Deep Thoughts in Deep Dixie

This morning I wrote to a friend that I was returning today to a ruined homestead I'd stumbled upon yesterday in the woods near Cecil's Mill in Southern Maryland. I told her how the little shack was perched on a muddy ledge near a running creek, that the tin roof was rusted and coming apart, that the whole back side of the house had fallen away – that it all had probably tumbled into the creek below it years ago – and that I had been able to see right through the back of it and into the trees beyond. I told her about the rusted padlock on what had once been a front door with one of those old knobs that you see for sale in antique stores all over the country. I described for her the rotting timbers of the door and the busted windows and how the one dingy white curtain that remained hung still, torn and in tatters, at the window.

How interesting, she wrote back, Tell me more.

So I told her I'd send her a link to the piece I was writing on the new blog about the little house I'd found and that she could see the photographs of it there too.

BLOG? she wrote back in capital letters, YOU have a blog? (Despite everyone's complaints to the contrary, it's pretty easy to read tone in an email. I'd have gotten her drift right away, but she went on.)

Oh blogs, she wrote, what a nuisance they are: all those ridiculously deep thoughts…like what diet bar some vegan woman goes for when she's starving, or how a man is thinking of leaving his wife because he has "fallen in love" with the wife of his best friend. What some 16-year-old Valley girl had for breakfast. Who got new boobs and how much it cost her old man. . . .

How simple it is, then, to ridicule the lives of others, and what is important to them. I wondered if this is how everyone feels, secretly, but doesn't have the heart – or tactlessness – to say so.

Still, I have to admit it made me think back to that scene in the movie, Julie & Julia. You remember it: the moment where Julie steps out of her little kitchen and announces to her husband, "I have thoughts. I could write a blog."

As if to merely have thoughts is the essence of writing. As if "I-think-therefore-I-am" is sufficient to keep anyone interested in the story you are telling.

Maybe it is. For some. But my thoughts don't run that deep. (Or that shallow.) Whatever this wild river is that I'm on right now, I'm going with the current of it and hanging on to any drifting thing nearby to keep myself afloat. But she got me to thinking – again – about why I'm writing. It's not as if there aren't already thousands of interesting blogs and books and articles out there. And it's not as if I have hundreds of readers: I have a scant handful of people who read these postings regularly and most of them are good friends and even some of them read the stuff I write, I suspect, out of reckless pity and compassion:

Oh dear. Anne's doing that writing thing again. . . .

Let's be honest here: my life is full-to-bursting as it is. Why take on one more commitment each week? Why crawl around in the woods and climb into the rotting haylofts of old tobacco barns; why hang at the frozen edge of a fence waiting for muskox to step forward from the ice-fog or watch the cat studying the wasp's nest in the eaves with great interest; why pay such relentless attention to all the small, ordinary things as I'm inclined to do? Why do all that if there isn't some story waiting there, patient as eternity, for someone – maybe me – to discover it and bring it into the raw light-of-the-world-we-live-in-now?

Or, as I put it in my notebook this morning while I was "out there in the real world," getting messy with it: Why leave the muggy woods and the tangle of underbrush you spent all afternoon picking your way through – red-faced, thirsty, jeans muddy and your shoes wrecked with river mud – just to settle back into a car and discover a snake has settled himself there, seeking out a little cool shade, while you were out traipsing through the underbrush? Why throw yourself out onto the ground then, thrashing about in terror, though your brain has already registered that it's only a little green snake. Harmless. Well, nearly harmless except for the heart-failure you experienced when he suddenly slithered under the gas pedal near your foot. At best, it was embarrassing. And no one even saw it: you flailing around on the ground like that, hung half-in/half-out of the Land Rover like you were having some sort of grand mal seizure in the dirt at the side of the road.

Maybe I write because, as the physical body fails and the soul's dwelling-place washes down to almost-nothing-left-now, it seems I still have words to serve as some little channel marker on the sea that indicates I was here, in this time, in this century, in this place or that. Here or there. Snooping around in the woods or the cool caves or along the mud-banks of the rivers. Poking my nose into other people's business - or what's left of it anyway.

My father says that my four children are what will be left of me and I should be happy with that. Maybe he's right. I don't know. I know I prefer not to burden them with all that. I gave them their lives once, rather ingloriously: strapped to a gurney on my back, my sock feet up in the gleaming stirrups, pushing each one of them into the blue-white light and sterile chrome of the delivery room in the latter quarter of the last century. I named them. And then, when they grew up and became who they wanted to be, I sent them out again with my blessings into their own happinesses and troubles. They will have enough to do, I suspect, without having to be some kind of living memorial to their mother.

But these writings, these notes, the two books I have written and published and the ones still to be written – Lord willing and the creek don't rise, as my people are wont to say, setting the blessing over the curse – these are some odd version of a ship's journal, I think, something I'll leave behind when the tide of what-is-coming finally takes me under. Every poem, every essay, every blog-piece lets those who come after me know some things about who I was and the moment in history in which I lived out my life. It lets them see the map and the stars I steered by. Where I went. What I saw. What I heard or overheard. What spoke to me over the din and dull racket of this world and all its machinery.

Here, it will say on one waterlogged page, I was here today. I saw this. I heard that. This thing troubled me. I gave myself over to that. And there, right there, is where I made it through a dark storm. Here, I was swept overboard. I traveled for a time in the dark, quiet belly of Leviathan. I had a sea-changed here. Only the moon looked on. Here is where I was swept away. . . .

And alongside those entries will be others too, entries not so much about me: You were with me here. I saw you there, from a distance. You waved to someone. You seemed happy. I almost knew you. I lost you there. I've placed a marker for you here. . . .

Kitchen Mercies

Deep Thoughts in Deep Dixie

Deep Thoughts in Deep Dixie

This morning I wrote to a friend that I was returning today to a ruined homestead I'd stumbled upon yesterday in the woods near Cecil's Mill in Southern Maryland. I told her how the little shack was perched on a muddy ledge near a running creek, that the tin roof was rusted and coming apart, that the whole back side of the house had fallen away – that it all had probably tumbled into the creek below it years ago – and that I had been able to see right through the back of it and into the trees beyond. I told her about the rusted padlock on what had once been a front door with one of those old knobs that you see for sale in antique stores all over the country. I described for her the rotting timbers of the door and the busted windows and how the one dingy white curtain that remained hung still, torn and in tatters, at the window.

How interesting, she wrote back, Tell me more.

So I told her I'd send her a link to the piece I was writing on the new blog about the little house I'd found and that she could see the photographs of it there too.

BLOG? she wrote back in capital letters, YOU have a blog? (Despite everyone's complaints to the contrary, it's pretty easy to read tone in an email. I'd have gotten her drift right away, but she went on.)

Oh blogs, she wrote, what a nuisance they are: all those ridiculously deep thoughts…like what diet bar some vegan woman goes for when she's starving, or how a man is thinking of leaving his wife because he has "fallen in love" with the wife of his best friend. What some 16-year-old Valley girl had for breakfast. Who got new boobs and how much it cost her old man. . . .

How simple it is, then, to ridicule the lives of others, and what is important to them. I wondered if this is how everyone feels, secretly, but doesn't have the heart – or tactlessness – to say so.

Still, I have to admit it made me think back to that scene in the movie, Julie & Julia. You remember it: the moment where Julie steps out of her little kitchen and announces to her husband, "I have thoughts. I could write a blog."

As if to merely have thoughts is the essence of writing. As if "I-think-therefore-I-am" is sufficient to keep anyone interested in the story you are telling.

Maybe it is. For some. But my thoughts don't run that deep. (Or that shallow.) Whatever this wild river is that I'm on right now, I'm going with the current of it and hanging on to any drifting thing nearby to keep myself afloat. But she got me to thinking – again – about why I'm writing. It's not as if there aren't already thousands of interesting blogs and books and articles out there. And it's not as if I have hundreds of readers: I have a scant handful of people who read these postings regularly and most of them are good friends and even some of them read the stuff I write, I suspect, out of reckless pity and compassion:

Oh dear. Anne's doing that writing thing again. . . .

Let's be honest here: my life is full-to-bursting as it is. Why take on one more commitment each week? Why crawl around in the woods and climb into the rotting haylofts of old tobacco barns; why hang at the frozen edge of a fence waiting for muskox to step forward from the ice-fog or watch the cat studying the wasp's nest in the eaves with great interest; why pay such relentless attention to all the small, ordinary things as I'm inclined to do? Why do all that if there isn't some story waiting there, patient as eternity, for someone – maybe me – to discover it and bring it into the raw light-of-the-world-we-live-in-now?

Or, as I put it in my notebook this morning while I was "out there in the real world," getting messy with it: Why leave the muggy woods and the tangle of underbrush you spent all afternoon picking your way through – red-faced, thirsty, jeans muddy and your shoes wrecked with river mud – just to settle back into a car and discover a snake has settled himself there, seeking out a little cool shade, while you were out traipsing through the underbrush? Why throw yourself out onto the ground then, thrashing about in terror, though your brain has already registered that it's only a little green snake. Harmless. Well, nearly harmless except for the heart-failure you experienced when he suddenly slithered under the gas pedal near your foot. At best, it was embarrassing. And no one even saw it: you flailing around on the ground like that, hung half-in/half-out of the Land Rover like you were having some sort of grand mal seizure in the dirt at the side of the road.

Maybe I write because, as the physical body fails and the soul's dwelling-place washes down to almost-nothing-left-now, it seems I still have words to serve as some little channel marker on the sea that indicates I was here, in this time, in this century, in this place or that. Here or there. Snooping around in the woods or the cool caves or along the mud-banks of the rivers. Poking my nose into other people's business - or what's left of it anyway.

My father says that my four children are what will be left of me and I should be happy with that. Maybe he's right. I don't know. I know I prefer not to burden them with all that. I gave them their lives once, rather ingloriously: strapped to a gurney on my back, my sock feet up in the gleaming stirrups, pushing each one of them into the blue-white light and sterile chrome of the delivery room in the latter quarter of the last century. I named them. And then, when they grew up and became who they wanted to be, I sent them out again with my blessings into their own happinesses and troubles. They will have enough to do, I suspect, without having to be some kind of living memorial to their mother.

But these writings, these notes, the two books I have written and published and the ones still to be written – Lord willing and the creek don't rise, as my people are wont to say, setting the blessing over the curse – these are some odd version of a ship's journal, I think, something I'll leave behind when the tide of what-is-coming finally takes me under. Every poem, every essay, every blog-piece lets those who come after me know some things about who I was and the moment in history in which I lived out my life. It lets them see the map and the stars I steered by. Where I went. What I saw. What I heard or overheard. What spoke to me over the din and dull racket of this world and all its machinery.

Here, it will say on one waterlogged page, I was here today. I saw this. I heard that. This thing troubled me. I gave myself over to that. And there, right there, is where I made it through a dark storm. Here, I was swept overboard. I traveled for a time in the dark, quiet belly of Leviathan. I had a sea-changed here. Only the moon looked on. Here is where I was swept away. . . .

And alongside those entries will be others too, entries not so much about me: You were with me here. I saw you there, from a distance. You waved to someone. You seemed happy. I almost knew you. I lost you there. I've placed a marker for you here. . . .

Crossing The Devil's Heart

"Now you must go out into your own heart as onto a vast plain."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

If you look at my birth certificate, you will know some things about me. You will see that I was born in May, 1953; that I was the first-born – a daughter – of Thomas Caston Philyaw (20 years of age) and Ruth Ann Philyaw (17 years of age); that I was born in the Ouachita Memorial Hospital in Clark County; that I was a "live" birth; and that the town of my birth was Arkadelphia, in Arkansas.

And that is all true. Or mostly true. The part that isn't accurate, not exactly, is the name of that town: Arkadelphia – Arkadelphia, which is now one of the "Fifty Fabulous Places to Raise Your Family," according to the City of Arkadelphia website. What isn't there - either on my birth certificate or on the website - is the name by which the town used to be known: Arkadelphia is the sanitized name of the that little town set on a bluff overlooking the Ouachita River in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains. Every map you look at now will point to that place as Arkadelphia. But the original name was a bit more precise, a bit less Baptist, a town named first by the early Scottish and Irish settlers in the region, a name that spoke to the wild nature of the place. The town had been renamed Arkadelphia by the good Methodists and Baptists who settled there much later and who had been much unsettled by the town's former name: Devil's Heart.

Those first Scots and Irish named the town Devil's Heart for the way sudden and terrible storms originated there in the little gully town between the mountains and the river below them. Violent storms seemed to come up out of nowhere, moving outward in all directions from there, devastating the outlying tenant farms and homesteads, leaving houses splintered and crops uprooted and scattered. Lightning struck the trees and set wild-fires among the thick forests; tornadoes set the treetops whirling and lifted shanties off their dirt floors; animals, it is said, went mad with fright when thunder rumbled underground, thunder that occurred with the regularity of freight trains. Rumor has it that in the foothills, in the hardest wintry years, babies were born ruined or stillborn. And once, in a freak summer windstorm, a weathervane spun so hard it lifted off and circled a barn-yard before flying into the window of a sharecropper's shack.

No wonder they named it as they had. No wonder it stuck, that name. No wonder the old-timers whispered that name - Devil's Heart - and crossed themselves after saying it. And so I come, later in my life, to the truth of my birthplace and my birthright: I was born in that stormy place, dead-center of the Devil's Heart which is, it seems, somewhere in Arkansas.

RECESS

Loudly now - below the open window where I work at my desk, from across the schoolyard playground of a local church school where the teacher leads the preschoolers through a game of Mother-May-I? - the voices of children drift upward to me and to my cat who sits in the window while I work each morning and who finds small children odd and frightening when they're too close in proximity to him. But, from such a safe distance as this, and looking down from such a height, the cat is more curious today than disturbed.

When the teacher is called away, when she steps back inside the building, Julio changes the game, changes even the terms of the game. No more Mother-May-I? No more civilized, orderly entreaties. No more call and response. No more polite steps forward - baby steps or giant steps - no more please and thank you.

"You're it!" he shouts and punches Emma's shoulder - punches her so hard her blonde braids bounce forward then back. Julio has run off screaming and the playground breaks down into bedlam. The other preschoolers squeal, and scatter like buckshot.

That Julio is trouble. Just ask his teacher: she'll tell you, just like she tells him every morning on this playground right before she sends him to a time-out on the concrete stoop. That boy spends as much time watching the play as he does actually playing.

The tagged girl - the new, blonde "it" - stands there for a moment, rubbing her shoulder, her crumpling face looking for all the world as if she'll cry. But then she clenches her small fists and screeches, "Ready or not, here I come," and she sprints off across the playground in the direction of the arbor vitae and the oak thicket between my side yard and the church school playground where Julio headed seconds ago. The other preschoolers disappear, laughing, crouching behind thick tree trunks and bushes and the gardener's shed at the back of the property. I see that Emma has stepped through the arbor vitae and has a hold on Julio's shirt collar. He looks surprised to see her there, and to see how determined she is to have her revenge on him, cooties or not. He's learning something right now, something even a blind man could read on his astonished face: don't mess with girls. And I chuckle and say to the cat that Julio's face looks just like the faces of a few men who have tangled with me over the years.

And just as the hide-and-seek, tag-you're-it silence falls over the schoolyard, the teacher steps out again. Seeing none of her charges where she left them, she grabs her whistle from her pocket and blows it three times loudly. I hate that whistle. I hate it even more today as, one by one, the children re-emerge and stagger out again into the bright hot sun - all but Julio and Emma who, having heard the teacher's shrill warning - are crouching now on my side of the arbor vitae watching the others line up, boys to the right of the long line, girls to the left, facing the teacher. It strikes me as a peculiar gesture for Church of Christers: more like Southern Baptists, in its tradition of separation of the genders almost from birth. The children aren't talking, so she pulls one boy roughly from the line and shoves him toward the church door. Going for the principle, I suppose, or maybe the pastor.

Good, I think to myself; now someone will rescue them from this beakish woman with the sharp face and shrill voice, this woman who pushes a little boy in front of his schoolmates today. What I am working on falls away, seems suddenly unimportant, as two little girls begin to sob and the woman waxes on and on, demanding to know who changed the game and why they all followed along. And that is when the boy returns and a small man in a starched white dress shirt and tie steps out beside the woman and joins the inquisition.

"Who started this?" he wants to know and I am thinking how you could slice open the fear in the stiff unyielding morning air of the playground. The teacher's brow has drawn itself into almost-precise alignment with her frown. There'll be no mercy from her - and haven't I seen her, heard her, single out the boy every school day as I've sat here at this window, working. He's missed more recess than any of the other children. That concrete stoop should have a sign on it that reads, Reserved for Julio.

I don't recall, just now, exactly when it first occurred to me - when I first noticed - that the bird-faced woman sends him from the play at precisely the instant he chases the little girls. The girls always shriek and squeal, Cooties! and they run, hand in hand, away from him. ALL the little preschool boys do this, of course, chase the little girls at playtime; it is their one greatest joy and delight, to chase and terrorize the girls. But only Julio gets sent to time-out on the stoop for doing it. Gorgeous Julio, brown-skinned, nappy-haired. Julio, who sets off some tsunami in the skinny, hard-faced woman who teaches preschoolers here.

So it is in this moment - "just like that," as my grandmother used to say in wonder and astonishment when something extraordinary seizes someone like me - just like that, I decide to be the angel of this playground. No others have appeared - and who can say what will happen once they line up and march again over that doorway, back into the classroom, beyond the ordinary angels who would intervene on their behalf.

I take the stairs, two at a time, push through the back screen door, and feel the cool of the old farmhouse fall away to the heat of the yard. I cross to the side-yard, to where the two preschoolers are crouching side by side now. When my shadow falls over them, they squint up at me and rise together. Julio takes Emma's hand in his. She looks at him with a kind of gratitude. And now they look at me. And this is when I see it: the fear in their eyes. What, in the four or five years of their short lives, has frightened them like this about adults? Or is it that I am a stranger - and they've surely had that talk from everyone by now.

Shhh, I say, and motion to them while I check the situation on the playground. It'll be okay. I promise. Come with me. Stay close. I take one of their small hands, each, in mine and walk them around the arbor vitae thicket, towards the playground, towards the stern woman and the officious-looking man who is sweating now in wide, wet circles under his arms, down his sides, and along his thin chest. The birdish woman is too intent on fixing the children in her stern glare to notice me at first. And the man is shaking his finger at the sky - a warning, perhaps, about God's displeasure. Or maybe how He sees everything and knows who started this.

Only the line of preschoolers sees us standing there. And maybe because they are staring openly now at the three of us, the two adults turn and notice us too. They seem word-struck, unable to say anything. It seems to me that this might be the perfect time to return the two preschoolers to their proper places. I tuck Emma into place among the other girls and push her braids back over her shoulders. Then I take Julio's gritty, chubby hand in mine again and walk him down the line. I tuck him into place among his friends, these other boys who also have cooties and chase girls and make them run away. And because my back is to the two adults, I wink at him and smile my biggest smile at the other boys who are slack-jawed, looking with a kind of wonder at the tall woman in torn jeans and flip flops and an oversized man's dress shirt with paint all over it. I must look like a giant to them. And I must look gigantic too to the small thin woman with the pinched look on her face and the fragile-looking headmaster - or minister - both of whom are at least a head shorter than I am.

I turn back to the two adults, and look over the rim of my bookish-looking glasses, fixing them in my stern amber stare, hoping they feel something, in this moment, strangely akin to how these preschoolers must surely feel most days. I ask them both quietly who is in charge here and who left such small children unattended here, on this playground so near a busy road. Then I go silent because I know that silence is more unnerving than words in moments like this one. And because something slightly wicked in me - some old, odd ghost of the frightened girl I once was - enjoys the discomfort I see on their faces. And because I think, today, these children need to see that this too is possible.

The headmaster apologizes for any "inconvenience" the children have caused me and assures me that they teach them, at this school, not to bother the neighbors. Interesting, since I am the only one whose property borders this churchyard. The beakish woman takes up the man's note, saying something about how surely I know how small children are prone to mischief. It does not escape me that neither of them has addressed my actual question. I let them stutter on until they sputter and fall into an awkward silence too. Only the cicadas and the birds are crowding the hot morning with song. I want - more than almost anything - to close my eyes and stay in this moment, to linger in it, to relish it for the bright jewel it is among the lesser days of my life. But when a truck rumbles by on the macadam, and I see the woman turn her glare on me, furious at the nerve of me for interfering in her affairs, I see that the moment is already gone.

I point up at the double windows on the upper floor of the old farmhouse we bought last winter. I am a writer, I tell them, and that is where I work all day, at my desk, facing this schoolyard. The children lift their faces to look up at the window where my cat is sitting now, looking down on them. I say I like the children's noise - their mischief as well - and that I see them going and coming. I hear, I say, everything that is said down here. These children, I say, are not an "inconvenience" to me. I emphasize the word and then I wave.

Bye, Julio. Bye, Emma. Bye, children.

I turn and draw myself up now, as tall as my 5-foot, 5-and-a-half inches allow. I will myself to walk slowly, deliberately, back across the schoolyard, past the arbor vitae and the oak, up the back steps and across the threshold, back in to the cool shadows and the neat order of my own house. Only here, holding to the edge of the kitchen sink, do I allow myself the luxury of shaking, of shivering as if I were standing barefoot in a snowbank, shuddering along the whole length of my body, shivering in that way I used to shiver in terror and embarrassment at the front of the schoolroom, my open palms upturned, held out in front of me, quaking in anticipation and the teacher counting out each blow as it falls: one... two... three... four....

photo courtesy of iStock

MY FATHER'S FISH

It seems preposterous now, looking back: that fish pond my father designed, the one he’d sketched out one hot May evening on his blue-gridded drawing paper, the one on which he had penciled, in his precise hand, the exact dimensions of the thing and the directions for its construction, the pond he’d built by hand - concrete, brick and mortar - and its fountain. . . all of it stuck, like a gaudy luxury, to the front of a concrete block house that was unremarkable as all the other painted concrete block houses along our street. When he’d finished it and filled it with water from the garden hose, he’d stocked it with three - or was it four? - large orange Japanese fish. Koi.

I'd loved the pond then, for the fish if not for the pond itself, and for how, when I put my hand into the cool water and held it still long enough, the fish would swim to my hand and latch onto my fingers with their suckered mouths, making a tingling place at the spot where their cool, wet world met my heat-riddled, arid world. My father had astonished me. He had thought of this thing all on his own, then had drawn it, painstakingly and perfectly, in the dim-lit, unfinished workshop behind our house. And then he had made it happen.

If you had asked me, back then, to tell you something about my father, I’d have told you that he worked long hours at the Glidden Chemical Plant across town and that he came home reeking of that chemical soup each evening. I'd have told you how my brother and I held our noses and backed away from that stench. I’d have told you that my father sometimes took a shower, ate quickly and went off to an evening class at the local community college, even after working all day. I would have told you that he went to church and prayed and read his Bible, and that sometimes he’d just start singing in the house for no reason. I’d tell you that, sometimes, he sat on the back stoop and played “Strangers on the Shore” on his clarinet and that it sounded sorrowful and melancholy in the twilight. I'd tell you how I’d come from anywhere – the nearby woods or fields or reading in the house – just to be close when he played that song like that.

But that pond and those fish! They were evidence that my father also dreamed. They were proof that he had conceived of something beautiful which had not existed before and that he had willfully brought into being, that watery thing lit from above by the sun, that orange flicker of possibility in my child’s eye.

That first night, while I lay in my narrow bed beneath the front window - the window right over the little fountain and pond - while I tried to forget the sticky heat of the evening, as I lay there marveling that my father had dreams, I drifted off towards sleep while the little fountain trickled faithfully on under the great expanse of the dark heavens and the Southern Cross.

I began to imagine that our lives had opened that day to something new and that there was a place for these fish – my father’s fish – in our lives, and a place for that water-filled fountain humming beneath my window, and even a place for my father’s dreams. And because I was the child I was, filled with fear and foreboding, because I was a child with a "vivid imagination," and also prone to moments of melancholy myself, it occurred to me that winter would come and that little pond would be rimed then with ice. What would happen to the fish? Would they suffer? Would they freeze slowly to death?

My father, I told myself, will know what to do. And for the first time, I was almost certain of that. Maybe, I thought, he’ll bring them inside. Maybe we’ll have a tank of water in the living room like Beth Poppell's house does, a tank where they’ll swim all winter, safe from the ice. And maybe, come spring, when we return them to the pond, there will be big-eyed babies. I grew dreamy and content then, lulled to sleep by the soft splashing beneath the window, never hearing it for what it really was: the feral cats gathering to feed on my father’s beautiful fish, picking the bright, fleshy parts from his dreams, discarding the impossible bones.

ENTOURAGE

When my two oldest boys were small, I'd entertain them by writing something on paper in black ball-point ink. Whatever they told me to write down, I penned there in my large, loopy cursive handwriting. Mostly it was something silly like Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, or Hinka-binka-a-bottle-of-ink, I pooped my pants and now I stink. Or other boyish nonsense and tom-foolery. Then, when they'd had their fun, I'd dip an empty pen-point in a tin cup of milk and write my own lines in between the inky lines, like the old Greek scribes used to do. I'd write, I love you. I'd write, Now is the time for all good men. I'd write, Say you love me back. I'd write their names. I'd write my own, which changed so often back then with each marriage and divorce that I sometimes woke wondering who I was. When the morning heat of the kitchen had dried the milk and the words had gone invisible, I'd ask the boys to tell me what had been written there, in between the black ink lines which still showed plainly, as before. Sometimes the boys could remember; but mostly not. Out of sight, out of mind, as the old adage goes.

So then I'd go outside to the wobbly second-hand grill a neighbor had given me and I'd take a piece of charcoal in hand. I'd go back inside and rub it between my palms until it began to crumble and a fine dust coated the paper underneath it, and all its writing. Then I'd lift the page and shake the loose charcoal dust out the open window. When the paper was on the table between us, the words were visible again.

Wow, the boys would say, and Whoa, and they'd snatch the paper up and take it out into the backyard, holding it up to the light, squinting at it, poring over the magic of it, wondering how something which had been visible had gone invisible for a time and how, with just the right element added, it had become visible again. They thought it was better than any other experiment we did. They'd beg for it again and again. I took to leaving notes on the refrigerator with "secrets" written in milk just for the pleasure of watching them run outside to the old grill and take the charcoal in hand.

Their clothes and hands were black with charcoal afterwards and I had to scrub them clean at the kitchen sink where the porcelain finish had long ago worn thin. Sometimes, the charcoal stained those thin places and I had to scrub all week to remove the traces of it. Sometimes, I could see, for days, the lines in the boys' hands where the fine charcoal dust had settled, intractably, into the empty places, the fine places which had not been visible until stained. Eventually, though, it all washed free.

Gone, I'd think and feel a small, baffling knot of sadness in me rising; all gone.

If you were to see me now, writing at my desk, tending the thorny roses outside my house, talking to the cat, singing at the sink, preparing lessons for my grad students in poetry, a middle-aged woman in jeans and men's baggy dress shirts (my husband's outcasts and hand-me-downs), painting trim or hanging wallpaper, sitting on the summer porch reading or just idly watching the day wheel by into twilight – if you were to see me like this, you'd think nothing of it except that I'm a woman ordinary as rain, nothing remarkable. What you see is what you get. That woman.

You'd be wrong, of course.

I am not what is written plainly as all that. I live also between the neat lines of who-I-seem-to-be. Always, despite the placid countenance and the genial smile, there is an entourage inside of me. The infant boy lying all night in the crook of a grown man's arm in that over-crowded morgue. The gray fetal bodies in their glass jars of formaldehyde lining the shelves of the anatomy lab closet. The burned boy whose drunken father set him afire one night for disobeying him. That first man I saw naked, dead. And all the ones who followed away from there.

There is more than mere memory here too, a mind recalling something long-gone. There is also the body itself remembering: the nose recoiling as it conjures up again the stench a burned body gives off; something in the stomach's unruly pit knotting itself; the left palm and how it rested against a fevered brow while the right hand fingered a thready pulse; the texture of a woman's long hair in my hands as I washed it for her, toweled it dry it, brushed it into place around her thin face in preparation for the family's arrival – or the mortician's; bare pink fingertips recalling again the post-operative feel of the swollen stump and its sutures, the sticky wet weeping of the wound and, later, the crusted cluster of epithelials sealing, the healing begun at last; the sloshy gauze I'd taken in my hand – the hand I write with now, feed myself with, cook with, caress my husband and hug my children with – that strong right hand stained orange once with Betadine where I'd swabbed a woman's chest one morning, prepping her for the double mastectomy; and my ears which still hear always, waking from dreams, their little moans of pain.

This is what is written, in the interstices between one visible thing and the next. The milky ink of who-I-also-am. And when I write them back to me again - as I do sometimes - they are not "art" to me, not the stuff of rank sensationalism and poetry. They are who they are. Or were. And I am standing again at the old crossroads considering once more the twin devils of suffering and mortality. I am wholly myself again then, the visible and the invisible body. The quick and the dead. A house and all its rooms.

GOD'S WILL

When a baby does not get born right, everybody goes to church – only it's not Sunday School or worship or dinner-on-the-ground or choir practice, and nobody passes the plate. This is a funeral, and for a funeral, you must wear your blackest, plainest, ugliest dress. No one appreciates a fashion statement at a funeral; that would be like spitting in God's eye and everybody knows only the Devil would do such a thing and look where it landed him.

When you come into the church-house you must sit quiet and still as death with your eyes downcast – like the deacons do when the sermon is on womanizing or adultery – and then there will be some singing of sad songs. "Amazing Grace" is a favorite song for funerals, especially if the organist can get the "bagpipes" key on the organ unstuck. "In The Sweet Bye-and-Bye" is another popular funeral song, one that talks about heaven as a sweet bye-and-bye, not the sour kind of bye-and-bye like when my grandmother used the word to talk about the woman in her housing project who is "loose," as in, "Bye and bye, that red-headed hussy is gonna get her just desserts."

Anyway, at a funeral, there is some singing and some weeping and then everyone lines up, single-file, to walk past the little wooden box where the baby is laid out in a starchy white bonnet and gown. The ladies sniffle and daub at their eyes with their hankies and the men all stand nearby in a clump, scratching under their stiff collars, eyeing the ladies in case the vapors should come over them and someone should swoon into a black heap on the floor. Mostly the women don't – swoon, I mean – but men are generally nervous about what a woman might do in a group, especially when there's a baby involved.

After everyone is done looking at the baby, the men stand out in the churchyard and shake the daddy's hand real hard and say, "Sorry for your troubles, John."

The women gather around the grief-struck mother under the shade trees and they take her hands in theirs, one after another, and pat it and say things like, "Don't blame yourself, honey; these things happen." Or they say churching things like, "God's ways are mysterious" or "You'll see that blessed little baby again in heaven" or "He's happy in God's hands now, sister."

In case none of this seems to comfort her much, if she tells them all that none of that matters and all she wants is her baby back again, the ladies go on to the inevitable: "It's God's will."

That usually works.

It works, I think, because it baffles her. Like God's will baffles me. Preacher says it's God's Will for every one of us to turn our back on the Devil and sin and to be saved and live with him forever in glory. Preacher says whenever a child of God is saved, all the angels in heaven rejoice and Gabriel blows a tune on his horn. There is shouting in the church then and rejoicing and clapping of hands and hallelujahs all around. This is called a jubilation. Jubilation is allowed in church, but only if you keep your feet still on the floorboards. If you move your feet, then it is called dancing and dancing is NOT allowed in church. NO DANCING. Dancing is too close to fornication and we all know where that will get you.

So when you're saved, there's a party in heaven. But on earth what you get is a good dunking in cold water in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But no party. This is because, if God gets you, you get no credit for it because it was God's Will anyway. But if the Devil gets you, that's nobody's fault but your own and there'll be hell to pay for it.

But I guess God's Will, today, is the baby in the wooden box and his mother who is cross now at God and how all of us are going to have to stand a while in the heat out back of the church-house, after the funeral, and watch as two colored men plant the baby beside other babies in a long row, babies who are all in God's hands now, though their boxes are lying under little white staves with their names painted on them, just like the little staves we push into our garden furrows each spring so we won't forget what we planted and where.