In the Room of Mental Health First Aid™

Photo by Gina Easley

By Heather Lanier

In the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we joke about bad therapists and the body parts we lost to cancer. We describe with lyrical precision the places where our panic attacks begin and whether they travel up or down. We compare notes on the panic attacks like we’re comparing notes on dining experiences at a new restaurant. Or we stay silent and listen, grateful to those willing to describe their panic attacks because we’ve never had one, or don’t remember a time when we did … although, now that someone describes them that way, maybe we have. We recant our understandings of manic depression, tell stories about doctors’ mental health misdiagnoses, and collectively laugh at the rawness of what it means to be human.

In fact, in the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we’re invited to talk about so many things the world beyond these walls does not want us to talk about that I start to lose touch with my usual filters. At the beginning of this day-long training, our facilitator Mandi said that if we ever need to leave the room for any standard reason—bathroom, phone call—we should give her a thumbs-up, so she knows we’re okay. “Otherwise, I’ll think you’re in crisis,” she explains. A few hours into training, I feel nature’s call, walk towards the door, make eye contact with Mandi, and lift my thumb toward the ceiling. She gives me a knowing nod. As I yank on the door handle, I have the uncanny urge to call out to the entire group of twenty-seven in a jolly, assuring voice, “Just need to change my tampon!”

I do not do this. But in the room of Mental Health First Aid™, I imagine the group warmly nodding and/or chuckling in a way no group of near-strangers ever has in response to the words, need and tampon.

Maybe we laugh so much here because there is nothing funny about why we are here. We are twenty-seven college professors at a south Jersey university that will, in four weeks, make national headlines for suicide. Three in two months. But we haven’t hit the New York Times or CNN just yet. It’s November 2019, and right now the University of Southern California is in the news. Two months before, it was the University of Pennsylvania. Last month, while south Jersey’s October languished in summer-like heat, the CDC released its report: Between 2007 and 2017, the rate of suicide among people age 10 to 24 increased a whopping 54%.[*] A 2018 CDC report found that suicide rates in half the states increased among all age groups by 30%. News outlets clambered onto the stats but couldn’t position them into a landscape of meaning. Like a Brancusian sketch, the numbers offered a clear if bare-bones portrait: We are a nation in crisis.

I’ve been standing in front of a college classroom for fifteen years. I’ve never had so many students write about suicide before—their thoughts of it, their friends’ acts of it.

In the second week of this semester, a young man I hadn’t seen before walked thirty minutes into my creative writing class and sat in the back. It was my first semester at this university. I was still learning where the bathrooms were. I found his name on my roster and marked him present. At the next class, he arrived on time but left halfway through. I never saw him again.

Nine weeks later, a voicemail from the Wellness Center sat on my cell phone. It was about an unnamed student, and would I please call back? Before I could, I read the official email from the university: the student I barely knew had died. The university was not legally permitted to disclose the cause. An online forum would later name it suicide. Before the student’s death, I’d considered myself too swamped for this all-day Mental Health First Aid™ workshop. Ten minutes after reading my student’s name in that email, I asked if there was an extra spot in this room.

Four weeks from now, when we lose our third student, the conversations in the media will center around our university’s wellness center, about whether there’s a waitlist for counselors, about how well our school is supporting students in crisis. We are not counselors, and we are not in charge of hiring counselors, nor are we in charge of determining the nationally recommended counselor-to-student ratio. We’re a department of writing professors, peeking out from mounds of essays and stories and projects in this, the busiest month of the semester. We are setting aside eight hours on a Friday so we can learn how to save lives.

“You’re earning a certificate, not a superhero cape,” Mandi reminds us frequently. We nod from our seats.

The Room of Mental Health First Aid™ is, in its usual operating hours, a sterile classroom filled with six long rows of tables. This is the same room in which many of us meet monthly to discuss the unsexy specifics of curriculum changes and policy requirements. It’s the room I stood in six months ago and convinced a committee to give me the assistant professor position I now hold. I wore a black suit, clicked through PowerPoint slides, gave confident answers. I wore the very persona of infallible competence that this room has, at least for today, invited us to disarm.

Not quite public, not quite private, the room of Mental Health First Aid™ invites professionals to disclose, with promised confidentiality, all the ways it has been hard for us to be human. “We use Vegas rules here,” Mandi says, clicking to a slide that features the city’s iconic neon welcome sign. “What happens here stays here.” We can disclose adolescent-onset anxiety. We can explain how trauma might link across our years like beads on a string. We can say what we would otherwise never say in this room: “Nope, the textbook descriptions of panic attacks are incomplete. Mine begin in my arms, or my belly, or my dizzied head.”

It strikes me that if more spaces followed the norms of the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we might actually need less mental health first aid.

Mandi is a thirty-something woman with alto-voiced cheer. “How many of you have experienced depression?”

Hands go up.

“Anxiety?”

More hands. Nearly all the hands, including my own.

This is one of Mandi’s strategies: accessing our personal experiences. She has given us softcover textbooks, and she scrolls through infographic slides from the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. But she also invites us to use ourselves as references, as wildly imperfect maps that might touch or even lay over and align with the maps of others, and which might, along with the textbook and slides, help us cobble together a fuller topography of what it means to be human.

We learn the official statistics: Twenty percent of young adults, ages 18 to 24, experience a mental health disorder.[†] Two-thirds of students who need mental health support do not seek it. The average number of years between when a person needs help and when they receive it is eight. The age of a third grader, the time it takes for a typical human to go from drooling baby to sassy calculator of math problems. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adults age 18 to 24.

“Why?” Mandi asks us to speculate.

“Social media?” someone calls from the front row.

“Climate change fears?” another person guesses from the side.

Mandi nods. “Sure. Those are all factors.”

But why, she says, is a question even experts haven’t answered. In our eight hours together, we will attempt to answer another: What can we do?

•••

It turns out that what we can do is remarkably simple.

She splits the twenty-seven of us into two groups. One group is labeled “Listening.” Another is labeled “Not Listening.” The groups must race each other to come up with as many outward signs of their designated label as possible. I am in Not Listening.

“Looking at your cell phone!” one of my group members calls out.

“Looking away!” another shouts.

“Not making eye contact!”

I’m not making eye contact. I’m looking at my notepad, frantically recording their ideas. A colleague grabs my list and runs to the whiteboard to scribble our answers. With equal urgency, members of Listening do the same.

“Time,” Mandi calls.

She tallies our lists. We of Not Listening have generated twenty-one outward signs. Listening only has nineteen. Not Listening wins!

But the whole point of the activity, of course, is that listening wins. It’s the “L” in our five-step Mental Health First Aid™ plan, which goes by the acronym ALGEE. We’ve skipped over the letter A for now. Mandi says it’s the hardest—we’ll get to it at the end.

Why ALGEE? “Because this program came from Australia,” our facilitator says to laughter. Maybe the others imagine what I do: surfers along the Gold Coast, aerial views of the Great Barrier Reef. Algae, the photosynthetic organisms that made the planet hospitable for life. Maybe it can help do so again.

•••

Sidenote: It is strangely freezing in the room of Mental Health First Aid™. I say this with zero metaphoric intention. I circle my hands around a mug of hot water. I wonder if I should slide my wool ski cap off my head, so I look more professional among my new colleagues. Then I remember: We’ll be talking about suicide here. It’s fine to strive for cozy.

“You are Anxiety,” Mandi calls out to three people clustered in the front row.

Their faces look up, stunned.

“And you right here,” she circles her hand around a group beside them, “are Depression.”

Nervous laughter erupts.

Another group is ADHD. A fourth is Schizophrenia. The laughter spreads, morphing from nervous to raucous. In a culture of person-first language, where we imply that people live with diagnoses rather than become them, her wording is jarring, but also hysterical.

So I am Eating Disorders, along with two men flanking me.

“Do you want to be Psychosis?” Mandi calls to a lone woman in the back. “Or you can join another group?”

The woman laughs. She’s fine with Psychosis.

Mandi has written age-ranges around the room’s whiteboards. “Go stand where you think your assigned mental health disorder, on average, begins.”

Substance Abuse stands beneath “13-17.” We of Eating Disorders sally up beside them. ADHD idles to our right at “8-12,” as does Anxiety.

Mandi asks Anxiety why they guessed eight to twelve.

“Personal experience?” a female colleague peeps with upturned uncertainty, then bursts into a low-bellied laugh.

She’s correct. So is ADHD, Substance Abuse, and we of Eating Disorders. Depression has planted themselves below “18-24,” but they’re off by a decade.

We return to our desks, and Mandi clicks to another slide. “Remember,” she says. “A mental illness is a physical illness. The brain looks physically different.”

I write these two sentences in my notebook. I box them and surround them with stars. Mandi’s quote gives new meaning to the dismissive phrase It’s all in your head. People hear this sentence in response to everything from depression to sexual harassment to autoimmune disorders. It means: What you’re describing, you’ve invented. It also means: Quit being inconvenient. But Mandi’s quote reminds us that the head is a powerful and real place in which to experience something.

The single greatest factor that contributes to mental health disorders, Mandi says, is trauma. Capital T trauma comes to my mind. The neglect of a parent. The fist of a spouse. A box for a bed. But she says no one can define trauma for a person.

“If anyone tells you that what you’ve experienced isn’t trauma, that’s bad counseling. In fact,” she adds, “everyone probably has trauma of some kind. Because everyone is alive.”

It’s the simplest mathematical proof:

Being alive causes trauma.

Everyone you have ever known has been, or is still, alive.

Ergo ….

I’m the stepdaughter of a chiropractor. If you fill out a form at a chiropractor’s office, it will likely ask you about your birth. Was it medicated? Were forceps used? A vacuum? The concern is for your neck and spine as it moved through the birth canal. But the implication is this: the very act of entering this world is traumatic.

•••

We break for pizza. We talk about our dogs, our cats, our Netflix binges, our children. We stretch cheese-covered triangles from our teeth and describe the things we love in this world. “I like your hat,” the man to my left, of Eating Disorders, says. I thank him.

•••

In 1990, I sat in a room with a judge and explained to him an ongoing experience of trauma. I was twelve. The judge dismissed my experience as not trauma. On my lap sat a composition notebook in which I’d written about my trauma. The judge wouldn’t read it. So mine was not, could never be trauma.

The details don’t matter—I’ve written about them elsewhere. (Thumbs up, reader. I’m okay.) What matters: Twenty-first century living sometimes affirms experiences that twentieth-century living denied. Not across the board, but in pockets of places, like in an op-ed that worries for the safety of transwomen needing to pee, like on a bestseller list where sits a memoir about a brown-skinned woman’s daily experiences with racism, like in a large discussion classroom on a patch of New Jersey that was once deciduous forest inhabited by the Lenni Lenape. We name at the onset of gatherings the tribes that inhabited the land we stand on. It’s a microscopic way of acknowledging Native people and the violence of white supremacy. It also ends up saying: Trauma brought us here. Trauma is embedded in the very birth of what we’re standing on.

Six months ago, when I stood at the front of this room wearing the black pantsuit, I described how I would structure my creative writing courses. I showcased my students’ work. Projected on the screen was a student’s poem about living in a female body in a country where the president bragged about grabbing female bodies. I talked about how I diversify my reading lists, distributed grading rubrics of varying complexity, and watched committee members nod.

Here’s what I didn’t say: When I ask my students to write, I sometimes invite them to excavate the ineffable little monsters in their guts. Just like I held a little monster in my lap in the form of a composition notebook when I faced that judge. I invite my students, however gently, to gather the courage to hold these little monsters up to their ears and listen to them. And what my students end up writing in response are often beautiful and strange and powerful songs about how they have managed to survive in this world.

But it is not always easy, handling these monsters. They can and do bite. If the student who died last month had been in my classroom, what would he have unearthed? Would my lessons have helped? Hindered?

During that interview six months ago, I was required to read my own work. I read a piece of nonfiction that excavated a little monster of my own. But the prose was polished, the structure artfully arranged, pressed into shape as neatly as my dry-cleaned suit. And when I was done, my future colleagues asked about professional things: how to craft a sentence, how an essay becomes a book. This is the professionalism of my field. This is also the gift I give my students: I take seriously the craft of their writing. Which means I also assume they, as people, are okay.

But Mandi’s ALGEE requires more. She’s still reserving the hardest letter, A, for the end. And we covered L, for listening. The G stands for Give reassurance and information. The two E’s stand, respectively, for Encourage appropriate professional help and Encourage self-help and other support strategies. As a writing professor, I not only need to help my students with syntax and diction and structure and voice and revision. I also need to help them stay whole.

It’s a daunting new job responsibility in the role of twenty-first century professor: to worry about how an absence of eye-contract might trigger isolation; to keep dibs on a student’s possible need for professional counseling; to make note of any mentions of suicidal ideation (so far this semester, three) and have the follow-up conversations: Are you okay? Are you getting the help you need? I feel the weight of my students’ well-being on my shoulders.

•••

What are signs of an eating disorder? What is the difference between substance abuse and addiction? How do PTSD triggers work? Much of Mental Health First-Aid™ training requires us to understand the range of mental health disorders, so we can identify signs of them and guide people toward appropriate help. We’ve become, in eight hours, like mobile triage rooms.

We tackle letter A, as promised, at the very end. And I too will get to it at the very end. For now, know that the light from the classroom windows eventually turns pink. The sun eventually falls below the horizon. And all twenty-seven of us eventually complete our training. Mandi reminds us to do something kind for ourselves tonight: a glass of wine, a bubble bath. Every flight attendants’ emergency instructions are both clichéd and true, and Mandi reiterates them: “Put the oxygen mask on your own face first. You can’t help anyone unless you also help yourself.”

The next morning, I am ensconced in a scene the Internet might call self-care: cocooned in bed beneath a weighted blanket, supine and turning pages in a book. My children are miraculously at their grandmother’s. I am burritoed in bed past ten. I have nowhere to go for two hours.

It will make every bit of sense if I want to stay in this place forever. It will make absolutely zero sense if I start to long, ever-so-slightly, and then very much so, to return to the room of Mental Health First Aid™.

It’s the book’s fault. A memoir about being gay and Black in the south, it’s one I planned on assigning next semester. But as I turn the pages, the author’s mother is unexpectedly diagnosed with a terminal illness, and it’s the very same illness that a student’s mother has recently been diagnosed with. This student has already registered for next semester’s class.

I want to go back to the room of Mental Health First Aid™. I want to raise my hand and ask the question I haven’t figured out how to answer. Not the first question perched on top of my head (Should I assign this book?). The question buried underneath it: How responsible are we for each other? Exactly how much are we in each other’s care?

The boundaries in the room of Mental Health First Aid ™ were clear. The doors were closed. The personal stories were confidential. People gave thumbs-up. We were okay, we were okay. The only signs of the outside world showed through the windows. By training’s end, the sky was nearly indigo, and we drove home in the dark. There are only so many questions you can answer in eight hours. How responsible are we for each other? It’s a question I’ll keep carrying.

•••

The answer I left with, though, is this: At least a little bit. We are all, every one of us, at least a little bit in each other’s care.

Over the next days, I catch up on grading, read a few dozen short stories, return them to my students with comments. Ten minutes into a lesson, a student is openly weeping. She can’t be upset about my comments—she didn’t turn in any work. I assign the class a short writing activity and whisper to her: “Do you want to talk?” She shakes her head no. I say okay. Five minutes later, she’s still wiping her face with her sleeve.

“Come on outside,” I say. She follows me into the hall. It’s a night class, and the hall is lined with bluish-black windows.

She chokes on a sentence. It cracks past her vocal cords. She’s in a domestic violence situation. It’s bad. What follows is another Vegas moment. The details of her story stay with her. But the all-day Mental Health First Aid™ shifts me into gear. I listen closely. I ask questions. I hug her for as long as she wants, which is much longer than I expect, and she weeps into the crook between my neck and shoulder. She holds tight, until she lets go.

I ask about her safety. I ask whom else she has told. We return to class, and I finish teaching, and then we sit together on a bench in the hall as she calls campus safety. She speaks to the counselor on call. The counselor gives her good advice. There are next steps. A way to feel safe tonight. An expert to talk to tomorrow.

I walk her to her car, which is right in front of the building—a spot she tells me she waits for each night that we have class. This is why she’s been late, she says. I watch her close her car door and hear the click of the lock, and she drives away. It’s raining, almost seven p.m.

Reader, I’ll tell you this: She won’t pass the class. But she’ll get counseling and a safe place to live.

On my way to the parking garage, someone behind me shouts with all their might: “FUCK!” During my ascent up the garage’s concrete stairwell, two men pass me. They are very tall, and loud, and seem amiable and they could also crush me against the wall, and they could be carrying something that crushes them from the insides, and they could be perfectly fine.

We’re all a little in danger, we’re all a little in each other’s care.

When I get inside my own car, I lock the doors, relieved to create a room of just myself.

•••

It is only at the tail end of the daylong training, when my blood sugar is low and the sun is threatening to set and I have the uncanny urge to scroll mindlessly through social media, that we tackle the hardest letter: A.

Assess for risk of suicide or harm.

In other words, ask a person if they’re planning to kill themselves. If we ever suspect someone is thinking of it, we need to ask.

We practice as a group, repeating the questions in unison:

Are you thinking of killing yourself?

Are you having thoughts of suicide?

We get the words right. We commit them to memory. Mandi tells us that it can be scary to ask, which is why we’ll practice in pairs.

“And if they say yes,” Mandi asks, “then what do you do next?”

A voice pipes up in front: “Ask if they have a plan.”

She nods. “And if they do?” she asks.

“Stay with them,” another voice says.

“Do not leave them,” Mandi adds. “Call campus safety. Call 911.”

Then it’s time. I turn to the male colleague next to me. I met him two months ago.

“Are you thinking of killing yourself?”

He knows it’s coming, and still he winces. His eyebrows relax, and he assumes the role. “Yes,” he says calmly.

“Do you have a plan?” I ask.

He pauses. “Yes,” he says.

The end of the role play is remarkably stark, like a cliff-edge. We switch roles.

“Are you considering suicide?” he asks.

I’m a terrible role-player. I give him the true answer. I give him the only answer I hope people will always give me, the answer I hope every person on this planet can give every day of their lives. It’s a hopeless hope for the world’s eight billion people, all of whom have been born and have lived years and are still alive. I say “No.”

[*] From Sally C. Curtin, M.A., and Melonie Heron, Ph.D., “Death Rates Due to Suicide and Homicide Among Persons Aged 10-24: United States, 2000-2017,” NCHS Data Brief, No. 352, October 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db352-h

[†] All statistics in this paragraph come from the presentation literature from the Youth Mental Health First Aid ™ USA training.

•••

HEATHER LANIER is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Longreads, The Sun, and elsewhere. She writes about parenting, disability, spirituality, and what a kindergarten teacher would call “big feelings.” Her TED talk has been viewed over two million times.

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Who We Are, Where We Come From

Photo by flickr/
Raveendra Jayashantha

By Anjali Enjeti

When my father immigrated to the United States from India in 1971, many of his relatives followed in his diasporic footsteps. By 2006, the year his mother, my Avva, passed away, our only family members left on the subcontinent were his sister, his eldest brother, and their spouses. Today only a single aunt and uncle of mine remain. All of my first cousins immigrated to either Australia, Singapore, Europe, or the United States. Even though I have never lived in India myself, with each relative’s migration I felt more untethered to a country I had grown to love as much as my own.

When I learned the piece of furniture that once held Avva’s neatly folded saris was up for grabs, I leapt at the chance to bring it back to Georgia. It arrived several months later, after a harrowing and outrageously expensive journey, in a state of utter disrepair. Part of the base had broken off, so it stood at a slant like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, threatening to topple over at any moment.

After its restoration, I discovered something on its floor I hadn’t noticed before—a fading white six-pointed star. Simple, yet elegant. Perfectly centered. A square border surrounded it like a picture frame. It was a muggulu, a design Avva created out of flour.

She would never have called herself an artist, but Avva created this art in the mornings in the courtyard and in the pooja room at her home. I can still picture her squatting in her sari, a stream of powder flowing from between her index finger and thumb. She did this in long swift strokes like the conductor of an orchestra. Stars, swirls, dots, and flowers blanketed the ground.

After her death, the developers who purchased my grandparents’ house converted it to condominiums. The canvas for her artwork became the foundation for a newer, more modern Hyderabad known as the Silicon Valley of India. The sari chest is all that remains of my grandparents’ home, and my childhood memories of Avva’s artwork.

Over the years, I’ve contemplated how to preserve the muggulu best. Should an artist friend restore it with a fresh supply of rice flour? Should my daughter trace it with white acrylic paint for a more permanent solution? How do I recreate something vital to my heritage, to my identity, so that it will always stay with me?

•••

Who am I? I am a woman of color. I am brown. Mixed race. Indian, Austrian, Puerto Rican. I represent multiple souths—South Asia, southern India, and the Deep South in the United States. I am an immigrant’s daughter. Claiming each of these identities has shaped and refined my perspective of the world. It has helped me to find and immerse myself in a community that nurtures all of these parts of me. And the act of claiming my identity has empowered me to engage on a sociopolitical level, to grow my empathy, to reflect on the ways I fall short in the liberation of others. And to learn how to rectify this.

The claiming of identity and the evolution of a point of view sow the seeds for social change. For if we are lucky, if we follow the idea of the self far enough, it can end at a community that prioritizes compassion and justice in order to build a kinder, more equitable, more humane world.

In the summer of 2019, two friends and I decided we needed to work harder to keep members of the South Asian American community in Georgia more politically engaged year-round. The problem, as we saw it, was that our South Asian friends tended to come together for various Democratic campaigns, but as soon as the election passed, we lost touch, dispersed, and disengaged with politics until the next election season ramped up.

The three of us decided to start the Georgia chapter of They See Blue, an organization for South Asian Democrats.

Like any movement, ours began small. In August 2019, about a dozen people showed up to our first meeting at an Indian restaurant. Six months later we packed 150 people into a room for a 2020 Election Kickoff event featuring Georgia’s former House minority leader Stacey Abrams, three U.S. Senate candidates (Sarah Riggs Amico, Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, and Jon Ossoff), and state senator Sheikh Rahman.

Today we are over four hundred strong.

Our members have roots in several different countries, faiths, languages, and regions. We are immigrants and U.S.-born. We are learning how to be better allies and accomplices to other communities more marginalized than our own. We are interrogating our anti-Blackness. And we are mobilizing together to help flip Georgia blue.

Despite the risk posed by Covid-19, in the fall leading up to the 2020 presidential election, we worked ourselves to the bone for the Biden-Harris campaign and all down-ticket Democrats. We made thousands of calls, sent thousands of texts, and wrote 7,000 postcards on behalf of Democratic candidates. We hosted virtual forums with candidates. We educated South Asian voters about the voting process and trained to be poll workers and poll monitors. Our labor has paid off. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders nearly doubled their voter turnout in Georgia from 2016. Approximately three-quarters of AAPI voters voted for Biden. Georgia’s sixteen electoral college votes will go to the Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992.

What I am most proud of, though, are the South Asians in Georgia, many of whom had little to no experience with political activism until this election, who found a community in They See Blue Georgia and threw themselves into this work.

This, to me, is the heart of how identity shapes activism. It is the process of engaging people in our communities who have traditionally and intentionally been excluded from political discourse.

It is a movement about solidarity, camaraderie, coalition building, and lifting one another up. It’s about how our shared identity can propel us to become agents of social change, whether this takes the form of running for office, volunteering on a campaign, registering voters, or protesting.

It is who we are and where we come from.

•••

I consult a neighbor before I begin. “It will stay longer if you make the rice flour wet,” she says. “Turn it into liquid. Then you can paint with your finger.”

I watch a few YouTube videos to psyche myself up. I am no artist. I pour some rice flour into a bowl and add water, equal parts. With a fork, I swish the mixture, scraping it from the sides. Eventually it thins evenly. I attempt to paint a design on my countertop with my fingertip, as my neighbor suggested, but my finger makes for a clumsy brush. Instead I roll a sheet of paper into a funnel, pour the wet flour into it, and bend the tip to trap the mixture so it doesn’t escape before I’m ready. I practice again, this time forming half of a sloppy circle. Still, it’s progress.

I’m no match for my grandmother’s dexterous hand. Many years ago, she offered to teach me muggulu when I visited her home. I declined. What I produce now will not measure up. It will fail to honor her legacy. But this no longer matters. She would want me to try.

I sit cross-legged at the base of the sari chest, the door propped wide open, and take a deep breath. When I first unfold the tip of the funnel, the flour mixture rushes out too quickly. I wipe away the excess with a wet paper towel and begin again, squinting to locate my Avva’s neat outline. I position my hand over the design, and this time when the flour-ink flows, I’m ready. Curves and angles appear that I hadn’t noticed until I reunited them into one.

The image that emerges takes me by surprise. The faint pattern I had assumed these past nine years was a six-pointed star transforms into an eight-petalled jasmine flower, the same sweet-smelling blossoms my grandmother used to string into garlands at her home almost every morning. I would never have recognized her design for what it was if I hadn’t tried to restore it to its original state.

When I finish with the rice flour, I set aside the funnel and lean back to take it in. Some of the lines are shaky, too thick or too thin. Certainly, it is imperfect.

But in its very own way, it is beautiful.

•••

Reprinted with Permission from Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change ©2021 by Anjali Enjeti (University of Georgia Press).

ANJALI ENJETI is a former attorney, journalist, teacher, and author based near Atlanta. Her books Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and the novel, The Parted Earth were published earlier this year. Her other writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Harper’s Bazaar, USA Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post, and elsewhere. A former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She teaches in the MFA program at Reinhardt University and lives with her family near Atlanta.

 

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Mysteries of My Father

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jody Mace

Tarzan. Tonto. Tuvafana. These were the passwords that my father used for all his accounts. I learned this during the stage of his dementia when I had to manage his accounts. Guessing his passwords wasn’t too hard. I just had to go through these three possibilities and maybe add a 1 or a 2.

The bigger mystery was what the hell Tuvafana was. Tarzan and Tonto were self-explanatory since he was a fan of Tarzan and The Lone Ranger. But what was Tuvafana? I asked him right away, but it was already too late. He didn’t remember.

I thought it might be Hebrew, since Tuva is close to the word for good, Tov.

My dad had been interested in languages all his life and had many stories, which I didn’t necessarily believe, about his surprising proficiency at unlikely languages. There was the time as a boy that he was visiting a friend, whose family was Greek, and had impressed the boy’s mother by speaking Greek. Or the Chinese restaurant where he spoke fluently in Mandarin, and in Cantonese, just in case.

But I had no clue about fana.

During the years that I was managing my father’s accounts, I made many attempts to solve the mystery. Was it a character from a book? The name of one of his relatives?

But the mystery remained.

One thing about having a parent with dementia is how much of the past becomes a mystery, and how abruptly it seems to happen. It made me realize how little I had tried to get to know him when he was mentally whole. My life with my father was dominated by his stories, but they were both endlessly repeated and apocryphal. I think that over time I was worn down by his narrative and didn’t really have the energy or desire to start up more conversations. But as his dementia progressed, he grew quieter and I started asking questions to fill the void. Sometimes he talked. I have a collection of voice memos on my phone of the conversations that did take off. But a lot of times he didn’t want to.

I was losing my only remaining parent, little by little, and with him was going all the knowledge of a different, but related world, where people who looked like me spoke Yiddish and wore long dresses and ran a corner grocery store. Which relatives did he visit in New York as a child? What led to the failure of his family’s grocery store? Why did his father have different countries and years of birth on his passport and life insurance application? Nothing huge. Just little things that started out as facts and then became questions. And then, when there was no way to answer the questions, they became mysteries.

•••

It’s a well-known phenomenon in my family that people tell me everything. I might ask one casual question, and complete strangers tell me about their first marriage, their cigar business, the novel they’re writing, the time they were homeless. I think it’s because I find people interesting, and they can tell.

But somehow that interest didn’t extend to my father, at least not in action. I guess I thought I’d have time for questions later, and then I didn’t.

•••

Solving mysteries has got to be one of our most fundamental drives. From Encyclopedia Brown to Nancy Drew to Sherlock Holmes to Jessica Fletcher, when they solve a mystery, they solve it. There’s no half-assery involved, no lingering doubts. That’s the kind of mystery solving I like. You find a hidden staircase. You catch the thief as he tries to execute his heist. You ask that one question that forces a confession. Everything clicks into place like a puzzle that can only be solved one way, or a meticulously maintained old clock. Clean.

•••

As my father’s dementia progressed, not only could I not solve the mysteries I knew about, but there were more mysteries every day. He often told me about things that were clearly dreams, or tv shows, but he thought they had happened.

I was learning to meet him where he was. This is the way you’re supposed to communicate with people with dementia. You don’t tell them that they’re wrong. You just let them talk and respond to what they say, as if it’s real.

He was in a continuing care facility, but in the “independent living” part of it. I knew that he would need to move to a memory care unit, or something like that, with more security, but, when? He actually functioned just fine in his apartment, with lots of help and supervision. I was there a lot, and there was also someone who came in twice a day to make sure he took his pills, and someone else who helped around the apartment a couple times a week. He told me every day how much he loved his apartment, especially the recliner I had bought him. It truly was the happiest I’d ever known him to be.

When is the exact moment that it’s best to make someone measurably safer but at the cost of making them immeasurably sadder? He seemed okay for now, but I knew that the decision was bearing down on me. I envisioned the decision like two arcs on a single graph. When do they cross? It’s a wrenching calculus.

One August morning I got a phone call from my dad. He said that he had returned my magazine to the library but had forgotten to put my note in it. There was a library in the facility where he lived, and he regularly borrowed magazines from it. I hadn’t borrowed a magazine and I hadn’t written a note, but I said, “Thanks for returning it. Don’t worry about the note. It wasn’t important.”

I had met him where he was. He seemed relieved, and I felt good that I had responded to him kindly.

Then, late in the afternoon, someone called me from the front desk of the care facility. Nobody had seen him that day. Was he with me?

When an 86-year-old goes missing, it’s an emergency. He had never walked away from the facility before. Not once. Not a step. He couldn’t have been less interested.

It took several hours under the blistering sun, and the help of a what seemed like a whole precinct of police officers, but it was ultimately the GPS signal from his Jitterbug phone that led us to his body. He was lying in a clearing in an overgrown wooded area near his apartment, with his hands crossed on his chest, his eyes open to the sky.

I don’t think anyone comes out clean when their parent dies. There’s always something to feel guilty about. But when you were the person who was supposed to keep them safe, and you didn’t, no matter what the reason, it hits hard.

I think about the things he missed in the two years that he’s been gone. He missed his granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah and his grandson’s college graduation. He missed the isolation of the pandemic, which he would have hated. He missed Trump losing the election, which he would have loved. Mostly, though, he missed the free fall of decline he was about to experience, and the loss of freedom. There was some medical event, maybe a mini-stroke, that had confused him and set him to walking. He missed going into a nursing home or hospital. Maybe he did this just the way he wanted to. Who knows.

“Who knows?” seems to be both the question and the answer to everything, the only response to a mystery that will never be solved. Who knows what he was talking about when he called me about the magazine? Who knows where he was when he called me? Who knows where he thought he was going? Who knows why he lay down in that clearing, looking exactly as if he was going to take a nap? Who knows.

I wish I had tried harder to solve his mysteries years ago, when they would have been easier to solve. Maybe the biggest mystery isn’t even about him. Maybe it’s about me—why I didn’t try to know him better when I could. Why I assumed that we were just too different to really connect.

I’ve been learning Yiddish for a few months. When I work on it I think of him. Although I doubted some of his stories of language acumen, he was definitely a fluent Yiddish speaker. His family spoke it when he was growing up. I keep wondering if I’ll come across Tuvafana but I haven’t. I’ve worked my way through “food,” “friends,” “complaining,” “leisure,” and “office,” but no Tuvafana.

The other day I googled Tuvafana again, and this time I got a hit. It wasn’t a definitive explanation. It was no smoking gun, no invisible inked message with a code I cracked. I don’t know if this was actually something my dad, a lover of languages, once came across and then forgot where it was from. I don’t even know if the translation I found was correct. But for now, I’ll take it.

It was a word in someone’s Facebook status, in an unfamiliar language. I typed it into Google Translate, which identified the language as Shona, a Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe.

The translation was “We are the same.”

•••

JODY MACE is a writer and website publisher in Charlotte, North Carolina. Several of her essays have appeared in Full Grown People.

 

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Please Call It a Comeback

Last time I wrote to you all, I was threatening to write a book. Well, I did it (!), and it comes out in February. It’s called Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia, and you can pre-order here or from your favorite bookseller. I’m very excited about it.

I’m also excited to be back in my natural habitat.

Next Thursday, we’re starting up again. Things will be a smidge different. Full Grown People will run on Thursdays (once a week rather than twice) and we’ll now pay the writers and staff photographer. I’ll be rolling out a membership program at some point, but right now, I’m still getting my internet legs back.

To avoid FOMO, be sure to sign up for notifications if you haven’t before. See you on September 30!

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2018 Nomination for the Pushcart Prize

It’s that time of year again when editors mail in their nominations for The Pushcart Prize. We each get six picks and untold hours of gnashing of teeth.

Congratulations to this year’s FGP Pushcart nominees!

Deborah Linder’s “Familiar”

While I like these men, and while I have tried so hard to make myself likeable, nay, loveable, to them, I’m not sure there’s a space we can all inhabit. I’m suddenly skeptical that the overlap between my life and theirs is enough for a real relationship to ever develop. Not now, not after so many years. Any scientist will tell you that blood is a weak binding agent. Without the underpinning of a shared history, does our kinship offer anything other than a possible source for a replacement kidney?

Amanda J. Crawford’s “Other People’s Clothes”

The second time I left my husband, I left with nothing but my purse. It was sitting in a room on the other side of the house with my cell phone and keys inside when he held me in a room and told me, “You will never leave this house on your own two legs again.”

Magin LaSov Gregg’s “To Punctuate”

Last year, when my husband and I joined the Women’s March on Washington, I told my father I’d be “out of pocket” that day. He never asked what I’d be doing, just like I never asked him if he actually voted for Trump. I simply assumed so because of the giant Trump sticker on the rear window of his car.

Jennifer James’s “Stars in the Sky”

A year earlier, I’d still been nuts but in a much more manageable way.

Patrice Gopo’s “Blueberry Season”

“We need to go to Alaska,” I say to my girl. “We need to travel to a place with a real winter.” I think of Anchorage, where I come from, the city I left twenty years ago.

Jody Mace’s “Weird, Loud, Smelly World”

Somehow, we’ve gotten this idea that we have a right to never be disturbed by other people, to never be offended.

Most of these essays are accompanied by photos by the wonderful Gina Easley. Let’s have a hand for her, too!

 

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Hiatus

By Jennifer Niesslein

Some news, sweets: I’m taking a hiatus. I truly love the Full Grown People community (I swear, I feel as if I know some of you just from your comments!), but we’ve been at it for almost five years now, and I need a break. I’m going to focus on my own writing, among other things—I’m hoping to write another book, but I’ve threatened this before, so we’ll see.

For writers who have sent work through Submittable and haven’t heard back yet, I’m working on refunding your fee.

If you need a reading fix, check out the writers’ bios. A lot of them have books out or coming out soon. And if you don’t have Full Grown People’s Greatest Hits: Volume 1 or Soulmate 101 and Other Essays on Love and Sex, they’re on sale now for ten bucks apiece.

Thank you all for making the last five years so incredibly fulfilling. I’ll see you when I get back!

•••

JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is the founder and editor of Full Grown People. To read her writing and stuff, go to JenniferNiesslein.com.

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Weird Loud Smelly World

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jody Mace

When I was around nine, I used to practice being blind. It was a strange practice but not totally far-fetched. I had worn glasses for near-sightedness since I was six, and my vision was already terrible. If I’d lived in a different age I probably would have already accidentally walked off a cliff by then. I practiced being blind by walking slowly around the house, blindfolded, my fingers trailing along the walls and doors. I’d get a box of Cocoa Pebbles from the pantry, pour it into a bowl, and top it with milk from the refrigerator. The important things. I’d play piano, trying to memorize my favorite songs, training my fingers’ muscle memory, so that the spacing between the keys was second nature.

I was completely confident that with adequate preparation I could adjust when I went blind and do fine, at least in the practical sense. But the part that really terrified me was just the idea of not seeing anything anymore. When out of my blindfold, I’d look around and try to memorize what things looked like so that when the inevitable darkness came, I’d at least have something to look at in my imagination. Otherwise, no more light, no more moon, no more colors, no more faces.

•••

I’m on a plane heading west. We’re over one of those states that I can never remember, one of the middle states. It might start with a vowel. I know that there are people who live down there but it’s almost impossible for me to hold that thought as a reality in my brain. When I’m on the ground and a plane passes overhead it’s the same thing.

Child development books talk about “object impermanence,” where babies under a certain age don’t understand that something exists if they don’t see it. Out of sight, out of mind. I guess that’s why peek-a-boo is continually exciting for them. It doesn’t take much.

It’s the same thing with adults in a way, though. Down there someone is in the grocery store deciding what kind of cheese to buy. Someone is practicing chords on a guitar. Someone’s teenage daughter just told her that she hates her.

As an exercise in compassion I try to picture these people down in that unspecified state and contemplate their humanity. But it’s too crowded a picture in my mind. The composition of the picture is stressful and chaotic, like a Where’s Waldo book. All those tiny people with their lives. They’re all talking over each other and I can’t handle hearing about all their problems, not all at once.

There’s an actual real, full-sized human behind me who’s been coughing this whole flight and I don’t care about him at all. Maybe it’s just allergies. Or maybe it’s emphysema, which is horrible, but in either of these cases his spittle is no danger to me at all. Or maybe he is contagious, but he’s on the plane because he’s going somewhere important and heartbreaking like a funeral. But I don’t care. I just want him to stop coughing. He should have taken a cough suppressant before he got on the plane. What kind of self-centered monster flies across the country hacking up the whole time?

Even though the guy on the plane is all too real to me, I don’t have any more compassion for him than I do for the theoretical people on the ground. I don’t want to think about what it’s like to be him right now. I can see him but I don’t really see him. It’s a myopia of the heart.

•••

My next-door neighbor works in security in Afghanistan. He’s over there for three or four months at a time and then he’s home for two weeks. Usually, the day after he gets home he knocks on my door and says he’s thinking of having “a little something for the kids” and is that okay with me?

I tell him of course it is, even though I know how it will go. The little thing ends up being a big party. Friends and relatives come and go all weekend. The music goes until late at night. He rents an inflatable water slide as tall as the house and puts it in the front yard. After the party there will be a couple of stray socks that have been carried by the temporary river and settled on the ground next to our trashcan.

I read about the party on Nextdoor. “Where’s that loud music coming from?” Consensus is that it’s a big problem. But what I know, and the complainers don’t, is that he’s been putting himself at risk and has been away from his friends and family for months. As far as I’m concerned, he can do whatever he wants, even if it’s a little bit too loud.

Somehow, we’ve gotten this idea that we have a right to never be disturbed by other people, to never be offended.

I understand wanting it to be quiet. I appreciate peaceful nights too. But, lately, and maybe it’s partly because my house is quieter since my kids grew up and moved out, I’m craving connection more than quiet. I want to know more about my neighbors. Sometimes it seems strange to be in such close proximity to so many people and know so little about them.

•••

We’re driving past Asheville, North Carolina, on our way home from a visit with relatives, and decide to stop there because a jazz fusion trio that we like is playing at a free, outdoor festival. The band is fronted by a steel drum player.

Asheville is a weird place. Sometimes I wonder if they embrace their weirdness a little bit too adamantly, and if it’s become contrived, just a marketing slogan. “Keep Asheville Weird.”

But on the other hand, it really is pretty weird.

Case in point: as the trio played, lurking backstage is someone wearing a Big Foot costume, holding a saxophone. We can see him there for a whole song, poised to come on stage.

Finally, he does, and it’s a surprise to the band. It turns out that he’s pretty well-known in Asheville. He goes by the name Saxsquatch. He’s got a Facebook page and everything. He randomly shows up at events and sits in with bands, apparently with no warning.

He’s a good saxophone player, although I can see that it’s a bit of a challenge to communicate with him. The steel drum player seems to try to tell him that the bass player is going to take a solo. He says something in the direction of Saxsquatch’s giant head, and pokes his big hairy arm with his sticks, but there’s no stopping Saxsquatch. He throws his head back and wails on that thing.

As the band’s been playing, the crowd has grown and it’s become more diverse. White, black, young hipsters, aging hippies. An older man who looks like he walked straight out of a holler is up front, clogging. It’s like he’s listening to a different band that’s playing some kind of old-time Appalachian mountain music, but on the other hand, maybe he’s hearing this inventive fusion band just as it should be heard and is adding his own chapter to its story. A young guy right in front of me gyrates with a hula hoop. He looks like it’s been a while since he wasn’t stoned and smells like it’s been even longer since he took a shower.

At first whiff, I’m annoyed, but he’s part of this scene too. He’s adding his own voice to this epic conversation. The sights and sounds and smells, even the ones that are a little messy, a little loud, a little rank, remind us that we’re part of a community of people. We’re not alone.

We’re all mysteries. Doctors can look at our brains with an MRI and can see the structures—the temporal lobes, the parietal lobes, the cerebellum, the thalamus, the hippocampus. Scientists have imaging technology that can reveal brain activity in those areas. But our actual memories and thoughts, the things we love, our fears, our hopes—although they’re stored in our brains, they’re all invisible. The only way we know anything about each other is through the stories that we tell. If we’re really listening to each other then we can’t divide people into us or them. But we have to decide if we’re ready to see other people, all people, as human. Because once we do, we can’t turn our heads away any longer.

I had one thing right when I was nine. The darkness is inevitable, one way or another, and until it comes I want to see everything I can.

The band’s telling its story through melodies and rhythms that twist around each other like a grapevine. Saxsquatch tells his story with his saxophone and with his mysterious arrival at the show. The drummer plays his solo with impossible speed, rising in intensity until he jumps an inch from the stool at the end, as if he levitated, as if, for a second, gravity was distracted by the story he was telling with his sticks.

Listen:

I want to hear your story. Even if you’ve told me before, I want to hear it again. I want to smell the burgers on your grill next door, even if I’m not invited to your party. When I walk into your kitchen I want to smell the curry you cooked, the ghost of your dinner. When you pull up next to me at a red light and the bass is thumping, I want to see you moving to the sounds, lost in the song. I want you to tell me about your tattoo. I want to sit across from you and your friend on the train and hear you speaking Spanish, Arabic, Lao. I want your drum solo to go on a little too long. Tell me your story. I’m going to try to listen.

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her website is jodymace.com. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

 

Read more FGP essays by Jody Mace.

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Blueberry Season

Photo by University of Delaware Carvel REC/Flickr

By Patrice Gopo

My youngest daughter tilts her head up at me as I buckle her into her car seat. She asks, “Can we go pick blueberries?”

I think, There is no blueberry season in Charlotte.

Her request comes just a week or two after our Charlotte strawberry-picking season. She recalls how I took her and her older sister to a farm flush with rows of low strawberry bushes. She tangled her fingers in the leaves and thin branches and found fruit the color of rubies. We later gathered around the kitchen table and lingered over strawberries rinsed in a colander. We discarded stems and mashed fresh fruit in our mouths. On the heels of the late-spring strawberry season and prior to the mid-summer descent of peach season and well before the tangy tart of apple season—when we leave Charlotte and drive two hours to the mountains for the day and pull ripe apples from a lush and giving orchard—my daughter says she wants blueberries.

“Too hot,” I tell her as I consider everything I’ve ever heard about blueberries, how they need cooler northern climates and mild summers. Charlotte is too hot in the summer for blueberries—and for me too if I consider the weight of the summer rays, the thick humidity that clenches the air, and the sweat beading around my hairline and dripping down my back. The air conditioner inside my home calls to me like a pied piper. I respond without protest.

“We need to go to Alaska,” I say to my girl. “We need to travel to a place with a real winter.” I think of Anchorage, where I come from, the city I left twenty years ago.

“Will we drive?” she asks me from the back seat as we join the traffic on familiar Charlotte roads and pass storefronts I’ve seen each day for six and a half years.

“Yes,” I tell her and catch her eye in the rearview mirror. “We’ll drive to Alaska, and we’ll pick blueberries.” Waves of my imagination roll over me, and I plan how we’ll drive days home to Alaska and fill our plastic pails with mounds of violet fruit. For the few moments I have the attention of a preschooler, together she and I dream. I plant a story of a long, winding road trip across the country, along the coast of Canada, and into Alaska, all in search of berries I think we can’t pick here in Charlotte.

This is my seventh summer in Charlotte. Six and a half years now in a city I thought might be a passing-through home. But my husband, my girls, and I, we are still here—beginning our seventh summer. Seven. The days of creation, the colors in a rainbow, the number of completion. Is seven also the number of years that signifies Charlotte is now the foundation for my family’s life?

Many summers ago, when I was a child in Alaska, my parents, my sister, and I collected pails of high-bush blueberries from first the slope of a mountain and then later the valley close by. We hiked into the hills near Anchorage and plucked the jewels that clung near tiny leaves, handfuls plopping in the bucket and at least as many more bursting in my mouth.

“Blueberry jam,” my mother declared, and she used a recipe a friend with extensive Alaskan roots had given our transplanted family. A recipe to boil the berries, stir in cups of granulated sugar and other ingredients I can’t recall. We set a row of jelly jars across the kitchen countertop and inhaled the fragrance of syrupy sweet. My mother poured the deep violet jam into each jar, and my sister and I helped tighten the lids. We used black permanent markers to write down the date and lined the pantry with jars of homemade blueberry jam. For the next few months whenever we wanted jam with warm slices of toast or paired with peanut butter sandwiches—perhaps all the way until that spring—we drew jars of jam from the pantry, unscrewed the lid, and remembered the slope of a mountain and the taste of fresh blueberries.

My mother is planning to leave my hometown of Anchorage and move to my Charlotte neighborhood. My father left when my parents’ marriage ended years ago, but my mother stayed and has remained now for forty-three winters of navigating ice-caked roads. And forty-three summers in mild weather offering just enough respite from the snow. My mother wants to be near her granddaughters. She wants them to come spend weekends with her and visit her on sweltering summer days. My mother has never spent a full summer in Charlotte, but soon she will. Sometimes in the midst of the Charlotte summer, when the heat bears down with an even greater intensity, I think of my Anchorage mountains. I think of temperatures ten, twenty, thirty degrees cooler. I think of days perfect for the flourishing of wild Alaskan blueberries—and overcast heavens spilling forth the crisp comfort of home.

•••

On the phone, on an ordinary day this summer, my mother tells me that she will put her house on the market in autumn, that she will pack her possessions, leave Alaska, and create a home down the road from me in Charlotte. The distance between my family and her will compress to mere streets, to a number of houses between, no longer the stuff of a thousand miles thrice over. I know these happenings usher in a time of the beauty of generations entwined, but I taste a slight bitterness in my mouth and the words slow.

“Wow. It’s sad,” I say when I think of her home sold and the way I’ll no longer be able to tell people my mother lives in Alaska.

My mother echoes my words. “It is sad,” she replies and there is a long pause in our conversation.

My daughters play down the road at a summer camp, running around a playground, sucking on ice popsicles, and living the lazy days as I once did far away in Anchorage. I stand in my garage, preparing to leave to go pick them up from a day of fun. My mother is coming to us. Next year she may be preparing to go pick up her granddaughters from a day at camp, bring them back to her house, and watch them create imaginary games at the edge of the woods in her new back yard. As I drive the couple of miles down the road, I recall my mother’s back deck and the mountains the color of blueberries in the distance and the way we were living like Alaska would always be home. I have gorged myself on the reality of a life rooted somewhere. Even as I’ve left Alaska, my mother’s presence there allows me to taste these ties to a familiar place. And with my mother’s words, with the few months left, I find the flavor I long to hold beginning to evaporate into nothing but memories.

I pull into the camp parking lot and pause a moment to glance at the height of the surrounding trees and the expanse of the manicured lawn. The months ahead will bring with it laughter and long hugs, shared meals and creation of the future—something new to alleviate the weight of the loss of my childhood home pressing against my chest but perhaps never dissipating.

•••

Days after I speak with my mother, my family and I spend a Saturday a few hours from Charlotte. We pass the afternoon on a farm on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, sipping cold drinks, seated on stools in an open-air tea house void of walls, windows, and doors. In each direction we turn, we spy plants and shrubs used in this eco-friendly business. Lavender and jasmine. Hyssop and hibiscus too. A couple of hummingbirds hover near a clump of leaves, their wings a blur. Bees buzz around, and I envision raw honey sold in canning jars. When I purchase my glass of lavender lemonade, I spot a sign that reads, PICK BLUEBERRIES HERE.

Blueberries? Here on this plot of land lit with summer heat, never knowing the chill of real winter cold? The girls and I wander past picnic benches and a makeshift playground to rows and rows and rows of blueberry bushes. We pluck the berries and begin to fill a quart-size crate to brimming, working steadily in the shade of a few trees, stripping each bush of its bounty. My girls want to move further down the row, but I keep us in the shade, the brute sun sure to transform the fun of berry picking into absolute drudgery. After we fill our quart and before we wander back to the tea house replete with spinning fans and cups of ice water, I take a photo of my youngest holding the cardboard container of berries. We stand not on the slope of a mountain, but instead on this flat patch of ground beneath a grove of trees.

“We didn’t have to drive all the way to Alaska,” I tell my daughter as she poses with her blueish-purple treasure. Here, just a few hours from our home, the blueberries grow in quantity enough to satiate and satisfy.

•••

PATRICE GOPO is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. She is the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way (August 2018), an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. She lives with her family in North Carolina.

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We Were Never Alone

Photo by Gina Easley

By Antonia Malchik

About two years ago, my sister and her family reached the edge of a financial cliff, one far too familiar to far too many Americans. My husband and I talked about the choices they had, the importance of being there for family during hard times, and our deep desire for privacy. And then we invited them to move in with us because in an America where the average person’s wages have stagnated for forty years and counting, what choices do any of us have?

Before we started sharing a house, I’d spent years working towards a zero-waste home. Paper towels were replaced with cut-up cloths from worn-out bath and tea towels. All food scraps were composted—even chicken bones after they’d been stripped of meat and drained of protein in a stock pot. Every plastic grocery bag at supermarkets and pharmacies and farm stands was politely refused. I bought raw milk straight from the farm in half-gallon Mason jars once a week and packed my kids’ snacks and lunches in cloth snack bags or little stainless steel containers.

I bought a lot of cloth snack bags and stainless steel containers and reusable grocery bags, all of which arrived in oversized cardboard boxes padded with puffed-up plastic bubbles. I used untold gallons of oil driving to farm stands and milk producers and butchers and flour mills to avoid buying food wrapped in plastic packaging. So much oil to save a certain amount of plastic, but to me it felt important, a contribution to shifting society away from dependence on disposables.

My niece was three when we started living together. She had an individually-wrapped organic fruit leather almost every night after dinner. She’d run over to the snack cupboard, where we kept the shared organic crackers and the big batch of granola I made for the household every week, and bring the package back to my sister or her husband. They ripped it open from the tiny slit at the top, placed there for the smooth convenience expected in a consumer culture where every scant resource of the planet is bent to the will of our ease, or our pleasure.

The fruit leathers are delicious. Sometimes I’d let my daughter have one. Not often because foods like fruit leather and raisins are nearly as bad for children’s teeth as candy, I’ve been told by pediatric dentists. They snuggle into the grooves of molars and the sticky residue is hard to brush out.

Sometimes I ate one, too. After a childhood of daily Pepsis and powdered milk and an almost complete absence of dental care, my teeth are shot anyway. I have more fillings than teeth, and three poorly-shaped crowns. I’ve lost track of my root canals.

The fruit leather’s wrapper went in the trash. There was always a lot of plastic in there. Soft, pliable wrappings and baggies. Crinkly plastic bags. Diapers and overnight pull-ups. The firm-flexible lids of yogurt containers.

The trash was full of food, too. It pained me to throw carrot ends and coffee grounds and the strings from beans into the garbage, but that started before my sister’s family moved in, when we’d relocated to a neighborhood where compost bins attracted deer and neighborhood dogs, as well as bears and mountain lions.

The fruit leather wrappers and food and thin plastic grocery bags headed to the landfill every Tuesday. They were dumped and buried with all our other trash, closed in the womb of land that surrounds and nurtures us. From there, they compressed on top of the aquifer that a local farmer had recently gotten the rights to tap for the water bottling plant he wants to build. Siphoning water from hundreds of feet under clay and sand and rock to pipe into molded plastic bottles that will be shipped to the hands of consumers reaching out for a convenient guzzle of cool mountain water. A picture of our valley, with its snow-capped peaks, will probably grace the bottle. And maybe the water will contain microscopic particles from the fruit leather wrappers that departed our house in plastic bags, nestled next to the chicken carcasses and diapers.

The living situation was difficult. We were squeezed together in a small house where my two school-aged kids and my sister’s preschooler bounced around on their blow-up Rody donkeys and played dress-up and shared a wide variety of cold viruses and stomach bugs. We adults managed meals and tried unsuccessfully to give one another the privacy we all craved. We thought constantly about the day when we could live in our home spaces as we wished without having to adapt to one another.

We all tried so hard, tried to get along, tried to meet one another’s needs, tried to step quietly around the house when others were sleeping and one of us needed to go to work early. It’s a testament to how much we care about one another that we were able to do this with minimal (though not nonexistent) friction. But every day I looked at the fruit leather wrappers and plastic grocery bags and thought about endocrine disruptors and the floating Pacific garbage patch and the damaged health of humans and ecological zones near the chemical plants that make these objects and wondered: what is the point of learning to live well together if we change our ecosystem beyond our species’ ability to adapt? And yet, what was the point of all my plastic-saving angst if we can’t learn to live well together?

•••

In August 1941, as Hitler’s Army Group North blew up roads and train lines in ever-closer encroachment on Leningrad in the Soviet Union, my father’s mother and her two older children, my aunt and uncle, took the last train out of the city. They spent a month living on kasha—hot buckwheat cereal—in the train car with other families, winding through the country to avoid bombed rail lines before landing in the Ural Mountains. Government mandates assigned the war refugees to local residents’ homes, and the family my relatives were housed with hated them. They hated sharing their space, hated having Leningraders in their home, hated being forced to split their resources with refugees.

Once there, my grandmother, a metallurgical engineer, worked as a manager at the metallurgical factory, and nights she worked on the factory line. When she was home she chopped wood to keep her children, and the other family, warm, since the grown sons who lived in the house refused to do so on principle. She grew potatoes to feed her kids and gathered mushrooms in the woods, while in Leningrad my grandfather, a nuclear engineer, continued his factory work and every month watched thousands around him starve to death during the first winter of the Siege of Leningrad. During a stealth mission to carry messages out of the city across enemy lines, he was nearly hit by a German bomb and fell into frozen Lake Ladoga along the doroga zhizni, the Road of Life that provided the only way out of the besieged city. Two nurses dragged him out of the icy water, and my grandmother finally found him in a hospital 1942, so skeletal in the near-final stages of dysentery that she said he looked like a monkey, almost unrecognizable.

At its most basic level, immigration is simply a matter of logistics. Physical logistics—how to house and feed people—and social ones—how to help them integrate into a different culture. Tensions in immigration often result from a failure to pay enough attention to and plan for those logistics, leaving everyone vulnerable to misunderstanding and resentment. Refugees, though, are not simple immigrants. Their status is sudden and unwanted and necessary, as my grandmother’s was. It’s a sad, repetitive tale of human history, that one dictator or power- or resource-hungry authoritarian wages war, or environmental devastation hits, and a country’s borders burst open with refugees, people who, until a short time before, had simply been going to work and sending their kids to school and making dinner, who are then welcomed by some but hated by others, those who wish to not have the strain of caring for them.

•••

One day two winters ago I stepped outside, while it was still dark, to look at the stars. I try to do this most mornings before getting my kids up for school. It’s my stand-in for meditation, and it became particularly important after our house folded in three more people than it was designed for—four, after my sister’s second baby was born. I craved space, quiet, privacy. We all craved it.

It was silent out there in our yard at that time of day, even in the summer when the sunlight was already growing pink over the far mountains. I loved it best when it was still dark, and the neighbors’ larches and lodgepole pines shifted in the morning chill.

High cumulus clouds divided the sky into patches of constellations. As I glanced from one star-specked patch to another, I realized that I could only see Orion’s Belt out of the side of my eye. If I looked straight at it, it disappeared; if I looked away I could see the three stars lined up bright in the periphery of my vision. I squeezed my eyes shut. A rectangle of light appeared front and center. I opened them again, and the rectangle popped shadowy and dark up against the stars. I recognized that shape. It was my iPhone.

I’d been scrolling Twitter just before I stepped outside. In recent months I’d become an addict, checking my feed obsessively, opening every article about politics, about protest, about the lessons of history, that appeared in my timeline. I tried to talk friends and colleagues out of doing the same—the world might descend into hellfire, I kept saying, but it would do it just the same whether you were checking your Facebook feed every minute or not—because the obsession with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and its results was affecting everyone’s ability to work and focus and frankly do anything productive with our lives.

I couldn’t listen to my own advice, though. I kept opening Twitter while I made my coffee just past four in the morning. My eyes always felt strained and painful afterwards but I told myself it would pass, and I needed to keep on top of things. The eyestrain didn’t pass, at least not quickly, and the truth was I didn’t need to keep on top of things. Keeping on top of things throughout every hour of every day is about as futile as trying to keep my email inbox empty. And in convincing myself that I was just checking in briefly but necessarily with the day’s news, I was blinding myself to the solace of the night sky.

•••

The morning after the presidential election of Donald Trump, I woke up still unable to believe the results. It was late. I usually get up between four and five in the morning to work and stargaze, but instead had stayed up until three texting with my mother-in-law in England, as we’d done when watching the Brexit votes come in a few months previously. I was exhausted and bewildered, but like millions of other exhausted and bewildered Americans, as well as the millions of exhausted and elated ones, I still had to get my kids up to go to school.

I went upstairs and heard voices from the section of the house we’d curtained off for my sister and her family. On the rare mornings my kids got up before I woke them, they liked to wander in there and play with their younger cousin, so I peeked around the curtain. My sister was on the couch nursing her baby. I’d been wanting to hold myself together for my kids, but that resolve evaporated on seeing my sister’s stunned, disbelieving expression.

Everyone’s eyes perceived the election differently. To mine, it culminated in mass acceptance that the rule of law and democratic ideals could be subsumed under hatred, desperation, and fear of a mythical “other.” I had to remind myself of one of the hard truths of America, one that someone of my skin color is mostly insulated from: that for many people, the rule of law and democratic ideals had never worked in the first place. Pale-skinned, middle-class, and upper-class liberals, or people like me who’d grown up white and poor and Christian and progressive, who’d always believed a better world was within our abilities to create, were just facing it directly for perhaps the first time. After all, the ground I step on when I look at the stars, the mountains and larch trees I love so much, are all part of land that was forcibly taken from Native American nations and handed to homesteaders like my great-great grandparents. The public lands and wilderness areas I now defend with my votes and phone calls have been, for tens of thousands of years, home to people who have now spent centuries facing the traumas of invasion, genocide, and betrayal.

•••

A few weeks later, near Christmastime and less than a month from when my family and I would move out of the shared household, my sister and I were talking in the kitchen about our father’s mother. When the Siege of Leningrad was over, four years after it began, and the family returned to Leningrad from the Ural Mountains, it was to find their apartment taken over by an autocratic Communist Party bureaucrat. My grandparents, my aunt and uncle, my father (who’d been born in the Urals), and our grandfather’s mother were allowed to live and sleep in one small room. The kitchen was shared communally with other families.

“How did she do it?” I asked my sister. Though we loved each other, and our husbands got along, the strain of living together had felt extreme. But we also knew that those strains were based mostly on small and inconsequential differences in how we preferred to exist in the privacy of our home. The forces pressing on our grandmother’s life were exponentially larger. How did she keep sane, keep moral, keep honest and humane, in a situation where little about what she valued, or loved, or honored, had any space?

“I don’t know,” said my sister.

“I keep saying I want my life back,” I said, as she jiggled the now-eight-month-old on her knee and I waggled my fingers to make my newest niece smile. “I’m sure you guys have said the same thing.” To which she answered, “Yup.”

Tangled together physically and psychologically in this small house, we wanted our priorities back, our ability to direct our own schedules, moderate our footfalls to our own families’ sleeping habits, maintain a level of cleanliness or graceful dishabille as we saw fit, not to constantly bend, change, trim ourselves to the lives and needs of others. Don’t we all want that? Like a poorly thought-out immigration policy, we had failed to plan the logistics of living together successfully, although we were learning. I wanted my sister and her family to stop using so much plastic. They wanted me to be less twitchy about toast crumbs crunching on the floor and less lackadaisical about the quality of our shared dinners. We’d hit a point, all of us, when we couldn’t change, couldn’t adapt, any more, without feeling that we were changing who we were.

My father’s parents were deeply ethical people who managed to get along in a profoundly compromised world. My mother’s parents were lifelong progressives, her father a Montana rancher, her mother a live-and-let-live Episcopalian. My sisters and I practically have a genetic blueprint for seeing the world from others’ points of view, for adapting. We have the self-awareness to want to bend further, to be the better humans. And even we found we could only adapt so far. Photographs of my paternal grandmother show deep, anxious lines between her eyebrows, but also kindness in her eyes and years of smiling about the lips. She knew something about living with the worst of others while maintaining faith in the goodness of humanity. She knew things about tolerance and adaptation that I will spend the rest of my life trying to learn.

There is no instruction sheet for how to meet the world when it swiftly becomes a place you don’t recognize. But there is, actually, a qualitative difference between wanting one’s life back and those who want to “take our country back” through violence and expulsion: the desire to live well with others, to understand that all our spaces are shared with people whose lives we might not understand. And that at any moment we, like my grandmother, could become refugees, could transform into the “other.”

•••

I attended an environmental writers conference some years ago, a collection of poets and essayists, geologists, and ethnobotanists, people from many different disciplines brought together in the Vermont woods through shared care for this planet and worry about its future.

A few of us went for a rainy walk one afternoon, in a forest much wetter and leafier and more disorienting than the pine-carpeted paths of my Rocky Mountain homeland. As we walked through and under dripping leaves and paths that kept disappearing on us, a perfect setting for fraught existential questions, I wanted to ask everyone: what worries you most? We’d had frank discussions of environmental devastation and climate change throughout the week, so, I thought, let’s get down to brass tacks. Let’s air our fears.

It took that walk and me asking everyone else the question that haunted me to articulate, finally, what I was so scared of: not that it—civilization, humanity, futures and supply chains we can depend on—would all go to shit. For many people who pay attention to actual climate change predictions and our lack of commitment to doing anything about it, that is now assumed. No, I wasn’t worried about everything going to shit, or at least, I was, but it wasn’t my deepest worry. What worried me, what continues to worry me, was that it would all go to shit and we won’t have learned anything. That remaining pockets of the human race would start all over again with wars and greed and resource hoarding and violence toward whatever or whomever they deemed “other,” including the entire non-human world.

If the best hope we have is that enough of us will manage to survive and that we’ll make the same mistakes all over again, what’s the point of us? What is the point of saving this beautiful planet from the worst ravages of our fossil fuel addictions if we don’t learn how mutually interdependent we all are? If we can’t learn to treat one another, and to share our spaces and countries, from a starting point of kindness?

Or, as my brother-in-law who spent too long putting up with my exasperating fixation on crumbs on the kitchen floor might say more bluntly: Could we try not being assholes to each other?

•••

The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, co-written by the Dalai Lama and an American psychiatrist, was the first book I read after the 2016 election. It’s not an easy read. The Buddhist practices and neuroscience research build a path out of the primal human jungle that answers so readily to tribalism, but it has to first walk through some gut-wrenching places. The early-1990s genocide in Rwanda, when neighbors and relatives turned on and slaughtered one another. The mid-1990s Serbian war, when Serbs and Croats who’d lived in the same villages for generations dehumanized and killed each other. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. A belief in difference, culminating in beliefs of racial or tribal or cultural superiority, drove these events, exacerbated by intentional radicalism.

The mindfulness methods used to counter those beliefs seem painstakingly slow and impossibly small. Look at pictures of people of different ethnicities, one method suggests, and for each face, ask yourself what kind of vegetable that person might like—a method that has been shown to decrease active racism, to humanize every individual.

While my sister and I and our spouses subconsciously, and frequently consciously, engaged in many of these practices over the year-plus-a-bit that we lived together (focusing most on the benefits to our kids of a shared household—they loved living with extended family), it seems a ludicrous effort when set against the reality of white supremacy normalized in the White House and angry diatribes unleashed against those perceived to be outsiders.

What else can we do, though, besides gather to protest and at the same time make these small steps, these tiny efforts? Progressive values may in the end win over each generation successively; that doesn’t mean the neurological structures that make tribalism and racism easy paths to follow will simply disappear.

The ability and desire to be the better humans are like the stars, though, ever-present no matter how hard they are to see in troubled times. No single day since the election of America’s forty-fifth president has lacked a story of violence, prejudice, bigotry, hatred, misogyny, or racism. The election itself was like a giant eruption on the surface of humanity, gathering together elements of anti-immigrant strife in Europe, sectarian war in the Middle East, growing authoritarianism in Russia and Turkey and the Philippines, and even a backlash of hatred against environmentalists simply seeking clean water, clean air, and less endocrine-disrupting, ocean-choking plastic pollution for all people.

But those news stories also never addressed the increase in small everyday kindnesses. How could they? These extra efforts are going on all around us, a hundred, a thousand times a day, and we’re all part of them, but they are not news in the traditional sense. The doors held open, the chasing after people with dropped gloves, the encouragement to tell one another’s stories and help new acquaintances find their places in unfamiliar worlds, the clearing of a neighbor’s snowy sidewalk, the eyes met and held for a beat longer than usual, acknowledging one another’s equal humanity. The family members we open our homes to, the babysitting of the newborn and the sweeping up of the crumbs, all out of the burning simplicity of love.

•••

ANTONIA MALCHIK’s essays and articles have appeared in Orion, Aeon, High Country News, The Atlantic, and many other publications. Her first book, A Walking Life, will be published by Da Capo Press in May 2019. She lives in northwest Montana, and her website is www.antoniamalchik.com.

Read more FGP essays by Antonia Malchik.

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The Age of Water

Photo by Gina Easley

By Eliza Thomas

Seven years ago, I had my first relationship after sixteen years of being single. I was sixty-two and he was fifty-seven. I remember these numerical details because I’m trying to keep a more precise account of life now. We had a short affair, unexpected and intense, made each other happy, then unhappy, and then it ended. I don’t know if I left him with anything positive, but looking back, I’m grateful for his gift to me.

He was—and I assume still is—a swimmer. It was summer, and we’d meet after work at ponds near our small Vermont town. We started with short stretches; he swam circles around me. Gradually I became strong enough to follow him all the way across. Exercise. At my age, a form I could tolerate, even like.

Other attempts have fallen by the wayside. Exercise is a big deal in my town. People ride bikes outrageously long distances, outfitted in outlandish tight spandex; they jog in place at stoplights; they kayak and hike the highest peaks of the Green Mountains. They ski. The local Pilates classes are always filled.

When I first moved here I joined the gym and tried my best, but failed to find any healthy activity I could stick with. Stairmaster was ridiculous—the stairwell to nowhere—and the rowing machine hurt my back and wrists. The weight machines were complicated torture machines; I didn’t even go near them. My membership lapsed. Forays into outdoor exercise also hit roadblocks. Bicycles proved no match for the steep hill to my home and kayaking was out of the question. I’m too scared of heights to climb any mountain even if I wanted to, and I’m too afraid of falling to ski, even if I knew how. At one point I was certain that jogging would be the answer—so simple, so straightforward, no machines, just me and the fresh air! I bought expensive running shoes and set off optimistically down a flat path along the river. Then, after two or three minutes, I ground to a halt. I hadn’t realized how bone-jarringly hard the ground could be.

But almost every day I come across another item in the news about aging and health and mental acuity and the loss thereof, explaining that as we get older we need regular exercise in order to retain our marbles and maintain a more or less steady heartbeat. The science is relentless, the conclusions foregone. I’ve learned about the unhappy laboratory rats forced into a sedentary life-style, seen pictures of them huddled in a slough of despond, unable to find their way through their own maze, their memory now in shambles. I’ve read the studies demonstrating that running increases brain volume, albeit temporarily, and improves one’s mood. I’ve learned that sitting is unhealthy. Apparently it’s been determined that standing isn’t so great either. Our bodies were meant to move.

So perhaps my new exercise regime will save me from premature decline, even premature death. I’m lucky to have no serious health issues yet. My bones are thinning and I’ve endured a few minor broken bones, but my balance is fine. Most of the time my heart pounds away rhythmically, aside from occasional bouts of disconcerting lurchings that the doctor reassures me are totally “normal.” Still, at my age it is difficult to avoid uncomfortable calculations. For example: Was it irresponsible to get a puppy? What if I become unable to take him for walks? I’m a pianist, with a piano even older than I am, but how can I consider purchasing a newer instrument when who knows how long I’ll be able to play? And then there are those meager savings. If I live twenty more years, how can I stretch the dollars? Should I be planning for the inevitable decline now—should I be saving all my spare change in a big jar and never shop for anything frivolous ever again?

I try not to dwell on these questions too often, though sometimes in the middle of the night, waking up from one or another unnerving dream, I experience a sense of impending doom. But in the light of day I tell myself that swimming can’t hurt, and in any case I seem to have taken to it like a fish to water. So I shop with enthusiasm, treating myself to a variety of “athletic” bathing suits, specialized swimmer’s shampoos, a pair of training flippers I rarely don, and a device to help me keep track of how many pool laps I’ve just completed. I may not—do not—know many more years I will be around, but at least I can count the laps I swim every week. And in the meantime I’ll have a bathing suit that’s not too hideous and very clean hair.

During the long Vermont winters I swim at the local pool. I tell myself to aim for grace, not speed, as virtually every other swimmer plows past me in the adjoining lanes. I’ve learned to reach, stretch and glide, and I try not to splash. I’ll never get any faster, but progress is an open-ended word. For me, progress is exactly one mile, three times a week. This is good. In the water my aging body feels almost ageless, sleek and smooth. My hips are no longer stiff and achy, and my muscles actually have definition. Though I’m not entirely sure what it means, I believe my “core” is stronger now. I am also humbled by the tenacity of other women I see in the locker room getting ready to swim, all shapes and sizes, in all stages of life, of health and of sickness. I think: water is life.

In the fleeting summers I look forward to swimming outdoors. After my short affair summer ended, I tried bringing my two dogs along—there are always many other dogs frolicking joyfully with their owners. Surely, I thought, my dogs would join in the fun. But my older dog, a dignified, gentle lab mix named Monday, disdained water—she wouldn’t even wade—while Mario, my silly young setter, became frantic to save me, or himself, or possibly some phantom of his overactive imagination, from drowning. He plunged in after me, churning up the water and clawing my latest bathing suit to shreds.

So now I go alone to the pond. In keeping with my resolve to keep an accurate account of life, now that it seems to be passing so quickly, I’ve pored over regional topographical maps, but so far I haven’t been able to measure the length of the pond with any precision. Maybe it’s just as well. Maybe some spans just can’t be calculated; maybe it doesn’t matter how far it is across and back. For now, it feels long enough. I emerge from the water at the end of my swim like some early ancestral amphibian, crawling over the rocks of the shoreline, gasping for air, finding my feet, trying out my lungs in the new environment. Then I find my towel, flop down, and triumph in my evolutionary transformation.

There are a few downsides. For one thing, the water seems to be getting colder. Perhaps this is an effect of the aging process or a chilling harbinger of climate change. Whatever the reason, even at the height of summer, I sometimes find myself shivering uncontrollably in the water, and by the time I finish my forty-minute swim my hands are numb and bluish, my teeth clacking audibly. It’s embarrassing, though not as embarrassing as the items I’ve recently purchased will be, assuming I ever manage to get them on: one purple neoprene vest, one skin-tight black neoprene jacket with impossible pants to match, and a lime green neoprene swim cap.

For another, I’m very near-sighted, and for the first few years of swimming I relied on blind instinct to find my way back to shore. So I was surprised and encouraged to find prescription goggles in generic form for a mere sixteen dollars. (I bought several pairs.) It helps to see where I’m going, but now that I see clearly, there are times I’d really rather not. I now make out with ease the tangles of weeds, globs of murkiness, disconcerting swarms of tiny fish. Far below, I discern the shapes of larger creatures slipping through the darkness. They look ominous and deadly, though they are probably only carp. Still, I’d rather not know what lies beneath.

And finally, there have been a few times in bad weather, struggling against wind and choppy waves, when I’ve thought: Maybe I won’t make it. I will die here. And then people will say at my funeral, “Ah, but at least she died doing what she loved.” I would hate that. I don’t want to drown. I don’t want to die, not here, not now, not in the middle of this pond. I don’t even want to think about it. I haven’t told anyone yet that I do not want to be embalmed—a fate, I think, worse than death. I don’t want to be discovered, days later, bobbing/floating/sinking in this murky water. It would be so terrible. And then there are my dogs, starving to death at home or, ironically, dying of thirst. So. The admission that I might be a little afraid has led to another purchase—a “swim buddy,” a small orange inflatable sausage that trails behind me across the lake. It even has a whistle. Just in case.

Despite these downsides, I love to swim outdoors. The sensation of gliding horizontally, the solitude and open space, the rhythm of my breath, the rocking balance, the absence of the fear of falling—it’s all gloriously different from being vertical and walking on the dry, unyielding ground. I don’t get to look around much, head down most of the time. But halfway across I roll on my back and rest. I wonder why anyone would wish to walk, walk upright, on water, when it is a wonder enough to float along its interface with air. I look up at the endless sky, watch the drift of the clouds, and turn to the surrounding woods along the shore, edged with the countless hues of the forests. On calm days, the trees and sky are mirrored perfectly in the still surface of the pond. Every detail is in place, only upside down. The image is so seamless that it’s hard to distinguish reality from its reflection, difficult to determine where land meets water.

Then I take off my prescription goggles for the old perspective that nearsightedness allows. Colors quiver slightly and merge; the outlines of people and dogs on the far beach mingle into a vague scatter. Mysterious forms hover in midair across the water, while the forests are billowy clouds, spilling their green along the shore. Sometimes the shoreline itself vanishes in a mist. I float in the middle of the pond, arms outstretched to a world that shimmers in the light.

•••

Inevitably, however, light casts a shadow. It’s fall as I write this. Outdoor swimming is over for the year, the days are shortening, and my dog Monday, she who disdained water, has died. She was far too old—over seventeen years—and unhappy at the end. I finally made the call, and a man with a heart of gold and the patience of a saint came to the house and sat with us for an hour before giving her last shot. The distance was just an immeasurable sigh, and she was gone. The nice man carried her frail old body away and a few weeks later dropped off a jar of ashes on my doorstep. Mario seems to have taken her absence in stride, but I’m still overwhelmed by the emptiness she left behind, still feel the complicated regrets of having had her put down, of having waited too long, of having not spent more time with her in the last months. All those hours swimming, and I could have been home with her. I have not yet figured out what to do with her ashes. I feel bad about that too.

But the other night I dreamed I was flying, only it was underwater. I sensed a movement, a dark reflection hovering nearby, and for a moment I was apprehensive. Then I saw her. She was right alongside me, my beautiful old dog, my own beautiful ghost swim buddy. Our eyes met in recognition, as if we’d been doing this forever. We were skimming together just beneath the surface. Miraculously, breathing was no problem. Our bodies were sleek and strong, our movements ageless and full of grace. We wove in and out with the current for a while, then together we turned to dive deeper, swooping down through the water, soaring effortlessly, effortlessly alive.

•••

ELIZA THOMAS is a piano teacher and accompanist.  She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her dog Mario.

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