Creature Conscience

            “Their souls expanded beyond their skins.”  This is Thomas Hardy’s way of describing the transformation that happens to poor rural working people when they step out of the rounds of labor to have a pint at the Pure Drop and share rumors of their noble Norman ancestors with neighbors.  I am still taking deep whiffs of Tess of the d'Urbervilles as if the novel were the boxwoods in the Mary Garden outside St. Michael’s church from which I inhale deeply to remember South Jersey.  I appreciated Hardy’s phrase because I have, over the last ten years, experienced soul expansion “under the influence” of an extramarital involvement that was as intoxicating (for better and worse) as Tokay wine.  Imagine my delight when I today I had my soul expanded in the company of my blue-haired teenage daughter, and all it took was a walk in familiar woods.

            Content-making was the way I would describe the experience.  And it could not have happened at home.  Or could it?  I have to relearn the movements and gestures of everyday life as if clumsily learning a dance I have never danced.  At home, I am usually buried in a book and she is connected to her phone, listening to music, texting, or in her room with the door closed, face-timing Lonnie or Trevor.   “Let’s do something,” I suggest midday on July 4^th.  “Okay.  How bout the Hogbacks?” she offered.  I was surprised.  The Hogbacks are a favorite place of mine.  Because of the hills that surround a lake where, on a day in April, we spotted trumpeter swans and active beavers.  When I am there, I am almost at home in the Adirondack mountains.  Katya probably associates going to the Hogbacks with stopping at Speedway where I always buy her a Monster or Rock Star, but perhaps there is more in the experience for her, too. 

            After we made it up the first hill and started along the spine of the ridge trail, walking into fully leafed-out woods—done in the verdant palette of a master.  I was stunned by the intimate beauty of it all.  “Isn’t it lovely and peaceful,” I said aloud, as leaves lifted and fell like the petticoats of some fairy, curtsying and inviting us into a veiled layered space.  I thought about Eden—the garden God created for man, that needed man to watch over it as much as it needed rain to water it.  “It is good,” God, the maker, decided after each day of creation.  But after making man, he decided that “it was not good” for the man to be alone.  

            “I just want this to be over with,” said Katya when flies were buzzing around her head and the thorns of wild roses scratching her ankles.  “Oh, no.  Let’s just enjoy where we are now,” I said as much to call myself back to myself as to coach my daughter.  She and I are different.  She is not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.  I adopted her when she was nine months from a baby-house in Kazakhstan, yet we have lived the same seasons and sadnesses for 14 years.  Too much sadness.  “I hate to see you like this,” she said to me in the depth of my depression several weeks ago.  She has cut herself since she was in sixth grade and is in therapy for ADD and anxiety.  Mother and daughter, genetically and ethnically different, occupying the same invisible body of emotions.  That is why I now know that I must defend myself for her sake.

            Eden was not perfect, and that was its special beauty.  God rested on the seventh day, leaving creation open-ended, letting his creatures be … creative.  She and I begin to tend the garden as we walk.  We stop at the run-off pond, dotted with duckweed, where she likes to chase frogs and I like to observe the miraculous growth of skunk cabbage (the first green thing up as the ground thaws—a plant that generates its own heat).  We delight in the alarmed squeak of frogs, and she looks when I point out the tiny sky blue flowers of forget-me-nots.  Talking about bands, boys, and coming back to life after break-ups, we get to the end of the lake and she groans as I turn downhill to find the path along the opposite shore.  “It’s too long.”  “Oh, it isn’t far, and we can dip our feet in the water.”  My mistake:  the path is seriously overgrown, and there are places where we have to crawl to make it under the thick growth.  “The struggle is real” is one of Katya’s favorite expressions, and it suits the moment:  arms and hands, arms and other brains, stay low, watch out for your head, cheek to the ground, the moss is dreaming, listen. 

            “Mom, I need a moment,” she says, and, after GI-Joe crawling through the thicket, we stop.  In the silence, she listens and alerts me to a tap tapping that is not a woodpecker.  “It’s a beaver,” she says.  We are near the lodge and actually saw a beaver with two kits swimming around Easter time. “Let’s sit on this rock.”  Although I don’t say it, I remember an intimate moment sitting on this same granite outcropping with my imaginary lover who couldn’t feel the spirit of the place without putting his hands all over me.  I remember him gazing over my sunglasses and commenting on the amber flecks in my irises.  He couldn’t see the greater loveliness of the wild purple irises hidden in the grasses along the water.  Oh.  It was sweet but ultimately ephemeral because groundless.  Sitting in the same spot with Katya, from which I spot a deer in the thicket and point it out to her, I am happier … really content … we are together forever and, as we help each other connect to real things, we are nourishing our shared body. 

            Rest time over, we continue walking and, although she groans her way through brush and prickers, I can tell she is enjoying my company.  “Just move through them gently like that deer … which must be bigger than either of us."  Imagine yourself a deer, with the grace to pass through a forest of tree trunks, alive to the fact that hearing is vibration.  A few steps later, Katya slaps my back.  “A bug?”  “No, it’s your punishment” [sarcasm] … “this was all your great idea.”  We make it through the woods at squat down along the water’s edge to look at the creatures in the shallows.  We see tiny crayfish scuttling along the bottom and a catfish whose existence we debate.  I think he is dead, but Katya votes for life.  Turns out, she is right.  “When you get really old and sick, what if this all turns out to be a dream and I am your conscience?”  I think about how wonderful it is to be a mother, imagining the doe with two fawns following that Katya and I saw in a different woods just yesterday.  What a privilege it is have to learn to move gracefully around obstacles for the sake of a creature conscience.

            By the time we get back to the car, together we’ve spotted a bronze toad, captured, kissed, and released him.  Katya is still swatting flies but laughing, “I want to be attractive to boys not to insects.”  I am laughing inwardly that, at this stage of the game, I find insects far less irritating.  We are humans from the humus of the earth, animals amazed at understanding what we do.  With Katya, I started to trust that I have enough vitality to assume the responsibility of my vocation, the human vocation, which is to feel the world, to be affected—like God who sat back and admired on the seventh day.