Dirt-Colored Dirt
August 18th, 2009
And after a day of travel-knots in my stomach, and the bumps and sways of the plane descending with the synchronized bobbling of all the heads ahead of us, we found ourselves, me and the boys, in New Mexico. I filled my daily journal pages with less analysis and more catalogues of description, thunderheads piling up and a hummingbird buzzing the table on my parent’s patio where I get up early and write, Rainer’s delight when we spot bats at dusk and it takes me a moment to realize what they are, “Those are not-birds!” which leads to a week of laughing identification of me as “not-Dad” and him as “not-Soren” cats as “not-dogs” ad infinitum — as the best almost-five year old jokes are apt to be.
I re-read the journal now, weeks later, grateful for the things I did capture, which may have been only a fraction of what was there, but I caught the rightness of resonant familiarity, from the silvered boards of the fence with yellow and purple flowers arrayed in front of them to the things I don’t think of when I think of home that nonetheless are braided into my oldest memories, the Catholic church around the corner, the people on city busses who cross themselves when we ride past it, the fruitless mulberry and the elm that were the first trees I knew and stand in my head as the archetypes of all trees. The fact that the dirt is the color I know as dirt-colored; not as dark or moist as the dirt of Oregon, dustier, redder, but precisely the right color in my head for dirt. And it’s that when we are out at the ruins at Qurai and I know from the line of cottonwoods where a stream must be that it occurs to me that this is what it is to belong to a place, to read things you don’t even know you know in the landscape. I wonder if I will ever reach this degree of familiarity with the Northwest, knowing what berries you can eat, being able to read berry bushes as a sort of calendar, for example, or recognizing and avoiding nettles and poison oak.
And then, to return is to measure yourself against the unchanging and see how you have changed, but also to note the changes from a distance, the ones that you don’t live with every day. Where I sat and wrote I could see where my parents had buried their beautiful black lab, Beau, the month before, and remember the puppy he was the first time I brought Xander to New Mexico, ten years earlier. It was difficult to approach their kitchen door and get the dutiful low whuff of protective greeting.
I had done my best to prepare the boys, and on the plane Søren checked in with me, “You’re going to” — how did he put it? –” try out life at your parents’ without Beau for the first time? Are you sad? Or more excited to see your parents?” I had to muster patience, he was pleased with himself for grasping some emotional nuance, and eager to connect with me, and I was trying as much to teach him tact as recognition of the emotions. Rainer rehearsed “Beau is dead. He died and his body is buried” requesting, politely enough, that my mother show him where.
It doesn’t matter that the yard is filled with different plants than when I lived here, I still see the shadows of my sister and me on on the front lawn running through the sprinkler and imagining that each drop reflecting the sun was a living being, a fairy of sorts living an entire lifetime in the arc between sprinkler and grass. I remember evening games where my mother would say “Find the Russian olive” and we would run to it and she would say “Good. Now find the yarrow” and we would run to that… how many plants could my children name in our yard, and will they remember them as friends when they are grown? What color will they think of when they think of dirt?
