“Curious creatures,”
says our quiet bus driver,
rolling his r’s.
“Look at that, would you.”
-Elizabeth Bishop, “The Moose”
My children shop craft supplies at the back of the store, but I stay on the other side of the sliding doors in a $69 wicker egg chair. I am the only person sitting still in this space. I am the only person reading a book. The book in my hand is old, faded, and slim. Same words since I bought it for grad school 25 years ago. I am surrounded by cheap wooden welcome signs and the scent of cinnamon and synthetic material. I am sweaty and stained from making our house clean and staged and ready to sell and I wonder what the ten-year-old girl exiting the sliding doors makes of me when I catch her bright eye. Her mom is sporty and tanned, younger than me and prettier. I mean she tries harder to be pretty. The autumn wreath in her arms highlights her picture-perfect face.
I haven’t tweezed my middle-aged chin in a week—too busy with school starting and all the other stuff. I think of the book Dicey’s Song by Cynthia Voight and the character Gram, who I’ve said before seemed old when I first read the book at age thirteen. She is probably 52, if that, and finally happy in herself. I am almost her age and happy in my faded paisley skirt from the Vermont Country Store via consignment, the elastic waistband so worn it needs a safety pin to make it stay. I imagine Gram would have worn something like it while she harvested tomatoes, barefoot in her garden. I am sitting in a seventy-dollar wicker chair made to look like it came from the kind of 19th century farmhouse porch that belongs to Gram, but the house in that book is like the woman herself—tumbledown, though whole. The pumpkins on the floor next to me are made of velveteen fabric in shimmery jewel tones.
In the poetry book I’m reading while I wait, Elizabeth Bishop describes a moose on the dark road to somewhere on a New England night bus ride. The bus stops to let it cross. Some fellow traveler looks out at the beast and decides, “It’s awfully plain.” Down here in the buckle of the Bible belt, we’re trained to only see what we’re told. But the usual things keep coming, anyway: clouds scudding off the moon, my ribcage more open, the muscles loose and ready. While waiting on my tea in the microwave, I float through the first three forms of Tai Chi, the part that reads like a creation story. On my desk, a lit candle. Dried herbs in the kitchen and the hot glue gun burns that didn’t hurt when I subbed in a second-grade class last week because the kids were so cute as they brought me miniature houses made of pebbles and moss to stick together. “I feed bearded dragons on Thursdays,” I told the eight-year-olds, and it was true.
This morning on the porch swing, dry autumn leaves rustling on the trees down the yard, a single strand of spider web, ten feet tall, walked across my vision, glinting in the light. A piece of hair. The opposite of a veil. A shutter click. The woods the same but not, something inside me blown wide. It’s an idea I’ve been running from for years: save me from the normal I can’t be anyway. I catch the fifth grader’s bright eye and she smiles back as her mom with the wreath walks on while I’m reading poems about moose in the road in the foyer of Hobby Lobby and nothing, I try to tell her with the intensity of my thought, is ordinary. Nothing.
As with all your writing, I love the juxtaposition of places, people, and objects. I can feel the wicker of the seat and smell the cinnamon of cheap fall decor. I know what it's like to be the outlier in a space, reading a book while others laugh together. Last week, it was looking at the sign in the waiting room of the gynecologist that labels it as: Breezeway 2, and trying to think of all the other words I could make from that one word. I do it every year, in that same padded chair, as others mindlessly scroll on their phones, and I desperately try to distract myself with the grounding that comes from the poetry of making words.
🙂😊❤️