the farmer or passing cars. After seeing the area, I can tell that wasn’t necessary. Her house was almost the last house on a dead end street, just one lot away from a huge cornfield, no farmhouse in sight.

New versions of old stories play like movies in my head, apparitions at dusk replaced by brazen sunlight.