Violence: A Daybook

This is an excerpt from a longer essay I'm working on right now.  Yesterday, for some odd reason, images/stories/memories/suggestions of violence kept arriving on the wing, on the airwaves, on the mindwaves, one after another.  So I wrote them down, and I will keep working with them, but here are the ones that relate to cancerland.  

The word violence comes from the Latin violentia, which holds other words like fury, ferocity, and impetuousness, all words that someone who's dealt with cancer well understands.

 

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.  Write your self.  Your body must be heard.”

                                    — Helen Cixous

This morning, wind raged through the trees, a storm hurtling by, swift, vehement, and then the forest grew quiet.  But out of the forest’s quiet came a yearling black bear with silver tipped guard hairs on his back, and he walked up the stairs onto my porch and licked a baking dish my husband had left out for the dog, a baking dish stuck with strips of cooked salmon skin.  It was a salmon my husband had netted from China Poot Creek, a salmon I’d bled, ripping its sharp, white, blood-engorged gills with my bare fingers. And then this bear stood up, and his ears perked up and he placed his front paws on the teak table and looked around, then dropped down and ambled back toward the stairs, and as usual I stood there gaping, in the midst of a phone conversation, too paralyzed to reach for my camera until it was too late and the forest had swallowed him up again into its quiet waiting. 

I’d been sitting by the fire all morning and afternoon reading a grad student’s poetry manuscript, poems of witness to her years living in Palestine, or, as she calls the place in her poems, “no country,” and at first I was reading it with my professorial eye and mind, the critical mind, until I just got sucked in to the necessity of those poems, their writing-for-survival impulse, poem after poem after poem.  They were written by a woman who many nights lay in her bed listening to gunfire, listening to the sound of rocks being thrown at her dwelling place.  They were written by a young woman who sat in her living room evenings listening to the news on TV, news of violence occurring on a street she’d walked down two hours earlier.  She wrote poems of violence taken in with her morning cup of bitter coffee, violence taken in through her skin while being stopped at check-points, observed by unseen eyes, through gun sights, from guard towers.  In her poems, whether it was mentioned or not, there was always a wall, always a war.   And it stopped mattering, if the line breaks or the meters were right, it stopped mattering if this poem or that felt unfinished or too easily drawn to a close, because they were poems of witness, and poems of survival, of being in over her head, a twenty-five year-old heart too serious to stand apart from violence, to honest to let the violence wash past or over or under her.  She let it in, she let it out.  In that way, her poems were like breathing.  And so I withheld the violence of my critical response.

  
And then my friend called, and then the bear came, and then these migratory-

restlessness-driven flocks of robins and warblers and kinglets came, flinging 

themselves against the windows of my house, and the bang of a robin right near 

my ear, against the glass, was so loud I jumped.  I watched it fly off into the trees,

apparently unscathed.  But my heart banged hard in my chest.  Not long after that, I happened upon an essay by Lidia Yuknavitch in The Rumpus called “Explicit Violence.”  Her article was prompted by a male friend half-jokingly saying, “Enough with the sob stories, ladies,” imploring them to tell no more tales about “fucked up sad violent shit that happened to you.”  And it was like that bird hitting the window again; my heart pounded, but this time, violently.  This time I thought about another kind of violence, which is cancer, which I had, in 2010.  How there’s that unspoken edict, too, after a certain amount of time has passed:  “enough with the sob stories.”  There’s a violence to being told (or telling yourself) you should be past the fear, the trauma.  You are a survivor.

But there’s the violence of what happened to my breast, what's still happening.  There’s violence in the corporeal-memory in the skin cells of the flat bony place that’s left now, in the breast's stead, where I laid my hand all last night because it ached so much, even after two years.  A new electrical twanging, shooting pain, maybe from yoga, maybe from some dead nerve reawakening, had zinged around just under my skin all day, and my pectoral muscle had throbbed.  I salved it myself with arnica because I don’t want to ask my husband to do it; I was afraid he’d be turned off or think I was trying to get him to prove something to me.  (Is that a violence I do to myself, the not asking, the shame?)  He doesn’t want to dwell in Cancerland anymore, that I know, and the flat bony place is Cancerland's very geography.  But there I dwell, and it dwells in and upon me.  I have come to know well the shape of my chest wall, each rib and the bony prominences of my sternum, and the groove of the scar, and the tenderness of bone so close to skin, and the violence of my not speaking anymore, or writing much anymore about cancer, because there, I’m told, I must not dwell; I must move on.  The violence I do to myself is maybe what I’m talking about right now.  The “wipe that cancer look off your face” when you’re talking to him/her/them I say to myself now.  But my chest wall has its own voice, its own rules, its own language of zings, electrical charges, aches, throbs, and it speaks a lot, and in the dark, my hand listens and responds, my palm flat upon the skin, salving an answer, salving away the pain and shame and doubt. 

 

It’s a violent earth, some would say, an earth of hurricane, predator and prey, cancer, earthquake.  But there’s nothing like violence of the human kind, the violence of father to child, husband to wife, the violence of words, the violence of silence, all the violence that isn’t about survival.  There's the violence we do, daily, to ourselves. The violence of me, with a sponge in my hand, swiping counters of crumbs instead of writing about the violence I’ve known.  The violence of me reading other people’s courageous words, not writing my own.  The violence of me, plugging in a vacuum cleaner, filling a sink with soapy water, stuffing clothes into the washer, the violence of not writing, the violence of me hiding.  The violence of me, typing at the kitchen table, stopping just before the truth comes out.  The violence of my unspilled angers and fears.

The bear does not return today.  Perhaps it has found the winter-killed moose

carcass in the gulch behind our house.  

The one antidote I know to the fear of my own body since cancer is the habitation 

of my own body, so I put away my computer and get dressed for a run.  Today, I 

leave my fake breast at home.  I don’t slip the silicone-filled device into the pocket 

of my running bra.  With a loose capilene shirt on over my t-shirt, no one can tell.  

After my run, half way through yoga class, stripped down to the tight blue t-shirt, I 

remember:  it’s not there.  I stretch and bend my body into triangles, into trees, 

into garlands with a class full of people, with a wall of mirrors, and it’s plain for 

everyone to see, my body’s strange mis-shape, one-breasted, lop-sided, violated.   

Let it be so, I think.  In the locker room after yoga, usually, I turn to face the wall 

when I undress so as to spare other women and girls the shock of my scar, my flat 

chest wall, the missing breast.  To spare them a vision of mutilation.  To spare them

the violence of too much unwanted news.  To spare them the violence of, perhaps, 

their own deepest fears.  But not today.  I stretch my arm up in half moon pose 

and turn my flat, bony chest to the ceiling, my girl-half.  Is there a way for violence 

be holy?  Yes.  Today, I let truth be a kind of holy violence, a fury, yes, a fierceness 

of wild birds, an impetuosity.  Just today, I let my body breathe and speak its 

truths.  I let myself be wholly embodied.

  


 

One Slim Envelope

Wouldn't it be nice if going through something truly tough -- like cancer, or the death of a child or spouse or sibling, like caring for a parent with dementia, like the loss of a job or a dream -- wouldn't it be nice if surviving the hardest thing, coming through it battered and weakened, came with an envelope arriving in the mail, and in that envelope came a special ticket?  Imagine this.  You walk to the mailbox, feeling finally that you can take a deep and clear breath, feeling finally that you have begun to re-inhabit your body, that grief has eased up.  You open your mailbox and inside you find a letter, a thin envelope.  What could it be, something so slender, weighing no more than a leaf?  You open it to find a ticket.  It is a "get out of hard stuff free" ticket.  Maybe it has an expiration date, maybe as soon as two years hence, but still.  "For going through what you just went through, you are hereby given a break.   This ticket buys you 24 months of smooth sailing."  Cool, you think, pocketing the ticket.  Nice.

But of course there is no such ticket.  And if you're a writer (or any kind of applicant to anything), a slim envelope like that, arriving in the mail, is the opposite of a ticket to free happiness; likely it's a rejection letter.   No, having survived cancer gives you one certain ticket:  a pass back into the land of the living, back into life, with all of its heartbreaks and unanticipated joys.  The slim rejection letter arrives in the mail, the phone rings in the middle of the night, the computer crashes, the commuter crashes into the back of your car.  A loved one tells you that they're disappointed or hurt or frustrated with you and you feel ashamed and have to apologize more than once.  And sometimes this happens all at the same time or in rapid succession.   During the ordinary mundane disappointments of life, where is that "I survived cancer, this little thing doesn't matter, is surmountable, etc." perspective?  The "water off a duck's back" and "roll with the punches" and "consider the source" and "don't sweat the small stuff" and "ommm" and "be the still pond" wisdom of cancer?  And maybe you even secretly wish you could still play the old "cancer card" in moments of fumbling and screwing up.  Thinking people will still cut you slack because you were, yes, a victim.  But after two years, the cancer card has, at least for me, reached past its expiration date.

It's been one of those weeks, rejection letters, screw-ups with loved ones, apologies needed.  And then, this morning, an email from a friend who is moving out of a long-term relationship, literally.   Extricating her physical life from the life of a woman she loves and lived with for many years.  My friend is 60; my friend will start a new life outside of Alaska, as a  single woman.  She is an artist, a writer.   She wrote to ask her friends for "energy" to get her through the packing and grieving and leaving.  I wrote back to her and for some reason a few of things people have said to me over the years about strength popped into my mind, and they led me back to a poem.  My friend Sean always says "stay strong, Eva."  Thinking of him saying that to me, I remembered a poem by Marge Piercy, "For Strong Women."  So I went to my bookshelf and found it:  perhaps the first poetry book I ever owned:  The Moon is Always Female.   This has been a kind of reference book, obviously, as evidenced by its  broken spine, its water-stained pages, the warped corners, the faded and  battered cover.  The book falls (literally) open to "For Strong Women."  The poem opens this way:  "A strong woman is a woman who is straining."  But the part I  typed into an email to my friend was this:

A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs.

And then these lines, from the last stanza :

What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns.  In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only the water of connection remains,
flowing through us.  Strong is what we make
each other.

I have read many beautiful and artful poems in my life, but perhaps no other has taught me as much.  I spent decades ashamed of my "weakness" and "neediness," decades questioning my own voice, as a writer and as a human being.   And of course I still do.  Cancer did nothing to assuage my self-doubt as a writer, my despair at every rejection, my fear of sending out my work because of it.  Every rejection reenacts the old internal struggles, reawakens the old internal critics, throws me into a bottomless funk.  When I read "For Strong Women" again this morning, once again it did its magic, reminding me of what it actually means to "be strong."  And what a liberation, to be taught that it means, in many ways, to NOT be "strong."  Actually, its an utter re-definition of the word "strong,"  including within it what's weak, and even futile, wrong-headed.  Earlier in the poem, Piercy puts it this way:  "She is trying  to raise a manhole cover with her head, she is trying to butt her her way through a steel wall.  Her head hurts."   I once heard the poet Sharon Olds give a craft talk.   She was a tiny, late-middle-aged woman in a blouse and plain knee-length skirt.  She had nice slender legs and silver hair tied back simply in a  ponytail, and she sat in a chair and talked to the audience as though to a group of intimate friends.  Her speaking voice was surprisingly soft.  One thing she said stayed with me through years and years.  She said that through out her twenties, she kept doubting her poems, her claim to be a "poet."  She felt terrified that she didn't understand what a poem really was (as decided by some vague coterie of "they," the editors of magazines, the judges of literary prizes, book publishers, and anthologists).  She kept trying to write "poems" but what was a poem?  Did she even know?  Was she successfully writing one?  One day, in her early thirties, she just gave up.  She decided stop trying to write "poems," and to simply write what she needed to write.  Now she is one of our most acclaimed (and also controversial), contemporary poets.  (Controversial because some criticize the intensely personal subject matter she admits into her poems -- the raw material of her own life).  What combination of forces gave her the strength to claim her voice, her right to put her life to the page in her own way?  I don't know, but her words come back to me, give me strength,  when I think to myself, "I don't even know what a poem/essay is anymore.  I've forgotten how to write one."  So I can't help but think that another's words (maybe Marge Piercy's?) gave her strength too, way back when.

"For Strong Women" ends this way:  "Until we are all strong together, a strong woman is strongly afraid."  Is there any truer sentence for people who have experienced breast cancer?  But today it spoke to me in my post-breast cancer existence.  After reading an email rejection, crying for a while, feeling sorry for myself (damn it, where is my ticket?!), telling Craig how much I HATED being a writer, how I BADLY wanted to quit; after getting the note from my friend about struggling through her splitting-up ordeal; after finding Marge Piercy's poem, I felt driven to write.  I came here, to the place where I write out of urgency, not caring if it's literary, it it's an essay, a prose poem, a self-absorbed journal entry.  In another poem in The Moon is Always Female, Piercy writes "  Don't think because I speak strong words that I am always strong."  The poem is called "Complaint of the Exhausted Author."

In a way, there is a ticket after cancer, redeemable at odd and random moments.  I wrote about it in my last post.  It's the ticket to be deliriously happy just to be alive and well, from time to time slayed by the luck of it.  But that's a ticket given and taken away.  It's valid for the space of minutes or hours.  The harder work is what we do in the long stretches without tickets.  So what else can I do?  When I think of the graduate students I mentor in creative writing, who will someday open those slim rejection envelopes too?  Send my essays out again, send my poems, make myself strong for them.   When I think of the loved ones I've recently frustrated, disappointed, angered, what can I do?  Suck it up.  Say I'm sorry, again.  Forgive myself.  Let it go.  Here is the last stanza of one of the last poems in Piercy's book; it is ostensibly about the speaker's mother.  But perhaps it's about all of us, our failures, the often dark and despairing places from which art, like a watermelon vine from a compost heap, arises.  It's called "Crescent Moon Like a Canoe:"

My muse, your voice on the phone wavers with tears.
The life you gave me burns its acetylene
of buried anger, unused talents, rotted wishes,
the compost of discontent, flaring into words
strong for other women under your waning moon.


    

Apple Seed in a Flash Flood

 

Mortality.  It’s pretty much a cliché that a diagnosis of cancer causes a person to say something like “I’ve faced my mortality.”  Mortality is, if not totally concrete to a person who’s had cancer, then is quite a bit less abstract than it was before.   For me, in the concrete, tangible moments of my life,  my mortality asserts itself as a prickling under my armpits, or a sudden gasp of breath, of a strange thought like “I want this song playing in my ear when I die,” or terror clenching me so tight in its grip that all I can do is curl up in a ball and wait for it to let go and pass, or even a twinge along the thin red scar on my chest.  It’s like a cold flash.  Afterward, I get up and go about my business.  Just now mortality came to me when I played a certain chant I love called “Ong Namo.”  I’d come back to my room after drinking coffee and chatting with students, and I wanted some music in the background while I worked on writing my lecture for tomorrow.  The chant begins this way:  “Oh my beloved, kindness of the heart, breath of life, I bow to you.  And I’m coming home.  (Repeat 4x).  And then the Pali chant begins with a flute, drums, etc.  I was putting some dishes away from lunch, and the part of my mind which acknowledges my mortality imagined those words playing at the hour of my death.  Who thinks that??? the part of my brain that believes I’m immortal asked then.  Who is that morbid???  Cut out the Eastern European darkness, damn it.  Be an American, damn it!  And then, as I continued to do my chores, washing out my coffee cup in the sink, it struck me that one doesn’t face mortality.  Mortality is, in my imagination, as un-faceable as the burning bush, as a nuclear flash, as (for me, anyway) Phillipe Petit’s very first step onto the high wire stretched between the World Trade Towers in the pre-dawn twilight.  Or the moment when he lies down on that wire, out in the middle of its sway, in the wind above NY City.   I can’t describe the face of my own mortality, or the abstract face of everyone’s Mortality.  The abstract idea is like some stone monument of poetry and philosophy that’s out on a vast desert, and no one’s ever found it.  Mortality has not stared me in the face.  I wouldn’t recognize the face of mortality if it cornered me in Safeway.

No, I realized, drying my hands on a towel, mortality is tiny.  Mortality is inside me.  A seed planted deep.  The seed has always been there (I’m thinking of the lines of a poem right now, Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” when she says “There is a ladder.  The ladder is always there, hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner."  I'm thinking There is a seed.  The seed is always there, planted innocently in the earth behind the solar plexus.)  The seed is always there, yes, like the innocently dormant cancer cell, or the faulty gene, or the coding within each cell describing its senescence, or the life and death of the apple tree trapped within the seed, there at birth, in each and every one of us.  But it is buried so deep, we forget it's there.  Or we never knew.  You can even eat an apple in such a way that you never see the seeds within it.   But in the last two years, from time to time, I have seen the seed, felt its presence in various ways, as flat-out terror, as grief, as worry, as despair.  But yesterday I felt it in a different way, and this is another aspect of the seed, another piece of its biology.

Some background:  I’m in Anchorage right now, teaching for 12 days in the university’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing.  So I have this little dorm room of my own.  And being a nester, and having driven here in my friend’s spacious car, I packed along a ridiculous amount of stuff from home:  about 25 lbs of books, about 25 lbs of organic carrots in a cooler, a juicer, a quilt, a yoga mat, several pairs of shoes, and the makings of a tiny altar.  As usual, I sat cross-legged in front of that altar first thing yesterday morning to do my daily ritual, reading a little something from the Book of Awakening, writing out some intentions/prayers, writing out some gratitudes, sometimes now even a rote activity.  But this time, for some reason, writing out what I was grateful for the previous day (i.e., eating Indian food with three writer friends, one of whom was poet Gary Snyder; for Derrick, Nancy, Rich, Kristine, Margaret, Greta, Zack, Sherry; for poetry; for my run; for my health; for my recovery; for spontaneous writing with a flash-mob by the pendulum in the UAA library that got me out of an ego-funk, etc.), I was suddenly overcome (if I weren’t  on the floor I’d have likely dropped to it) with gratitude for being alive, for being a living, breathing creature on this earth, for getting to be here on earth, for two more years of friendship, writing, thinking, reading, being with whales, running, yoga, meals, gardens, travels, conversations, coffee, walks, misunderstandings, music, waking up beside my love, showers, hikes, trips to Prince William Sound, kayak paddles, rain storms.  It felt like I was being swept up by a flash flood thick with memory.  Maybe it’s that daily listing of gratitudes that had suddenly “lipped the orgiastic pool” as the poet Stanley Kunitz wrote in “King of the River” (which is about salmon but really about sex and mortality).  I mean I started sobbing.  I mean I started saying thank you over and over again, and I wanted to call someone (I actually did walk across the hall to knock on my friend Nancy’s door, but she was at breakfast, which is good, as I might have appeared slightly crazed, like the reincarnation of Christopher Smart dropping to his kneels in a public square chanting the praises of his cat Geoffrey).  I wanted to tell someone how god damned lucky I felt. 

To hold that seed, small, oval, mahogany-skinned.  For a moment, to hold it in your hand.  For a moment, to look right at it.  Does it also look back?  Because to look at mortality is not to look at death (who can, really?) but to look at life.  And isn’t that just as scary?  Because isn’t life just too rare to comprehend, doesn't it burn too brightly, isn't too incomprehensible, the unlikelihood that you’re alive at all, and that you get to hold a moment in your hand?  Inside that moment, I was a person with no future, only a past, and that past spilled its banks, and carried me downstream.  And I let it.

From the Island of Nests and Severed Wings

A long hiatus from the blog.  Chalk it up to spring fever, everything alive pushing up through dead grass like these false hellebores.  Earthy birthday candles.  So I'm taking some deep breaths, slowing down some to write.  These reflections are from our first trip into the field on the boat this season, into Resurrection Bay.  Could there be a more appropriate name for the place we start each summer season?  So this is a dispatch from  a bay called resurrection, somewhere on a planet called resurrection:  my divine teacher.

May 26

On the boat, rocking.  Thumb Cove.  Figures moving down the beach.  Mountain slopes deep in  old snow.  A holiday weekend.  We take out place among many anchored boats.  The air cold, metallic, old snow’s exhalation.  Craig asleep already in the bunk.  Breath of life, divine teacher, the chant I’m listening to says, I bow to you again and again.  Despite my resistance at leaving home, now, in the evening, at anchor, I feel that I have actually come home.  Left useless things behind, returned to something essential, a kind of salvation.  (I know this is fleeting).  Water endlessly moving, cradle endlessly rocking (Whitman), the cup a hand makes dipping water from a stream, bringing it to the mouth, the cup a bay makes, a cirque, a valley.   The thing held (me) (you) (time).  And part of the  ache of it is the knowledge that it’s fleeting.  (The water in the cupped hand leaking out drip by drip no matter how tight I clench my fingers, so drink fast, slurp it up!)

Speaking of (time) can it be true that it’s been an entire year since I returned to the ocean for the first time after cancer treatment?  That I’ve lived out a whole year?  Been given 365 days, scooped each one into my cupped hand, drank it down?  All of these days, mine, now, inside?  That I’m allowed another, this one with quivery, mercuric water twitching like the hide of a horse?   I feel the external things falling away, how I am defined by others, how I measure myself against others, all the meanness, all definitions, slipping away.  This is mercy, I am thinking, this right-now-awareness-stopped-time-sensation one of my grad students calls “momentness.”  The thing a poem tries to capture but can’t.  This is it.  And of course it’s always present, this mercy, and was a year ago, two, forty-five.  There are animals who’ve died in the deep winter snows I’m looking at, animals buried in avalanches, there are hunted and killed birds, and still, mercy is this place.  Leaving home to come to the water is to come into the presence of this mercy.  (I know this is fleeting, this feeling, it won’t last).  So I pin it to the page, I try, right here:

May 27

It didn’t last, no, this is another kind of momentness, the merciless kind.  Out in rough water following a small group of orcas,  I’m seasick, and I can’t help myself, it reminds me of chemo.  Not just the nausea but the trapped feeling.  Here, I am trapped by a limited set of sensations, a limited palette of colors (mostly grays), a limited acoustic repertoire (chugging of pistons, groan of engine, clanks of shifting gears,  the boat’s sway and shudder).  Where is the silvery light, the mercy?  Mark Nepo writers:  “No matter how I lift my heart, my shadow creeps in wait behind, background to my joy.” This is fleeting, but in the grip of the unmerciful,  that awareness is lost, or is irrelevant.   Conclusion:  I am NOT enlightened.  All around me, the islands we walk on at night, speak to it:  merciful, merciless life.

June 1

I dreamed that cancer came back, Dr. S. told me I had five days left to live, just five, five exactly.  At first, I railed, I screamed, clawed, wept, raged.   Impossible, that I could let life go.  But then, as in a dream I had just about a year ago, this strange fog began to creep in, on the inside, a sort of grogginess, a little like anesthesia.  And I began to let go.  And it was easy.  I lay down to die, perhaps the way a moose in the deep snow does.  It was so natural.  This winter, a lot of moose died around Homer in the hard, long winter, the deep snows.  One day, Craig and I, out skiing, spotted two brown bear juveniles playing with the bones and hide of a moose, throwing them around a creek bottom.  They were alive on the snow, in the sunlight, unaware of us, and the moose was over, and yet it was present, a part of the living earth, its surface, like a piece of ordinary detritus that makes up one of artist Sarah Sze’s sculptures .   Divorced from its moose-story.  A player in some other, ongoing history of life on earth, a plaything in the earth's ongoing memoir.

Today, I kayaked to a rocky shoreline, carefully extricated myself from the cockpit, scrambled up into the forest, followed the trail of river otters through the blueberry thickets,  and suspended from branches,  all along the trail, were the black and white wings of killed murres.  Gruesome decorations.  Looked almost like they’d been impaled on the branches.  Or like they’d been carelessly shed, cape-skins thrown over twigs, then abandoned to the rain.  The sharp breastbones protruding from matted feathers, marking the place where the spirit of the bird detached and fled.

When I love it out here, it’s because in the woods, all my fear of dying goes away.  It is no mystery, just the facts: these wings were once murres.  But that’s not so.  I look carefully for signs of bears.  I do not want to die of cancer; I do not want to be eaten by a bear.  How I will die: that knowledge isn’t given.

Tonight, in the near-darkness, the island of severed wings is alive with the cheeps of nesting storm petrels, who come to land only once each year, at night, to burrow into the ground under tree roots or tussocks to lay their eggs.  An island of hungry mouths.  Bones and feathers litter the burrow entrances.  The body, my body, yours, is a similar island.  Little deaths, and the urge to live, manic aliveness, bottomless depression, coexisting, feathers, bones, eggs, cheeps.   In the body, little deaths asleep, burrowed in the bones, lungs, brain or liver, and every moment, the body replenishing itself, renewed.  William Stafford said “the darkness around us is deep,” but so is the light.  The light around me is so damn deep.   

I dip my hands into this stream, and all I have is what the stream yields up, what’s in this cup of my palm, this sip, these severed wings, that silver light, this moment.   Today, I followed the stream to its source, a pond in the forest half-filled with snow.  From its mud-bottom, the water looked nearly black.  Half-white and frigid with enormous anvils of snow.  Surrounded by forest, by nests and corpses of seabirds, I kneeled down in the mud, filled my hands and drank it all.    

The Swan is How I Know That I am Alive

The swan is a white blur far out in the pond.  I don’t have my glasses on,  so my friend must confirm that it’s a swan, not a clot of whipped cream mysteriously dropped from the blue sky onto the pond’s surface.   It’s morning, and we are sitting on a wool blanket drinking tea brewed in a cast iron pot.  This is Cape Cod, and this is the second pond of my morning.  This is the moment, the present tense.  The moment is a swan.

~

And this is the future, two days later, sitting in the oncologist’s office, in my jeans and a hospital johnny,  my arms crossed to keep the johnny closed,  my sister in a chair against the opposite wall,  working on her laptop.  As always, Dr. S., as he walks through the door, looks for a split second almost startled, then pleased to see us.  I want to hug him but can’t right now, because if I open my arms, my johnny will open too.  And that would be awkward.  Because suddenly, the spartan, sterile examination room sort of melts around us, and we’re momentarily in another place and situation.  Dr. S. sits down and asks me how I am.  Not as a doctor, but as though he were just a friend.  As though he’s invited us to his house for a visit, and we’re sitting in the living room catching up.  For a moment, we’re just people.  Even though he wears a white doctor coat and there’s a stethoscope dangling from his neck and I’m in this cotton garment of the sick, we’re just talking about life.   All the time we were waiting, anxiety built inside of me.  We waited for almost an hour to see “the Shnip,” as Mara affectionately refers to him.  We always wait a long time here.  But rather than annoy me, I accept it.  Because this is what the Shnip does.  He treats you like you’re the only patient he has.  Or like you’ve dropped in for a visit at the end of his busy day, and he can finally relax and chat for awhile.  I wonder if he’s begun practicing meditation, like his wife.  He’s that present.

~

The swan is coming into focus now.  I want to write “she,” but my friend corrects me.  It is probably a male, his mate tucked into some sedge and cattail indentation in the pond’s shore, sitting on a clutch of eggs.  He patrols the shore always, she says,  describing an all-day all-out battling with danger and potential danger he wages with the lake.  Like the pair of Canada geese we just watched waddle onto the sand several hundred yards away, the pair he is at this moment bee-lining toward.  He is no decorative swan, spinning slow circles, preening, hoping someone takes his picture.  He means business.  His focus is impressive.  His path is direct.  He is intent.

~

Earlier this morning, after I dropped my sister off at work, I drove to Nickerson State Park.  It was unplanned, like this visit with my friend at the swan-pond.  It was spontaneous.  The morning was pure spring, mild, the trees flushed various shades of baby-green and speaking in their spring voices, the voices of newly arriving migrant birds.  On the radio, I heard that people had been spotting indigo buntings, even one rare black-throated sparrow who normally lives in the desert southwest.  I was going to go to the coffee shop to do some computer work, but I cranked the wheel over at the entrance to Nickerson Park, thinking I’d walk around Cliff Pond, to breathe the morning air, maybe write in my journal.  Cliff Pond was my refuge during chemo.  But something pulled me to another trail, a shorter trail around Little Cliff Pond.  In my eight months on the Cape, I never walked that trail.  I was the only person in the parking lot between the two ponds.  I walked the trail,  pushing through a thicket of birdsong.  I found a sandy spot in the woods at the pond’s edge, sat down, and pulled out my journal.  “Time here now on Cape Cod is stacked many layers deep, the moment dense with past time, with memories of when I lived here during treatment.”  It’s disconcerting.  Driving the car down Rte 6A was like swimming through a kelp bed.  So maybe that’s why I walked a new trail, to break out of that viscous sensation of memories knocking around against the present.

~

 I tell the Shnip it really took a full year, like everyone said, after treatment ended, to feel somewhat “myself” again.  “Me and my shadow,” I say,  the new shadow that now hovers at the edge of my sight, cancer and its uncertainties.  He tells me that the shadow will grow paler with time.  I believe him not because he’s worked with countless breast cancer patients over the years, but because his wife is a two-time survivor of breast cancer.  He knows about the shadow.  And I take to the image of a pale shadow.  One day, perhaps, it will become a negative of itself, a ghost print, and when I look into it, what will I see?  What will it show me?

~

The swan is not aiming toward those geese after all.  He is aiming his prominent orange beak, its black nobs, the curve of his forehead, his black eyes, his wings, which my friend observes are never relaxed on his back,  toward us, the two of us on the blanket, with the pot of tea.  I think of a scene in the novel The Snow Child, when the girl Faina battles a swan.   A swan, as graceful and placid as it appears, is a strong, fierce bird.  Its beating wings could break our shins.  We stand, we back away.  The swan does not swerve until he’s almost grounded himself  in the shallows at our feet.  Then he turns, eyes us, pushes back off the sand and begins to forage.  We sit back on the blanket.  This is the moment, the acute moment of the swan acknowledging us, eye to eye. “I see you, I know you are there, I am aware.”   It is how I know that I am alive.

~

An Alaskan friend emailed me this morning of his struggles to not dwell too much in thoughts of mortality.  A survivor of  one kind of cancer many years ago, recently, he’s had surgeries for melanomas.  He’s an athlete, a mountaineer.  He described to me crashing his bike the other day, blood on his smashed helmet, walking his unscathed bike and self 8 miles back to town.  “And I didn’t think about it once,” he said.  Meaning cancer.  It is how he knows he is alive. 

~

The Shnip asks me about Craig, and I tell him it has not been easy on our relationship, cancer and its aftermath, and that only now am I accepting that Craig and I took two separate but parallel journeys.   And everyone, I say, focuses on the cancer patient, and expects partners to be rocks of support.  The Shnip says yes, that is the way it is, there are even support groups for partners for that reason.  And I tell him we are different, that for Craig, the numbers are his rock of Gibraltar.  He is a scientist, I say.  And he goes back again and again to one scene.  When we sat in Dr. S's office that first time, two years ago, Mara, Craig and listening to the NP rattle off my treatment plan.  “We don’t usually provide numbers unless s someone balks at treatment,” she said, but she gave them to us nonetheless,  the way that each kind of treatment halved the chance of recurrence.  And as I sat there, the words and percentages streaming past my ears like twigs in a big, breaking-up northern river, as I sat there ignoring the twigs,  fixating instead on the enormous slabs of ice roiling past, Craig looked like a man who’d just lost everything.  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees,  face in his big hands.  He looked despairing, but he was doing multiplication and addition in his head.  Chances of recurrence.  Months of treatment.  To those prognostic numbers he’s returned again and again, lobbing them at my fears.  The little sticks bounce off the ice chunks in my head.  “For me,” I tell the Shnip, “The numbers are no Rock of Gibraltar.”

~

 Now the swan tips up its snow-white tail.  It appears to do a headstand, holding the pose for long minutes as it searches the sandy bottom for food.  My friend and I talk, drink tea, the swan feeding within a stone’s throw.  We are suddenly no threat, and I wonder, were we ever?  “I think,” I tell my friend, “some animals are just more social, some more solitary, than others.”  I wonder if the swan is lonely.  I wonder if it feels more secure in the company of other creatures like us.  Why is it feeding right here?  When there’s a whole pond available.  I will never know these things.  And they are not the point.  The swan is the point.  The point of this moment.  Its gleaming black eye.  There are no icebergs here, in this moment.  There is no fear.  No future, no past.

~

In my journal, at Little Cliff Pond, an hour before the visit with my friend at her pond, an hour before the swan, I wrote, “I want to squeeze as much life out of life as I can.  This morning, I am aware, maybe through the birds, and through the distant background hum, a low, human mechanized roar of cars, of the intensity of life, the burning of both candle-ends.  I want to squeeze every drop of life out of life and I want it to squeeze every drop out of me and leave me spent.”

~

“What is your rock?” Dr. S. asks me.  Is this the kind of question an oncologist asks?  Or a friend?

“Writing is my rock,” I say.  “Writing my blog.”

“But isn’t that painful sometimes?” he asks.  “It must be intense, to put those fears down, to go into them, to explore them that way?  Isn’t it harder?”

“No,” I say.  “It’s much harder when I don’t write.  The runaway thoughts in my head are a much worse kind of pain.”

~

The swan is moving gradually away from us now.  While feeding, the wings relax along the torso, but the black feet move separately to balance the tail tipped up as it feeds deeper and deeper.   Now the swan rights himself,  and the wings again assume what appears a position of tension, of defense.   Yet now I see that they also make a basket, a cradle, of the swan’s back, in which cygnets will ride.   The swan swims now for the place where we saw Canada geese earlier.   My friend and I talk about the wild, about the bird songs, about the nature of nature, which is not peaceful, but incessant, focused, intent on survival, on life.  Birds, birds, and the strange birds we are, too, continuously falling off our bikes so we know that we are alive.  Bird hearts beating impossibly fast.

~

We talk a long time, and then it’s time for the Shnip to turn into the doctor again.   “Well, let’s take a look at you,” he says.  I sit on the table, and he presses his fingertips into my neck, my sternum.  “Breathe,”he says, the stethoscope cold on my back.”  I lie down and he taps his fingers on my abdomen, runs them quickly over the numbness of the scar, presses up into my armpits.  “Okay, you can sit up.  You’re the picture of health.  Go ahead and get dressed.”

~

The swan is not a picture of grace or beauty.  The swan is flesh and blood, feathers and beak – real.  The swan is now.  My friend and I gather up the tea pot and cups.  We leave the blanket where it is.  We say goodbye.

In my journal, at Little Cliff Pond, I wrote “Here, the pond asks nothing of me.  It doesn’t even care if I look at it or just sit here staring at my page.  The breeze touches the side of my face and moves on.  The birds territorialize,  a scratchy, whistley, buzzy, chucking, chattering  din, the business and industry of their brief spans of time on earth.  Like me, they live like there is no tomorrow, filled with urgency.  Like me, they are alive only right now.  They’re not peaceful.  Their calls in the forest aren’t sweet music.  Their music is incidental.  They sing work songs, love songs, fight songs.  But still, despite all of this urgency of the earth all around,  and the urgency inside me, I can finally breathe here, alone in the woods, on the pond’s edge.  I can let the incessant ripples of memory and future flow past my ears, like the ripples on the pond itself, heading across the pond, glancing off this beach, on their way to someplace else.  Like the swan, they recognize no edge or ending.  They move forever forward into the next moment.

~  

This is my moment.  It is 1:30 am on my 49th birthday.  I am in bed listening to the rain.  The swan sleeps.   We dream each other.  I am writing these words:  the ice has gone out of the pond.  For this moment, the ice has gone out of my life.      

Small Animal in an Elderberry Thicket Ponders Love After Breast Cancer

Last night I finished the novel The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey.  The book is a deeper story disguised as an Alaskan take on an old Russian fairy tale.   At the heart of that fairy tale – at the heart of many fairy tales –  is darkness, is longing and loneliness, desire, disappointment, letting be and letting go.  So of course The Snow Child is more than magical and dream-like.  It is very real.  It’s about loving something desperately but not being able to own it, fix it in time or place, rein it in.  It’s about overcoming your own deepest cravings and wounds to see and accept another person, place, or animal as it is.  It’s about loving something wild and untamed, and having to adjust your manner of loving – all you’ve been taught about what and how it’s supposed to be – adjust it to the true nature of the beloved thing.  It’s about letting yourself actually see the beloved thing, beyond your own projections.  Mary Oliver, in a poem, asks the reader to just “let the small animal of your body love what it loves.” The small wild thing, the animal of the body, isn’t always a rational creature, and it isn’t always pretty or polite or well-behaved.  It’s difficult enough to know and then focus on that small animal’s meanderings, its desires and impulses and instincts, much less ask others to honor them too.  But that’s what love does, doesn’t it?

When your love gets cancer, get ready.  The small wild animal, stuffed, buried, contained, muffled, suppressed, awakens.   No, you didn’t sign up for this insurrection of the body, did you?  You didn’t sign up for this particular train ride.  Even when your love, the day she was diagnosed, asked you directly, “So are you ready to get on this train with me?” and you said,  “Yes,” how could you understand?  You didn’t know the train was heading down this particular narrow cut through a dense forest, jumping the track your life was on and careening down another.  You didn’t anticipate that when the treatment was over, she wouldn’t want to jump off that train and trudge back in the opposite direction, searching for the one you started on together when you first hooked up.  That when you finally found that old train, finally hauled yourself into a boxcar, she wouldn’t follow.  And now you see her there, waving from a boxcar on another train, swaying down a parallel track, but you can’t make out her words.  They don’t make sense.  They don’t sound like the language you used to speak together.  And she can’t seem to understand your words either.

Two years after cancer, on the home front, nothing is the same, and everything is the same.  I still get mad when he forgets to bring cloth bags to the grocery store and comes home with plastic.  He still gets mad when I drive too fast on our dirt road.  I still get mad when he chainsaws down the elderberry bushes in the orchard to let in more light for the raspberry patch.  He still gets mad when I buy more books than I can read in a year, more books than I can afford.  But I don’t know the terrain of his inner life, exactly.  I don’t know what happened to him during the year of breast cancer, what path those months carved into him, and where that path led.  It’s a private place.  There’s that song, “Stand By Me,” and when I hear it, I think of Craig and my sister, my mod squad, and all of our trips to Boston, to the hospital, and all of the shit we faced together.  But the truth is, cancer doesn’t happen to one person with everyone rallying around, standing by.  And it doesn’t happen to “a family.”  We each take our own trip with it, alone.  I write my way through.  That is not Craig’s way.  I talk about my “healing process,” a lame phrase, a euphemism for the way I flail through the elderberry thickets, lost, following the small animal of my body, which is sometimes frantic, sometimes exuberant, and sometimes afraid.  Craig says he can’t go there with me, into that thicket.  By god, he wants to clear it out with a chainsaw, let the light in.  And I think I’ve got the map and key, but it doesn’t fit into his door, it doesn’t show the way to his wilderness.  His way is equally a mystery, equally a place, and a path and a language, and someone walking alone through a landscape only he can see.   Does this sound lonely?  Sometimes it is.  But maybe it should be.       

Breast cancer changes something about the small animal of the body.  Not the obvious things.  Not so much the animal itself, but one’s access to it.  In my case, it leapt out of its woodpile like the red squirrel in our shed, and chattered at me, and it hasn’t stopped. This is what I love.  This is what I want.  The best times are when the big gawky human of my body and the small animal are one, as in the other morning, when I walked down the road from my house.  The puddles had frozen in the night, the air was cold against my face, but birdsong flamed here and there, deep and near, in the forest.  The sky was pale and flat as old tin, not yet bright.  And this all-out, desperate, obsessive, consuming love for the earth, the wild dead grass, the freezing air, the frenzied push-of-the-world birds arriving year after year, their rough songs, the broken branches, the moose-chewed alders and willows, the rabbit-stripped spruce trees, the scruffy rabbits themselves, mangy and tousled and fleet, half-brown, half-dishwater, the ground without its snow clothes, which behind our house resembles the matted, damp coat of a moose, like we are walking around on the enormous body of a moose that is sleeping (thank god), and I wondered, how could I ever let it go?  And this desperate voice inside me said, “I want to stay right here forever, this is my heaven.”   There are two forces at play in this moment: my intense fear of cancer coming back, of dying, and my equally intense desire to be alive. The flip side of fear, for me, is joy with a knife in it.  I cannot stay here, in my heaven.  I will love it anyway.  

And maybe that’s what The Snow Child touched in me.  The main characters, an old man and woman in the Alaskan wilderness in the 1920’s, have lost a baby.  They’ve grieved it in mutual isolation, in completely separate ways.  And then a child appears out of the snow, but she’s not theirs.  They have to learn another way to love.  They teach me how to love something with the fierceness of a bear, knowing it is not mine.  It is beyond me, apart from me, wild unto itself.  I can’t keep it, lure it, seduce it, tame it, even know it completely, or be known by it, without killing the essence, without dousing the flame.  I will love it anyway.

Chapter 3 of a Brief Hair Biography: A Crooked Letter

Last night, on sleep’s verge, a thought blew into my face flat and fast, like a door ripped off an old barn by a tornado and sent flying.  A big flat thought-bang slammed into the space behind my closed eyes, I guess what you could call, in psyche terms, a post-traumatic stress flash-back-forward-whallop.  I’d spent the afternoon searching through hundreds of old slides for possible images for my book, which is now “in production,” and I’d found some images of my younger self unclothed out in Prince William Sound, a two-breasted, long-haired younger self sprawled in muskegs or perched on a bunk or grinning behind the wheel of a boat.  Always a nature-girl, for decades a food-purist and reformed binge-drinker, decades sober, decades drug-free, clear-skinned, sans make-up, decades breathing cool, clean Alaskan air, decades eating wild salmon and beach greens and so many wild blueberries during the late season, it’s a wonder I didn’t turn inside-out and purple from all the anti-oxidants.  Of course, after the diagnosis, I asked why, asked my doctors if it could have been because of that or this (no nothing you did, they repeated), speculated with my sister about all the pesticides sprayed on the grapefields we worked in and lived next to; and the pesticides my father sprayed on his apple trees; and the pesticides sprayed on the cultivated strawberries we ate and ate without washing while picking them in the fields with my mother; and all the alcohol I downed in college before switching to mushrooms and pot (more pure I rationalized); and my father’s secondhand and my own-for-awhile firsthand cigarette smoke; and skinny-dipping in Lake Erie and eating its fish every Friday; and Three Mile Island upwind of my hometown; and all the drives through Lackawana, the now-abandoned steel city near Buffalo, my sister and I holding our noses and chanting “Lackawana P.U.” and staring out the car window at the row-houses grimed by smokestack spewage wondering how people lived there breathing always that stench; and all of the Latvian food, dairy and meat-heavy; and then packs and packs of sugarless gum trying to slim down from my Latvian childhood; and my chocolate addiction; and not having born a child; and the buried pain of childhood wounds.   I considered pretty much everything.  But never the kind of why that hit me out of nowhere last night, the why with a such a wail in it, like wind whistling through a slit between a cabin’s wall-logs.  A why finding its way in, past my defenses.  Why did I get breast cancer?  Why me?  And then the thought, the flat, hard shape of it end-over-ending away in another gust of wind.  I practiced my new anti-insomnia technique of shoring up the logs around my sleep-mind, mind swept of worry-debris, a log cabin around my inner silence, and finally I fell asleep.

Besides, as the late Dorothy Matkin, my mother-in-law, would say, Y is a crooked letter.  Why is a crooked question that leads you on a crooked trail that dead ends with a sign: Warning:  Impenetrable brush ahead.  Turn back.  Dorothy got diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer late in life, and I can’t be sure, but I’d guess she spent little if any time or energy batting that crooked letter around in her mind like a badminton birdie.  I doubt if she looked back and questioned the myriad ever-changing hair dyes of her life, or the perm chemicals, or the nail polish and lipstick shades, or the chilled wines, or the non-organic oranges and lemons growing in her back yard.  She died not of cancer, but of old age, at home, in her nineties, surrounded by family.  Even when her short-term memory went, even when her legs failed her, she never lost her sense of humor or her flair, her flash, her panache.  I think of Dorothy forever red-headed and wearing midnight blue, turquoise or royal purple, wherever she is now.  So let Dorothy be my segue back to hair, to the final chapter of my hair's cancer journey.


I've been, as I wrote before, a nature girl all my life, and not until I let those Latvian women have their chemical way with my hair did I ever use a fake color on my head.  I did have a couple of the requisite perms as a teen, aiming for that Farrah Fawcett loft, and gave in to the unfortunate urge to use blue or lavender eyeshadow (from lids to brows, I'm afraid) in high school, but in college, I threw away all of my make-up when I heard that it was made of whales and stopped cutting my hair.  


So it's pretty weird when I think about the fact that in the last two years, I've had more hair-does than in the previous 46 years combined.  Maybe even out-hair-doing Dorothy Matkin.


Baldness during the 90+ degree Cape Cod summer months of chemo was refreshing but psychologically hard.  Mostly, I covered my head with a scarf, and I started a head-covering collection, thanks to friends and family.  (I gave most of them away after).  I'm very happy that one friend, Tara, saved up a bunch of very cool, hip hats, but never got around to sending them until my hair grew back.  Yeah!  I could keep them, and wear them to this day.  


I was pretty self-conscious of my bald head, and forced myself at times to strip off my head scarf when I swam.  I literally was afraid of freaking little children out.  But one hot day on the Cape, my sister and her kids and I paddled a nylon raft to the middle of a pond and I pulled off my scarf and we dove and did back-flips and rolls on and off for hours in the cool water, and it felt like liberation.  I finally covered my head for fear of sunburn.  I loved that my niece and nephews and even some of their friends grew used to bald auntie, didn't mind when I flung off a headscarf in the house in exasperation.

This photo, which I posted a while back, was taken by my brother in the Bronx Botanical Garden, one of my early childhood haunts.  When you choose to wear a headscarf and not a wig as a cancer patient, you are indeed a marked woman.  Especially when a lack of eyebrows or lashes erases any doubt about whether the scarf is simply a bohemian fashion statement.  (I wore Indian headscarves in my twenties, but had a long ponytail trailing down my back).  Sometimes, the mark comes in handy, like, say, when you get stopped by the cops for rolling through a stop sign.  But mostly, you learn to wear invisible plexiglass walls around yourself when you go out in public.  And sometimes someone taps on a wall to say "Hey, I went through it too, and I'm fine," and that's a good thing.  But other times, it's an invitation for all kinds of bizarre reactions and comments from strangers, and those you hope will ping off the walls and land back in the tapper's face, but mostly, you just sputter some inane response, and then come up with excellent come-backs when it's too late.

And then it was fall, and then it was October, and then it was October 15, my last chemo infusion.  And my friend Margaret flew to Boston and met me at the hospital, where I was in a hospital bed woozy from Benadryl and having a particularly messy blood draw.  After hugging my infusion nurse Myrielle goodbye, and after a nap at the Beacon Inn, and after all the drug-dopiness wore off, to celebrate the end of chemo, Craig, Margaret and I went to dinner on Beacon Street, and then saw a Woody Allen movie in a vintage theatre, and then walked back to our cute room at the Beacon Inn and slept, and in the morning, Margaret bought me a boot.  One black bad-ass boot.  A book like a motorcycle mama would wear.  And so I had to buy the other boot to match.  And I walked down Beacon Street with Craig and Margaret feeling like I'd given cancer everything I had, the hardest kick inside me, and the boots would keep that kick alive.  And they would take me somewhere else, somewhere new.  Bad, black, ass-kicking fuck cancer boots.  

On the drive back from Boston to my sister's house, we stopped at a breast cancer supply boutique.  What else to call it?  That's what it is, basically, a place where you buy bras with special pockets for prostheses, where you get fitted for said prostheses, where you buy special swimsuits, wigs, scarves, hats, and lymphadema sleeves.  No, it's not like the Gap or J. Crew or Victoria's Secret.  Most of the bras and swimsuits are downright ugly.  I'll just say it.  They mostly suck.  Maximum coverage.  Like a lingerie shop for Puritans.  But we did our best, stocked up, and while I waited for my prosthesis to get boxed up, Margaret led me into a tiny room with mirrors, told me to sit down and said, "Eva, just try this on for me, please, just for fun." And because Margaret has said this to me countless times in clothing stores, holding up  some piece of clothing in a color or style I'd never choose for myself, and because she's always been right, I let work the auburn wig onto my head, and I stared at myself in the mirror and started laughing in this weird way that sounded like I was winded.  Maybe it's what they call guffawing, but it kind of had sobs in it, because suddenly, for the first time in six months, I looked almost normal.  I laugh-sobbed and stared at myself in disbelief.  And when Craig saw me he said, "Damn, I'm going to BUY that for you," and he did, and then we drove to the nearest Wall-Mart and bought fish-net stockings, and when I got back to Cape Cod wearing my regalia, and walked up to my sister, at first she actually didn't recognize me.  She really did.  She thought I was some friend of Margaret's.  And then my nephew Quinn's eyes got wide and this huge smile slowly spread across his face and he said, "Auntie Eve, you look awesome."  And I gave the ground a little kick with the toe of my boot.

  

 I never thought I would wear a wig.  I'm a very self-conscious person, as Craig can tell you.  I'm always hissing "Shhhh" in public, looking around to see if anyone is listening into our conversations.  I don't even like to dance in front of people, and I switched my major from music to biology because of terrible stage fright.  But after going bald, after months of headscarves and no eyebrows or lashes, and everybody knowing my business, I found myself just showing up at the UU church services suddenly with shoulder-length red hair, or at the Hot Chocolate Sparrow, or at the grocery store.  Knowing of course, people would know I hadn't grown this auburn head of hair overnight.  One thing breast cancer did for me was give me a tiny bit more pluck, a tad of "oh fuck it already" attitude, a "who cares what anybody thinks" demeanor, which was refreshing for someone like me.  I guess you could say it made me get over myself.  


One of my favorite wig-era encounters was at a little cafe I used to go to every time I visited my energy healers.  It's in a tiny place called Marstens Mills, and you can actually imagine there being a waterwheel somewhere, and an actual mill, and men in hemp clothing hauling sacks of freshly milled flour over their shoulders.  It's just a winding road through dense forests and suddenly a few business establishments, one of which is the cafe and one of which is a gift shop where I found several of my head scarves.  I had a few minutes to kill before my energy healer session, and so I  went in and ordered my favorite tea flavor and a corn muffin, and the woman behind the counter, who'd served me many times over the head-scarf months, said, in the most off-hand manner, quietly, "I love your hair.  You look great."  And then she told me that she'd admired me from afar, my courage in wearing a scarf, she said, not wearing a wig all through treatment.  She told me she'd had very early breast cancer herself, hadn't had chemo, but she said "I don't think I could have done it, worn a scarf like that."  Besides that bravery on my part had nothing to do with it, I loved that she never said a word for all those months.  That she made me feel like I was just another customer while I was at my sickest.  That she held her comments and thoughts close to her own chest, until I was on my way to recovery, until it was the right time.  And it was the right time.  She knew I'd made it through the fire, and she was there to say hello on the other side.


During radiation, a white infantile fluff began to grow on my head.  So I kept wearing scarves or the wig, depending on my mood of the day, or going bear-headed at home.  And then it was over.  On the day of my last radiation zap, Craig and I left the Cape and headed for Hawaii to recover the rest of the way.  There, I retired my wig for good.  I kept the scarf on for another month, as the white infantile fluff grew, turned grayer, and eventually turned into something more like hair.  Here I am with some dear Alaskan friends who visited during that transition time.

Those were the days of still going to bed by eight every night, of napping in the afternoons, of bone-weariness and tears and fits and sudden terrors and rages and a slow, slow recovery mimicked by the slow, slow growth of my hair.  Before returning to Homer, not wanting to hit town after a year away with a completely gray-white head, I went to a salon for a color job.  The guy said it was semi-permanent, semi-natural, but it was not.  He lied through his teeth.  I was a Latvian brassy red-head again.  Here I am in Prince William Sound on my 48th birthday:

In that place, Prince William Sound, love of my life, I stuck my fingers deep into the spongey wet earth.  I let rain soak my hair and saturate my skin and run down my face.  I did yoga on a black sand beach on my birthday, 48 sun salutations, alone while the tide licked in.  I lay face down on alpine bluff-tops.  I lifted my shirt and pressed my bare chest into the muskeg, into sphagnum moss, which was used as antiseptic bandage material during long-ago wars, I don't remember which.  I collected water in little blue bottles to send to my friend Lauren, going through a hot Cape Cod summer of chemotherapy.  I gathered all of the broken and scattered and crooked pieces of myself.  I crawled back into my animal body.  In my animal body, I knelt to drink, time and again, from streams, replacing every cell within.  Like someone rebuilding a crude hut blown down by a big wind.  I grew a new skin, and a new pelt.  This is where I go when the whys come careening by in the night.  I rebuild my hut, crooked stick by crooked stick, one for every crooked letter I discard.