Like a Teardrop
I find myself wanting to tell you about a walk I took not long ago with Coco, a canine friend. Coco has two humans and doesn’t really need a third, but she’ll joyfully snuggle me and walk with me and chase the rocks I throw down riverbanks. On this particular morning, one of her humans was with us. The ground was slippery. Mossy. Slimy. Green. The grassy field on our left was yellow. Like late afternoon summer. Like saffron. Like memories in film. On the other side, rain pin dropped the river. The water churned. Fog hung low in the distance.
Chaos has reigned in my body of late, warping time. “How was the city?” I ask, inquiring after my sister’s weeklong trip she was about to take when we last spoke. “It’s been two days,” she said. “I haven’t left yet.” I totter back, more or less upright, onto the timeline and continue the conversation, pretending not to be as discombobulated as I feel. Later, I look at the calendar and gasp. It’s been April for nearly two weeks?
During these flares, I plod. I look out through glass, twice distorted, both my eyes and my gaze. The chaos and pain in the world becomes at once a terrifying view through a pinhole camera and a drop of poison in my veins.
On that walk, Coco and I and her human carried on till we reached the hazelnut grove. The trees this time of year are willowy ladies decked in sepia fringe.
On a different walk, we two, Coco and I, had found a wasp nest hanging from a low branch near the path. Frost clung to it. I’d marveled at how it hung there, not weighing the branch down, impossibly large.
I’m not complaining, about the state of my body, that is. The state of the world’s a different story. I’m fortunate. This isn’t the way I feel all the time. After a flare, I snap back to me, time returns to itself, and I’m flooded with renewal. I have excellent support. And whatever brings you fresh perspective is, at least in part, gift.
How human, don’t you think, that I feel whatever is now always will be. From the depths of a flare, I ponder all the things I’ll never do. On the other side of the flare, I plan and move as if another one will never come, as if everything’s possible.
“Are you even in there?” I’d whispered when Coco and I first found the nest.
The gray oval had hung there, cold and silent. An edge of its tissue-thin top layer fluttered in the breeze.
My attention drew Coco’s, and she’d nuzzled the strange, ashy ball. “Back up,” I said in a rare stern tone. I was thinking of my cousin’s dog Josie, a stoic, old-souled creature, who cried and cried after being stung.
What do wasps do for winter? I’d wondered. Had they left, like the ospreys, whose empty nests, high in the trees, I still looked to, though none had soared down the river for months?
When my daughter left the home we shared, I emptied it out, selling or giving away most of our furniture. I didn’t need all that space. The rent was well over my budget anyway. I covered the walls of my new tiny place with the paintings she’d made or thrifted and left behind. This was years back, before Ruby the van.
Even though it was outsized in that space, I kept the pink, high-back Victorian chair with silver studs and shiny, walnut-colored wood that we’d picked out together when she’d first come back to me, not long after her eighteenth birthday. It was pink. Like sunrise over dark blue water. Like guava. Like the crayon kids use to color in hearts and cold cheeks.
I can still see her as the girl she was when we first reunited (I’d adopted her out as an infant), trying not to drown. Kicking and kicking. For the first time in a while. And I handed her whatever I thought might keep her afloat. Thrift store trips. Warm veggie-filled meals. As many wooden pallets as we could collect, along with a circular saw and hammer and sander and paint. Together, we built things in the front garden, bits of the past I’d missed spilling out alongside wood shavings and offcuts as we worked.
On the walk with Coco and her human, we weren’t far into the sepia grove when I saw the first broken bit of nest. It was lying inside up, catacomb to cloud. Bits of it were splayed along the path.
Coco sniffed it, looked up at us, head cocked, and then turned to sprint. A fat gray squirrel had meandered onto the path up ahead. The squirrel, who I’m pretty sure is the same creature we always see at this exact spot and who seems to be getting cheekier by the walk, sauntered as Coco bore down.
That squirrel did a slow half turn, taunting, and then shot across the path and up a towering oak, long tail like a pewter boa. Coco, a shot of ink, scaled the first few feet of the trunk.
I tried to remember the last time I’d run like that, nothing held back, heart chambers to sky.
In the tiny house, nestled in the pink chair, I missed my daughter. But she called frequently with tales from her most interesting classes and to spill tea on her fellow students and professors. Her photos of art projects as they progressed kept me stunned by her talent.
And that it was time for a new direction in my own life became clearer and clearer.
As Coco moved on from the squirrel, nose to ground, her human and I contemplated who had demolished this abandoned home. An animal? The tender of the grove?
Most wasps die off during winter, I’d learned. The queens, sole survivors, hibernate and never return to former nests. They’re not territorial like bees. It’s not places but, rather, creatures they recall. Wasps recognize individuals by facial markings and can even pick out some human faces. In spring and summer, these winged creatures work together to construct the catacombs, chewing wood into pulp and using their saliva as glue. The nest is a constant project both seasons as numbers expand. And a few fly solo, never joining a colony.
I couldn’t help but wish the nest was still hanging from the bare branch, low to the ground, impossibly large for its thin connection point. Like a teardrop. Like an ornament. Like a memory of shared creation and harmony.
I’ve known what it is to kick after a long time of sinking. Thrashing up for a gulp. Sinking. Thrashing. Sinking. On repeat. To build and rebuild. To make ever more space.
I think what I’m wanting to say is that, right now, I’m kicking. We’re all kicking. I want to tell you that whatever you’re doing to stay afloat, to keep your loved ones afloat, it’s enough. I want to tell you that, if you’re among the particularly vulnerable, I will do whatever I can to help you stay afloat. I want to weep for those already lost. I want to say, if you’re in the position to and taking steps to help us all stay above water, thank you.
I want us to remember other times when we thought whatever terrible thing had taken over us would be all there ever was.
I want to tell you the ospreys are back. The saffron field has emeralded. The sepia-fringed ladies have plumped and greened in preparation to bear fruit.
I want to tell you I still believe what feels impossible is possible. I want to say none of this makes it OK, all that’s been knocked down and strewn about and will be.
I want to say thank you for being here, for connecting and creating together.
Want more wasps? Once in my nomading life, I befriended a surly red paper wasp called Jaxon. It was Covid times. Jaxon, who I’m certain was one of the lone wasps who never joined a colony, paid a daily visit to the desert camp Ruby the van and I called home for a month or so. Jaxon features in two previous Rolling Desk stories, “Oh the Places You’ll Shower” and “No Room in the Forest.”
Thank you for reading, liking, commenting and restacking! I’m sorry I didn’t post last week. It’s rare I miss a week. But a flare had me in its clutches, and I couldn’t see out to make it happen.
For the comments: Are you staying afloat? What do you need? What’s going on in your part of the world? Ever befriended any insects?
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Good grief yes, look how April is flying, but that's fine Holly, you're here now, and you're kicking up beauty with all the power of light and inspiration you always do, keep kicking and I'll kick with you, when you feel yourself sinking just shout and I'll help drag you out! With love beautiful xx
Amazing all the layers you go through on a walk, love how you wove everything together.