Category Archives: Nature

moon with spiky tendrils in a dark sky with silhouetted tree branches

Short Essay: Duet

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I fell asleep watching a mindless show on my iPad, woke up an hour later, turned off the iPad, and the light. Eleven p.m. The cat was curled against my side like a cake hot out of the oven. 

Sometimes the cat’s heat wakes me from an initial doze but this was different. I heard a sound outside, an almost-music. I listened and waited until it came again — an owl, a female Great Horned Owl. Her mate joined the song with his lower, darker voice.

The owls must have been just above my room in the tall white pine tree that crowds this side of the house. Even with the windows closed against the cold, their calls were loud through my chronic tinnitus and the glass. I lifted the quilt and sat on the side of the bed to hear better. It was like lowering myself onto the first step down into a swimming pool as the cold wrapped my legs and arms my bare feet whispered on the floor.

I pulled the window shade aside, and looked up, trying not to make a sound. The lower tree branches were black silhouettes against the starlit sky. I couldn’t see the owls, but I imagined they could see me.

Also invisible in the dark, the virus washed over the world, buzzing like a Dremel inside human cells and on hard surfaces.

But what a gift — the wild voices and unconcern of night predators, the thrill of being close without fear in the certainty that I was not their prey.

 

March 22, 2020, Freeville, NY, USA. ©Patti Witten, all rights reserved.

two deer grazing in a field with trees and a hill in the misty background

Fiction: The Day After

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This is a chapter from a novel in progress. ©2020 Patti Witten, all rights reserved

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Fiction: Robert and Phil

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This is an excerpt from Lowlands, a novel in progress.

What was this AA thing about guilt and forgiveness, the mysterious transformation from resentment and fear to serenity and amends? Robert had taught the Big Book’s line on it to his sponsees, but it still confounded him. He could not figure it out for himself, for Maylin and Cynthia. Jessica, Leah. Much less with Phil, who’d left Maylin to drown.

The fury he’d felt during his failed attempt to confront Phil just days before had calmed, and after the meeting, he went back to the hospital. This time, he parked and sat in the truck with the window down, and he noticed everything: the dusk, the daytime birds going to roost in the trees, and the night insects winding up. And he thought about her. How free he was to open the door and go where he wanted while Maylin had drowned in Phil’s truck.

The automatic doors sighed open for him and he stepped into the lobby. A woman behind the curved prow of the reception desk did not look up, but a uniformed security guard standing against the wall gazed at him. 

“Can I help you?” the woman said. 

Robert leaned on the tall counter and asked for Phil Maser’s room number. She looked it up, told him, and warned that visiting ended soon. 

He moved down the chilly corridor in his stained T-shirt, work boots, and jeans, feeling like a walking stump, a dumb, handless animal, left knee catching and belt cutting into his belly. Feeling old because Phil and Maylin were so young.

An elevator, a hallway. He passed a corral of workstations where nurses talked and typed, faces lit by blue screens. Then he was at the door. 

Phil lay under a sheet in the high hospital bed, eyes closed. A fluorescent light behind his head threw shadows on his face. Dark bruises ringed his eyes and crossed the bridge of his nose. His beard had grown out, and his hair was unwashed. One arm was wrapped in a bulky bandage from fingers to elbow. His other arm was bare, scratched and bruised, an IV taped to the back of his hand.

Robert knocked once on the doorframe. “Can I come in?” 

Phil roused and blinked. “Oh, it’s you. Yeah.” 

The bed buzzed and levitated Phil’s upper body, like a boat lift. He looked at Robert, his glassy eyes and expression slack with narcotics. 

Robert sat in the chair beside the bed, knees shaking, his hands cold, and forced out the words he should say and not the other things — you were drunk, why did you do it, couldn’t you save her? 

“I’m sorry this happened. Just, sorry.” 

“I’m sorry, too. Are you OK?” 

Robert folded, sobbed. When he regained control he looked up at Phil, a perfect rendering of the cartoon Coyote after an explosion. He wanted to laugh. 

“You look terrible, man!” 

“So do you.” Phil tried to smile. 

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Robert stood up. “Take care,” was all he could think to say.

On the way home, he leaned out the window into the humid night wind and listened to the truck’s low-pitched Tuvan throat song harmonizing with the doppler rise and fall of insects in the ditches and hovering woods. This time, when he got home, he would tell Cynthia about seeing Phil and the regret he’d felt during the meeting — not about his secret shame, that day with Jessica and what happened to Maylin. Not that. He wanted her to understand and let him back into her heart.

Suddenly, a deer flashed at the side of the road and leaped in front of the truck, missing it by inches. The truck idled at an angle in the middle of the deserted road, headlights staring. He rested his forehead on the steering wheel and wept again, surprised that there was more inside him. The pain of weeping was terrible, as bad as any bone he’d ever broken.

He thought, this is defeat, a surrender I never knew I could feel. Now that it was out, he was afraid it would never stop, and it would carry him to the end of the world. 

He pulled up the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his face. The dash lights glowed and crickets sang their stream of consciousness from every direction. An eggshell moon stood above the tree line in the east.

Out there in the dark along a hedgerow, the lucky deer zig-zagged on its impossibly thin legs, big-eyed and alert for the kind of danger it could understand, with just two strategies to face it — run, or keep perfectly still.

© Patti Witten, all rights reserved

Crow landing on a snow covered field

Fiction: Hospital

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This is an excerpt from Lowlands, a novel in progress.

Phil could see the dials: speedometer, clock, RPM. But his arms and legs were pinned under something dense and heavy, dragging him down. Someone pinched the back of his hand and his senses spread. Light, sound, confinement. He swam up to consciousness, sharing a bed with his old enemies, old friends — pain and hospital paraphernalia. 

A bright light shone behind his head but the room was slippery with nighttime. Buzzing voices came from the hallway beyond the open door. A monitor beeped, out of sight. The pinch was an IV needle in the back of his right hand. The rest of his body was a maze of dread. 

A female nurse came through the door trailing a breeze that wafted over his face. She reached over his head and the beeping stopped. She turned his wrist and looked at her watch. 

“Are you dreaming, hon? You awake now? How’s your pain? On a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt.” 

How’s your pain? Phil tried to answer but it came out in a cough. He watched the nurse lower his hand and close it around a thumb button on a thick cord. 

“It’s a medication pump. Press this if you have too much pain. Can you do it? You have a catheter so don’t try to get up. Do you understand?”

She held a plastic cup and a straw for him to drink. He discovered that his bottom lip was bruised. Something about the straw bothered him and looked at her over the cup. He had a question.

“You’re OK,” she said. “You were in an accident. You have to stay in bed now.”

He pushed the straw from his lips. “I know,” he croaked. “What time is it?” Then, “How bad am I? What’s wrong with me?”

“Your left arm is fractured, and your pelvis. Your right knee is sprained and you have some cuts and bruises. But you’re going to be OK. It’s very early now. Go back to sleep if you can. The doctor will see you in the morning.” The nurse straightened and pointed at a whiteboard hanging on the wall next to the bed. “That’s me, I’m Becky. Oh, let me change the date because it’s tomorrow.” 

She pulled the top off a marker with a pop, and the felt tip squeaked on the board. “I’ll be back.” Becky left the room in a puff of wind.

She had written “Sunday, August 17, 2008.” Because it’s tomorrow. It almost meant something and he tried to puzzle it out. His left arm was wrapped in layers of thick bandaging. A light blanket covered his hips and legs. He wanted to look, to be sure everything was still there. But when he shifted experimentally the pain took his breath away. He found the pump and pushed the button. He pushed it again in case it didn’t work the first time. 

The next time he woke up it was day and there was a lot of noise out in the hall. A man wearing hospital scrubs was fiddling with something below the edge of his bed. 

“Hello, sir. How we doing today?” The man didn’t wait for an answer and left with a bag of dark yellow urine. 

A doctor wearing a white coat and a tie came in, exchanged a few words with the nurse — a new one, not Becky, and asked him how he was feeling while he looked at the chart. 

“We need to perform a surgical procedure on your broken arm to fix the fractures, OK? You’ll be asleep. OK?” He uttered some medical jargon and offered a clipboard.

“No, not OK,” Phil said. “Can’t you just leave it?” He wanted to fight. The doctor remained impassive, explaining the technicalities of the fractures and the surgery. Finally, Phil gave in and made his signature — a distorted scribble on the paper.

People came and went while he dozed fitfully. It was too bright and too noisy in the room. He tried lifting the not-broken arm to cover his face in the crook of his elbow, but the IV stopped him, so he felt for the pain pump in the folds of sheet and blanket. 

 “Hey, you’re awake.” His brother Kevin. Fresh haircut, smooth button-down shirt, fixed smile. 

“It’s you,” said Phil. “Tell me what happened.” 

Kevin sighed. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“You tell me.”

“OK,” he began. “So, today is Sunday and you’ve been here since Friday night. Well, since early Saturday morning, a day and a half? You’re pretty banged up but you’re not paralyzed or anything. A flood pushed your truck off the road into a ravine. A flash flood from the rain, do you remember that?” 

He remembered. 

“They said you’re very lucky you survived.”

Phil swallowed. “What about . . .” He couldn’t say her name.

“OK, this part is bad.” Kevin sighed. “The girl who was with you, she did not make it.”

People were talking in the hall. Carts rolled by, shoes squeaked on the polished floor. Kevin leaned closer. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but, you know, you’ve been pretty out of it until now.” He waited. “How are you, are you in pain??”

Phil closed his eyes. He knew she was dead, had known the whole time, but the blackness and the sounds and the water rolled up like a video he could not shut off. The feel of his feet pushing against her body, the rage. Panic. 

After a minute he asked, “Is Mom here?”

“On her way.” Kevin sighed again and straightened. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, dropping his hip. It was the whole body equivalent of an eye roll and summed up what they both knew about their mother. “Do you want me to call anybody for you? I didn’t know if you wanted me to. Like a friend, or your boss.”

“No, it’s OK.” It was lucky that Kevin was the one to tell him, and not their mother, who was a handful. Another not-Becky nurse came in with the usual breeze and loud voice. Phil turned his head away and waited for her to leave. Then he asked, “Has anyone been here besides you?” 

“Actually, some cops, but you were still out of it. I don’t think anyone else. The funeral is on Saturday. I don’t know if you’ll be able to go, or if you want to. Do you want me to do anything? Flowers, make a call?”

“I won’t go. They won’t want me.” He tried to feel angry or sad or ashamed, but those things were outside his body and might be lying behind a curtain in a different bed with a different Phil. 

“Why not?”

“Trust me.” Phil lifted his head from the pillow, wincing. He had the idea that if he talked to Robert now he could reasonably explain it wasn’t his fault. He was looking for his cell phone and realized it was gone, of course. Kevin reached into his pocket and offered his. Phil stared at it. 

“Fuck. I don’t know the number, even if I wanted to.”

“Who?”

“Robert. Her father.” Phil let his head drop back to the pillow. 

“I can look it up,” said Kevin.

“No, don’t.” He closed his eyes and pushed the button. Once, then again.

Short Essay: “L” is for Lucky and Liniment

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When we were girls in the early 1970s, my two sisters and I were lucky, so lucky. We lived in Connecticut, in a historic rambling brick and clapboard colonial home painted white with black shutters in the deep woods. Small brown bats slept behind the shutters during the day and a long green sweep of lawn and gardens led to a pond guarded by weeping willows and bullfrogs. It was heaven.

But the luckiest way that we were lucky was to have a horse. Nightmare was a sturdy, glossy, black mare with some draft horse in her unremarkable pedigree. She tolerated everything we did to her, from fawning on her to climbing and jumping from her back to pushing through brambles, to pulling her thick mane and braiding it with brightly colored yarn, to bathing her with blue Dawn detergent under cold water from the hose.

We kept Nightie at a nearby riding stable. She was so sturdy that unlike the touchy thoroughbreds I would ride as an adult, Nightie was never injured, except for one oozing wound of proud flesh on her right hind ankle that didn’t heal for the longest time. Still, we watched the other girls treating their more sophisticated horses with fascinating ointments and liniments for sore muscles and pulled tendons, and we also applied these lotions to Nightie’s legs and practiced bandaging them snugly but not tightly with cotton fleece and wide wraps, even though she did not need them. Such a patient horse.

The liniment everyone used was an alcohol, menthol and who-knows-what concoction that tingled when you tipped it into your hand from the brown glass bottle and rubbed it down her cannon bones and hocks and down the straight-as-saplings tendons at the back of Nightie’s lower legs. We pronounced it ab-zore-bean. Decades later when I mentioned it to other grown-up horsewomen, they laughed and corrected me. The proper pronunciation was ab-zore-bean, they said.

But I still say it the old way in my mind.

flower

Essay: Bringing in the Hay

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Bringing In The Hay

It’s late July, the grass is above average tall, and if it ever stops raining the farmers will get a lot of hay in.

My neighbors to the north have a small farm. They are a young family who’ve grown up in the life of farming here in Dryden. Dana and Carol were high school sweethearts and now they are in their early thirties with three small children. Dana wants to have steers on his 80 acres—in fact, he wants to buy some of the adjoining 600—but that’s still on the wish list. For now, Dana hays the open fields every summer like he did with his father growing up. This summer he has a couple of horses in the fenced pasture closest to his house, the one where he kept a steer a few years ago. They’re here because another neighbor’s horses ate all the grass at her place, plus she broke her arm, so Dana stepped in. He’s been hauling water for them in a 100-gallon utility tank tied to a small trailer behind his four-wheeler, pumping it by hand into a trough.

Nine days ago, three-and-a-half inches of rain fell in just 45 minutes. The deluge caused major flash flooding in parts of the county. I had water in my basement, not from creek overflow but because the sump pumps could not keep up and the ground was already saturated. Last year, we had a 100-year drought. Seven months of far below average rainfall, from late spring through the fall. This year, corn and soybean rotted in the fields. The horses drink from a new pond that has filled a low spot in their pasture.

Three days ago, Dana mowed the field closest to my house with his twenty-year-old tractor. That’s not a bad age for a John Deere, having replaced a truly ancient one the year before. But since then Dana has been struggling to get the hay in before another round of thunderstorms and flood warnings. He started baling yesterday but every few minutes I heard the tractor motor drop to an idle because of some problem. He didn’t get very far, and despite the near-perfect weather, the tractor went silent well before sunset. This morning help arrived.

With Dana driving and the helper walking behind the baler hitched behind the tractor, they got it all done. Dana’s bales were a bit wonky, a little crazy-shaped. Some were curved into wide letter Us. Others were twisted like square slinky toys. I listened to them work from the top of a ladder where I was cleaning the gutters until I was chased down by hornets. I was stung three times and ran around the side of the house where I examined the welts on my arm and legs and watched the heavy blue thunderheads piled in the western sky. The wind switched and turned cold as inflow rushed to meet them.

At about four that afternoon, Dana and his two older kids worked fast to bring in the bales before the evening thunderstorms. They buzzed around the field loading 6-8 bales in the 4-wheeler’s trailer (minus water tank), ran them to the hay wagon, loaded the bales on the hay wagon, then rushed back to the field for more bales — wash, rinse, repeat. According to the weather radar, the storms heading our way were slow moving but intense, running in a line from southwest to northeast, from Corning to Ithaca. At 7 p.m. the dark sky was pierced by lightning and frequent thunder. The four-wheeler buzzed and voices shouted until the rain began.

My stomach was a twist of anxiety about these approaching storms, for a different reason. On my weather app, I looked at the huge clots of orange and red rain cores, trying to gauge if/when the deluge would hit. I had to do some talking to myself and slow breathing to calm down. I thought about the recent flood, knowing all too well that if we lost power the sump pump would not run. To prepare, I moved the cat’s litter box and the dehumidifier to what passes for high ground down there. There wasn’t anything else to move that hadn’t already been ruined in the previous flood. I ran the worst case scenario and felt my gut twist.

So I thought instead about Dana and his family. About the bales of hay in danger of being soaked and ruined, become worthless due to mold, making all that work for nothing. What must it be like to desire a farming life these days, even if it’s just a small place to raise your kids and keep goats and chickens? Maybe a few steers? Day jobs must fill the void. Everything must be deferred in favor of the farm and equipment, including needed renovations to the house, vacations away, new vehicles. Three kids under 12, the youngest less than a year old.

The storm caught up to us but fortunately just a glancing blow. No prolonged, drenching rain, no flood, no loss of power. Other people had flooded basements, ruined hay, no power, and stress. But not me, not this time.

Now it is near dusk and a cool breeze is pushing the storm south and east, away to other towns, other farms. I hope they got the hay in and under cover. I hope there won’t be more storms tonight. I hope we can adjust to the new normal of weather extremes and enjoy this beautiful part of the world while it still resembles what we grew up with.

Meanwhile, I’m watching the next line of storms heading this way in a line stretching from Detroit to Toronto. Sunset is lighting up the back of that storm line in the east with a diffuse, pink glow that slides into orange and golden yellow as I watch. A rainbow stretches up to the base of the cloud and receding rain so that all you see are two curved pillars touching the earth and a dome of color suspended between. Lightning arcs beneath it.

Sometimes the drama is behind you. Sometimes it is ahead.

© 2017 Patti Witten
Photos © Patti Witten | more photos at sway2this.com

Lyric: How Can It Help to Speak of the Heart

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How can it help to speak of the heart?
Tell me about the horses
Their language of meaningful gestures
Hooves stirring the hay
At night in the dark silent barn

How can it help to speak of the world?
Tell me about the sunrise
The adorable wars of sparrows
Their street-fair circus reunions
Vise-like grip in the thunderstorm

How can it help to speak of the truth?
Tell me about the river
through forest, plain, and desert
to the salty mouth of the sea
over the silty tongues of giants

How can it help to speak of love?
Tell me about the garden
Blooms that nod or stretch or crawl
Arrived for the attention of sunshine
Stoic or showy, brave or discreet
In the brief heat of summer before the rain

How can it help to speak anymore?
Tell me about your drawing
A monster, a building, a hand-holding child
My head is a hostel for metaphors
And faithless memories, like as like not

So a bird is a baby, a touch is a star
Bits of the whole are ciphers for all
Arrayed in a brilliant expanding web
Connecting the beginning with what
Has no end

©2017 Patti Witten
photo / Patti Witten

Essay: Killdeer

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The house across the street is deserted. A modern attractive home set back from the road, it’s on a large, open lot in a neighborhood of modest homes that have nearly all been built over the past fifteen years on what used to be farmland. The home is always dark, always empty, except for one or two weeks every summer.

The owner, Monica, is a thin, tough woman in her forties or early fifties. She lived there with two or three Australian Shepherd dogs until 4 years ago. Her dogs always barked at me as I left the house, and when I returned. They barked when I mowed the lawn, or puttered around the garden. They barked until Monica hollered at them, her voice cracking with strain. The barking always resumed a few minutes later and continued until she hollered again. When she left her house in her pickup truck, they barked in their kennel behind the house.

I have spoken to Monica on just two occasions. The first was six years ago shortly after I moved here and introduced myself. She wasn’t particularly interested in me, but made up for it with surprising admissions about herself. She seemed careworn, even old for someone whose hair was still brown. She was slight and wiry, dressed in men’s faded jeans, boots, and a tan work shirt. She wore no jewelry, and her long hair was pulled into a loose ponytail under a faded baseball cap.

She talked about herself eagerly, without looking at me, describing how she built the house herself and was building another house on a parallel road a mile or two away. She told me she was not happy here, on our road. Although hers was one of the first houses on her side of the road, now there were three in close proximity — certainly close enough for the neighbors to hear the barking and to be barked at, I thought. And right on cue, Monica told me her nearest neighbors had called the sheriff about her dogs. She also said she used to train horses, but not anymore. I thought: poor dogs, poor horses. She went on to say that her parents were ailing and she was called away a lot to care for them. Poor parents, maybe. She had decided to move to the new house even though it was unfinished.

She seemed annoyed by and resentful of just about everything. She said, “I won’t have a mailbox here, are you kidding? They’ll just knock it down and steal my mail.” (This has not happened to me and my mailbox.) She said she and her building crew would be at the bar most nights if I wanted to join. Lightbulb moment.

Last summer Monica returned in her pickup truck and trailer. The dogs barked while she moved things into the house, and a sign appeared at the end of the driveway announcing a yard sale. Curious, I walked over and reminded her that I was her neighbor from across the street. She said the furniture she was selling was from the rental unit in her other house, and some of the other items had belonged to her parents. It was all junk. She invited me inside to see some more junk. I was very curious to see the inside of the house, but there was nothing personal inside, just junk. The walls were a graying shade of off-white. Dingy carpet had not been vacuumed in ages. Empty kennel crates appeared to be the only permanent furniture. Two dogs shadowed the edges of the room, low to the ground, borderline aggressive. I deliberately ignored them. But one of them stared at me, advancing slowly, as Monica talked about her parents’ crappy stuff. Noticing her dog, she suddenly screamed at it with a tremendous display of anger, “Wolf! Get back! Get down!” Time to go, I thought.

Monica disappeared within a week, and the house went dark again.

So, the house is deserted almost year round. I like it this way. No barking dogs and no inarticulate yelling, no headlights careening into my front windows at night. A guy comes every week during the summer and mows long, curving swathes of grass on a riding mower. Otherwise, the place is quiet. The long driveway is directly opposite mine, giving me a clear view of Monica’s unchanging house at the other end. Grass invades the gravel and blurs the edges. It’s a path for deer and night marsupials, an airstrip for meadowlarks, woodcock, robins, red winged blackbirds and sparrows. On rainy nights it’s a trysting place for frogs, salamanders and toads, and it’s a cafeteria for ferrets and owls. Tree swallows swoop above it and chirp all summer long, fishing for insects in the sky, undisturbed.

Every year in early spring, a pair of killdeer returns to nest. They are some of the earliest migratory birds to return. One day there is silence, the next day (and evening) the sky is alive with their short repertoire of piercing cries, “kill-deer kill-deer kill-deer kill-deer kill-deer kill-deer.”

Peace is fragile and life is short. I worry about the killdeer, about their open nest on the gravel. Some years I see their young scurrying along behind the parents, looking just like the sandpipers I saw as a child on Long Island Sound. Sometimes a parent bird will play decoy if it perceives danger, faking a broken wing to lure a predator away from the chicks. Some years the killdeer fail to raise a brood. Perhaps Monica’s truck destroys the nest when she returns, or her dogs raid it, or the guy who mows the yard runs them over. We humans are usually thoughtless beasts busily building our lives and resenting our kind, and mostly oblivious to everything else. I can only hope the killdeer will be all right this year, and the next, however many years they return to the silent driveway of the deserted house across the street.

Essay: Green, Gone

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It’s February and Northern California has turned green again, as green as the Emerald Isle. Only four months ago in October, the hills and ditches were a crisped brown in the fifth year of severe drought. Small animals like birds and squirrels seemed to move quietly, conserving their energy. I imagined them in the hot summer, tense with thirst and stoic with resignation, staying close to water sources until they went dry.

But now the bare hills are green, green. Ditches and flat valleys brim with water, buoying trash and breeding bugs. House cats stalk the tall grass at the verge of new ponds, between the hotels and fenced neighborhoods, poaching frogs and mice. Crows and robins are plentiful. Frequent rains have turned the surface cracks in all the paved roads dark with moisture, and many trees are bright with new leaves.

It is 8am, Thursday before Super Bowl 50, and I’m on the airport express bus from Sonoma County to San Francisco, at the start of a travel day heading home. This route has become familiar to me from visits over the past two years. Off the 101 between Petaluma and Novato, cattle meander bright pastures, relaxed in a world of plenty. The sun rises through blurred cirrus clouds, and white birds crowd a distant, shallow lake. The morning traffic becomes dense near San Rafael, where we make a stop before crossing the Golden Gate and threading our way through the city to the airport in South SF.

I think of all the repetitive roads and airports that have led to family over the years, strung behind me like beads on a string. The 250 miles of highway and 2-lane roads between Ithaca and Fairfield County, the college town that became my home and the place I grew up. Later, Ithaca to several towns in Florida: Vero Beach, Orlando, St. Pete. More recently, the complex itinerary of flights and taxis booked to get to Boquete, Panama, where my mother, sister, and brother-in-law lived for 2 years: SYR to MIA, then, not one but two airports in Panama City (arrive at Tocumen International and get a connecting flight from Albrook International), finally arriving at Enrique Malek International in the city of David on Panama’s Pacific coast, not far from the Costa Rican border.

Closer to home, I think often of the two-lane roller-coaster roads in the Catskills between Ithaca and Big Indian, NY, where for the past four summers I have spent a week with a tribe of musicians. And I think of all the domestic air travel done over the years requiring transit through US hubs, mainly Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, Newark, Charlotte, Detroit. And ATL, the grandmother of them all — Atlanta, my mother’s birthplace, where some of our family still live. I wonder how many more times will I travel this particular route between Ithaca and Santa Rosa, the scene of my mother’s decline.

Dorothy is a resident the senior facility that my mother lives in. She is white-haired, thin, and sharp-eyed. She was a Rockette during the second world war, hired in 1942 at just 17 years old, below the minimum age requirement, but, as she says, “It was war.” She has a smile that is both devilish and sad, and, in case I mistake her for an old woman, she is quick to offer me a profile of who she really is, inside — young, adventurous and risk-taking, at one time a mother and matriarch of a country house full of dogs and children. Now she’s a widow like all of the women on the assisted living wing, carefully walking the well-lit halls of invisibility. My mother walks here, too, but she is quiet, reserved, inward-looking, and seldom offers any insights into her feelings or thoughts. Perhaps this is her advancing memory loss, or perhaps it is her true nature.

Traffic is heavy on the 101, and the ride to SFO will take two-and-a-half hours this morning. But I’m not anxious about missing my flight. I will have time to get something to eat before boarding the long flight to DTO on a 737. After a one hour in layover Detroit, I’ll take the one-hour-plus flight to ITH on a Canadair jet, arriving about 10pm. Home.

I’m obsessed with my travel details: times, distances, signage, countdowns, gate numbers, terminal letters. Every fifteen minutes I check the contents of my large, heavy purse: iPhone, iPad Mini, wallet, passport, lip balm, liquids in a quart size ziplock, handkerchief, hand lotion. I read every highway sign overhead on the 101, hearing the words inside my head: Lucky Drive, right lane closed, Tiburon Blvd. The big names of myth and magic: Blithedale, Tamalpais, Alcatraz. But there is so much monotony, too. Miles of big box stores, car dealerships, generic houses crowded into every available bit of real estate. Cars, cars, cars. Whatever is beautiful and fine must be shared by so many. There are no private experiences, everything is reduced to a common denominator, from affluence to working class to poverty.

My travel OCD is more pronounced as I age. I repeat these numbers and names to myself, over and over. Delta. Gate 41. One dollar tip for the bus driver in my right pocket. Passport. Boarding Pass. The unbelievably blue ocean and bay under the Golden Gate distract me briefly. The unimaginable breadth and depth of the Pacific Ocean bordering this coast threatens to unmoor my travel thoughts. It almost knocks them from the top spot. Almost.

I could never live here. It’s too dense. The green is too thin, too transient. There are too many people, too many cars, too many houses. I feel that my mind could not survive the constant onslaught of stimulation. There are too many numbers, names, and times to track and memorize. Street names, addresses, amounts, garbage pick up days, new routes to necessary places, intersections, mental maps, instructions. People’s names: doctors, neighbors, instructors, caregivers. Too many homeless, panhandlers, crazies, drug addicts. Perhaps I would adapt, if I chose to or was forced to. Necessity is the mother of adaptability. But for now, I’m gone. Just a visitor anxious to leave, conveyed passively with the conviction of deliverance. I visit California as the green only visits. We make our long arrivals, recessions, and departures. And then we fly away, again.

 

April Fool : Music Video

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My song, “April Fool” (from CD ‘Tell The Wind,’ produced by Rich DePaolo) with my own photos* and video —

*the CD cover image is by James Nelson (Getty Images).