I stand in fear
You just don’t know
Don’t push that button
It raises the veil
His grace is sufficient
It protects you today
My pain will be your pain if you don’t walk away
Warring undercurrent floods this occasion
I no longer hear you
I am fighting temptation
I know I should hold on
The belt will go back on
Blows tear open my soul
You should start running now.
My Dearest Baby Boy,
I don't know what happened. I don't know what has changed. Your birth changed my entire heart. I never knew love like that existed before you. When I looked at you, I knew I was looking at my own heart. I wanted the rest of the world to disappear so that it would just be you and me. What happened? Why can't I stand you now? I know I still love you! I know you are still as important to me, but I don't want you around. I hide from you in the computer. I park you in front of the tv so that I can do what I want to do. I used to miss you when I was away from you for a couple hours - now, no amount of time is enough. You are so hyper and loud. You want my attention all the time. You're so insistent and frustrating. I want to be there for you, but I feel like you're sucking the life out of me. I yell at you all the time. I glare at you. I want to hit you. My dream with the lady hitting her child broke my heart, but that's me; and that's you. I hit you with my words and my angry glances. I shut you out and leave you alone. I see the looks you give me - sometimes so full of frustrated anger and sometimes so hurt and bewildered. It's like you're afraid of me - and you have every right to be. One minute, I'm smiling at you and the next, I'm screaming. Your eyes are so beautiful and expressive - I hate the me I see in them. I want to be friends again. I want us to play in the world that's just ours. So often, I kick you out or walk away. I see you alone and I want to be with you. I love you, my little man.
***
I love you, too, mr mommy
I want to be with you all the time. I love hugging you and being held. Do you remember when I was sitting on one couch and you were sitting on the other and I was on the other and I got up to come sit with you? I miss you, too. It seems like you don't want to be with me. Why are the dishes so important? Why are you always talking to other people and not to me? Why do you want to look at boring stuff on the computer instead of playing with me? The only time you see me is when I yell or make Emma scream. You say, "Maybe later." When? When are you going to play with me? When are you going to have time for me? When are you going to see me? We used to be friends. We used to share secrets and enjoy things together. Now you want to be with everyone else. I try to be funny for you and you smile politely at me or tell me to be quiet. I accidentally spill something and you make me feel like I'm so stupid. Do you hate me? You spill, too, sometimes! How do I get you to see me again? How do I get us to be friends? What do I have to do to get you to like me? I love it when we play together. I love it when we talk about things. I want to be friends again.
The Fruit
I look so fine in my shiny, supple skin.
My color is hot, you will be taken.
Come here, smell the scent of my green branches, Come!
Into my world, my adventure, my flesh.
Soft, juicy, slimy, seedy, handle with care!
Be gentle when you break me off the vine.
Hold me gently; softly press your lips on me.
I am yours, your ripened fruit, flesh.
The Woman
Looking down at my hands, I stared at the fruit freshly plucked from the branch. Did I really take this forbidden object away from its home?
The fruit was cool in my hands and I found myself rubbing its smooth skin. I bet it is juicy and sweet. I could almost hear it being crunched by my teeth; I could almost feel its texture on my tongue. I wanted it, but God had said…
How long had I been here? How long had the questions been running through my head? How long had this fruit been laying in my hands, begging to be bitten?
I rolled it across my hands. I felt it move across my left hand, and then fall into my right, settling itself in my palm. How easy it would be to eat it now. All I needed to do was raise my hand, open my mouth, and bite down.
The shiny surface of the fruit mirrored Adam’s reflection as he snuck up behind me, resting his head on my shoulder, eagerly looking at the object of my attention. I sighed.
Adam and I stared at each other for a moment. My life was full and lacked no pleasure as I walked through this garden each day with God and Adam. All I saw was mine to take. I had enjoyed it all. God had given us everything. There was no need to question or doubt if this was as good as things could possibly get. God had told us that this was it, and then He had given it to us. Or had He?
I closed my eyes blocking out Adam, blocking out God. I needed to remember what happened. I needed to think things through What should I do with this object in my hand?
God. God. I needed to think about what God said. He said I couldn’t eat from this one tree. I don’t even think I was supposed to touch it. I touched it. God, I touched it and I’m not dead. Didn’t You say that I would die?
It looked good. It sounded good. Knowledge. It would make me like God. It felt good in my hands. Nothing seemed wrong with it. Really, how was it bad?
There was no way it could be bad. Why did God lie?
Why did God lie and tell us that this one tree would kill us?
Would it really just make everything better? Could I be as good as God?
Opening my eyes, I looked down at my shoulder where Adam rested, nearly asleep. I looked back at the fruit. Closer, and closer, my mouth finally met its target and I bit, sinking my teeth into its flesh. Flesh.
The Fight
Let us think about flesh. The flesh of the fruit varies. If the fruit were an apple, it would be crunchy, sweet, and generally well-liked. Apple pie, applesauce, apple cider, apple juice, apple slices, apple-off-the-tree. We like it so many ways, and appreciate its versatility. It’s easy to imagine the fruit of the Tree as an apple, but what if the fruit were different? What if it was a fruit that made you wonder, and made you question everything?
Tomatoes, as fruit, provide my taste buds with more questions than answers. Every time I bite into a tomato, I hope for less of the slimy, seedy center. I hope for sweetness, and for understanding that this is, indeed, a fruit. If I were a tomato, I’d be embarrassed by my unusual flesh. I would long to have the true sweetness of a strawberry. Shame would be inevitable. I am less than desirable. My texture makes men gag. My flavor is unusual. I am less than the other fruit. I will never be enough.
I’ve always been acutely aware of my flesh, my physical body, and to be perfectly honest, I see myself as a tomato. I see Woman as a tomato, and I am Woman. There are parts of me that stir up desire and are held in great expectation, but those same parts are a bit slimy and not nearly as sweet as hoped. As I think through God, man, woman, and the Tree, I have many feelings, many thoughts, many questions, but mostly I have shame.
I wonder why woman was tempted with the flesh of the Tree? What did the woman feel as she stood by the Tree? Why was the Tree so central to the world God gave her? Where was her mate? Did she think about God? Why did God have to make me a woman? Why am I tempted – to see flesh, to feel flesh, to doubt, to isolate, to choose pain, to sabotage, to hide myself?
I wonder about how I choose things – how I choose God and I don’t choose God, how I choose my husband and I don’t choose my husband, how I choose the hunger of my stomach over the hunger of my heart. I struggle with fear; I doubt that I am loved. Why do I doubt my husband’s heart? And how, how can I doubt my God’s heart? There are some things I don’t ever wonder about. I don’t ever wonder about being a woman; I know I am irreversibly so. I don’t worry about my flesh. I don’t ever worry about shame. I know them well enough, and I embrace them again and again. I am Woman, I am Flesh, and I am Ashamed.
I turn over the first chocolate chunk of soil with my garden spade. It is beautiful, rich, and pungent, smooth and shiny on its underside. Later, when I plant the whole garden, early May, I’ll fetch the neighbor’s Roto-tiller, the neighbor who is too old to use his many machines but not too old to plant tomatoes. I’ll till his garden while I’m at it.
But it’s only the shovel for my onion bed. I want to turn the soil by hand, loosen it deep, give the bulbs unconfined soil in which to grow big. I want to smell the dirt not exhaust. I want to see every worm and grub as I break up the clumps and worked in the compost that has been cooking all winter.
It’s a temperate day for March and I know it won’t last. March fair weather doesn’t and shouldn’t. Without some coolness in March, the warmth of April seems like a repeated compliment, nice but not fresh and unexpected and sincere.
The last trace of snow melted three weeks ago. The ground is moist but workable. My spade does its job. Where I have not dug, the ground is packed down by winter, almost gray, flat and hard, futureless. But in my churning I leave a wake of upheaval and promise. When I get my rake after it, the ground will look orderly. It will carry my mark.
I don’t need a big area for my onions but it’s hard to stop digging. The repetition is addictive. It strengthens my belief in the myth that life as an assembly line worker would be less stressful than mine.
Interruption. She brings the phone to me and I notice that she’s getting bigger. Her hooded sweatshirt strains and stretches at the zipper.
“It’s your mother,” she says extending the handset toward me.
“I’m filthy. Tell her I’ll call her back,” I say.
“Did you hear that?” she repeats into the phone. She listens and then laughs.
“She said to call her as soon as you’re done playing in the sandbox,” my wife tells me.
I continue my digging. My father had his sandbox too. ‘A man needs a place to get away,’ he said to me many times before he went away, far too young.
She’s back.
“I think it’s getting colder,” she says. “How much longer are you gonna be out here?”
“I just want to get my onions in,” I reply. “Another half-hour or so.”
The sky darkens, the warm sun from earlier now hidden by clouds, replaced by a chilling north wind. It has all changed so quickly.
“Where’s Jeff and Lisa?” I ask.
“Jeff’s over at Mike’s house and Lisa’s inside watching a video.”
“’kay.”
As she walks away I see that the growth is not just confined to her stomach.
I go back to my digging. Can anything break my concentration on this one task? I treasure every shovel-full. It’s so simple. Every time is the same. The result is predictable, immediate, and useful. No one tells me how to do it. I could dig with the shovel’s handle if I wanted to.
The temperature has dropped nearly 10 degrees in one hour. A dark bank of clouds appears over the crest of the hills to the northwest.
The wind picks up and the onion skins inside the mesh bag begin to rattle. Leaves left over from last fall, once held captive by snow banks, skitter down the alley, free.
The sweat from my digging cools and evaporates under my sweatshirt. I look up at the coming front and shiver so slightly.
I clear the 4’x4’ bed, raking mounds of dirt to each side, and scatter the onion bulbs haphazardly. They didn’t need to be in rows. I will thin them out, harvest many of them for spring onions. The rest will find their way into vegetable juice and onto late summer burgers or will be tied into bunches to dry in the shed.
As the wind increases, a rain starts. No good digging up wet ground and I’m glad the onions are in. I wanted to plant the spinach as well, but that will have to wait, and wait it will. Like so many things, in its time, in its time. If only we let things move at the pace they wish, how much less resistance we have in our lives. What happens happens and so we find out how little influence we really have. But that philosophy only works in a one-man garden.
The shovel is caked with the moist dirt, so I find a rock, a good-sized one with a sharp end and enough size for me to hold onto. I scrape the steel blade until almost all the dirt is back in the garden. It falls in little chunks.
Inside, she’s waiting, watching me out the back window. She was cold and so she has brewed a pot of coffee. Decaffeinated, fine for me this late afternoon. She doesn’t take in caffeine, not now with Johnny-Come-Lately inside her. She’ll wait until he has arrived, and then she’ll return to regular coffee, and a beer now and then, and occasionally something stronger when the girls go out and she calls me from downtown and tells me she’s spending the night at Chelsey’s and I go to sleep alone.
“This blew in fast, didn’t it?” she says.
“Yeah, that’s March for ya,” I reply, getting a cup and pouring some coffee. Inside me my thirst is more for water but my fingers are cold now from holding the rock and scraping my shovel. I hold the cup with both hands, look out the window as the temperature continues to drop, the wind steady, and a light rain going from left to right, west to east, falling at a 45-degree angle, making Isosceles triangles with the yard and the laundry-line posts that stand along the back walk leading to my now empty garden.
We stand there for minutes, her just inches from me. Now that her tummy protrudes, she sometimes forgets where it is. She bumps into things and she is not normally a bumper but a smooth and agile evader. Her left hand unconsciously strokes the side of her tummy as her right hand holds the mug and slowly lifts it to her mouth, sipping slowly, never in quick repetition as I do.
“Hot beverages are to be sipped slowly,” she has said many times to me as she expounds on her life rulebook, the one she continues to write, edit and change as we go through our marriage.
“I don’t know how you drink your coffee so fast,” she says this time.
I say nothing. There is nothing to say. I have told her time and again that is the way it is, and I will change many things for you but please let me have my coffee the way I like it (black) and at the speed I like it.
As she sips, her lips purse and lines form in her skin. I have only begun to notice recently that her face is showing the wear from too much tanning. It looks healthy in the summer, but in the winter, when the brown is gone, she is just left with faded leather. She has the belly of a 25 year old but the face of the 40 year old she is.
When she was pregnant with Jeff she was 25. I look at photos now of her baby shower and she looks like a baby herself. She won’t let me photograph her this time.
The rain is different now. The drops have grown in size and I realize it is turning to snow. Just that quickly.
“This won’t amount to anything,” she says.
I say, “Never does in March.”
She finds the one exception to my statement. “Remember the March blizzard of ’93?” she comes back.
Yes, I do, but I won’t bother saying it.
We watch a while longer. The rain stops. But the wind remains and dark clouds move by to the north.
“I’m going to shower,” I say finally.
“What do you want for dinner?”
“Let’s just go to the diner.”
“Fine.”
Upstairs, I take off my dirty jeans and put them in the wash. I shave – my one weekend shave – and shower. My fingernails are still a little dirty when I’m done, but I like that. My grandfather the farmer never had completely clean hands. I used to look at them as he ate a sandwich and marvel at how gnarled and scarred they were. His left pinky was half its original length. I used to sit next to him in church and dare myself to touch it.
I look at my hands. Beyond the dirty fingernails, the rest of my hands are soft, almost dainty. The only callus I have is on the middle finger of my right hand, from my pen.
I dress. Clean jeans, Penn State sweatshirt, good sneakers. Diner-wear.
As I come downstairs, I look out the window for the first time since stepping into the bathroom. The rain has fully turned to a snow. Huge flakes look like white Wheaties. The grass is covered, snow clinging to the blades that had just started to turn green. The streets and sidewalks, though, are just wet. Even the bare ground of the flower beds and gardens do not play host to the snow flakes, melting them on contact.
“The Onion Snow,” I say to myself but loud enough that Lisa hears it above the din of her video.
“What?”
“I said, ‘It’s an onion snow.’”
“Why do they call it that?”
“Because it comes late, about the time you’re planting your onions and it’s supposed to help the onions grow.” It comes about the time when you think there will be no more snow. Just when you think you have it all figured out and you can do what you want with your garden.
From inside my car, I could tell only that the night was black, not that it was also blustery. I parked, stepped outside, and knew the coolness. My car was just two blocks off the busy street, and I had come to this point in Mt. Washington from an English department reception full of friends and food. I wanted to be alone. I wanted quiet moments with God. And I wanted them not safely in my house but here in the dark and the wind where I felt just unsafe enough to feel even a small sense of both fear and awe.
I hurried up the street on foot, crossed the main road, and half-walked, half-jogged to the railing that lines McArdle Road. McArdle is hard to drive. It scales the side of a bluff, rising high above the Monongahela River on its southern shore. The road is straight until it makes a hairpin curve away from the water at the very crest of the hill. The ascent, though, is made most treacherous by its beauty. One look to the right and I have to consciously turn my eyes back to the pavement, the guard rail, the oncoming traffic. Just across the river the Golden Triangle, Pittsburgh’s downtown, glows in its nighttime finery. A million tiny lights, the illuminated water of the Point’s fountain, the constant motion of headlights and boat lights . . . yellow, green, red, blue, purple. A visual feast.
I gripped the railing, looking down the sheer side of the bluff feeling my body sway ever so slightly with the mere suggestion of falling. I was safe, occupying the same space of sidewalk that thousands of others traverse gazing at the panorama of Pittsburgh from such a perfect vantage point. But the wind rushing up and around me, the darkness of the night, and the presence of One drew me intently into a feeling of dangerous delight. The charcoal grey clouds over Pittsburgh’s tallest buildings rolled, forming and reforming into massive shapes. Their undersides glowed, the slate sky behind them looking angry, flat, and distant. The heavens were upside down, the stars glowing from the manmade splendor of city beneath what looked like a churning ocean of stormy grey undercurrents. I felt the spray of the sky-waves on my bare arms and neck.
Some part of me wanted to leave, to rush back to my car and drive home where I could lock myself safely away from the night, from the dangerous sky and wind, from the One capable of making them. But I remained for minutes, long awe-full minutes wondering about the God, my God, who could draw me so intensely to His side in the midst of tumultuous beauty. I thought I would stand there captivated by lights, sounds, the vastness of urban constructions. Instead, my eyes locked on the ever-moving expanse above, my skin responding to the soft, strong buffet of the wind.
Not long after I returned to my car, friends called me on the phone. They thought they’d seen me standing by the railing on McArdle. “Are you in trouble? Do you need our help?” Somehow they sensed the danger though they thought it was perhaps because of a broken-down car. I told them I was fine, on my way back home. I just wanted to feel the air, see the city. They know how I love heights. I didn’t tell them that I’d felt threatened, just unsafe enough to want to run. Not threatened by cars. Not by people. Not even by darkness and solitude. But by the One, the One who made the angry slate color, the multitudinous churning clouds. The One who made me. The One whose love is so tender, so fierce.
