Wanting

On June 8, 2018June 8, 2018 By trashonthemonocacyIn Family, Reflections3 Comments

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What do I remember?

The gritty slope of concrete,

Pressing into my tailbone,

Cold,

As I watched the silty water

Of the creek

Run, metal-scented,

From man-made tunnels.

I imagined myself

Elsewhere, but

There

I was.

My house,

My father’s house,

Down the street, was where I

Least/

Most

Wanted to be.

Not that there was a

Choice

For a teenage girl

To go anywhere

But where she was.

Now I watch a river

Two, three times the size,

Brown and thick

With manure,

Mud of

Men and animals,

And I cannot see where

It goes.

I want to be

There,

Just there,

And nowhere else.

I want

My mind to stay

Too.

But it goes to that

House,

Father’s House,

Dad’s House,

Where he

Isn’t anymore.

And then I want so much

More.

I smell the water

And can’t forget

The wanting.

I’m Not Alone

On May 8, 2018May 8, 2018 By trashonthemonocacyIn Family, Memoir, Monocacy River, Reflections, Wildlife3 Comments

5 white-tailed deer, in 3 different locations
1 pileated woodpecker
1 groundhog
1 rabbit
5 squirrels (maybe more)
2 opossums
2 Canada geese
11 Mallard ducks (10 of them ducklings)
1 barred owl
Too many songbirds to keep track of (mentally)

My walks lately are emotional affairs, vacillating between sublime wonder and heart-pressing sorrow in a matter of a few steps. I can’t help but feel pleasure in the unassuming beauty of the river, but the memories of earlier seasons, so easily evoked in a quiet mind, lay over it the blue tint of loss and grief. Especially as the days warm, I feel myself fighting against the passage of time, even as I smile at the new life it brings.

On the sunny days of this late, cold, wet spring the shores of the river glimmer in green, and elusive vernal ponds formed near its banks appear like secret oases beneath the trees. When I come upon them, I follow the deer paths to their edge and try to find frogs and turtles. Today I instead startled a mallard with her prodigious brood of ten ducklings, who skimmed across the water with astounding speed when they saw me step out of the woods. They’re clearly unrelated to the Frederick ducks of Baker Pond, who, despite the signs saying otherwise, see humans as a potential source of bread crumbs and other such duck junk food. I tried to take a picture of them, but, between the limitations of my camera phone and their determination to get away from me as quickly as possible, I got nothing but a photo of the pond.

I left them in peace, pursuing the main trail to the river, only to fluster a white-tailed deer, who paused mid-stride when she saw me walking up the path. I paused, then, too, to allow her to cross ahead of me, but she decided that this behavior was much too threatening on my part, and retreated back into the trees. Shrugging, I stepped off of the path in the opposite direction, following a switchback down toward the river, where a pair of Canada geese, after one look at me, launched into the water with agitated bickering and began paddling in indecisive circles.

Guessing that there was a nest nearby, I left the waterside and returned to the high trail. It was only a few minutes before I came upon another bird, whose large head and bright red crest immediately identified him as a pileated woodpecker. He was on the ground, throwing large chunks of dead wood off a log so soft with rot it hardly required pecking. It took him some time to notice me, but, even once he did, he only flew a few feet to another pile of wood, calling out a laughing song that always makes me feel as if I’m in a jungle. This time, as a pair of barred owls began hooting in the distance, the feeling was even stronger. But the peter-peter-peters of a tufted titmouse managed to keep me firmly in my mid-Atlantic reality.

Beyond this there was a part of the path that I hadn’t traveled since walking there with my father, last December, on one of the last days when such a walk was possible for him. It is a part of the path just beside my neighborhood with the easiest access to the Monocacy from the assisted living facility where my father lived the last 2 months of his life. While we were there, bundled against a gray day, I pointed out to him where Israel Creek flowed into the river and showed him the rocks where the boys liked to play, and we wondered a little about the birds we saw and the geology of this part of Maryland. He couldn’t always say what he meant, but he was himself, and I understood. It wasn’t long before we turned around, afraid that he wasn’t warm enough or strong enough to go much farther. I still imagined that we would come back again in the spring, when it was more pleasant and there would be more to see.

This morning, I feared walking on that path again. Not so much because I was afraid of what I might feel or remember but because I was afraid of treading over yet another place where my last memory was with him, alive. I suppose some part of me believed — or wanted to believe — that he could somehow remain alive right there forever, as long as I never wrote another memory over it.

But I walked on. It is spring. And I told him we would come back in the spring.

The curious thing is that just when I reached the part of the path where I had stopped to speak with my dad, the part of the path that would seem the hardest to pass, I ended up so distracted that I didn’t think of it at all until it was already behind me. Because, of all the curious things, out of the corner of my eye, partially obscured by a pile of tree limbs and twigs, I saw two white forms shuffling about. At first I thought they might be small dogs, and then maybe young pigs, but as I got a better look I realized that they were two full-grown opossums, out in the morning sun. They’re not terribly quick things, so they thought a little before rambling off back down the hill into the woods, away from me. I was honestly tickled because I hadn’t seen a live adult possum in the wild since a family vacation years ago. And I had never seen one in daylight. And here were two! My father would have loved it.

I loved it.

On Loneliness

On March 6, 2018March 6, 2018 By trashonthemonocacyIn Memoir, Monocacy River, Reflections, Trash2 Comments

During my long absence from this blog, I continued to visit the river, finding some respite in its wintry dun aspect. At the start of the year, it froze over completely, and the boys startled me with their delighted insistence on stomping over the surface to prove its impenetrability. It was some comfort to me when their mocking brazenness receded with the ice, although I missed the stillness that accompanied it. We were always alone on these coldest days.

My trash collection was perfunctory, distracted as I was by emergencies and the inevitable crises and phone calls and text messages that followed them. Among the regular bottles and cans and plastic snack bags, I once found a Frozen balloon.

What I find remarkable about this now is not the balloon itself but the day on which I found it. I must have stepped out early on this expedition because the rest of this day was taken up entirely by moving my father’s things out of his last apartment. I ended up at a storage facility, alone, locking away the last of his possessions. There was a loneliness there that I never feel at the river.

It is the loneliness that comes of things. Discarded things. Ownerless things. That one shoe by the side of the road. The tent pole caught in the brambles. The handleless cooler buried in mud.

But when I collect these things, I take away some of the loneliness. Don’t I?

Reflections on “Cicada”

On July 1, 2016July 1, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Childhood, MemoirLeave a comment

Cicadas remind me of transformations. Slow, patient transformations. Even the annual cicadas live in the earth for years, feeding on tree roots as small, white nymphs before finally crawling out of the soil to trade their dull exoskeletons for wings and color. After a life of silence, they drown out even the birds’ songs with a harsh, incessant buzzing that, for me, is the defining sound of summer. They demand to be heard. Is it their years of invisibility that makes such bold insistence possible?

If so, can I learn from them? Can I accept my years of quiet acquiescence as years of growth and then be brave enough to let them go, to break out of them and find a new form? While nature forces the cicada into its impressive transformations, it seems to work against my own. It is much easier to remain as I am, safe and fed, than to risk the precious resources of time and energy to try something new.

Loss has been such a power in my life that I’m reluctant to lose anything purposefully, even if it is my own sense of limitation. When I lost my mother at the age of 5, it was too much for me to understand. Certainly I couldn’t put my grief into words. I knew only that my world seemed to change color the day she was buried, from bright hues to a constant sickly green. In the car, I would count my family over and over again, only to come up with the wrong number, but for some reason I was sure that it wasn’t my mother I was missing. There was something else, something bigger, something too frightening to really look at. I wished upon the first stars of many nights for my mother to return, until a well-meaning adult told me that I needed to wish for something I really could have…like a Barbie doll. Children are so resilient, I heard them say.

But I didn’t feel resilient. Not even 20 years later, when my oldest brother died in an accident so bizarre that it’s almost impossible to discuss. We buried him next to my mother, while his own son, the same age that I was when my mother died, looked on. Why can’t anyone just grow up with both of their parents? my grandfather asked at the wake. My brother’s loss was nothing less than a reaffirmation that change is frightening, risk is an expression of stupidity, and that that great big hole was never really going to be filled.

As it happens, I was with my brother’s son, now an adult, when I found the cicada yesterday. He bent to look at it with me, still wondering at my weird preoccupation with the life of the Monocacy River. He was there at my son’s command, to skip rocks across the slow, brown water of one of the broadest spots along the river. He is, like my brother, a gentle and soft-spoken man with a desire for family and a peaceful life. In fact, he is studying to become a family counselor, noting that he wants to help people the way people helped him. Maybe that is what resiliency looks like.

Grief can force change. It can force action. It can force one to see time more clearly for the precious thing it is. I know that there is time to wait and to grow, but that time is not limitless. I need to dig myself out of my safe hole, shed my fears and truly spread my wings. I’ve been close so many times. What’s stopping me now?

Motherless Day

On May 6, 2016May 15, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Childhood, Memoir4 Comments

Mother’s Day has never been a favorite of mine. The simple explanation, although it is not complete, is that my mother died when I was five. This month, it will be 35 years since I last saw her, and still the loss stings. I’ve tried many times to write about her, about what it was like for me, a little girl, to try to hold her and keep her even when I finally understood that she was really and truly gone, but what I write is never quite enough. It never captures the almost comic bewilderment that went with the pain.

I’m not quite sure why, but I’ve decided to post this year’s effort, as incomplete as it is. As you might guess by my anonymity, I’m not keen on sharing myself too directly with others, but I’m also aware that my one-sided ramblings have long ago ceased to be helpful. What this has to do with collecting trash on the Monocacy River is very little, except that all of the events occurred in Frederick, around the small streams and creeks that feed the river, and the waters were flowing then as they are now. Whether that is a matter for comfort or despair is entirely up to the reader.

It begins and ends in a bright yellow room. The sun is shining in the windows, through the lifted shades, casting a warm, clear glow over everything, and I’m under my covers, in bed, still safe in the cocoon of sleep even as my eyes are opening. There is someone beside me, sitting at the edge of the bed, his weight pulling me toward him. It’s my father, and he’s speaking to me. Maybe he’s woken me up. I can’t be sure, but he’s telling me something. Something that I’ve known.

My mother is dead.

I haven’t seen her in months. I wouldn’t want to see her, I was told, she wasn’t really Mom anymore. She couldn’t speak or hear or move. She wouldn’t know me, and I wouldn’t know her. It was best I just draw pictures. So I did that. I sat with my little sister, who also wouldn’t want to see Mom, and I drew princesses, mostly, and signed my name with a backwards J, and made a picture in my mind of what Mom must look like in the hospital, still, serene, hands folded and eyes closed, surrounded by white, but alien somehow.

Kindergarten had ended, a whole summer had passed by, first grade had begun, and she was still in the hospital. I was already forgetting her face and voice, and what really happened the last time I saw her. I remember her backing out the front door of our house, leaning over me to say goodbye, but in fact she had probably dropped me off at the babysitter’s small rented farmhouse across the street. The woman was the mother of a classmate of mine, a boy I did not like but who liked me. Her face was harsh and her words sharp. I was at her house when my grandmother came to get me that day in May, she dressed properly in slacks, loafers and crisp shirt, the babysitter disheveled as usual, and I watched them speaking from the safety of an old swing set. I knew there was something wrong, but I can’t remember her or anyone else explaining it to me. My mother had had a heart attack and she was in the hospital. By July my father told me that she wasn’t coming back. He told me that at the park downtown, across the street from my grandparents’ house, while I hung out by yet another swing set with my little sister.

So, yes, all of that had happened, but now it was for real. Mom died last night.

I think that I understand. I think that my little sister understands. But, when we go downstairs and peek in the family room, where the T.V. is on, I see my two brothers and my older sister, who is crying, and I ask her, “Are you crying because of Mom?” It’s a sad day, but the sun is shining, and the whole world glows. How is this possible? She nods her head.

I still think I understand.

TRASH ON THE MONOCACY

Tag: Loss