Connor, Sam, Doug, Emily. good company.

this is about holding hands.

riversummerboone

This is my first summer in Boone. Summers that aren't summers spent at home in South Carolina are still disorienting to me. Sometimes I miss the crawling heat of sticky air up my spine, under my clothes, the tops of my arms burnt and freckling.

Before I ever thought about my dirty glass eyes, I looked through them in earnest.

I see eight adults and twelve kids packed into a tiny shack that sits contentedly on the edge of the Chechessee river. I see them all dancing in a moonlit spring tide. The dock is under three feet of water on this one night of the year. They can't see the end of it and laugh when one more step is a soft dark plunge into the river. Surprised by the lack of impact, their knees tingle.

The kids try to see who can touch the bottom first, digging up pluff mud with their hands to prove it. The adults hate this. There was a boy who drowned last year. He dove to the bottom and sunk his feet into the ambiguous brown. When he pushed his arms up and down he didn't go anywhere. His feet got suctioned to the bottom.

Pluff. A good name. An onomatopoeia for the sound of anything that touches the bottom of salt-water rivers.

It is day and I see them catch stingrays off the dock. It is evening and the sun hits the marshes from behind. Yellow green reflections and an undulating orange sun fills the landscape. It wavers and persists, suspended. They take a johnboat out to catch dinner. My dirty glass eyes watch my brother cast a shrimp net. He stands on the bow of the boat. His feet are maps of sophisticated oyster cuts. They sting a little. His red curls are pushed to one side by the wind. He bites an edge of the net in his teeth the way my uncle taught us. The tiny lead weights threaded around the bottom of the net taste smooth and salty in his mouth. He spreads his arms wide and grabs the farthest ends of the net he can. His burnt shoulders flex. One. Lean. Two. Lean. Three. Lean. His arms swing through the air. They never stop adjusting for the shifting weight of the net. They never stop calculating. When he is taut and long and at his most reaching he releases. The net flies high, no longer a part of him but he still leans with it. It spins and takes a fuller shape as it drops.

It’s about to touch the surface of the water and it's an impressive circle. The weights make the ends snaggletoothed but the net itself puffs up beautifully for just a moment before it races through the water, following the lead.

Sink sink sink sink. Plastic line runs through his fingers. Chink. Lead weight hits bottom. Pluff. Calvin leans back, pulling the line up. He grabs the bright blue bunched top that's green in the brackish water. He shakes it out on the floor of the johnboat. Shrimp fall with shivering plunks. We all race to pick them up by their tails and put them in the cooler.

We ride back home and wait in line to shower with the hose outside. Seven of us wait with shampoo in our hair while Melanie washes it out first. We laugh and spike our hair up until each of our heads is a foamy white hershey kiss. It's dinnertime. Buttery grits and shrimp leak through paper plates and make our laps warm and damp.

There is one tiny TV in the house and nobody uses it except sometimes for jeopardy. Grayson (we called him MayDay) crawls into my lap when we watch it. I scratch his head and smell his little boy smell. Apples and laughing. All twenty of us shout the answers and argue good-naturedly and we take dance breaks if our favorite soul music comes on. Bare feet on cool, sandy linoleum twist to ain’t no mountain hiiiiiiiiiiiiigh enough ain’t no river wiiiiiiiiiide enough.

The first person to wake up woke everyone up with coffee smell and unsuccessful attempts to not trip over all the leaky air mattresses and soft bodies molded to the hardwood floor. If you pressed your cheek to the dark brown floorboards and closed your eyes and did a big inhale you'd smell the rich, dark, sweet soil that lives next to the river where raccoons run up palm trees and fiddler crabs lift their claws at you and you believe a little bit in the Gullah voodoo.

Something about the way Spanish Moss hangs like old people hair.

Weeknights we watch the big shrimp boat next door come in every evening and after they tie it up they let us jump off the bow. Savannah takes pictures in black and white.

Grayson frozen in the air, his brown body a sharp, triumphant outline against the sky.

By the end of the summer, the sun has crisped our faces and made a harder line between our bodies and the rest of the world. We know our shapes better.

It's a different heartbeat in the mountains. Somebody showed me how to look at my dirty glass eyes. Sometimes I don’t remember how to look through them. I’m in college and always trying to think my way towards something. I'm trying to peel away the gum and the crust, and squeeze a hard pit in my palm. If I'm not careful, I'll forget about the wisdom in those softer bits. The cartilage and flesh that make up everyday experience. The feeling of sand on cool linoleum floors.

 I don't want to be consumed in my truth seeking. I don't even want to always have the big picture in mind. Excelsior and all that. I'm not the whole trembling mosaic of place. I'm a tremble part.
My ego just flew away on the tail of a Marvin Gaye song. It will come back. This is a good scab to pick at. It's a good hurt to feel again and again. Everything’s much fresher underneath.

On Language

Elegies and Vacations

from Hank Lazer's Elegies and Vacations (pg. 49)

if i call you
every day
if i call you
every hour
i can get down to
an increment of time
in which change
cannot take place

that anti
epiphanic space
the im
perceptible
modulation
of current circumstance

not repetition
but as stein
had it
minute
differences in
insistence

and somehow
everyone comes to be
an old one

and when we
look closely
very closely

"it is a very
difficult thing
to know anything
of the being
in any one"


Pema Chodron insists that there is no solid ground. That we will fall through anything we thought was bottom. That nothing lasts, that the beloved will, given enough time, become unrecognizable.

And Lazer asks, what if I refuse to look away? Even for a moment. What if I call you every day/ call you every hour. What if I pay close enough heed to each passing moment that change cannot  take place.

Yet, even if one could bend down and collect each moment as it falls, explanation does not erase the distance between "then" and "now."

My mom likes to tell a story about my older sister, Savannah. When Savannah was four, she knocked a glass of water off the table. My mom handed her a dishrag. Savannah got down on all fours, soaked up all the mess, proudly smiled, and, seeing that her rag was full, wrung it out. The water poured back onto the floor. Savannah mopped it back up. And when she saw that her rag was again too wet to soak up any more water, she squeezed it back out on the floor. Several times this happened before my mom stopped her.

(stagnate) 
1. to cease to run or flow, as water, air
2. to stop developing, growing, progressing, or advancing

When our actions don't create space, when we wring the wet towel out onto the floor over and over, when our perspective rusts the gears and constricts the throat of potential, we are made stagnant.

Lazer recognizes the futility in resisting movement. somehow/ everyone comes to be/ an old one

And finally, it is a very/ difficult thing/ to know anything/ of the being/ in any one . When we do look closely enough, we recognize that different things
have/are/will
passed/passing/will pass
through you and I, and "keeping up," looking down, breaking your back to pick up a never-ending trail of somebody else's moments, is to be made stagnant.