What Matters Most

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After nearly seventeen years of marriage we sometimes
spend our Friday nights in the basement, going
through boxes of old stuff,
trying to decide what to keep
and what to cast off.
It’s like the ocean floor down there,
where everything settles after being shaken,
shipwrecked,
sifted.

You go through plastic bins full of children’s clothes,
preparing for this next baby, number six, and we
smile at the sight of clothes the other children wore:
a yellow rain coat; those monkey pajamas; boots
covered in cartoon insects with big eyes. Artifacts
from some other life, reminders of
this long and winding road. You sigh. You fold
each piece with care
and gently place everything here
or there
to keep
or to cast off.

I unearth the boxes of yearbooks and old
journals, binders full of short stories I wrote. In those days
I was certain publication was just
around the corner. Yet here I am,
so many years later, on the cusp of perhaps a book,
or perhaps not. Still waiting.
This is the way of things, the subtle gathering of years,
the persistent belief that words, thought through,
will find their way to the surface.

And then I see a notebook from October, 1997, when
I first laid eyes on you. Noticed you for the first time.
I wrote seven words at the top of the page
of my American Lit Before 1900 binder:
“Fact of the day: she’s from Ohio”
How little we knew of one another.

I read the words out loud to you, and you smile and almost
cry and we laugh, thinking back to who we were.
Who were we? Who would we become? We
had no idea.
How could we? Yet.

Yet.

Yet here we are in the basement of a row home, 20 years
later, somewhere
in the city, the sound of five children running the wooden
floorboards above us, the amniotic movement of another child
twisting and turning inside you.
Here we are, sifting through two decades.
This has been the way
of these years, the keeping and the casting off.
The sense that somehow, that which matters most
will find its way to the surface.

Regarding the Age of Our Mattress

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You said you cried as they cut down the tree
in our backyard, the one Sam liked to climb,
the one stretching up into the wires overhead.
But the arborist told us there was no use
in trimming this kind of tree – it would only grow
faster in the direction of its brokenness. So they came
early in the morning with their chainsaws and
their ladders and their chipper, dismantling the branches
first, then working top to bottom until there was only a
stump
so small it is not even worth standing on.

And I think about how there have been things in our
life we tried to save, trimming them back, only to find
we, too, grow faster in the direction of our
brokenness.
It is a sore lesson to learn,
this idea that sometimes a thing
must be taken all the way down to its stump.

I think about this in our dark room, in the middle
of the night, Abra on the floor beside our bed, her
breathing labored, asthmatic. I think about this
while listening to the fan in Leo’s room, the one that drowns
out the noise. I think about this while lying on
our old mattress, the one with the valley in the middle,
another broken thing, but one that draws us
steadily
closer together.

If I Could Tell My Son Anything

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Photo by Mel Hattie via Unsplash

Have you wandered?
I have.
I have wandered to the uneven edges,
to the place the straight rows break apart,
the Negev
and the Jordan. I have listened
for heartbeats that never came
for laughter that bubbled up in the spring.
Have you wandered?

I think if I could tell my son any-
thing, I would sit him down, place
my hands on his thin, widening shoulders
and tell him it is no sin
to be innocent. It is no wonderful thing
to rush into the knowledge of good
and evil. It is quite fine, in fact, to decide
to go on playing with toy cars
long after your friends, or to sit
with your baby brother and watch
the trolley move in its halting fashion
all the way to the Land of Make Believe.

This is what I would tell my son if I could.
But these are not the kinds of things you can
simply say. Words can never dry the river
while it’s running.

The only thing that can do that is the first
trusting step over the bank’s edge. Did those priests
carrying the Ark close their eyes? Did they hold their breath? Or
did they stare into the white water, determined
to see the hand of God as it worked?

I have wandered all the way to the uneven
edge, eyes closed, waiting for the courage to take
that first step into the white water.

Regarding the Miscarriage That Led Us To You

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Someday I’ll tell you how empty we felt
when the nurse left the room, the scan of your
mother’s womb, empty and dark, like a sun-
spot. The Catholic doctor
who did the second scan tried to spin it
into light.

“My mother had a dozen kids and nearly as many
misses,” he said (or something like that)
with a sympathetic smile, but your
mother still wept all the way home,
and for days after, wondering who that small space
would have been.

There

were

large

spaces

in

our

lives

during

those

later

days. The minutes and hours stretched
like an awkward verse pried open and scraped
clean.

Then, two months later,
two months after the emptiness
two months after the breath-taking scans
your mother became pregnant
with you.

I’m sorry to say it, but we didn’t dare hope for you
in those early days, so recent was that vast
emptiness. That lost future. We held our breath at the
first doctor’s visit
and the second
and especially later, when your heart would stop
for short periods of time. Your mother strapped on
a machine that tracked your beats through the night,
the line on the paper sometimes straightening out like
a desert horizon
or a needle with no string trailing behind.

When you finally slid into the world, angry and pooping
all over your mother, we laughed and cried and named you
Abra, “mother of nations,” from my favorite book
East of Eden
because, yes, we had left the garden behind, but we
also realized there was still good in this world, even after
the empty spaces.

Perhaps I could even say there is good in this world
because of the empty spaces
but that is a leap over a void
I am not yet prepared to take.

 

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While You Were Away – A Confession

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I drove home from the airport
absent-minded.
The highway was quiet and I left
the radio off. I considered the last
17 years of us, the turning of the tides, the ins
and outs of two tangled lives. I thought
about how we’ve become
a sort of background noise for one another
comforting
like the hum of tires on long, straight
roads. Sometimes
you have to turn down the noise to hear
what is constant,
what is true.

I must admit that when you are gone
we eat more pizza than usual, and more
cereal. The Nutella is nearly gone, and the ice cream
didn’t last the first night.
The kids all sleep on our bedroom floor
so that when Leo wakes up,
crying for you,
I have to walk to him gingerly, stepping
through the tangled trickery of blanket-
covered legs and arms, not always succeeding,
missteps then yelps or groans.

I lift Leo from his bed and rock him on that
tiny chair, smell his hair, and think of you
six or eight states away. I know your geography
better than my own country. I feel his weight and think,
We made this human being together, and
How can we possibly be responsible
for this kind of beauty? and
When will he finally sleep through the night?
These children are, all of them,
the two of us, wrapped in skin
and bone, like a gift we gave each other
not caring how much we could keep
for ourselves.

 

A Letter to the Books in My House that Are Falling Apart

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Photo by Joshua Earle via Unsplash

You are my oldest
friends, you with your ragged
covers, your split spines, your brittle
pages. I remember reading you in the secret round
flashlight glow, undercover, when
the crickets chirped. I remember
sitting on the front porch, swatting away
the flies, telling mom, “Just one more chapter!”
My name, written in a stumbling script, is on the inside
cover, along with the year we first
met.

1985. 1986. 1987.

So I apologize to you now
for the times that Leo has used you
as a teething toy, or when Sammy and Abra
toted you around by your tearing pages,
pretending they were in college. I am sorry
to those of you being read and re-
read by Cade and Lucy so many times,
your pages escaping,
your dog-ears breaking.
I hope you know how much we all
have loved you.
How much you have
meant to us.

Perhaps sometime soon, when the weather turns,
I will put you in a box and
the kids and I will take you camping,
out into the woods (from the woods you have been
made, and to the woods you shall return).
We’ll start a roaring fire, and I’ll tell them how
the first time I read you, you made
my world a bigger place. I’ll tell them
how you changed me, and in those dancing
shadows your stories will come alive
again, the monsters just outside the circle
of light, the heroes there among us. Then
we’ll gently place you in among the flames,
watching your pages blacken,
reminding ourselves that stories are things
that can never be burned
or done away with.

Maybe twenty years from now a child
playing in the woods will dig up a fragment,
a paragraph, the corner of a cover,
and the words will light something in them,
something like adventure,
something that cannot be easily quenched.

But, still.
I am sorry.