The second time I encountered birth I was two years old. That year, my sister wedged her way into the world while I was hushed and entertained by a familiar woman, but I don't remember. The third time, the sounds scared me and the baby was slick and sloppy, covered in mucus: I was sure there was something wrong with her. I was nine years old, and she was my parents' third girl.
I had already made plans with my best friend: we were to be herbalists and midwives together. But those schemes faded when we moved cross country and my relationship with her ended rather abruptly (putting pen to paper wasn't my thing yet.) In my teens and early twenties I forgot about wombs and motherwort as I made room for more sensible dreams like building a house and becoming a cardiologist or writer.
It's been two years since I could really call myself in my "early twenties." Plans come and go, and certain things stay the same: the creation of family moves to the forefront. I had forgotten of my herbal-midwifery dreams until a few months ago, when my feed started to fill with news of birth and breastfeeding and babies. A gift of a midwifery magazine broke me open and the warm fluid of possibility washed over me. I am moving towards my thirties more swiftly than the Canada geese flying towards Georgia and I can do anything. The braxton hicks of this remembered passion startled me again and again - should I consider midwifery school, become a doula, attend a birth as an adult first? Should I consider nurse-midwifery? What if I doula'd in a prison, coaching and advocating for soft births for incarcerated women and families?
As I prepare my body for a pregnancy (don't start knitting, y'all: I'm still years out), my heart slowly builds the tissues and ribs of a career to be birthed someday. A sweet career, all slick and slippery and covered in mucous, with all kinds of heartache and muscle spasms, and surrounded by familiar faces.
Showing posts with label Hannah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hannah. Show all posts
Fences: 10.12.13
Two springs ago we nailed together pallets from the bread factory, forming a hefty fence to keep the goats from chewing the neighboring hydrangeas. I hated them in that enclosure. Though the two had much more than the recommended amount of room to roam, I yearned for them be free, spread across a scrubby hillside, constantly shuffling around between tufts of grass and shrubbery.
I do believe there is a good way to keep animals enclosed in fences, happy and loved, if hardly free. Like a dog can be tummy-up sun-soaking pleased, tethered to the hemlock on the east edge of the scruffy yard, a goat or duck can be living their best life under the care of a human who will eventually end their lives with a swift slice and be nourished by tender flesh and succulent bones.
I wish sometime to live in a place where the animals I take in have so much room, that the fences will feel more like subtle one-way streets than muddy urban backyards. Soul-stretched limbs wake to sunlight on food, their lives can go around with the wind, and mine can be molded around their milking cycles, their needs for new pasture, their understanding of weather approaching.
Keeping animals thus far has been like a gritty salad, unwashed and earthy but with bursts of flavor, and with strides in learning and understanding. I have salted stubborn mats of manured hay with harsh, irritated tears, and gasped as a machete took feathered lives on the wooden block behind the goat house. And when we pushed the two girls up the ramp to the slaughterhouse, where gruff and gentle hands tugged them from us and to wherever they were going next, I wished there had been less fence, and more freedom. More scratching behind the ear, more seeing each other's inner selves through the shiny layers of eyeball cells.
This year, the pallets lay in jagged angles, where the lives of girthy oaks and beeches slammed to the ground by the whirr of the chainsaw in preparation for building. Now the contents of the freezer slowly drain into my bones, and my cells awaken from years of vegetarianism: Their flesh feels right in my body.
I do believe there is a good way to keep animals enclosed in fences, happy and loved, if hardly free. Like a dog can be tummy-up sun-soaking pleased, tethered to the hemlock on the east edge of the scruffy yard, a goat or duck can be living their best life under the care of a human who will eventually end their lives with a swift slice and be nourished by tender flesh and succulent bones.
I wish sometime to live in a place where the animals I take in have so much room, that the fences will feel more like subtle one-way streets than muddy urban backyards. Soul-stretched limbs wake to sunlight on food, their lives can go around with the wind, and mine can be molded around their milking cycles, their needs for new pasture, their understanding of weather approaching.
Keeping animals thus far has been like a gritty salad, unwashed and earthy but with bursts of flavor, and with strides in learning and understanding. I have salted stubborn mats of manured hay with harsh, irritated tears, and gasped as a machete took feathered lives on the wooden block behind the goat house. And when we pushed the two girls up the ramp to the slaughterhouse, where gruff and gentle hands tugged them from us and to wherever they were going next, I wished there had been less fence, and more freedom. More scratching behind the ear, more seeing each other's inner selves through the shiny layers of eyeball cells.
This year, the pallets lay in jagged angles, where the lives of girthy oaks and beeches slammed to the ground by the whirr of the chainsaw in preparation for building. Now the contents of the freezer slowly drain into my bones, and my cells awaken from years of vegetarianism: Their flesh feels right in my body.
Heart 10.05.13
My culture has learned not to stand still and I have followed seamlessly, valuing brain over heart. But water makes we want to stand
still. I feel as if I should enjoy the loons, so I point them out to myself,
and seem to marvel at their shimmer against the water’s surface as my mind wanders.
I squat and try to feel the ground through my callouses. I try to appreciate
each buzz of mosquito, knowing the irritation is tamable somewhere deep inside
me, but I swat as it tries to land. The cattails are pretty, but the air is
muggy. I should come back here more often,
I think as my right brain makes a shopping list and remembers that important
email. I should be more quiet. I should
meditate. I should learn to be present.
The brindled pitt-mutt is relaxed at the edge of where our
house will be, content by the pounding of his heart and the twitter in trees above. Five-foot walls of earth shield the bathtub; wildflowers and
scrubby grasses provide complete privacy. He lays sideways, hind legs extended,
facing the opening where the home will transition between half-underground to
level with the topsoil. He breathes heavy, but his ears catch each stir in the
evening hum. He guards seamlessly, completely at ease.
We are all on edge. Not dis-eased, uprooted, filled with
worry. But stirred, opening to the present. It is as if I stand on the last
inch of sandstone above a clearwater quarry, but I don’t wobble. My toes grip
at the edge, but slowly lift, as if ready to fly, placing my heart in my stomach. Purely translucent, as deep as sky. Weightless.
There were four fava beans in the pod I opened, trying to
stay present in the inspection of the garden without drifting. Each bean is
flat, an inch long and nearly as wide, and not yet fully grown. Proliferous,
strong stemmed and think-leafed, with white and black flowers covering the
plant from tip to nearly ground. They germinated on a sheet of ice this spring,
straddling the transition in seasons with near-perfect ease. Within the thick
skins there is more protein than any other bean, and they despise soil that is
too rich. Use them at the edge, between the time when grassland or lawn becomes
thriving garden. They seem to transform sand into carbon, pulling up minerals,
making vitamins from soaking in sun. Their roots reach one yard down, and their
vines reach one yard towards the sky. They will heat hearts in dreary February - a thick warming down the chest - their radiance accepted by weary muscles and valves.
Harvest: 09.28.2013
My grandmother puckers her lips from side to side as she surveys the cards; her thin hands slide gently over the calico oilcloth, wrinkling to and fro as she fingers the familiar objects of her life. Her husband shuffles in and pinches her loose cheek before returning to the balcony. I have long tired of this game but it is the only pastime that makes sense. She doesn't understand any part of my life: why I would travel anywhere in Europe other than to her industrial hometown; why I eat pork and beef while my mother rejected it for decades; why I knit and shower every day; why I don't need my underwear ironed; why I would study biology or plants or writing; why I have a dog, or tend a garden.
I draw ounces of courage from the far corners of my skin and heart (the emotional distance is an aching in my chest): "When did you move here?"
The card game disintegrates.
The harvest begins with a single ear of corn: shucking awkwardly reveals pearls of periwinkle and goldenrod kernels. It was just a few years before my mother was born, the last child. Stuck with a sour inlaw in a shattered, German, post-war town, they fled to the city where her husband would get work in the factory.
I fumble less with the next question, and the kernels spill out in every direction, filling the static apartment with fear, and love, and hunger. They are simple stories, but they are all inside of her. She has loved, but is cold from someplace inside. The questions break her open, and my grandfather cries a little, later on, when he comes in from the balcony, filling in the blanks.
The connection is sparse, but I learned how to husk.
Just in time.
I draw ounces of courage from the far corners of my skin and heart (the emotional distance is an aching in my chest): "When did you move here?"
The card game disintegrates.
The harvest begins with a single ear of corn: shucking awkwardly reveals pearls of periwinkle and goldenrod kernels. It was just a few years before my mother was born, the last child. Stuck with a sour inlaw in a shattered, German, post-war town, they fled to the city where her husband would get work in the factory.
I fumble less with the next question, and the kernels spill out in every direction, filling the static apartment with fear, and love, and hunger. They are simple stories, but they are all inside of her. She has loved, but is cold from someplace inside. The questions break her open, and my grandfather cries a little, later on, when he comes in from the balcony, filling in the blanks.
The connection is sparse, but I learned how to husk.
Just in time.
WONDER 06.29.13
"Have you ever shot a gun?" he asked, his own pistol pressed to his palm with a casual grip, his thumb toying the trigger. His belt hung low like a real cowboy. His hat pitched forward over the forehead, washing gentle shadows across his smooth face, but at least one eye was in full sun and cast in wonder.
"No," I said, "I haven't.
"Do you want to?" He sought only one answer; it happened to be the truthful one.
"I do. I want to learn to hunt animals." The eyes widened to encompass his entire being. They were as alive as fully-cured compost, and the color of chicory wilting in the rain. His hair shone like a field of California-poppies, and curled out from under the braided straw. Releasing the tension of sheer awe, he shot a couple of rounds out the open window.
"What kind of gun would you get?!" He asked, pulling the trigger again.
I thought for a moment. "Well, a rifle, I suppose." I crossed tiny sleeve over tiny sleeve, straightened collars and smoothed towels into even piles. Laundry is my favorite: freshening the soiled, making neat out of a pile of wrinkles, and placing finished stacks in drawers of perfect dimensions; my blood is light by the end of the clear and finite chore.
He stood up straight, forming the question in his posture. "Why wouldn't you want a pistol?"
Indignant hands on narrow child hips. The gun in his hand went slightly limp, but he shot a few more times, this time at his little brother.
"Because those guns are used to hurt people," I said. "I don't want to hurt people, I want to hunt animals, hunt them to eat them. I want to learn how to shoot them quick, and how to butcher and cure them."
"When do you think you'll get it?" He asks. Indignation turns again to wonder, and his eight years suddenly seem like a vast opportunity.
"I don't know," I reply, sliding a sheet of paper under the crayon trapped between a two-year-old palm and the table. "I'm not ready to own a gun. It's a big responsibility. It can be a dangerous thing if not used in a very safe way."
As I load finished piles into the laundry basket, I tell him that he is not allowed to aim at me or his brother while I'm around. The 'you're not the boss in this house' is easily tamed with a mischievous evil eye and a firm, closing statement. When I leave for the day, I realize that I am proud of this conversation. Proud of knowing where I stand with guns and food and children's play, and proud that I can tuck little nuggets of perspective into these tiny brains, just by telling my truth.
And to an eight-year-old, the truth is wondrous. To know his nanny's real feelings and opinions is all he wants. The questions never begin and never stop, and I am grateful.
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