Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

Click to hear Ode to a Blustery Sunday

It’s a little longer than the Tiny Ode.

Click to hear the Tiny Ode

Twice, I have seen a squirrel while driving on N Lombardy, in the block between N Grace and Broad.

The trees hang over the road, and I’ve seen this squirrel, or another squirrel (for all I know this could be a major squirrel thorough fare) leap from one tree to another, no net, only cars below, waiting to run it over.

But it leaps anyway, and lands, the branches it leaps from so thin that they shift with its weight, the branches it lands on bending as it claws its way further into limbs.

Don’t worry. I was stopped at the light both times.

I’m not the type to get distracted by a flying squirrel and hit the car in front of me.

Probably not.

When I came back from the bathroom, Uncle Stephen was sitting up, leaning his back against his bedroom windows.

He had built his bed to the edge of the room, so that the window ledge was also the edge of his bed.

The room was so small, he had told me, he was trying to make the most use of the space.

And it was small.

The door clears the bed frame by six inches.

I thought he was asleep, and he startles me when he speaks.

“You don’t have to do that,” Uncle Stephen says.

Shirtless, he leans back against the window glass. It’s December, and outside, the gray Mississippi sky pools and spits rain.

“Aren’t you cold?” I say.

“The cold helps the nausea.”

I put the plastic bowl next to him on the bed, and he curls one hand around it. The veins stand out under his skin, and I wonder if he’s been drinking enough.

I sit at the foot of the bed, so that I won’t disturb Uncle Stephen if I move.

When he’s sick, every motion, he says, rocks his brain in his skull.

The wind that’s been blowing for days tilts the trees, and now that the leaves have fallen, the black balls of squirrel’s nests show, high up.

I wonder how they anchor them so that they don’t blow out of the tree.

“Any gone over yet?” Uncle Stephen says.

“No.” I say. I had told him about how one of the old Oaks on our property had blown over, its crown crumpled, its base black and coiled with roots.

“I wonder why they can’t save it.” Uncle Stephen says.

I should know why, I think. I’ve been taking an A.P. Plant Biology class.

“I’d like to be a tree surgeon.” Uncle Stephen says.

“You could do that.”

Uncle Stephen shakes his head, rolling it against the glass, until he’s looking at me, one ear flattened by the window.

“Pish,” he says, “these tree surgeons we have now, they’re useless.”

Outside, there are no squirrels jumping from tree to tree. Sometimes, even on the windiest of days, they’re out there, and I love it when they leap even as the tree twists, as if they’re performing stunts. Daredevil Squirrels.

“What can they do? Cut off limbs? Apply some leeches and if that doesn’t work, a poultice?” Uncle Stephen says.

“Leeches?” I say.

“I think tree surgery is at the Civil War stage of medicine.  Maybe.”

In class, we learned how trees send out their tendrils of roots, exhausting water from the leaves and sucking water from the ground. In second grade I had been taught that two thirds of a tree’s mass was under the earth, and had imagined the underground tree to be like the top part, only in the earth.

I was disappointed to learn that the mass was comprised of lots and lots of thin roots. Tree limbs I liked. Worm like roots?

“I guess the problem is with the roots.” I say.

“You’re a genius.” Uncle Stephen says, but he’s smiling.

He hasn’t shaved and even in the pale afternoon light I can see the gray in his beard.

He turns away to face the opposite wall, the doorway, through which he can see the width of his house, and the windows on the opposite wall of the living room, growing darker. Bluing.

“That’s the way I figure it,” Uncle Stephen says, “the tree falls over, tearing apart the roots, like ripping a vein, but the leaves, they still keep up with their capillary action, and the little roots, they collapse under the pressure.”

He coughs. And I sit up, ready to hold the bowl, but he waffles his hand at me.

“I talk too much,” Uncle Stephen says.

“You want to sew all of those roots back together?” I say.

“That’s right. A real tree surgeon. Someone who can put the tree on life-support, inflate the tubes.” Uncle Stephen says.

“Cellulose,” I say,  “you’d have cellulose patches, thread, some kind of fertilizer.”

“If only I could talk to them,” Uncle Stephen says, “tell them not to breathe, that it will be OK.”

Outside, the trees sway, but don’t topple.

“You’d need some sort of water-bubble,” I say.

“To hold the roots.” Uncle Stephen says.

“Maybe a gel.” I say.

“Can’t you see me, driving in the truck, a big ball of gel in the back?” Uncle Stephen laughs until he vomits.

But it’s not too bad. There’s nothing much to throw-up, and I walk it to the bathroom for him, finding my way in the dark, because the light would hurt his eyes, and there’s nothing I need to see anyway.

I helped Uncle Stephen pull up the rotten floor in his bathroom. We found several sets of pipes.

Each time it had been repaired in the past, instead of taking up all the old pipes, a new set was installed, leaving the old.

Uncle Stephen wanted to start over fresh, so we hauled them all out, crawling in the dust, and despite Uncle Stephen’s warnings, I didn’t see any snakes or spiders.

There were pieces from six sets, everything from brass to cast iron to PVC.

We took the pipes to the field next to his house, and piled them up, where he was piling all of the rotten wood, old shingles and the remains of the small engines beyond Uncle Stephen’s ability to repair.

Later, Uncle Stephen planted that field with pine trees.

Somewhere in the forest, is a pile of pipes.

Sometimes, when we’re sitting on the porch, Uncle Stephen speculates where the pile is, now.

This’s what we see, when we sit on the front porch.

That’s his driveway, leading down the path from his yard’s sidewalk.

At least once or twice a day, a car will pass by.

back when I was making little books, this was one of the computer collages I made to use as a cover.

It looks better on the computer screen than it does printed.

I’ve been going through my pictures, as I move into the office computer, and I found this one.

photo by Dylan Karges

I lived in Blacksburg, Virginia, when I was a kid. Or various suburbs. Price’s Fork.

And then I moved away in sixth grade, to go to Palo Alto, California, and then last year, I moved back to Virginia, to Richmond.

I think it’s been about twenty-four years since I lived in Virginia, but yesterday, when I walked outside, the first thought in my head was: snow.

I hadn’t seen a weather report.

It felt like snow.

And the same thing happened last winter too.

Both times, I looked at the sky and thought, snow.

Yesterday we had snow flurries. With an occasional flake almost the size of a dime. Last year we had a miniature blizzard. Five minutes of total white-out. Giant flakes.

I guess snow-sense never goes away.

I thought he wasn’t home.

The school bus dropped me off at the corner, and I walked to Uncle Stephen’s house.

Past the place where my grandmother says there used to be a general store, run by a great great aunt, although everyone seems to have been my great great something or other.

Grandmother says that when I was two or three and they were out in the field working, they turned their back on me and when they looked back, I was gone.  They were making hay, or picking cotton, or using the Combine on soybeans, and they all had visions of me munched up in whatever machine it was.

They found me, they say, a mile away, stumping towards the general store, towards the candy.

Now, there’s only an empty place on the grass. Probably a few silver dimes in the ground, somewhere, or a tiny glass bottle, waiting to wash up in the ditch. I collect those when I find them. Part of what makes the walk to Uncle Stephen’s fun, the ditches.

I scan the ditches for the small bottles, the cobalt blue glass my favorites, but I’ll take any I can find.

Grandmother laughs that I collect what they threw away.

Each bottle, I wonder what medicine it contained. Who it was for. If it helped.

On the right, what was a field when I first started making this walk, is now a forest of pine trees. I’ve watched them shoot up, and now they’re taller than I am.

When I was a little kid, Grandfather used to point to one of his calves and say, “Go and pick up that calf every day, and by the time it’s big, you’ll be able to lift thousands of pounds.”  He laughed at the faces I made at the suggestion, because I knew there was something illogical in what he was saying, but didn’t know how to say it.

Now, I wonder about the pine trees. If, every day, I had walked by the field, and pulled a pine tree up by its roots, would I now be able to pull a seventeen foot pine from the ground?

Uncle Stephen isn’t on the porch, waiting for me. Thought it’s fall, it’s a good day, the light clear and the air cleansed by last night’s rain.

He would have a thermos for me, of hot chocolate, while he would still be pulling from the cooler, Coca-Cola, wearing fingerless mittens to help keep his hands from getting too cold.

But he’s not there. The cooler sloshes with dirty water.

He never locks the door.

He’s in the bed, and I think he’s asleep, with the blanket over his head and the fan oscillating, herding back and forth the gray dust on the windowsills. I’m about to leave when he speaks from under the blanket, making me jump.

“Dust, it’s skin cells, most of it, did you know that?” Uncle Stephen says.

“No.” I sit down. I don’t drop my bag. If he’s under the blanket, it’s his head, and I try to make as little noise as possible.

“What I’ve been thinking about,” he says, “are ghosts.”

“Ghosts.” I say. There’s no remnants of food in the room. No dirty plates. No empty cans. When did he last eat?

“Ghosts are the spirits of us, people, right?” Uncle Stephen says.

“Sure,” I say, “but,”

“I know,” he says, “you don’t believe in ghosts.”

“It’s not that,” I say, “but,”

“What I’m wondering, see, is if the problem with ghosts, is that each cell has its own ghost, if you see what I mean.”

In the clumps of gray in the windowsill there’s a dead wasp wrapped in a crumpled spider web. It rocks in the wind from the fan.

“If each cell has a ghost,” Uncle Stephen says, “each tiny ghost, how do they all get together?”

He doesn’t have any of the windows open, and even with the fan, the air has a sour tang.

“Or maybe that’s it, we trail a line of ghosts, our entire lives, the ghosts of our dead cells, and when we die, they all coalesce, and somehow decide what particular ghost they’re going to be. What part of our life they’re going to represent.”

“Coalesce?” I say.

“Your grandmother told me you’re having trouble with your vocabulary words.”  Uncle Stephen says.

The words are stupid, I want to say, that nobody would ever use them in conversation. But Uncle Stephen does.

“Maybe that’s why it’s important to keep moving, so that all of your cell’s ghosts can’t catch up with you.” Uncle Stephen says.

From the bus stop, to here, a walk I’ve made all my life. Does the bus confuse the tiny ghosts? Do they wait on the corner for me, to gather around and follow me up the road.

Is that why the dogs bark? The birds scatter at my approach?