Hands in the Soil

When I lifted my hands away from patting soil into place around the spruce sapling I'd planted in our front yard, I noticed something familiar about my fingers. With the dirt deepening the lines of my knuckles, I recognized the strong, sinewy hands of my maternal grandmother. 

I've never had much of a green thumb. Plenty of houseplants have met a premature demise at my hands, and I'm a known killer of cacti. So, it was surprising earlier this year when I managed to keep a begonia flowering in my kitchen for a couple months, which is a big deal for me. There are a few plants at my office which I care for as well, including a century-old fern that once decorated my great grandmother's porch. This year, they've been in exceptionally good form. While I know this is primarily due to the outdoor conditions, I feel a measure of pride as I water and trim them, as though I could claim their success as my own.

I associate gardening with my mother, who keeps her gardens gorgeous and green throughout the spring and summer. I cannot imagine the Victorian home in which I grew up without hydrangeas bursting with firework blooms around it and swallow-tail butterflies flitting among flowering bushes in front of the porch. 

Some of her gardening prowess comes from her mother, my grandmother, Edie. When I think of her, I imagine her kneeling by a garden bed, gloved hands pulling weeds out by the roots, piling them next to her legs, tireless under the Michigan sun. 

Edie died as a result of her ALS on Christmas in 2011, surrounded by family. The year is significant, because at that time, I'd come out as gay to my parents and friends, but I can't remember if I'd officially come out to anyone else by then, or if it was a shapeless knowledge that seeped outward without me directly addressing it.

I don't know if I ever talked to Edie about my queerness, and that uncertainty tortures me.

Edie and I were close. I spent summers with her and my grandfather, Bill, camping in their RV or roaming the strip of woods behind their home, hunting morel mushrooms to fry in butter. My relationship with my grandmother was one of quiet, mutual understanding, a kinship of spirits. As much as I loved my parents, there was a need in me that could only be met by spending time with someone as much like me as Edie.

As a kid, I thought of my grandmother and myself as a pair of cats in a family of dogs. We were independent and aloof, content to devour books as we reclined in patches of sunlight, and to sneak away to peruse yard sales, seeking treasures and projects and discarded histories. So often, the world felt too loud for me, too overwhelming, and Edie could sense and relate to that, and would sit with me by the fire, and we could be comfortably quiet together, and be nourished by that.

A lot of our communication was nonverbal, a contrast with our more verbal family members. Our conversations were book recommendations and sewing projects and polishing found furniture and sharing ice cream at midnight. 

I'm so afraid that none of our actual conversations were about something that is so large a part of my identity as my queerness. 

Which is not to say being gay is or should be a huge part of one's identity, but in the current culture, it kind of is. I'm sure Edie would have accepted me... her son is gay, too. But I actually don't know much about her opinion of LGBT matters. 

What torments me most, though, is that regardless of whether she knew my orientation (which, given our silent conversations, she probably sensed to some degree anyway), she never met my wife.

Kelsey is such a significant piece of my life, and it astonishes me that she never met one of the other huge influences on my life. I think about how my grandmother wasn't at my wedding and I cry.

But then something will happen that reminds me that Kelsey is still meeting a part of Edie. I look in the mirror at my hair, graying early, like Edie's. I tap on Kelsey's arm when I see a sign for a garage sale. I use the garden hose to rinse dirt from my grandmother's hands.

Kelsey did meet my grandfather, when he was sick, close to the end. I think he knew we were together, but I didn't know how to talk about it. Kelsey recently told me about her one conversation with him, showing him a photo of her old truck, his face briefly lighting up. I wish he'd had the strength to show her his barn full of tools and projects. I wish they could have known how much alike they were.

Because day by day, we step more into my grandparents' shoes. We dream about camping by Lake Michigan as we stoke the fire in our backyard. We hunt morels, though we lack the perfect hunting grounds that Bill and Edie had. We take our dogs down to the shore to fish with us. We create things. We cultivate saplings.

Pulling weeds from the garden, our hands in the soil, we keep them with us.

Update and Bonus Fiction: "Air Hunger"

I've been a little quiet lately, huh? There are a number of reasons, I promise, and though many of those reasons are related to the newest title in the Legend of Zelda series of video games, there are a few more legit reasons, too. The biggest thing standing between me and putting out my desired quantity of writing, both on this blog and in my current LGBT romance novel endeavor, is my quest to become a Certified Financial Planner. I've been cramming for my intro course exam, and unfortunately, I'm worried the test is going to go a little like this:

Here lie Abi's hopes and dreams. (Source)

I'm a weird kid with a bachelor's in psychology, a minor in studio art, and a tendency to become emotionally attached to horses in video games. My primary media are the written word and acrylic paint, so the often abstract and number-based world of finance feels especially foreign to me. Don't get me wrong: I love a good puzzle, and I like the idea of helping people plan for their futures, but I'm studying philosophy in a language I never learned. Plus, I'm 88% sure Kelsey and I will never afford things like a house or children or maybe even lunch tomorrow, so what gives me the right to manage someone else's wealth?

But, before I knock myself down too far into the Pit of Unworthiness, I must remind myself that this is an introductory course. This is dipping my toe into the water and exposing myself to the chill of it. Haha. Exposing myself. AHEM. As I've been told, there always must be a first experience, and so much of financial planning seems beyond me right now, I am picking up on things as they're repeated to me, and it's OK that I still have a long way to go.

Alrighty, there you have it, the personal update, AKA: Why Abi Has 30 Half-Written Entries Saved in Her Drafts That She May Never Get to Complete. 

For the sake of sharing at least some content while I work on bigger things, I thought I'd include a rough piece I wrote a few years ago, after my grandmother died. This is half fiction, gathered from several surreal and casually existential conversations with my dad with a healthy dollop of artistic license. It's a bit grim, and I describe my wonderful father in perhaps an unfairly unflattering way for the sake of the visceral mood of the essay. I definitely put my own words into his mouth as well. Sorry, Dad. Like I said: little fact, little fiction. Lotta drama, to be honest.

Without further ado:

Air Hunger

The glass case in the front of the China Inn restaurant contains a mint-in-box Elvis doll in his white bejeweled suit, a series of McDonald’s toys from around 2007, and a set of Star Trek Pez dispensers. It’s easier to look at these American souvenirs than to look at my dad as he spoons the stringy, salty slime of egg-drop soup into his mouth between sentences.

“We call it air hunger,” he says and washes the soup down with Japanese beer served in a Bud Lite glass. “When she was gasping for air right at the end. She made that gurgle-hiccup sound in her throat for a few minutes, remember? Like uururggh-aah… uurrrrghhh-aah.”

When he tilts his head back to imitate death he reveals an impressive forest of nose hair creeping from his nostrils. I nod to signify that yes, I remember. He slides his hand over his smooth head and the harsh lights reflect on the sheen of grease there.

“The body doesn’t want to die, even if you think you’ve psychologically resigned to death. All this afterlife stuff you may tell yourself over the years doesn’t mean shit when you’re lying there about to die in a stiff hospital bed. I think she saw that. Suddenly, it’s not Jesus and glowing gates in your future. It’s nothing. It’s curtains. The end of your narrative. Not even darkness, just void. There’s no peace there, and however much you may be suffering, it must be horrifying to face that sudden stop to everything you could ever comprehend. People don’t want to end.”

The kung pao chicken arrives and we silently scoop our portions onto our rice. My chopsticks fail to snap completely apart but I pretend not to notice. My dad continues with his speech.

“We evolved to sense something bigger out there, some reason for existing. We’re complex organisms with a hyperactive frontal lobe that constantly reminds us: ‘hey, you’re going to die, and there is nothing that you can do about it.’ And so our brain forms a mysterious, wondrous perception of a world beyond our own that explains what we don’t understand and provides a continuation of ourselves once our meat rots away. Religion. Extremely important to psychological well-being and social cohesion. Divisive too, sure. That would have been an adaptive characteristic for a group of people thousands of years ago. Shared beliefs created camaraderie and distrust of other groups with different beliefs was a trait that could save your family.

"She believed in the Christian afterlife, or heaven and hell. Maybe God exists,” says my dad the Sunday school teacher. “But if an actual god exists, why would he need to give a reward to 'good’ people? Or punish 'not good’ people? For eternity? After our tiny blip of existence? That makes no sense. Being good for the sake of an eternal reward is cheap, fake. We must be good for the sake of being good and contributing to the health and happiness of other humans. If you know you’ve done that while on your deathbed, that must be heaven.”

The vegetables are savory but a little tough. A few dark, dry pods are strewn through the meal and when I bite into them they burst with a fiery, flavorless burn on my tongue. My dad collects a few of them in one bite, which he chews languidly as if he were numb to their shock. I can’t think of anything to contribute to the conversation. Much of Christianity has labeled me as inferior because of my gender and damned because of my sexuality. It’s a relief to hear my dad discount that belief system. It means I’m spared and that those rules are as stupid as I always hoped they were. But for some reason I feel hollow.

“Now Hell,” says dad gravely as the fortune cookies and check are placed before him by a white woman in athletic shorts, “I know that exists too. Hell is when you’re lying in the certainty of death and you realize you’ve failed completely at the human mission. You’ve done nothing of significance to anyone. You are ending forever and you’ve left no act of kindness, no great thoughts, and no legacy behind. You’ve made no impact in all your years. As you die, you remember the stories you didn’t tell, the helpful impulses you ignored, all the days you spent doing nothing. You amount to nothing. You are a carcass still hungry for a little oxygen, but what does it matter? You are void. And that is Hell.”

My dad reads his fortune to himself as he chews the cookie. He then tucks the paper into his breast pocket and pulls out his wallet to pay. There is no fortune in my crushed shell.