Hi there. I write a lot about life and feelings; right now, life and feelings are consistently rocky. There is always a point/counterpoint, though, and if I have learned anything over the past year of therapy and existence, I’m a pretty alive person, even at my darkest points.
Things that bring me undeniable delight:
Working with children
Listening to children
Feeling kids’ joy when they realize that I see and understand them
Writing
Dawn
The lift and weightlessness of running
The lift and elation of music with beautiful beats
The sound of my children’s hearts beating as I tuck them in at night
The curl of my husband’s fingers around mine
My dog
Cats
BABY BUNNIES
The last bullet was a surprise, as I’ve never considered myself a rabbit person, but my school recently fostered a mama and two kits, and the kits are so unbelievably calming and beautiful and adorable. This morning I arrived at work at 7:30 am and held one in my hands. Its tiny body settled into the cup of my fingers. Its eyes closed. I raised its tiny body to my cheek and breathed in it’s baby bunny fur. And then I sat there, Lint Ball’s little body against my face. I closed my eyes and felt every muscle in my body relax. And then I declared these kits Therapy Bunnies. Everyone should have a therapy bunny, but if you don’t have one, feel free to look me up.
I am a forest person, but my richest memories have been formed on the shore. I grew up there, feet numbed to the rocky northern coastline, face salty, lungs stiff from seawater, hair bleached white from the sun. As a child, my mother shared stories of her youth – summers spent on a similar slice of shore, away from the city heat, in the 1950s when eastern Long Island was just on the verge of development. I would trace my fingers across square black and white photographs as I listened, faded pictures of twin girls standing in the sand, the same tousled hair as I would have three decades later after long days watching the tide ebb and flow, after building sand tunnels and trapping jellyfish, after warm, gritty peanut butter sandwiches and sunburnt shoulders.
My aunt died of cancer at forty-nine. Before her battle ended, back when she was still in her apartment on West 84th, when I was still walking across town to help with groceries and late-night trips to the hospital, we took a walk. We hobbled past Zabar’s and Fairway, and then, tired, she asked to rest by the river. We sat together quietly at first, and then she talked about family. She spoke of dying. She told me that her greatest fear was being forgotten.
My father called the morning before her death to tell me it was time. By then, she had moved in with them, her hospital bed in our den, and later, in hospice. I remember the train ride east from Penn Station, the rush of the city disappearing, swallowed by suburbs, the blur of fall foliage.
After her last breath, after our goodbyes and the grieving and relief, once the night wrapped around us, I climbed into my mother’s car and drove down to the shore in the darkest of darkness. At the turnoff from North Country, I shut off the headlights, moving fast and blindly, steering only by the feel of the curves. I knew them by heart. It was like driving with my eyes closed, except they were open and encased with heartache.
At the beach, I climbed a lifeguard chair. It was a clear night, cold. The waves crashed, barely visible in the darkness. I could see Connecticut shimmering just beyond the horizon, a razor-thin line of light defining water from the sky. I sat on the giant wooden chair and cried harder than I thought possible. I cried until I gagged and gasped for air, until my lungs and ribs felt bruised, until my head ached. Once empty, I took a running jump off the chair, spread my arms wide, and felt that brief moment when time was suspended, the millisecond before my body tumbled downward, slow then fast, to the damp sand below.
Years later, my mother told me she’d driven her sister to the beach days before she died. My aunt had longed to see the beach but was too weak to leave the car. They sat in the parking lot, watching the gentle surf. Twins returning to the shoreline.
Eventually, my parents sold the house and moved north. I didn’t return to my childhood beach until almost a decade later when I was heavily pregnant with my first child. We had set out east to go apple picking, to buy a pie at a stand that I’d remembered as a little kid, but en route, I longed to get off the ugliness of the main roads, and we detoured to the sound. The beach was the same as when I was six and sixteen and twenty-one, empty in the late September sun, the shore still beautifully rocky, the smell of salt and seaweed, the clam and mussel shells, the weathered sea glass.
The week before my first child was born, as my husband and I stood together on the shore of northern Long Island, I thought about the journey we were about to embark on, the unknowns, the possibilities, the fears. I imagined the joys and the heartbreaks and the ordinary moments in between. I thought about the strength of the moment on the cusp of motherhood. I thought about the fragility of life.
I dipped my toes into the cool sand and felt the humid breeze against my cheek. I placed my hand on my swollen belly and looked toward a lifeguard chair. I thought about that painful night and remembered the numbness of driving in complete darkness, hurtling through unbearable emotions, half wishing that the car would cut a curve too close, that it would careen out of control so that I just wouldn’t have to feel. I looked across the sound to the tiny speck of Connecticut glittering in the afternoon sun.
I envisioned my aunt. I imagined what she might have looked like as a child running down the shore of Wading River. I remembered her smile, steadying her bike with one hand as we talked, having run into one another on La Guardia Place. I conjured that moment on Riverside, her body weak, on the brink of her last journey.
I wish she could have known then that her memory is always with me, that for years I would walk by her apartment building and trace my finger across her last name on the buzzer, which remained there for years until the building was sold. I wish she could have known that when I ran my first NYC Marathon, I ran it for her, repeatedly saying her name in my mind as I crossed through each borough, that I smiled and burst into tears at the finish line, that I’d carried a small photocopy of her portrait folded in the pocket of my shorts.
I wish she could have known that my oldest child’s name is hers, that I knew that day, feet digging into the sand, heart filled with remembrances, that I could capture a tiny piece of her, of us, in a new and vibrant life to come. I can’t know for sure, but perhaps she knew, somewhere in there, that the rocky shore and sea salt air was a bond we carried together in our blood, in moments that, while not congruent, were unspoken, soft reminders, memories in the lapping waves.
On Saturday, we visit open studios. At our last stop, I find myself face to face with a 4’x6’ work of fiber – hand-woven muslin with wool and thread. The curves and stitches move me so unexpectedly that tears sting my eyes.
The artist presses a finger to my forearm as we say hello and goodbye. Those are ginkgo leaves, she says gently, briefly tracing the lines and then the tendon down to my wrist. Did you know they survived the atomic bomb?
Yes, I reply, they symbolize nature’s ability to move through all sorts of horrors. We lock eyes.
You seem to me to be someone moving through things, she says, shaking my hand. Resilience comes in all forms, she whispers.
I prefer the word transformation, I breathe. Resilience implies springing back to what once was, but we are never put back together the same way once broken.
The matrix of protective film that covers the rear window of hospital transport pixelates. From my bench seat inside, I feel the warmth of the setting sun weaken as we drive east. We have been awake for days, us adults, grasping at short sighs of slumber when we have moments to breathe. I gaze out the window, the view obscured by the privacy pattern, turning the highway and cars into blurs. For a moment, I wonder if I’ve forgotten my glasses.
Facing backward, I can only see what has already passed. The drab interstate scenery seems to speed in reverse while the vehicle hurtles forward. Traffic noses up to us and then slides swiftly around. I see hundreds of people making their way somewhere, moving toward us, surpassing us. This is what time is like these days. A solitary stasis.
I have always been good with landmarks. As a child, I knew the roads by feel. My eyes closed, curled in the back seat, I knew the curve of Crystal Brook Hollow, the dip down and twist of Old Post. I knew the acceleration when the main road morphed into the parkway, the jolt of brakes when traffic clumped at the border of Queens. During my time in the city, I could run thirteen miles through Brooklyn in the dark morning, primarily based on feel, sound, smell, and the sense of sidewalk changes beneath my feet.
I have no idea where we are. We have lived in this state for ten years, and I have never bothered to learn what highway gets us where except for the one that takes me back to the city. I have hidden beneath the ease of GPS. Just tell me where to go, and I will get there. I never stopped to think that perhaps one day I’d sit backward in a transport vehicle, the future very much unknown, and yearn to know one solitary landmark, something, anything, to tell me where everyone was going and, more importantly, where the two of us in this truck will land.
My child picks Car Seat Headrest as our driving music. Actually, they chose “Midwest emo,” and having little to no idea what that micro-genre was, I chose the first thing I found on my phone. The sound echoes ethereally through the ambulance bay. The sun has disappeared behind the asphalt New Jersey horizon, buried beneath the dusk and trucks and cars. We pull off somewhere, some road that leads to another, and the lyrics weave their way through my heavy head.
I thought one day
I thought I'd find a hole
In my own backyard
I’d never seen before
Follow it down
Underneath that fence
Come back up on the other side
Live another life
The transport stops beneath the fluorescent lights of a loading dock. There is a strange relief in knowing that this part of the journey has ended. We have reached a terminus for the moment, temporary, a vague temporal, but a place to rest. For now.
I open the door to fill out paperwork. On the sidewalk, half in darkness, there is a peacock. It screams a strange hello and sends its feathers out full and flush. Once the surprise lessens, I pause in the reality of the moment – the beauty, the absurdity, the flash of the unexpected.
On the first full day, we search for stones in the Ventura riverbed. Each of us unearths works of contemporary art – geometric wonders, inadvertent sculptures, rocks veined with intersections so perfectly haphazard that they could be purposeful. I collect more than my pockets can support. My backpack pulls at my sunburnt shoulders, laden with a makeshift museum of rocks.
My favorites are the broken surprises – the stones that appear whole, veins like scars. Lift them, and the pieces separate, some like puzzles, others like folded treasures.
What is the nature of brokenness? These stones, laced with fissures, nestled in the riverbed: are they fragile failures of stability or simply waiting in the silt and sun, welcoming the rush of river water from fresh rain, settling into the inevitable, the process of becoming?
Let me tell you the story of whole versus broken, the infinite possibilities of piecing together. Let’s weigh the gravity of words and assumptions and ask, when the rains come, and our comfort is dislodged, do our pieces form newness, do they round and weather with the tumult? Do our sharp edges blur?
Our unit of four hikes our way back to the car. The landscape is sage mottled with yellows and pale purples. Our pockets are heavy with moments.
A year has passed, and I still cannot touch our museum of stones. They sit in small bowls on shelf in my office closet, too beautiful to part with but too painful to relive. How could we have known that so much had already broken, that we sat together like those pieces of the whole but already shifting? That the river was already rushing. The water just hadn’t hit us yet.
object of memory 