Time According to Fruit

Fall is the season of rotten things. I mean this from a practical perspective, not intending to besmirch the season. For the past month, I’ve measured time by the rotting process of crabapples. My home is surrounded by fruitful crabapple trees, which begin to shed their fruits in late August. When they first fall, the crabapples roll like small round stones on the sidewalks. With time, a fresh apple smell fills the air, reminding me that summer will not last forever. After a couple of weeks, the falling crabapples are softer, bruising from their fall to the hard ground below. The smell develops into one of fermenting, perhaps a bit more pervasive than the fresh one that preceded it. Finally, moving towards and past the autumnal equinox and into true fall, the crabapples form a sticky mush on the ground, the pungent smell of a crabapple vinegar soaking into the transitioning land. Every day, I contemplate the olfactory nuances of rot. Perhaps the presence of rotting crabapples skews my perception of the season, but I don’t think I’m entirely wrong.

It makes sense that the fall would be a time for rotting. In a seasonal climate such as the one we have in Colorado, generally speaking, spring is the time for fertilizing flowers, which eventually develop into fruit. Summer is the time for fruit to grow. Late summer and fall is the time for fruits to ripen. (I realize there are some fruits that ripen as early as late spring, but just go with me here.)  

The process of fruit ripening involves several chemical processes that begin with an increase of ethylene. Pectinases begin the breakdown of cell walls, leading  to a softening of fruit; amylases convert carbohydrates into simple sugars, leading to a sweet taste; and hydrolases destroy the green chlorophyll, resulting in the change of fruit color. The juiciness, sweetness, and color indicate to the hungry masses of creatures that roam this green earth, that the fruit is ripe and ready. In a story told over and over again by a bunch of perfectly ripened bananas that becomes overly brown, soft, odiferous, and good for nothing but baking in just a few days, there is a short distance from ripe to nearly rotten. Ripening is, in fact, the beginning of the rotting process, with cell walls breaking down and simple sugars becoming prime for digestion by the creatures that make fruit rot. This is the point where bears engorge themselves with fruit to tide them over the long winter months, and humans, when they are done with all the fresh fruit they can handle, make efforts to preserve them. (Once again, I realize that humans also find a source for whatever they want around the globe and get the fresh version throughout the winter months, but let’s put that aside for now and return to the process of preservation.) The last  weekend in September, I had the opportunity to partake in a bit of fruit preservation, and it leaves me thinking about playing with time.

I went back to the Midwest, the region of the country where both sides of my family come from, partially in order to learn about canning from my aunt. On Saturday afternoon, my aunt  and I dug into her most recent bushel of apples to make apple butter. She quartered apples twice as fast as I could remove the core. They piled up in a pot that would cook until they were soft and ready to become applesauce.The warmth and smell of baking apples mixed with the fresh breeze from the open door as we stirred the applebutter and prepared jars and lids for canning.  My aunt gave me helpful pointers as she filled the jars and I placed lids and tightened rings on, before packing them into a boiling pot of water And finally, I fished the jars back out of the steaming baths and placed them on a clean towel to cool and create a tight seal.

It is my understanding that canning preserves food by killing microorganisms with high temperatures, enacting enzymes that assist in preservation, and creating a vacuum to exclude new air  that would introduce more microorganisms. It captures a moment in time by destroying the organisms that move time and rotting forward. Change is how you know time is moving; without change I don’t know how to prove that time is moving. Rot is a measurement of time. My aunt and I halted a piece of change, brought the past into the present and made it possible for the present to exist into the future.

My grand mother’s farm was a place strongly rooted in the past, but was also a constant presence in my childhood. The cellar was lined with shelves covered in dusty jars filled with faded vegetables and fruits. The lid of each one had my grandmother’s handwriting, describing the contents and the month and year in which the jars were filled. By the time I was old enough to stare wonderingly at rows of mason  jars, the preserved foods were far too old to be eaten. But still, I knew there was something I wanted to know more about, contained in those jars. On the farm, there was a small pond full of frogs for the cows to get water, there was a hayloft high up in a barn lit with sunlight sneaking in around the edges of dried old boards, there were stacks of U-shaped shoes left from generations of mules. I hold onto these memories tenderly. 

I feel a need to defend my efforts to continue living pieces of the past. I know, the jars really just contained slimy old vegetables, nothing special at all. I don’t have any sort of thrilling background. From everything I’ve heard, my ancestors immigrated to the U.S. by sea and quietly came north from the Gulf of Mexico to settle in the rich farming lands of Illinois, where they worked hard to make a living on a farm, sent their kids to school for as long as it made sense, and went to church on Sundays. For some reason, I still want to maintain some sort of connection with this history. I think the flat farms of Illinois, interspersed with woods, are beautiful. At least nominally, I want to can fruits and vegetables in the way my grandmothers spent hours canning food to keep  the family fed until the next harvest time. I garden to remember that apples, cherries, and plums grow on trees and that gooseberries are a delicious fruit that grows on branches covered in thorns, all facts my ancestors knew from birth. I take time to slow down in life, so I can recall the past. My trip to rural Illinois was an opportunity to connect with my background.

24 hours after canning the applebutter, my aunt and I wrapped each jar individually in bubble wrap and a ziplock back and packed them into a box to eventually take to the post office and send back to Boulder, CO. I realize that flying all the way to Illinois in order to prepare and preserve apples to then mail back to Colorado is not the most efficient way to do things. Amazon probably could have had just as many jars of apple butter to my home by the end of the day, if I’d gone online. I feel a need to defend how I spent my weekend. Most people might look around the room for something more interesting to get them out of our conversation, as I excitedly describe what I did and learned. I feel a bit sheepish as I try to justify my excitement.

 All I can say to defend myself is that somehow, I find depth and meaning in connection to past generations. I want to think I could maybe live simultaneously in the present, past and future. The time I spent connecting with my aunt and my past exists a hundred years ago, over the weekend, into the present yet to come as I eat the apple butter, and I hope even further into the future. (Part of my adventures in farmland included a trip to Farm and Fleet, a bit of the Target to the agricultural world. We found a canning set on sale, and I plan to can at least a few jars every year going forward.) As I grow older, I can better see how time exists separate from clocks, built to move at one pace and in one direction. Canning fruit with my aunt was one more way to live in time out beyond space, pace, and direction.

A Fallow Season

Well, the pumpkin plants are officially dead. I know, it’s a pretty small defeat in the whole scheme of things. But I was so excited about them and seeing if I could get an early spring pumpkin out of a windowsill, I’m sad to admit I don’t have some sort of mystical power with plants that will overcome the absence of sun.

The plants looked strong– even if a little stunted — as they put out new pairs of leaves and then each one put out three blossoms. After reading about hand pollinating pumpkin plants, I could identify which blossoms were female by finding the beginning of the pea-sized fruit on the stem just below the female ones. I was ready for them to open up, so I could transfer the pollen from the male blossoms to the female ones. Sure, I was nervous that I was going to screw it up, but there are no pollinators flying around right now, so someone had to do it. (On a side note here, there are mechanical pollinators used in commercial agriculture to make up for the lack of pollinators in other situations. They mostly just shake the plants to set the pollen loose and hope some of it falls where it’s needed. As you might guess, nowhere near as efficient as live pollinators doing their work.)

But before any of the blossoms could open, one of my plants just wilted away, all in one day. I was watering it the same as usual, and it looked fine one day, and then the next day everything had shriveled up and it was drooping towards the sill, like a puppet without a hand.

Of course, I immediately watered already damp soil and tried to suspend the stem and leaves back in the air above the styrofoam cup, as if I had the ability to breathe life back into a dead plant. People frequently comment that I have a green thumb, but I already know I have no particular skill. I simply get enthusiastic enough plants to have enough of them that I wind up with enough alive in the end to disguise how many died along the way. My efforts to reanimate the plant were in vain.

The fact is that I couldn’t offer this plant the one thing it wanted most, more sun. If I’d planted these seeds in season, there would have easily been twelve hours of sun at this time in its life. Instead, it’s quite inescapably winter, and my plants, on sunny days, get probably about three hours of sun. My guess is that they held on through the shortening days until they started creating flowers and fruit, a demanding set of tasks. The second plant held on a good week longer, but when its first blossom withered away without opening, I felt disgusted with it and didn’t want it around; I took it outside and dumped it on top of a flower bed to turn back into nutrients in the soil. Of course, it’s winter, and decomposition basically stops in the frozen ground of winter. It’s going to become spotted and slimy like the leaves buried under snow until spring starts everything up again.

It’s good to be reminded that there are seasons in the year and in life. Temperature isn’t the only reason we plant pumpkins in the spring and harvest them in the fall. It’s a reminder of a lesson I’ve learned before. One fall into winter, I decided to build a cold frame and keep growing greens until the next spring. I found a piece of plexiglass to allow the sun in and keep my greens from freezing. I aimed the structure towards the south and placed it in the spot where the plants stood to get the most sunlight possible. However, they never grew byond wooden-tasting small leaves. My will could not overcome the reality of the season.

Horticulture is not the only part of my life where I try to overcome reality with bullheaded stubbornness, simply the easiest one to write about. I have a firm sense of what I want the world to look like, and sometimes I’m impractical in my dedication to what I want, even if it conflicts with reality. Instead, I join a long line of humans caught in an interminable battle against foes they have chosen to fight  to the death.

Right now is a season of quiet and stillness. Due to an injury and pain I’ve dealt with for several years now, I’m taking a break from running. It drives me up the wall to not be able to exercise and be active. I’ve fought against that for years, but I’m finally going to try to see if I can face it, instead of fighting it. It is a time to be fallow, and my efforts to keep something growing are just a waste of energy.

I know I will plant figurative pumpkin seeds in the late fall in the future. I want the world to be a certain way, and I’ll try a thousand different ways to try and get it to be what I want it to be. Sometimes I actually am successful, and sometimes my plants die dramatically or in a slow, painful failure to thrive. I don’t regret trying. And by the end of February, just about a month from now, they’ll be selling seeds again, and so I’ll try once more.

Pumpkin Plant Addendum

Hold onto your hat, the pumpkin seedlings are getting even more exciting. I need to make significant revisions to what I told you about the early days of a pumpkin plant previously. I love having a chance to notice and change my observations. If anyone wants to run a couple of experiments for me, please let me know. I’m now out of seeds, but I have a couple things I want to try out.

Such happy plants, their faces plastered to the window.

Previously, I reported having a few seedlings. Since I planted at least two seeds in each styrofoam container, it made sense that I’d have more than one plant in each pot. However, I now think I have exactly one complete pumpkin plant in each pot for a total of two.

In my last post, I mentioned that some of the seedlings seemed to have put more energy into height and others into growing a new leaf sooner. It turns out the sprouts are completely different.

The taller sprouts now have a new leaf, about the same size and shape of the cotyledons. The main difference is that the new leaf has a fuzzy texture, while the cotyledons have more of a waxy feeling. However, the shorter ones wound up putting out two new leaves, the shape and structure of grass.

The most exciting part of this whole drama is that the shorter seedlings seem to reach towards the taller ones, embracing and twining around them. I can now picture how pumpkin plants wind up with a main vine and smaller vines twisting around.

But now I want to know where the two separate stems came from– one seed or two? The reason I wonder if it came from two separate seeds is because the third pot, in which nothing grew the first time, still has nothing growing in it, even though I stuck a third seed in there a couple of weeks after I planted the first ones. According to the timeline of the other two pots, I definitely should have sprouts up by now.

I wonder if there needed to be at least two seeds in there in order for a plant to come up. Maybe there is some sort of communication between the plants so they differentiate and know what part of the ultimate plant they should become. Of course, both parts might come from a single seed, but I wonder, because, while one of my pots seems to have both stems coming out of the same spot, the other pot has the two stems separated by probably a little less than an inch. Maybe the communication between seeds is required for anything to come up?

You can see how the stems in one plant seem to come from the same origin while the other seems to come from two different points

I’m sure a doctorate candidate somewhere has answered this question for me in their dissertation. But I don’t urgently need to know, so I’d rather explore it for myself. In fact, several of you informed me that you choose to eat pumpkin seeds instead of planting them. If you happen to have any that have not been roasted, do you want to test this for me? Maybe take four pots and plant two seeds in one pot and one seed in the other two. Sure, it’s a small sample size, but I don’t want to deny anyone their snacks.

See? Nothing growing in there, even though I’ve put a total of three seeds in at two different times.

I also could dissect my plants and examine the root system to see if they originated from the same point or separate ones… but then my plants would have to die. I’m not up for that. Another option would be to stick a few seeds into a damp paper towel and put them in an open plastic bag in a dark place. When they begin to sprout, you can take them out and see what is happening. But like I said, I’m out of seeds, and the rest of you are eating yours.

There we go, I have updated you with wonderful developments in the world of pumpkin botany. I hope your day is just a little better for it.

Probably More Than You Wanted to Know

I’ve recently had the privilege to plant a few pumpkin seeds and watch them grow at a time of year when I’m not trying to start a thousand other plants and prepare a garden for spring and summer. (Yes, I do realize this is a non-traditional time of year for planting pumpkins. However, I figure my pumpkins will be ready forMay Day, starting off a grand new set of traditions surrounding maypoles and pumpkins.) I swear pumpkin seedlings are magical and/or have a sense of humor. One morning, just over one week from when I planted them, I found half of a new leaf sticking out of the soil. I did a small dance of excitement, spoke encouraging words, and petted the little guy. By the end of the day, both cotyledons had fully emerged and risen above the soil, spreading apart in their sunny spot on a south-facing window sill. Way more exciting than watching paint dry.

All my little seedlings

I tried really hard to make some sort of insightful connection between the magic of watching a leaf completely emerge from the soil over the span of maybe eight hours and the magic found in the pumpkin patch in It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. Linus’s unwavering faith in the Great Pumpkin leads him and Charlie Brown to experience something that, of course, none of the other children will ever believe. Unfortunately, pretty much everything has already been said about The Peanuts, and I didn’t want to act like I was experiencing some brilliant insight, especially when it didn’t seem to want to present itself to me.

Despite my reluctance to draw deep connections from my pumpkin seedlings and the Great Pumpkin, I still want to try and describe to you the magic and joy I see in these new plants. I mentioned two fully formed leaves popping up in a short period of time. They actually aren’t true leaves. They are cotyledons, existing inside the seed before it was planted. They are full of the energy the seed will need to grow its first true leaves and situate them in the sun so as to grow the rest of the plant and its fruits. They aren’t considered true leaves, because they can’t photosynthesize– although as with many things in nature that avoid easy classification and definition, some can change into photosynthesizing leaves once their role as cotyledons is no longer needed.

Now, just over two weeks since I planted the seeds, a third leaf, the new leaf, has begun to form. It is nested between the two stems of the first leaves, like a tiny soft taco, slowly growing its own stem and unfolding. How often am I so lucky as to watch a process like that?

Beautiful little plants

Eventually, this new leaf will grow out past the cotyledons, making them the base of the vine of leaves. I’m also concluding this is one of those plants in which the pre-formed leaves have become photosynthetic, because they are now green. Also interesting is the fact that my tallest seedlings also have the less developed new leaves. If I were to make a guess, I’d say the plants that are taller put more energy into stem growth than new leaf growth. It’s a hypothesis, but it seems to explain a consistent pattern in my very small sample. There is still so much more to watch for, and I hope my plants just maybe survive long enough to keep observing.

As much as I’ve observed about how pumpkins grow, I have questions for a seed I planted just a couple days ago. Were the cotyledons green right when they came up? About what size were they when they first came up? At what point in time do the seedlings start relying on sunshine– which is becoming more and more scant, even behind the protection of a window? What would happen to the plant growth if I remove one or both of the cotyledons once four or five new leaves have formed? Will I be able to get these to blossom based on what is available in the winter? (At this time, I’ll have the chance to hand pollinate the female flowers in each plant with pollen from the male flowers. I already feel the pressure to perform.)

Okay, I realize not everyone out there is as excited about all of this as I am. Sure, you could plant a pumpkin seed and watch it change throughout the day and also in full leaps from stage to stage overnight. (That reminds me of another question– Does the growth process really speed up overnight? Or is it just that I don’t look at it for 8-10 hours, so it seems like whole new parts of the plants leap into existence?)) Most people aren’t that interested in the growth of a plant, and most other people would probably just Google it. That’s okay. I’m okay with knowing that I’m easily entertained. Thanks for taking a minute to listen to me about something I find fascinating.

Such lovely little guys

A Little Sick of This

The other day I was reading customer reviews of Preggie Pops, a candy for women with morning sickness. No, it’s not time to buy cute little onsies; I am not pregnant. However, I have been struggling with nausea for the past few months. Someone suggested I give these candies full of whatever anti-nausea essential oils a try. However, I already spend my days sucking on ginger to try and ameliorate nausea, perhaps the less packaged version of these candies.   

I’m probably never going to take the time to write up a product review on Amazon, but sometimes I’m grateful to the other 4,000 people who take the time to do it. In the first few reviews I read, people complained about the new raspberry flavor or the ratio of green apple and lemon flavors in a package. I realize it’s not exactly my place to judge the experiences of pregnant women. However, based on my own recent experience of nausea, I guess I am going to judge them, because anyone who can tolerate their nausea enough to complain about the flavor of a candy is not nauseous enough for me to care about their opinion. The only review I care about is if  it will give me any relief from the waves of nausea that leave me grabbing my chair, taking deep breaths, and trying to decide if it’s time to stop fighting and just vomit.  (Sorry about the graphic details.)

I wish I could point to a cause for my nausea. It has come and gone throughout my adulthood. But I suppose that if I knew what causes it, I’d be more likely to be able to control it, and wouldn’t be complaining about it here.

For me, probably the most reliable and direct source of nausea is an automobile. I’d say I get nauseous about 75% of the time I’m in a car or bus. I’ve heard multiple explanations of car sickness, but since I can’t see, the ones based on vision don’t make much sense for  me. There are explanations related to proprioception though, and I find those much more interesting.

I’ve conducted my own experiments in a desperate search for relief, and I’ve discovered two possible solutions. The first is that I can eat something small, like maybe half a granola bar. I don’t know what is going on there. 

The second solution involves opening a window and letting the wind blow on either my face or hand. My hypothesis is that inside a car, my body receives mixed cues, and for some reason, that leaves my stomach in rebellion. My body/inner ear can feel the car’s movement as it speeds up and slows down, or as we go around a turn, but my skin and hair roots think I’m sitting still in a chair at home. My brain cannot reconcile the information, and I’m left praying that we’ll arrive before I lose my lunch.

The inability to reconcile information feels like a broader theme in my life this summer. There’s COVID– going from being terrified about it to relaxing and going back to something close to normal and now trying to remind myself to be cautious- there’s Afghanistan, and there’s my grocery store- still undergoing remodeling after a man shot and killed 10 people back in March. Those are just the first three things that come to mind, but I know there are other ways the world is spinning past me faster than I can handle– climate change and politics just to name the next couple that come to mind.

I hear factoids about the world around me moving, but at least half of me is convinced everything is holding still. I remember spinning in circles as a child, falling back into the grass and watching the sky above me spin as my body rocked back and forth on the solid ground beneath me. In childhood, this was mostly entertaining, whereas the adult version of me is likely to curl into the fetal position in the face of incoherent conflicts coming at me from different sources. I know children are physiologically better adapted to line up the input from different senses, but I still like to think kids are also readier to suspend disbelief and trust it will all work out in the end; the hard earth and itchy grass beneath them can coexist with the spinning and rocking sky. As an adult, I’m less certain which sensations I should focus on.

I know the stillness of apathy and the blankness of forgetfulness are not accurate. I also know my body cannot handle the constant movement and change of direction going on in the world around me. I wish I could say that I just need to find a way to accept motion and stillness as they come in some sort of meditative insight or wisdom, but from what I’ve seen of myself, I think that would still leave me sick.

I don’t tolerate feeling stuck and helpless very well. I want to be able to move in some direction, even if it doesn’t solve my problems in the end. But both movement and stillness leave me sick. Perhaps I’m being too metaphorical when I say this is true both physically and inside my brain/mind. But then again, I’ve already said it, so I’m going to go with it. The only option I can think of for now is to try on new perspectives. No, I won’t adopt most of them as my own, although it’s hard to say how much I might integrate bits and pieces into my own perception of the world. I can read about Afghanistan from as many sources as possible, and still accept that I don’t really know anything. I can remind myself that a place I used to be familiar with has disappeared, and that one more shooting that hits close to home has occurred in Colorado. I can also give myself permission to “forget” by avoiding the place sometimes. I can remind myself that I am made up of microbes, that I appreciate life with microbes, and when I need to, I can also tell people I’d rather stay outside when I’m in public and just wave at them instead of shaking their hands.

I suspect the strong flavor of ginger is part of why it helps me keep the nausea at bay, so I try to keep exposing myself to novel and strong sensations. Feeling the wind on my face as a car races down the highway is one way to get this. Inhaling the aroma of rotting crabapples from the box of them I’ve collected is another. None of this cures my nausea, but it does keep me in the world. For now, I might need to accept what I can get.

I’d be furious if a doctor tried to give me a solution like just needing to tolerate it, but since it’s the best I’ve got, I guess I’ll go with it. I do know the severe nausea will last for a few weeks, but eventually will get better. I’ll have a while when I feel pretty good, before it returns. I mostly think I can accept that. Sorry to anyone who has to put up with me in the meantime.

Nothing

On Monday, March 22, 2021, there was another mass shooting in Colorado. A man walked into a King Soopers grocery store and killed 10 people before the police were able to take him into custody. This time the shooting was in my grocery store. It’s the grocery store in my neighborhood, in my community, filled with the people I know, in the aisles where I’ve purchased eggs and milk and cereal for years. I keep telling myself that this happened, reminding myself of it when I forget and have the thought that “I’ll run by King Soopers and grab something on my way home,” but I can’t actually feel anything yet. 

I want to judge myself for feeling numb in response to a violent tragedy, although I realize an understated response is one of many “normal” responses to trauma. It seems like it would be easier if I could feel sad or angry along with many of the more public displays of emotion around me. I find myself expressing an emotion about something in the future or frustration about taxes or entertainment about something one of my animals did, and then I feel guilty when someone else expresses “heartbreak” or “a sense of disruption in life” or a “loss of safety and security in the world.” I feel like I need to step back and reflect back to the other person with an understanding of their emotions, drawing a space around where they are right now. I’m not so sure how to make space for my own nothing.

There is a natural tendency to fill open space. Air spreads to fill a container. Life finds ways to inhabit hostile environs with very little encouragement. Flat surfaces in my home do not remain clear for long. Sometimes the things that fill a space feel cluttered and chaotic, and sometimes they feel invigorating and hopeful. But no matter how it begins, the things that fill a space can become stale and repetitive to the point of being compulsive if I’m not careful. I have to remind myself to make new space for nothing. I have to work to not fill that space out of panic and discomfort.

A friend and I were recently speaking about her desire to have enough space in her life for the dog she adopted. She expressed regret for leaving her dog home all day while she was at work. I didn’t want to make some sort of trite statement about dogs that anthropomorphizes them into the “perfect” none of us manages to be. I think animalistic urges drive dogs to behave in ways that happen to complement the needs of humans along with what they are able to provide– humans help provide food and shelter, and dogs have a playful puppy-like nature, along with the ability to read communication from humans, to create a relationship that reinforces itself. 

However, it is my experience that dogs fill to fit the space we create for them. Dogs don’t sit at home, resenting that the neighbor dog gets to go to doggy daycare all day and then complaining to the therapist how they were neglected and unloved. (Sure, they might not be able to handle anxieties they develop in being alone, but they don’t blame their human.) Instead, dogs are excited and enthusiastic and cuddly in the moment, and then they nap or bark until the neighbors go nuts in another moment. If my friend can be with her dog before and after work, providing food and a home and walks along the way, the dog fits into that space. If I expect my dog to work and follow strict commands and expectations around behavior sometimes and I let her play and behave how she’s more naturally inclined in other moments, she steps up and does it. If someone else does not have a consistent home or source of food, the dog fits into sleeping in a variety of settings, eating food as it comes, and staying at its human’s side along the way. People with dogs are generally healthier and happier, so it’s a question if humans will make space for them.

I got a cat just over a year ago, and he very conveniently turned out to be the COVID cat I got before I knew that was going to be a thing. I thought about getting a cat for a long time. I was worried about not knowing the nature of a cat and how to influence its behavior. I wasn’t sure I wanted to add clean up after a cat to my household responsibilities. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if the cat and my dog couldn’t live together peacefully. But when I finally made space for a cat in my life– after briefly investigating raising chickens in an apartment setting- he settled right in. Just the other day, I found the first dead mouse of the spring in my kitchen. Yes, I was a bit freaked out the first time I stepped on a dead rodent on my kitchen floor, but now I’m used to it, and there’s space for them in my life… and in my garden where I bury the little bodies. I feel honored that my cat regards me worth the prizes he hunts down. And now joy and love accompany the toenail curling fact that I have dead creatures appearing under foot.

However, not everything that fills the spaces we leave in life is cute and furry. Long after I cleared a large patch of land of weeds and Canada thistles, I learned that disrupting the soil encourages the growth of aforementioned thistles, and now I have a healthy crop that grows taller than me each summer. I’ve had to learn to make space in my life for the blindness about which I don’t have a choice. I tried to save women and children from domestic violence, and I had to learn that I cannot save others from that compelling dynamic between partners. I tried to teach kids that they were smart and could change the world, but I had to accept that a mainstream classroom probably wasn’t where I was going to do that. I had to step back and leave space around a friend when I learned that support I tried to offer him as he struggled with life wasn’t what he truly wanted. Sometimes loss and disappointment fill the open spaces in my life, and I wish I’d never left the spaces open, or that I’d never allowed anything to fill the space. Sometimes the pain that fills the space is too overwhelming for me to face the uncertainty of more of the unknown. I fill my open spaces with the fuzz and snow that used to fill the television screen when stations went off the air. My own mind shuts down for a time. But even the static and snow clear after a while, and once again I can look out and see past my comfortable distractions.

What I have learned keeps bringing me back to the open spaces in life. I want the surprise of what fills it. Sometimes I wind up with chances to run and good friends and a verdant garden, and sometimes I wind up with a severe disability and a broken heart and tragedies like mass shootings that seem to keep hitting closer and closer to home. I know I will eventually react to the shooting at my grocery store. I wish I could react now, when other people expect it, and that it would take a form I see as more “controlled” and “normal.” I’m a bit nervous that I will lash out at a stranger or push away someone I care about in the future, because I’ve seen myself do that in the past. But I also know this isn’t something I can control. So instead, I’m going to try and clear out space in my life and see what appears. Nothing is scary, but so is everything else.

How to Live a Life

Side Note: I actually wrote this in the middle of the summer. Just 4 or 5 months later, my thoughts about the pandemic already seem dated. The summer with flowers and plants also feels more distant than it should. I credit that to the pandemic.

COVID-19 highlights incongruities in my nature. Part of me believes this time of pandemic is simply what we go through on our way to a reality where COVID-19 will be a normal part of the world we live in. We might or might not wind up with a vaccination or drugs that help treat the
illness, but we will return to a sense of normal where we think of it like all the other illnesses we live with, but usually manage to avoid catching like the flu or pneumonia or a staph infection.But then there’s this other part of me that can quickly start to lose control as I imagine a world filled with an invisible enemy that might not affect me at all, or that might make me painfully ill, leaving me with lasting damage to my body. I read recommendations that tell me to use hand sanitizer both before and after I touch my mask, to only touch my mask at the ear loops, and to switch masks frequently. Inevitably, I touch the front of my mask without sanitizing my hands. I wonder if I’ve contaminated my mask with this virus that is all around us in the news and government and the operation of businesses, whether or not it is in the air we breathe and the surfaces we touch. I think about how I’ve removed this mask and folded it into my pocket, and I wonder if I’ve now contaminated my pocket. I open the front door to my home, touch my backpack to put it down, and pet my dog and cat, and I wonder if I’ve somehow smeared virus onto each of these places. I wonder if I need to disinfect everything I’ve touched, or if it will be a source for infection later on, when I unthinkingly pull something out of my backpack and then touch my face or if my laundry detergent will kill any remaining virus in my shorts pocket. I begin to see how easy it could be to develop a neurosis about germs and contamination. Authorities tell us an invisible virus is present, causing many people to fall ill and die, and I have to simultaneously believe them and block out the possibility that it is at my own arm’s length, or else risk going batty– no intended reference to the suspected source of the virus.

Spending most of my time alone during this time of pandemic, I have more than enough time to look at my life critically. When I pass by sunflowers that are done blooming, I collect them for my own garden. I’m excited when I find a new variety, the straight ones with a single flower versus the ones that branch out and have multiple flowers. I smell the scent that comes from the tacky fluid at the back when you pop off a head. I imagine the sunflowers that will grow and bloom a year from now. Collecting sunflowers for next year makes me happy. But I also wonder why I do this. Anyone who wants sunflowers can purchase seeds next spring. I might not be able to find the bag of seeds in whatever place I choose to tuck them away this winter. I wonder if I am only tricking myself into thinking that collecting the heads of sunflowers is meaningful. Maybe I’m lulling myself into a false sense of accomplishment to take the place of the much more worthwhile things I should be doing with all this time and energy.

Sometimes I sit outside, unable to focus enough to complete anything for work. Then I start to suspect that the only reason I work is to pretend I’m doing something meaningful, giving myself a way to fill a certain number of hours each week. I appreciate the structure, but maybe the structure is just to keep me from wandering around aimlessly. I’ll relocate from one location to another based on the movement of the sun, knowing I should be present in this moment, appreciating everything around me, but feeling empty instead, as the battery level on my computer drains. Every year, I do well on my performance review, and people give me positive feedback on the work I do. Even better, people ask me to do work for them or to help with their work, and all of this helps fill my need to know I’m doing something that matters. But there’s still this little bug inside my head, making me wonder if all of this is really just an illusion of importance and value.

I bounce between cleaning up weeds from my garden and planting more vegetables and herbs in my garden, and sitting indoors, thinking about everything I should do in the garden, but being unable to move and do anything. I tell myself how it goes fine once I get out there. I think about all the tools I should take with me. I imagine myself cutting and pulling, but I remain inert. I ruminate on how my neighbors must be annoyed with me for neglecting the garden. I wonder when one of them will actually approach me to complain. I try to imagine my response, if I will apologize for neglecting the garden, or if I’ll accuse them of not doing anything either. Then I am outside again, making progress– however you define progress in a setting while you simultaneously try to encourage plants to live and thrive and die. If you were to complete a cost benefit analysis, you would definitely conclude I should just purchase my produce at the grocery store, except that it’s hard to quantify what I get from gardening. I know people have tried to quantify satisfaction, and sometimes I reject that effort, and sometimes I let myself fall off the cliff that comes with thinking you can place a monetary value on everything, and I usually find myself in a dark pit of despair, not one where I’m smiling and grateful for the depth and vividness of life.

Sometimes I feel like life is a tightrope balance. When I fall, which I will always do eventually, I can fall to one side where parts of life are measured and defined and are going to be counted in the end. On the other side, there is a world where life is lived fully for the current moment, regret doesn’t exist in the moment.

I think of a poem by Mary Oliver. The last two lines in the poem go, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” I try to decide what I think about this question. Perhaps it belongs on an inspirational poster with a pretty picture,too many answers that I don’t want to hear, that don’t apply. Or perhaps I really should stop long enough to ask myself what am I going to do with this one wild and precious life I have been given?

I start by looking around me, at the life that feels very small to me, especially in this time of COVID. My first thought is that I am supposed to make my life big. I am supposed to travel to distant and foreign places, or I am supposed to do something exceptional and insightful enough to justify everything I’m lucky enough to have. But I’m at a place in my life, where I’m exhausted from grand gestures, whether it be pursuing high academic achievement, chasing a career full of noteworthy successes, or demonstrating great skill at any particular task. I automatically revert to thinking these things will make my life feel complete and satisfying, even though I know it has not worked in the past. But then I’m left unsure about what would make this one life wild and precious.

I try to think of what I do to make my life wild and precious, what I could do to make it so. I confess that I often feel content in the runs I go on from out my front door, that never go more than a couple miles away from my home. I don’t think my little runs are enough to define my life as wild. I do have a large garden, and I explore the worlds of seeds and plants as I plan and dream what my garden might look like each year, but in reality, the garden means I spend dozens and dozens of hours just outside my home digging and arranging and pulling weeds. I feel good at the end of a period of time spent squating on the ground, burying seeds or cutting back the latest generation of thistles, even though I know the next ones will be strong and growing in a couple of weeks. Every year is an evaluation of what worked and what didn’t and decisions about what I’m going to try next year. Still, probably my life is not wild or precious according to many means of measurement. I write, but the value of art in both the eyes of the artist and the public is notoriously fickle, leaving many artists troubled when they relied on it to measure the value of a life. In short, I feel both regret and anxiety that perhaps I have chosen to live a life smaller than what I should.

I find the poem, part of me, hoping that when I read it as a whole, I will see the whole work is silly, proposing ideas I don’t actually believe in. Or I hope that when I read the one question I can remember in context, I will see the answers I need to tell me how to live the life I’m supposed to live.

I come from a culture where I make the world around me into what it is. I have the power to envision a reality and then to build it piece by piece. When I was young, they taught us to make goals and then to work towards them. No one told me of the life that might come from serendipity and necessity. My life had value because of what I did to put value into it. My brain was important because I proved I could complete difficult tasks with it, and I could do them well. My hands were valuable if I could create art or play a musical instrument with them. My legs were valuable if I could run or hike on them. I’ve always had to work a little harder to try and make sure I was doing enough to justify all I have.

As I reread the poem though, I saw that was not what Oliver wanted to tell me. She told me that I have one wild and precious life. She wanted to know what I was going to do with it. I come up short trying to understand that my life is wild and precious. I do already understand that I have one life exactly. I don’t know what happens when we die, and I feel very focused on the one life I am in now. I also have a sense of how precious my life is. I am aware of a force flowing through me that clings desperately to life. No matter how I would describe my life at any given time, something inside of me clings to life. Last, I look at the wild life. I know many people who have gone out and done brave and noteworthy things. They have pursued passions and created new and wonderful contributions to the world and the people around them. When I compare myself, I find myself lacking. I have spent far too much time obsessed with fear. It is hard for me to believe my life is wild.

But the truth is that I do want a wild and precious life, so maybe I will simply choose to accept what Oliver has offered knowledge that I have– one wild and precious life. Regardless of history or effort, I have this one life. If I do nothing else for the rest of my life, I will always have had one wild and precious life.

The Opportunity to Vote

I am 37 years old, and I just completed my first mail in ballot on my own. My access to vote has been limited by the fact that I have a disability, I am blind. I have voted most years since I turned 18 by going to a polling place either before or on Election Day and using accessible voting machines. I am grateful that there are accessible voting machines so I could vote without having to tell another human being how I was voting. However, because of COVID, this year I did not want to go to a polling place.

A couple years ago, I heard rumors of accessible mail in ballots in the works, but it was easier to just do what I normally did. I was curious, but I did not make the effort to find out more information until COVID. This year, my regular trip to a polling place turned into filling out a mail in ballot from the comfort of my home, a task I completed at the end of the day, like checking my email or taking out the trash. It was simple for me to complete without having to track down someone else to help me, but also thrilling in that finally, I could actually do it. I simply went to a website, checked a box to
Verify that I have a disability, filled out an online form, printed two pieces of paper, signed one, and then sent it off.

I hear stories about what other states or individuals are doing to make voting more difficult, and it makes me feel both proud and grateful to live in a state that is expanding options for how people can vote. We can look back at the Civil Rights era and everything that was done to keep black people from voting, and we know that was wrong. But there are still far too many factors that keep people today from being able to vote. I know accessible mail in ballots for people with disabilities does not address all the problems out there, but it made it possible for this individual to vote in 2020.

I know people around the world stand in lines for hours, risk threats on their lives, and deal with corruption that means their vote does not actually count. In response, sometimes I feel guilty for complaining that I just want to be able to vote from home, like most of the other voters around me. But people who face far worse than I also remind me how fortunate I am to be able to vote with relative ease, and it makes me want to vote that much more.

I know that many people put in much effort to make it so I can fill out a mail in ballot independently, and I send many thanks to all those unrecognized people. On a cold fall Sunday afternoon, I pushed my envelope with my ballot all the way into my local drop off box and then took a photo of my guide dog standing in front of the box. This year, I will not walk away with an “I voted” sticker, although I am thinking of making one for myself on Tuesday, November 3.Much more important though,I got to vote in a way that felt safe and worked for me. When there are more ways to complete a task, it increases accessibility. Accessibility can refer to the ability of someone with a disability to complete a task, but it also refers to the ability of people with all kinds of characteristics to feel welcome and as though they belong. Providing greater access is not about trying to cheat the system, although I do suppose that more access points potentially provides more opportunities for using it incorrectly. Instead it is about being able to imagine that other people are different, and what works for me might not work for them. We encourage little kids to reach a developmental milestone where they can imagine the nee
needs and feelings of other humans, but we are not always very good at that as adults. However, knowing how often we can fail to consider others makes me more appreciative of my own experience voting this year.

The Second Of April

I haven’t posted in this blog for a while, but we’re in the middle of physical distancing with COVID-19 right now. We are supposed to focus on connecting with others while we stay far away from them physically. I find a good way for me to connect is to have someone understand or relate to something I write. So here’s something I wrote, and I’m posting it:

It is Thursday, April 2, 2020. I sit down to try and write about this day. It is one on which I should have profound insight and clear direction about the meaning of life and all of its significant moments. I’ve had 22 years to reflect back on a single day, so you’d think I’d have at least pieced together a coherent story by now. But I haven’t.

When I try to write about the event, I want to capture the whole event in a single package, wrapped and taped, and tied up. It seems like I should start at the beginning, and I try to. But I don’t know where that is. It might be the morning of Thursday, April 2, 1998, or it might be when we left town the Friday before or it might go back to who and what I was as a 14 year old kid, or it might start all the way back when my parents were 14 year old children. All of those starting points would help you better understand the moments that live in my memory by giving you context. But when I try writing from all of those places, I get lost in stories I think I’m supposed to tell, but somehow don’t feel right.

And I want to put the memories together into a chronological series of events, because I think that will make the most sense to you. But the events do not exist in chronological order inside of me. I simultaneously feel the weight of two little girls as I give them piggy back rides around the streets of Santa Fe, and the groggy mixture of a voice I recognize and the sensation of being put in the back of a vehicle… when we arrived back in Denver. I don’t know why those two points in time, separated by a few days, have become interlaced, but they have.

If I stop trying to tell the story chronologically though, I can see that the effort to place my memories into a coherent narrative keeps me from seeing that my life is not a single unbroken line from point A to point B. On Thursday, April 22, 1998, the line that was my life stopped, and I started again on a completely separate point. One moment, I was in a car traveling north on I-25, and the next I was in a formless realm, waiting to see where I would start living my life again.

I could not tell you anything about those first couple weeks after the car accident. Even the fact that there was a car accident is only something I know as a result of other people telling me whatever details they remember or could obtain from other sources. Sure, I’ll tell you that version of history, because it’s the easiest to understand. But someone else could have told me that I had suddenly become very ill and I could tell you that I was kidnapped by drug traffickers, and we’d probably both believe it.

If I told you what I remember from that time, I’d tell you that my mom and I were driving north on I-25, through the sage brush covered terrain of New Mexico, headed home after a camping trip. Then I was on a stretcher, and it was World War II and we were in these mines with a train made up of cattle cars running through it. They would put me into one cattle car one spot and then pull me off again in another place. Then they would put me back on. Or I’d tell you about being a grandmother with my family in these fields of sunflowers in Mexico. We had left our home, each of us with five seeds, to start a new life in a place far away. Our vegetables grow well in this new place, but my children and grandchildren put me in a hospital bed out in the middle of this field and tied my hands and feet to the bed, accusing me of pulling up the vegetable plants. I couldn’t speak to tell them I hadn’t. I do have memories from the moment of the accident to when I finally became aware enough to understand I was a patient at Children’s Hospital, being treated for injuries to my eyes, face, and brain. It’s Just that what other people tell me happens to answer more of the questions other people have, and my version does not provide a meaningful storyline.

Much of my reflecting on the anniversary winds up being about filling the space between the car accident and where I am now. People like to hear that I’ve overcome my injuries and disability. But I know that I live with my disability in everything I do, because it is part of who I am, and I hate having to pretend that I have somehow erased an important part of who I am. It makes other people more comfortable to think that disability can shrink or even disappear with a bit of determination and talent, but no matter what I do or don’t do, people in the world see me as a blind person, so I can’t escape that identity.

There are several stories I could tell you to connect, explain how the 14 year old teenager became the 36 year old adult I am. There is the story of overcoming great adversity that I already touched on. There is also the story of an individual who is uniquely strong and determined, enduring remarkably hard situations. There is the precautionary tale of loss and appreciation and life. Or, there is the version where a significant loss is balanced with an equally valuable gain.

At the root of all of these stories is the assumption that this is a zero sum situation– there was an enormous loss, so we must find a gain to equal it. I have spent much of the past 22 years trying to live in a way that does not acknowledge the loss and devastation the car accident brought into my life. I add and compare and try to make it so I am equal to or better than I would have been as a 36 year old to whom the accident didn’t happen.

But if I start to question the mathematics that surround tragedy, if I refuse to compare and contrast, if I refuse to try and calculate the weights of one event over the next, then I move into a world that is irrational, where tragedy happens and I don’t have to explain or justify it. A car accident happened, it made me blind, and that is it. The event and my subsequent life doesn’t say anything about my character or wisdom or spiritual insight. I am who I am now, blind for 22 years, with all my strengths and weaknesses. If I am only the blind person I am here and now, I don’t have to pick and choose between everything that is true about me, because I’m not trying to tell a story to get me from then to here.

Needing to fit into an archetypal story about disability/tragedy has prevented me from doing some of what I still need to figure out what to do. I hate to make mistakes or to not know something, , and that has interfered with me being humble enough to learn in some situations. I pretty much just regained consciousness and went back to “normal” life, never giving myself the time and space to actually look at the trauma of severe injuries that do not heal in the end. When I feel anger or fear or confusion or dislocation, I tend to assume there is something fundamentally wrong with me, versus understanding those are universal feelings around life changes.When I reflect on the past 22 years, they do not come back to me in an organized narrative, so I probably brush over my experience by presenting it that way.

My life as a disabled person more appears as points, sometimes arranged by chronology, sometimes by importance, sometimes by clarity of memory, sometimes by relevance to my current life, and sometimes by other rules. Some points connect to just one other point, some to multiple other points, and some to no other points. Themes of redemption, gratitude, strength, etc. do appear, but the attempt to select one and to narrow my life down to a single narrative obscures the truth.

Without a clear narrative, I’m lost and uncertain about my purpose. I have to deal with demons and monsters in the present tense, not only in a single point in time in the past. I am constantly deciding and living my life in new ways. There were approximately two weeks out of my life where I lived in a world partially shaped by sensations from the world around and partially by drugs and partially by a mind wandering through dreams, before I woke up in a world with rules different from what they’d been when I could still see. I have been a multitude of people: very strong and very weak, creative and stuck in a rut, determined and defeated, intelligent and stupid, wise and foolish. The fact that I’m blind leads other people to assume I’m a certain kind of person, but that’s because they need to fill the gap between 22 years ago and now. I’m learning to embrace the freedom in leaving the gap wide open.

To Have Wings

On a warmish Sunday afternoon in April, my brother takes me up in a glider. A small airplane is still towing us through the sky, when we hit the first thermal. In that moment when terrific forces jostle us like the hands on a snow globe, I realize I’m at peace with my maker. Speaking in very general terms, hot air goes up and colder air goes down; air closer to the ground warms up and air higher up cools down, creating constant movement and interaction between massive amounts of air particles. We humans experience the movement of air particles as anything from a slight breeze to bone rattling thunderstorms to tornados that lay whole swaths of surface dwellings to waste. When we hit that first column of rising and falling air, I see why I am secured in with a five-point restraint. My feet fly up off the floor and my guts slosh to the seat and ground thousands of feet below us. The two of us are in a 250 lbs. shell that most certainly cannot stand up to another shaking like the one we just went through. We are about to die in an accident that will fill a couple inches in the Daily Camera tomorrow morning, and I calmly accept my fate.

A glider is essentially an aggrandized kite made from carbon fiber. With a kite you try to get enough wind under it to create lift and keep it from crashing back to the ground when you let go; in a glider, you create wind by dragging it behind a plane to start and then search for areas of rising warm air, thermals, to lift you up further. In an airplane, when they send everyone back to their seats because of turbulence and tell you they’re looking for smoother air, it’s because of rising and sinking air patterns; if an object is flying forward in a straight line and it hits air that is moving downward, it will abruptly sink and then rise as it continues traveling forward to the area where the air is moving upward. Passengers become frightened and annoyed when their orange juice goes flying and their stomach feels like it does on a roller coaster, so especially commercial pilots try to avoid turbulent pockets of air. However, traditionally a glider has no internal source of power, so you depend on air movement to move against the forces of gravity, which only want to pull you back towards the ground. As a result, you seek out areas of rising air in a glider. As my parents tell the story, my first airplane flight was when I was two weeks old. I passed the flight peacefully, asleep at my father’s feet, under the seat in front of him. I have no memory of the event, but I was no stranger to plane trips throughout my childhood, being the daughter of a parent who worked for the travel industry, got flight benefits, and loved to travel. I am not afraid to fly. But if flying in a large commercial airplane is like watching a National Geographic show on crocodiles, the glider was more like floating down a river in a flimsy boat, surrounded by mostly submerged prehistoric reptiles.

Once I accept that I might die and I might survive, depending on the skill of my brother, very newly licensed to fly a glider on his own, I decide to, like the enlightened Boulderite that I am, practice being as fully mindful and present in that time and place as possible. I exhale, let go of my parachute straps, and begin to look at the world around me. I notice that wearing a backpack with a parachute in it is unexpectedly comfortable. The wind blowing in through the edge of the window gives me fresh air to gulp down every time my stomach starts feeling upset. The bumps and turns in the plane remind me of being a patient on a gurney, heading to surgery, an observer along for the ride, letting my body sink into each movement. I think of the first time, back from college, I rode in a car my little brother was driving or many years later, in a boat he was sailing. It is just one more large machine my brother has sought to take control of, while I operate nothing faster or more complicated than my own two feet.

As we glide along the surface of the sky, I begin to see fingers running across braille in my head. Each time we hit a new thermal, the texture the glider draws out for us turns the invisible into something solid. You cannot see air movements, only secondary clues about what is happening up there, such as clouds taking shape and birds soaring. Before we take off, my brother stands there with two other men, looking at the distortion in an airplane’s contrail, deciphering if the afternoon is good to fly; they have studied, they see more than tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. I shrug and trust them.

I begin to see line graphs inlaid upon an X and Y-axis. Silently I chant—rise over run. Rise over run. Rise over run. Rise over run. As we go up in the thermal, I picture the line slanted up and to the right as we move forward. The glider has no motor, nothing propelling it forward; Newton’s first law says an object will continue to move a uniform direction until a force changes its movement. In our case, the airplane gets us moving up and forward, while gravity and friction pull us back in speed and height. As we slow down, we no longer have as much lift under the wings, and the forces pulling us down take greater control over our movement. The line on the graph is still moving up and to the right, but it’s shallower. Rise over run. I think of the middle school kids I used to tutor, trying to convince them these graphs and equations really were relevant to their lives, as they sketched out where they had been, where they were now, and where they were going through time and space. The graphs could make sense of questions the kids didn’t even know they had yet. Rise over run. They groaned and played with their pencils and the cooperative ones made guesses until I smiled and nodded, while the others tried to distract me with the topics they would rather talk about right then. But I take comfort as I watch the graphs sketch themselves out in front of me. I hope maybe a couple of those kids learned those graphs in their guts, whether or not they ever made sense in their heads. We hurtle forward, dependent on invisible forces like gods at play. At least I can trace out our movement above the earth.

From a position on the ground, it might be hard to imagine why a creature in the air moves the way it does. An airplane moving passengers or freight from one location to another seems reasonable. It also makes sense to move here and there according to the land below in order to observe it all from a new perspective. But destination and sightseeing are about human will, and my intentions play absolutely no role as I sit in the back of the glider. I surrender and try to understand what the air has written in it. I can’t tell you a story with plot and purpose. The air simply does what it does, because that’s what it does. It’s only humans who search for more meaning than that. As I sit there with my eyes closed, the invisible becomes visible. To someone standing on the ground, the sky is only the pale Colorado blue interrupted by a few flat clouds left from the cloud cover at the beginning of the day. Flying through it though, it becomes a mosaic of texture and color. I travel through a world that only birds, the microscopic organisms on specks of airborne dust particles, and a few humans ever know. What didn’t exist to me before going up takes shape and gains mass. Now I get to know it’s real.

I feel lucky to have touched this world just above the one I live in. I moved along and around its contours. I tripped over valleys and slid up its bulges. I was the primordial creature with no form or will, leaving all knowing to my stomach and the fluid in my inner ear. I have never steered a fast moving vehicle like the glider, but I managed to see the memory my muscles lack as my brother steered around the moving world around us. If he had stopped to think about his responses, we’d have already passed through one shape of our surroundings and into another. In reading braille, the fingers should slide smoothly across the paper, not stop to push in harder and have it break apart into a meaningless prism of parts separate from the whole. I always say that I love running, because all you need are some shoes and socks, no clutter from other hobbies, but I got a glimpse at why people might be drawn up into the sky. It is a vast emptiness until you touch it with wings.

Disclaimer: the above perspective is entirely that of Amelia, Elliot did not read any of this before she published it, and any errors are entirely Amelia’s fault. As is true in most things between this pair of siblings, there is probably at least one—likely, more than one- piece of Amelia’s perception that Elliot would disagree with. Amelia welcomes the disagreement and would be sorely disappointed if her brother agreed with her completely.