SPRING 2020

Lisa López Smith is a shepherd/mother/alchemist making her home in Mexico. When not wrangling kids or rescue dogs or goats, you can probably find her in the garden. Recent and forthcoming publications include: Helen Literary Magazine, Jabberwock, Mom Egg Review, Sky Island Journal, Mothers Always Write, and Tiferet. 

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Just to get out of the apartment on my days off, I sometimes visited friends of mine who owned and operated a cactus store on Echo Park Avenue in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

           I myself lived in the neighborhood, my apartment building adjacent on both sides to the homes of retirement-age couples, terrific friends apparently, always inviting each other over for dinner, the result being it was impossible to determine which individuals lived in which building. Perhaps they had abandoned such formalities. At night I could see their silhouettes making abbreviated gestures into the street, levitating beer cans. They seemed pleased to ignore me.

            My friends Paul and Kathryn ran the cactus store. Ran is a generous word. They locked and unlocked the doors at unpredictable intervals. I don’t think I ever saw a customer. Maybe I was their only customer — once I bought a cactus for no other reason than I liked the word: cactus. Then I forgot to take it home. Maybe other people bought it too, later. We liked to sit together in the back of their ridiculous store and talk about anything but the things we really cared about.

            On this particular day, instead of beginning in back of the store, we met at a bar in Atwater Village. I’d never heard of this bar. I don’t know who suggested it or why. All I remember is that once we got there, we seemed to be waiting for some important person to arrive. They wouldn’t tell me who it was.

            Willie Nelson? I guessed.

            Who? said Kathryn. No.

            Do I know this person?

            You’ll be filled with awe and gratitude, she said, I’m warning you now.

            I smelled a gas leak which I declined to mention. It was an old bar. I thought, maybe what I smell is its age. My tallboy grew slippery in my hand. Soft-rock played. All my thoughts became soft-rock-themed. It’s hard to think that way. I suggested, at the start, that we find a new bar on account of the soft rock music, but Paul and Kathryn ignored me. They didn’t even respond to my suggestion, it made so little sense to them. I concluded that they probably couldn’t hear the music because their thoughts were soft-rock-themed already. They had a permanent soft-rock sensation in their minds, which meant that whenever they encountered soft-rock music in the world, they felt properly aligned. They filled up with a perverse kind of clarity.

            I thought, this is why I’m vigilant. I protect my mind from chronic soft-rockness in all its various forms. But I didn’t say anything, not today. These were my two best friends, Paul and Kathryn. I needed them to love me.

            The only downside is I didn’t lose any weight, said Paul. He was talking about surviving cancer.

            Kathryn said, I heard they studied mice with cancer and found that the mice, on average, lived longer after the initial diagnosis than humans with similar kinds of cancer. Even though the humans received medical treatment and the mice did not.

            Wow, said Paul.

            Yes. They attributed the difference to the mouse’s superior cancer-fighting mindset.

            Mice don’t want to die. They never have, said Paul.

            I’d put my money on you, Paul, I said, over any sort of cancerous rodent.

            Awfully kind of you.

            If I may comment objectively, said Kathryn, I think you’re at a disadvantage because you know that death is inevitable. It takes some of the wildness out of you. But it makes you cunning.

            Death? Jesus, said Paul. Is that what happened to my parents?

            No. They just took a very long vacation.

            Good.

            They’re fat and happy somewhere. They lost their cell phones, that’s all.

            I already beat the mice anyway through the power of modern surgery and anesthesiology. They cut the problem right out.

            How did it feel? I asked.

            Like nothing. I don’t think I even dreamed while I was under. Paul shrugged.

            This beer was making me float already. It opened me up. When it opened me up, more soft-rock got in, I noticed. An embodiment of a soft-rock thought might be: gushing to your friend about a poem you’ve never read. My heart rate quickened. I wondered if I should say something about the gas leak. I couldn’t smell it anymore, which was either a good sign or bad sign, I didn’t know which.

            Beer is almost as good as anesthesiology. And way cheaper, said Paul.

            Now I couldn’t remember if we were actually waiting for someone important to appear, or if that was a joke. The bartender took away Paul’s empty can and supplied a fresh one. I’d lost track of how many he’d had. That’s the principal advantage of drinking in a bar. The bartender expunges the record after each drink. The evidence is disposed of. You don’t have to find a trash can or make any movement at all. Every drink is the first and only drink. Until the check comes. And maybe, if you’re in the kind of money the two of them seemed to be in (where did it come from?), not even then.

            I had an aunt who was a famous anesthesiologist, I said.

            I hear that one a lot, said Paul.

            Well, she wasn’t really famous. But she put a few famous people under.

            Who?

            Richard Nixon. I forget who else.

            I don’t believe you, said Kathryn.

            Personally, I can’t believe Nixon would survive surgery, said Paul. He wasn’t well-liked in his time.

            At one point, he was popular enough to become the president.

            Great point, said Paul. Actually, I think I would be a decent president. I make difficult decisions with surpassing ease. A shocking amount of ease, some might say.

            What are you talking about? said Kathryn.

            For example, I once hit a deer with my car simply because I had a premonition that the driver behind me, an elderly woman, would hit it. Time slowed. I could see her bobbed grey hair and trembling fingers. I’ve got a better chance of surviving, I decided, so I changed my trajectory in order to make impact. I altered the fate of everyone involved. Except the deer, I guess.

            I remember that differently, said Kathryn.

            That’s because you were thrown from the car and lost consciousness for hours, said Paul.

            They said a pine tree saved my life.

            Anyway, surgeons don’t kill people they dislike, I said. It’s unprofessional.

            That may be true. But I worked hard to make sure my surgeons liked me. You can’t convince me it didn’t pay off.

            I think my aunt would have done a good job on Hitler.

            Don’t say that name too loud in here. You’ll attract the wrong crowd, said Paul.

            Really? Kathryn and I said at once.

            I’m kidding. These people are nice. Although I did meet a Nazi in here once.

            How did you know? I asked.

            We were having a normal conversation about tennis. Then he said to me, Ever seen Germany’s World War II uniforms? You got to admit it: they were pretty cool. And he looked at me with a look labeled Invitation to the Brotherhood, you know. It was scary.

            What did you say?

            Nothing. I said nothing.

            I put my phone away. I had been trying and failing to find my aunt’s name in an article about Richard Nixon’s surgery for phlebitis, an inflammation of the blood vein. The surgery didn’t really go well. His stomach grew dangerously full of fluids. Nixon lost a lot of blood. I found an unnerving typo in a 1974 New York Times article about the surgery. It referred to part of the procedure as the replacement blood kiss. Elsewhere, it referred to the replacement blood lass. Blood kisses and blood lasses. A confusion of blood and tenderness. And the president trying not to die.

            I leaned into Kathryn’s ear to whisper, I think there’s a gas leak.

            What’s that? demanded Paul. Secrets?

            Oh, said Kathryn.

            I just said I think there’s a gas leak.

            They don’t use gas here. Troy? Do you use gas here? Paul asked the bartender.

            Absolutely not, said Troy. No. We never use it.

            This is a gas-free environment, said Paul. His hand did pirouettes in the air to demonstrate.

            Later, Paul’s head stopped moving. It was just angled over his beer. I worried his neck might give way and the glass nozzle might give him a shiner.

            I called for Troy.

            Does this bar have a carbon monoxide detector?

            Yes, he said. Right here. He pointed at his nose. Beep! he said.

            What’s that beep mean? I asked, growing sick.

            One beep is good. Two is bad.

He poured us apple pie shots for no reason and wiped the counter. Three apple pie shots. Then I understood. This was a Wisconsin-themed bar. I noticed Packers merchandise on the walls. All my life, I’ve responded to Packers gear with revulsion. I don’t know why. The color scheme offends me somehow. Even before I learned to hate football, I hated the Packers. A shameless combination of moss green and cheddar yellow. A color-coded picture of total spiritual depravity. It’s a cynical way to reckon with the problem of the world, smashing green and yellow together that way. The soft rock had become intolerable soft jazz. Troy now wore what appeared to be a hat in support of the president. He must have just put it on. I would have noticed it before. I averted my gaze. Troy beeped again. I looked away from everything, just to steady myself, down into the corner of the room, but there I saw a sinister excess of twinkle lights twisted into a snare trap of the kind used to catch prey fast by the ankle. I actually thought it would be a functional snare if somebody pulled it. Perhaps the little lightbulbs would catch and keep it from closing.

            When I looked back, Paul seemed to be crying.

            I voted for Hillary, he said to nobody in particular. Just so you know.

+

Our evening should have stopped there. I should have cancelled everything. Instead, I made the mistake of going back to their cactus shop to help tackle a six pack. We began discussing dreams. Paul told us about a dream of his in which a revolutionary war was taking place inside the charred remains of our city. His mission as a member of the resistance, he told us, was to throw a very special exploding brick through a certain residential window in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood. But in the middle of his journey to find the window, he found himself under considerable pressure to make people laugh, and so he ate the brick. After that, he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t by any means continue on with his mission now that the brick was gone. The dream continued with an episode in a museum full of disappeared paintings, but that part wasn’t very interesting. I only mention it because it made me think to tell the story about the paint-and-sip class.

            The paint-and-sip class was an absurd BYOB networking event for aspiring film editors. I can’t remember how I convinced myself to go. I brought a bottle of red wine which I poured continually into a little plastic cup. Most everyone else drank beer and hid behind the little pieces of canvas we were supposed to be transforming. Not much networking occurred, really. The painting selected for us to emulate was Cape Cod Evening, a Depression-era work by Edward Hopper. In the painting, man and wife lounge hungrily in front of their home while daylight vanishes and their dog, an attentive border collie, listens closely to the sounds of the forest just beyond. Everything is lit drastically, like something from the end of an unhappy play. Our instructor stood in front, watching us drink, explaining simple brush-stroke techniques which would lead us straight into the realm of Edward Hopper. He told us over and over not to be afraid. Be bold, he said, make it your own. Do not be afraid. After an hour and most of a bottle of wine, I noticed that something unusual had happened on my canvas — the dog was bleeding. I applied more paint in an effort to heal the dog, but the bleeding only grew worse. I didn’t know what to say. When the instructor looked over my shoulder, all he said was, Beautiful. You make good choices.

            Help, I said.

            No! said the instructor, I won’t consider it. You’ve got a nice touch.

            What happened to the painting? asked Paul.

            I must have tossed it.

            But that wasn’t true. Despite the presence of the bleeding dog (or perhaps because of it), the painting made my ex-partner happy. Unaccountably happy. She hung it on her side of the closet, where she could encounter it each morning. I guess it’s still there.

            I had prepared myself in advance to lie about my current job and all things related to the subject of my job, my career, everything, especially the upsettingly bad short film I was supposed to be editing (the story, best I could tell, concerned an aspiring actor who lands a spot in a STRETCH-E trash bag commercial. Unbeknownst to him, the ad runs with a graphic overlay that reads, Real customers! Not actors! As a result, his career is ruined — the STRETCH-E people will stop at nothing to prevent him from becoming an actor and thus sabotaging the good repute of their best and most successful STRETCH-E commercial), but it never came up. And why would it? I almost never mentioned my career, which I hated, around these people. I hated it because it didn’t exist, like the protagonist’s career in the terrible short which was so terrible it would probably finish me off for good. Instead, I was lying now about other aspects of my life for no discernible reason.

            You know, we have a strange dog in real life, said Kathryn.

            Oh, that, said Paul, Jesus.

            Does it bleed for no reason? I said.

            No, but it poops. Like, forty times a day.

            Oh, I said.

            It is truly a magical dog.

            We’re lucky to have such a big yard.

            She can’t help it.

            What’s her name? I said, though I shouldn’t have.

            Georgeanne.

            Georgeanne the Ever-Pooping Dog, I thought. The idea of giving a beautiful name like that to such a poor, wretched creature enraged me. Why hadn’t they named her Poops or Disease or something like that?

            You know what I would do for Georgeanne? I said, aware of the mistake I was making but unable to stop. Then I made a hand gesture involving a gun I’m not proud of.

            Don’t hurt me, please, I said, because I could see the violence in the way they held their heads up. I was already backing deliberately, step-by-step, down the hall, away from the office and towards the storefront, while they followed at exactly the same pace, Paul tapping his fist against the wall. I’ll kill you, he said. Something was wrong with both of them. They had been snagged in tandem by the same quickening dream, and it was my fault, or maybe my hand’s fault — I was now convinced my hand had caused all this trouble by making such a convincing gun. There’s always some latent violence in the fingers of people, in the very shape of them, waiting for a chance, the simplest transformation. I’ll break your fucking arm, said Kathryn, but instead we just continued our march. Ultimately, they kicked me out of the store, like some kind of thief. But as I backed through the storefront, I noticed the potted cactus I had paid money for months ago and never taken home. Had it always been this beautiful? Three purple flowers hovered like music above the white needles and green flesh.

            My cactus, I said, grabbing it by the pot.

            Bullshit, said Kathryn.

            No, I paid! Remember?

            No, no, you paid for that one, she said, pointing at a gnarled, dying specimen. I hadn’t known it was possible to kill a cactus through sheer neglect.

            I clutched my flowering cactus, the one I was certain I had paid for, as close to my heart as possible. Kathryn and Paul stared at me with sunken malevolence, drunk and angry. I tried to remember if we had ever been friends.

            How do you two make money? I said. I’ve never understood it.

            Outside, the sun touched every part of the sky. I wanted to visit the nearby park, to sit by the water. I strapped the cactus into the passenger seat of my car and drove down Echo Park Avenue, caught the green light at Sunset Boulevard and sailed straight through the intersection, feeling like a local. This was my neighborhood, my home. At my side, my cactus, a trustworthy associate. I knew where we were going and where street parking might be available. Sure enough, a stretch of open curb appeared beside the sign that welcomes people to the park, across the street from a stucco church building of obscure denomination. They say some churches don’t have locks, but I heard this church was different. Its doors didn’t have hinges. Its doors couldn’t do the job of a door, which meant they weren’t doors at all. There’s a lesson about holiness to be found in all this, I thought. Then I leveled with myself — I didn’t know what holiness was. Nothing happens when people knock.

Parker Young lives in Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Oyez Review, and Back Patio Press. 

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Erinn Batykefer earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of ALLEGHENY, MONONGAHELA (Red Hen Press), THE ARTIST'S LIBRARY (Coffee House Press), and EPITHALAMIA, winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Chapbook Prize. She served as co-founder and editor of The Library as Incubator Project 2010-2017 for which she was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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My work uses formal properties to visualize spatial relationships between color and form in relation  to the body. I create provisional tableaus that are assembled and arranged based on the space they are in. Repetitive actions, like stacking rocks or pulling a tube of fabric from a pile, are performed  in a manner that is reminiscent of domestic and factory labor. Objects in videos overflow, are depleted or arranged and re-arranged, always having a cause and effect relationship with my hand.  

I  seek  out mass  produced objects  and materials for  their aesthetic value,  removing the intended function  and context. Growing up in a working  class family where women gained independence  and power through ownership of floral shops and  hair salons, I was always surrounded by kitsch and  artifice. Plastic wall sconces painted to look gold, or fresh flowers that were spray painted to match a vase, are some examples of the visual aesthetics that surrounded me.   

Printed images of plugs, moles, and mass-produced consumer products such as rawhide bones and cosmetic sponges evoke a tactile quality. Lumpy sculptures coated in beige pink tones, evocative  of the body or skin, rest in a space between pleasure and repulsion. Using printed fabrics paired with sculptural forms, objects are arranged to divide the space with color, layering space  as one might layer a painting. Scales shift from small intimate collage-like assemblages to larger sections of color. The chemical, often pastel colors in my work are evocative of mass-produced plastic products, cosmetics, and interior decorating images.

Humans’  attempt at  filling emotional voids and making sense of the world is mediated by  objects and products that are readily available, always on the  periphery. I am influenced and attracted to specific objects and the  way that bodies respond to materials, both sensory and emotional. Impulse  and desire become blurred, resting in a space between wanting with no fulfillment,  haptic experiences standing in for human interaction. How does the intent that objects hold become removed from what they come to represent for us?

Alicia Little (b. 1990 in Cincinnati, Ohio) currently lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. She received an MFA from Ohio State University in 2018 and BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2013.  Alicia has been awarded several grants for travel and research and was a resident at Vermont Studio Center in 2018. She currently teaches in Art Foundations at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, USA. 

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My·gra·tion Artist Statement

The first time I witnessed a murmuration I had to stop what I was doing and sit down in the middle of a city sidewalk. Everyone else around me slowed or stopped. A murmuration formation is trickery: many small starlings appear as one large unified entity, so predators have a harder time picking them off—it’s a strength-in-numbers game, using the illusion of scale. A synchronized dance, as if they are hypnotizing the predator into fear or fascination to avoid being prey. We in the crowd exchanged delighted glances, then returned our eyes to the sky. I felt contentedly small and safe among strangers.

My mother’s recollection of fleeing her homeland is riddled with such flashes of wonder, awe, curiosity, humility; in the midst of the most terrifying moment of her life, my mother was always finding beauty. This contradiction is what sets my mind racing to make art. Distilling my mother’s experience is both my humble attempt to help her and others reflect on and move through their trauma, as well as my invitation to viewers to find empathetic connection in the experiences of refugees.            

My·gra·tion is also inspired by Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. The story of the young Japanese girl who became a symbol for peace affected me deeply when I read it as a child and it remains a recurring force in my work. How can anyone know stories like these and continue to wage war? As a rainbow child of refugees, my protest is to make art, teach art, and encourage others to find meaning in making. Through visual narrative, I hope to initiate conversations that bridge imagined boundaries and invite intimacy. Creating art that honors the beauty of diversity, highlights the power of interconnectedness, and promotes inclusive dialogue is at the heart of my artistic ethos. 

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A.

Always I have kept a garden. I have no aptitude for growing food or flowers. I’ve no ability to remember the Latin names of apples or azaleas or asparagus. I’ve less ambition to translate a gardening manual’s arcane lore. What gardening knowledge I have is cluttered as a dusty attic. Apartments change. Housemates change. Lovers change. Always for yet another place to become a home it needs a garden just as a bed needs sheets and a table needs plates. 

B.

My gardens have brought forth broccoli, Thai basil, Italian basil, butter lettuce, butter beans, pole beans, string beans, green beans, beets (next year’s garden), Brussels sprouts (one day), and blueberries, which the birds eat before the white berries have a chance to darken to purple-blue. Every summer I think this year I’ll make blueberry pie, blueberry jam, blueberry waffles, and every summer, the chickadees and crows have their blueberry joys before I do.

C.

I garden in a city, where there are no wide-open spaces, just narrow ones, usually rock-ridden and small, ignored and left to feral cats, grass, or thorn-ridden and long-forgotten rose bushes. Front yards, backyards, and that odd bit of grass between the sidewalk and the street have sheltered my city gardens. I look around and see what’s available to grow food and something more than food. Call it a connection to a place; call it a reminder of a season; call it the satisfaction of saving money; call it the juicy sweet taste of a fresh tomato; or call it a statement: even amid concrete and cars, I can be grateful for whatever blossoms and blooms, whatever feeds my body or spirit.

D.

My garden has dung. Compost made from organic cow manure, black and seemingly ready to steam, layers the topsoil. I push my shovel into ground I’ve turned over for over a decade each spring and bring up earth worms fat and twisting where once there was only grey, sandy dirt strewn with rocks. The worm castings enrich the now moist, dark soil where tomatoes thrive alongside red leaf lettuce and radicchio. My garden dead ends our street’s alley where coyotes cut through our yard to go to the community center. They leave neighbor’s sightings and stories of their passing, and tight strands of dung dropped on our driveway or carport and unavoidable to any other creature of the night. Grey fur, bits of bone, sometimes talons are ensnared alongside other undigested remnants of cat or squirrel, dog or opossum. I yank on latex gloves and toss it into the yard waste bin that the City picks up every other Monday for an urban composting program. Perhaps some speck of it makes it back to my garden.

E.

Real gardens have edges. Straight footpaths delineate rosemary from roses, strawberries from squashes. Neat rows allow for easy picking of weeds rather than wanted plants. Unyielding lines demarcate that a human-defined space, a garden, is apart from the world beyond its borders. My garden can’t keep out that world. True, the neighbors put up walls on two sides and a cedar-plank fence on another. The landlord planted three now towering incense cedars along the eastern edge. These are boundaries, I grant you, but common tansy, crocus, crabgrass, laurel, mint, raspberries, morning glory, silverbush, and who knows what else grows wherever a spot can be found. Coyotes and Cooper’s hawks, opossums and feral cats, and who knows what else roams through at will. My small garden has a stubborn porousness in how it fills up with life.

F.

My four-year-old daughter planted flowers in our front yard.  Now chrysanthemums, pansies, strawberries and cream, tulips, first-of-spring, violas, those flowers that look like a pink button, and daffodils dazzle amid iris and lavender. In my daughter’s short life there’s been the Boston marathon bombings, police drones, rising anti-Semitism. I don’t know where the world is heading, but it’s certainly not heading anywhere I want to go. I feel guilt over the world she is inheriting, and thankful, too, knowing that we are alive alongside lady fern and sword fern, and seedlings of vine maple, red osier dogwood, huckleberry, and ninebark. I’ve been trying all my life to repair the world, but things don’t seem to want to be fixed. Maybe I can care enough for these flowers that they’ll be here for a long time.

G.

I once rented a Phinney Ridge house where I planted kale and cucumber and daydreams of buying the dingy grey house, ripping out its carport, and putting down soil, cedar seedlings, a living land. The garden grew; my hopes died. Fourteen years, and it was time to move on. Our last summer, I planted nothing. A summer-long goodbye, I thought. My husband, daughter, and I would leave on August 31 and not return, again and again, for the last cherry tomato, the last chard leaf, the last harvest. Still the garden grew. Shukshan and Rainier strawberries went where they would regardless of my careful arranging in years past. Tomatoes eaten long ago (or just last year) by rats and squirrels and birds had their seeds passed from poop to ground to take root far from where I’d thought to plant. Morning glory crept up and over raspberry canes that shot up where they didn’t belong (or so I said). Grasses appeared through last summer’s straw put down to prevent that occurrence. And so, my garden said goodbye to me. I was just passing through; this place was here before me and will be here after me. Who was I to think otherwise?

H.

Ghosts climb up rhododendrons to reach a porch. Skeleton dogs stand guard.  I enter a neighbor’s yard and there, under a hummingbird feeder hanging from a conifer, is a man with a toad’s head on his shoulders. I jump back and against my better judgment look again. It’s a straw-stuffed scarecrow in a flannel plaid shirt and denim overalls with a head made from an odd, bulbous yellow and orange squash with bumps and ridges and bulges cut to look like an open-mouthed toad. Then I see the witch smashed into the fence post, her cloth broom crumpled, her stitched stocking feet splayed out. Poor dear. Toad man must have scared her too.

            Halloween is America’s Samhain, the Celtic harvest festival when the dead walked among the living, and food was left to appease them. By Halloween, I can still ferret through the garden’s brittle vines to find green tomatoes, hardy broccoli florets, a few strawberries, now small and soft and shriveled. I remember last June looking out my window and seeing a squirrel nibbling a strawberry so far from ripeness that it was still white. The squirrel couldn’t wait for a sweet harvest. It needed to eat when it had the chance. Who can blame it? Life is short; death is long; everybody’s hungry.

I.

When my daughter was born, she left my body three months early and entered the world at the Vernal Equinox. One Saturday, nearly to the day she should have been born, we went to the hospital and learned she was ready to leave: she had a steady heartbeat, an even body temperature, and could sip from a bottle. We took her home on the Summer Solstice. Our walkway was blooming with iris. I stopped to show her the dark purple blooms, the black and gold honeybees and bumblebees buzzing from blossom to blossom, the long stalks of green leaves, the blue sky above the irises, the one small part of the world that was now hers.

J.

Joy. What else draws me to farmers’ markets and nurseries as winter slowly softens to spring? I plant seeds and seedlings in fertile earth alongside hopes and dreams. I work and wait, I get my hands dirty, and I trust it will come sweet, tart, savory. Sugar snap peas sweet in more than just name. Basil that’s spicy (Thai) or sweet (Italian). It’s the joy of a promise kept. That gentle trust: yes, the world is turning, turning yet again, day to day, year to year, and there will be months of sun and sweetness, and months of food to carry me through the dark. My garden is a simple, sustaining joy that keeps my mouth open to taste the world.

K.

Bugs like to eat kale more than my husband does. I like kale’s thick and dimpled, darker-than-emerald green leaves, the stringy and thick stems that crack when you break them. It grows if I forget to water. It grows if I forget to weed. It grows if I forget to harvest, and I find myself with an unexpected winter garden. The kale may be small, or it may be large and long past seed, but it survived rain and cold and dark and me. What more could I ask for?

            I have a favorite kale recipe: a salad made with hemp seeds, walnuts, dried blueberries, goji berries, mulberries, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and just about any else that’s tasty and takes well to an olive oil and lemon juice dressing. If I make it with spinach or arugula or a lettuce and chard mix, the greens are overwhelmed. They’re crushed by the weight of low glycemic, HDL-enhancing goodies. Only kale, as tough and chewy as a street fighter, holds its own against an onslaught of healthiness. 

L.

Who knew that, when left to bolt, lettuce shoots up stems that end in beautiful purple blossoms?

M.

I don’t have mint in my garden. I have a garden between mint. Winter; spring; summer; fall; mint; mint; mint; mint. My yanking it out by the roots does nothing. My nipping it in its buds of purple flowers does nothing. My smothering the garden in straw does nothing. Mint; mint; mint; mint. Mint is infinite plenty, a weed impervious to harvest. This sweet-tart stubbornness will never leave the world, or at least never leave my garden.

N.

My garden shelters nests. I turn over broccoli stems and kale leaves to squish the soft white larval bodies and egg sacks of cabbage moths. If I don’t, they’ll eat from my garden before I do. There’s no maternal care among cabbage moths. They trust to natural selection. Other nests are better hidden. Do crows nest in the conifers? Are there rat young in the dilapidated shed? One day, I looked out the bedroom window and saw neighborhood boys, rowdy and young and eager, run up the alley, cut behind the shed, and scatter up and down the climbing tree. I knew better than to open the window and call out hello or, worse, welcome. Any sound from an adult would have sent them running.  They needed their play. Natural selection would come knocking at their house sooner or later, and when it did, those boys needed all the skill and experience they’d learned before that door opened.

O.

Onions remind me that I am an optimistic person. Forget my weary cynicism in matters of politics, marriage, and letters. Forget my age. Onions remind me I am a child at heart eager to reap gain from dubious hopes. When my Trader Joe’s yellow or green onions sprout tangled roots, I go to the small plot near the cedars and push the bulbs into rich black earth. Most years, the sprouts grow a few inches before withering. Some years, I’ll weed out grass to find a stalk that ends in a large bulb of small flowers. If I yank or dig, I’ll find an onion no wider than my thumb. Not not bad for a mushroom omelet for one.

P.

Politics is my fertile ground. In my twenties, I experimented with meat-free diets to save money, read Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet, and became a vegetarian to remove my complicity (I hoped) in American food production that promoted world hunger. For years I lived in a collective household of vegetarians amazed at my prodigious appetite for whole-grain waffles, granola, and whole-wheat spaghetti with tofu balls. There was a reason I couldn’t stop eating: I was an undiagnosed type 2 diabetic, and illness cares naught for political correctness. I needed protein; I needed fat; I needed to eat a whole lot of brown rice with tempeh to get close to the protein and fat I’d get from a chicken sandwich. It didn’t matter that I recited legumes plus beans make a protein, beans plus seeds plus grains make a protein, and all the other amino acid combinations like a Catholic praying over her rosary beads. I lost the faith and started eating meat as soon as I moved out of that house. Then my politics of food shifted to animal rights (free range chickens and hold the veal) and sustainability (eggs from local farms, please, and pass the milk without bovine growth hormones).

            Then came the politics of marriage. Unlike my husband, I cannot live on frozen pizza or S&W chili beans served on tacos fried in olive oil. My husband was so amazed that someone (me) could grow tomatoes in the backyard that he produced an arms-length list of what we (I) should grow next. He was disappointed when I passed on the amaranth and settled for snow and snap peas, spinach, chard, onions (which never did well), garlic (ditto), and quite a lot else over the years.

            Sure, my husband missed his S&W beans, but more and more, I wanted a life of color (cilantro-lime rice with spinach), adventure (Havana black beans cooked in coconut milk), or a least a leave-taking from the mundane (brown rice sautéed in coconut oil and crushed cardamom pods and then boiled in chicken stock). The politics of joy comes from living out my values, which is what drew me to food growing and eating in the first place, and what good is a politics that doesn’t allow for pleasure or experimentation or occasional indulgence? “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” is attributed to the anarchist Emma Goldman. “If I can’t enjoy what I eat, your revolution doesn’t change anything,” is what I say.

Q.

A garden is a bed of questions. Can I sleep there? No. It’s cold and filled with scary creatures. Coyotes. Feral cats. Skunks and raccoons, and probably owls. So, is this wild place still a garden? Human-defined and human-dominated, isn’t that the definition of a garden?  Don’t we keep a garden (and not the other way around)? Can I say I ever kept a garden if all I did was put in seed or seedling, water (most nights), weed (more or less), but otherwise sat back for the ride? Can’t I just trust life to do the life thing as long as there’s rain, air, sunlight, time? Can I even call it my garden if I’m leaving in a few months, never to return? Yet didn’t I plant something of myself over the last decade: my hopes and dreams for my marriage, my child, my life? What took root in heart or soil? Doesn’t everything (or does anything) grow to its own design regardless of my picking and pruning, my choosing and acting, my taking in and leaving be?

R.

Two days before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I hobble outside despite my sciatica and forage for the last of the raspberries. I’m still tethered to the house by an antibiotic schedule, but I venture out long enough to snip raspberry canes bristling with thorns and arching over the tomato cages. Crimson raspberries are soft and purple and sweet, others tart, a bittersweet melting on my tongue like the prayers I will soon say to end one year and start another. And, what a year that was. My husband’s unemployment. My mother’s death. My blank pages. I should be contemplating my sins, but I’m too angry. And tired. Not so tired that I can’t pull back the stinging canes, shift leaves, pluck a juicy red gem, and another, and pop them in my mouth. I’m hungry for sweetness, no matter how sharp or fast-fading. All around me the garden prepares for winter. Shriveled leaves crown the green tomatoes, and the basil is brown and limp.  But there are still a few late ripening raspberries, a bittersweet gift to savor before journeying into the winter ahead.

S.

Strawberry season starts slow, but, soon enough, I can’t keep up. Strawberries and walnuts in spinach salad; strawberries tossed in brown sugar and frozen; strawberry shortcake with cream and vanilla; strawberries; strawberries; strawberries. For years, I had Rainiers, Cascades, Shukshans, and a hodgepodge of other varieties planted amid the root stump of an old rosemary bush. Crimson berries cascaded over grass, rose up amid common tansy and lavender, and sprawled out onto the sidewalk to the delight of neighborhood children. “They’re spreading like weeds,” my husband said, and I didn’t disagree. One day, the landlord visited from Florida. I returned home soon after and saw my strawberry patch was gone. Another weed was there: newly planted, deep-rooted grass. I couldn’t pull it out no matter how hard I tried.

            But the landlord didn’t go into the backyard where I’ve had fitful success growing peas and lettuce amid intricate webs of cedar roots. One year I planted strawberries. Many died; a few survived; enough spread. By July, the strawberries seedlings will be thick and sparkling with water from my bucket. By August, heart-shaped leaves will be laced with spider webs, and snails will hang from the pink fruit. When we move out will the new tenants notice that summer sweetness, that nourishing abundance? Every gift brings its own question to unwrap, I suppose.

T.

I never tire of tomatoes. The beefsteaks, early girls, and sweet cherries are for my husband, but green zebras, Cherokee purples, the less known varieties like Gardener’s Sweetheart, Bonnie’s Best, Afghan Purple, and Ruth’s Perfect are for me. Tomatoes burst out sweet and juicy as summer rounds towards Elul, the month of reflection before the High Holy Days, but the big harvests happen near Rosh Hashanah as summer yields to fall. Then tomatoes bloom into recipes. There’s shakshuka made with cumin, smoked paprika, red chili flakes, garbanzo beans, cauliflower, and caramelized onions.  There’s pot roast, and brisket slow-cooked in tomatoes and onions, and makeshift Jerusalem eggplant baked with lamb and pine nuts.

            Soon there are too many tomatoes. Soon the kitchen counters are covered with paper bags filled with hundreds of green tomatoes ripening alongside apples. Soon my husband complains, and my child rolls her eyes, and even I get weary of yet another salad. No matter. It’s a small inconvenience alongside the gazpacho served cold and sweet-tart with cucumbers and bell peppers on a hot August night.

U.

I have an ugly garden. I envy those meticulous gardeners at the neighborhood patch whose careful rows and weeded plots yield weeks and months of tall stems of red chard, thick bunches of emerald spinach, round and rippling globes of purple lettuce, plump and juicy black tomatoes, huge heads of broccoli or combs of brussels sprouts taller than I am and all of it surrounded by festoons of dahlias, foxglove, and azaleas. What planet did these gardens of bright and perfect plants come from? How did they land just two blocks from my backyard plot, where I fertilize with organic compost, water by hand with a metal bucket to conserve water, plant marigolds to repel aphids and raspberries to attract bees, and still the red peppers are stunted, the snap peas sun-shriveled, the tomatoes small or bulbous or horned, and the broccoli broken down to florets that never form a head. But it’s healthy and tastes good and all I have to do is go outside, stand for a moment in the sun, look about at cedars and lavender and primrose, and gather what I need. How perfect does it have to be to feed me well? Perhaps my ugly garden is growing forgiveness and not just food.

V.

Between roots and weeds and rocks it’s hard to grow anything in this small patch, yet here are sugar snap and snow peas shooting up from seeds that my daughter and I planted last spring. Such joy! Almost a parental satisfaction in a lupine potential brought from seed to shoot, and soon to flower and fruit. And these days, my daughter is walking, running, jumping, talking non-stop. She drew rectangles today and knew what they were. She did the same with triangles yesterday. She writes As, Ls, and Js. She goes to Folklife with us; she plants seeds, one at a time, slowly and in just the right spot. Is this ordinary for a four-year-old? It doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels like a victory, and we are growing and eating together the food our victory garden grows. 

W.

In Keven Henkes’s wonderful My Garden, a little girl helps her mother in the family plot amid beans and lettuce and the usual garden fare. But if I had a garden, the girl thinks, it would be where flowers never die but grow in polka dot or plaid patterns, the rabbits would be chocolate, the morning glory would shine like stars, the tomatoes would be as big as beach balls, and “good, unusual things” would be found, like “buttons and umbrellas and rusty old keys.” If I could, I’d grow chocolate-covered raspberries the size of strawberries, chickens roasted with plums and shallots, a crème brûlée bush, and a sponge cake hammock where I could read and rest after feasting. You work in the garden you have, I suppose, and you grow what wonder you can.

X.

Every garden has an empty spot. The x factor. The unknown. There’s a traditional Jewish agricultural practice of shmita, where fields are harvested for six years, but on the seventh friends, neighbors, strangers, and wildlife can take what they need, and the fields lay fallow so the land can rest, rejuvenate, and sprout anew with life. But, what life? Only what’s planted? Or what arrives on its own determined to take root? And who (or what) comes for the harvest? That’s the necessary mystery of a fecund garden.

Y.

The Jewish year, like a garden, flows from harvest to harvest. I have observed a garden’s harvest more years than I’ve observed the Sukkot, the harvest festival that caps the High Holy Days.  (I am not proud to say that.) For nearly a quarter of a century, I’ve had a garden at every apartment or house I’ve rented. I will not do this next year. My husband and I have bought a house, one where we don’t own the property and can’t plant anything without permission. What kind of home is that? What kind of year will I have there?

Z.

I refuse to plant zucchini. Who hasn’t spent the late summer and fall refusing yet another serving of zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, zucchini fritters, zucchini fries, and the neighborhood bistro’s “seasonal vegetables?” There are gardeners so desperate for some crop—any crop—that will survive drought, weeds, bugs, anything at all, really, and so they plant the one thing they know will succeed, and by God, it does. When the human race ends, the world won’t be taken over by cockroaches or rats. No. It will be taken over by zucchini, tasteless and endless as infinity. No. I will not be part of that. All things have an end, but I will not have mine made with grated zucchini, eggs, a teaspoon of milk, flour, salt, and pepper.

Adrienne Ross Scanlan is the author of Turning Homeward – Restoring Hope and Nature in the Urban Wild (Washington State Book Award Finalist 2017). Her creative nonfiction has appeared in City Creatures, the Prentice Hall Reader, Pilgrimage, and many other print or online journals. She is a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books and was the nonfiction editor for the Blue Lyra Review. She earned a Certificate in Editing from the University of Washington and is now a freelance developmental editor. You can reach her at: adrienne-ross-scanlan.com or adrienne@adrienne-ross-scanlan.com.

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Derek Annis is the author of Neighborhood of Gray Houses, which will be released by Lost Horse Press in March, 2020. Derek lives in Spokane, Washington, and holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University. Their poems have appeared in The Account, Colorado Review, Epiphany, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review Online, Spillway, Third Coast, and many other journals. To preorder Neighborhood of Gray Houses, visit https://derekannis.wordpress.com/  

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I came across a pair of arm weights in the back of a closet the other day: the kind you wrap around your wrists to create resistance while you are busy doing anything but exercising. I began to strap them on, then noticed the logo printed on each one: Vicodin ES—for Extra Strength. They must have been a gift from a “drug rep” at one of their fancy lunches, presented to doctors like me with pitches for newer, more expensive drugs, and gifts of branded clocks, pens, and other reminders of their great product. In this case, arm weights—made to link a narcotic with health.

Ironic, since the majority of patients I saw were trying their hardest to get off this type of medication. I worked at the clinic of last resort. We treated patients with chronic pain who were fired from their previous clinic for accelerating their opioids, or those with out-of-control mental illness whose primary doctor couldn’t handle them and whose psychiatry appointment was months in the future. We saw the addicted, the personality-disordered, and any patient deemed “too difficult” for a regular primary care office.  None of these patients would be made healthier by Vicodin.

Stella, in particular, fit all these categories. She had been enslaved by opioids for years, and we wrangled over them in long and contentious appointments. Our last appointment had been Christmas Eve: a frigid morning when I left my house preoccupied with presents unwrapped and dinner preparations not finished. I was not in a holiday spirit as I stomped through the snow from the parking lot, the wreaths and colored lights reminding me only that I wanted to finish on time and head back home. It was, thankfully, only a half-day clinic, with maybe a chance to leave early.

That hope vanished when I looked at the schedule. Every opening was filled, some with two names in the same slot, and Stella was the last patient. I was not leaving on time.

Picking up my stethoscope, I headed for the first patient’s door, hoping to keep the visits short. I tried to shave minutes from each appointment but, as the day progressed, I got further behind. Each person needed just a little more than there was time for: housing or financial issues complicating treatment, blood sugar elevated, or blood pressure-out-of control. By the time I got to Stella, it was almost quitting time.

I reviewed our history before entering the room. Our first encounter had been two years ago when a colleague asked me to present her a behavioral contract. Staff could no longer tolerate her disruptions. Generally arriving late, she berated the front desk attendants, insisting they told her the wrong time. She swore at the medical assistants, accusing them of making the blood pressure cuff too tight, challenged other patients with “What you staring at?” and yelled at the assistant who asked her the required questions before her doctor came in. The behavior had to stop.

I was medical director. It was my job to show her the politely written document detailing “What you can expect from us…” and “What we expect from you….,” and ask her to sign that she was willing to comply—or leave the clinic. I had done this before and, with the help of our clinical social worker, was generally successful in negotiating a resolution. Stella was different.

Her identified medical problem was chronic pain exacerbated by the opioids she had taken for years: a problem likely caused by the medical system that first prescribed them, and then kept on prescribing them. I’m sure they helped her pain at first, but continued use had caused her tolerance to rise. As her doctors kept prescribing them, she needed increasingly higher doses. She became dependent on them—her brain could no longer function normally without them. When she predictably began to accelerate her dose and ask for early refills, her previous clinic had fired her for violating the controlled substance agreement—another politely and formally written document stating under what conditions the clinic would continue to prescribe opioids. Having few other options, she ended up with us. 

Stella’s dose was massive — lethal, even, in someone not gradually habituated to it — and my colleague had been attempting an opioid taper. Stella responded with the expected anger. Her brain needed it. She had developed the compulsion to use, the preoccupation with getting the drug, having it, taking it. She had become addicted. Stopping suddenly would cause withdrawal so painful that an addicted person would do almost anything to get more drug. It’s not a simple matter of Just Say No. Stella had been through withdrawal before, and she didn’t want to go there again.  She exhibited the behavior of someone who has become addicted. Seeking refills became her motivator.

I was accustomed to the bluster and intimidation used to finagle an opioid refill. If a patient made the situation unpleasant enough, the doctor frequently gave in. A nurse friend recently told me her doctor “just gives them the medicine to get them out of the office.”

I expected the same bluster with Stella on that first visit. Adding to the difficulty was her remote history of heroin abuse — she should not have been prescribed opioids at all — and I anticipated more than the usual resistance. And yet, I wanted her to understand we were not being punitive. The taper would be a few milligrams at a time over a long period. Our concern was for her health and well-being.

  What I didn’t know was that Stella was a force to be reckoned with.

I heard her before I saw her at that long-ago visit. Her voice penetrated the exam room door, at a rate that was startling. Hardly a pause to catch her breath. I knocked and, hearing only continued rant, entered. The ranting woman was thin, but the skin of her arms hung loose, with deep stretch marks that betrayed how much weight she had lost. She wore tight clothes that seemed to demonstrate pride in her new thinness, while a tattoo on her arm proclaimed “Big Ella.” Her shoulders were tense, body rigid as she sat leaning toward our social worker, Al, who sat across from her. At my entrance she seemed to speak faster and louder.

Al attempted to greet me over her continued words, wanting to make introductions. Stella kept talking, continuing to look at him. Not so much as a glance came my direction.

“…And I don’t think you understand either, how I am being disrespected, the way they treat me,” she continued to Al, “they don’t let me come in when I get here, telling me I’m too late, and they make the cuff too tight, they stare at me, they talk disrespectful, they never tell me the right time to come, that medical assistant doesn’t like me. She keeps asking me questions and interrupting, they don’t respect me on the phone, they hang up, they won’t let me talk, my doctor doesn’t understand my pain, no one understands my pain, you don’t know what it’s like….”

“Stella, I’m…..” I tried to break in, to tell her why I was there. “Stella, I’d like to….” She kept talking. “Stella, can we talk about…” Continuing to announce, at top speed, the insults she had suffered, the faults of our clinic.

  I tried to talk over her; she got louder. I attempted to interrupt; she spoke even more rapidly. Finally, I blurted out, “Just be quiet and listen.” 

There was, blessedly, silence.

She turned to me and stared.  “Who are you?” she spit at me.  “What do you know?  You—” She looked me up and down. "You are just—old.”

“Old. Old…hag.” Getting louder. “You are an…old…hag!”  She yelled, then glared, silent.

I’m sure I had aged after nearly thirty years in practice, and I was used to being suspect as a woman, but being old was a new one. I looked at her with all the calm my face could muster, searching for words to respond. 

Then Al said, simply, “You sound angry.” 

Her face softened as she turned back to him. 

“Of course I’m angry,” she said sharply, and began again her litany of bad treatment the clinic had given her, and the lack of understanding of her doctor, who wouldn’t give her what she needed.

Al repeated each concern: You felt disrespected at the front desk. You didn’t like the way the medical assistant looked at you. The blood pressure cuff felt too tight...  With each repetition, her body relaxed and face calmed. She had been understood.

With tears she said, “Yes, you are the first person to listen. To care.” 

Then, she turned to me.

“You didn’t understand me,” she said. “No one understands me. No one will help my pain.” Her voice had become pleading.

Taking my cue from Al, I said “Perhaps I didn’t understand your point of view, Stella. It sounds like you have a lot of concerns. I would like to understand you. I would like us to get to know each other. But you really will have to treat the staff better.”

Her shoulders dropped. “I know,” she said … “I’m manic.” She looked directly into my eyes. “I can’t control myself, my anger. I try, but it just comes out.  Here, at home, everywhere.  I’m suffering.”

Then I realized—I had been trying to have a rational conversation with mania!  I had steeled myself for a difficult conversation, and had been so focused on it that I missed textbook manic symptoms: “rapid and relentless speech, pressure to keep talking even when others try to speak, racing thoughts which manifest a continuous stream of consciousness, a repetitive cycle of thoughts, with fragmented, incoherent thought.”

Identifying the correct diagnosis was the way to begin. It wasn’t so much a matter of self-control, as of illness.

Slowly, with much refocusing of her racing thoughts, we reviewed her medications, starting with those for mania, then identified the other medical conditions that needed to be addressed.

She had a past stomach stapling which had caused malnutrition and neuropathy, a painful nerve condition, from vitamin deficiency. For that pain she had been started on opioids, which had been continued for years, increasing over time. The neuropathy eventually caused loss of feeling in her feet, and she had developed chronic foot ulcers. There was esophagitis, back pain, and difficulties paying for her medications. We reviewed it all. It all needed treatment.

“Can we start over, Stella?” I asked at the end.  “Can we give each other another chance?”

She agreed.  We read and signed the behavior contract, and agreed on frequent appointments until she was stable. As I left, she shook my hand. I walked out of the room that first visit, two years ago now, recognizing again what patients so often show me. My message to her was not as important as her message to me. What I had to hear was more important than what I had to say.

I’ve tried to keep that in mind as we’ve worked together these past two years. With multiple medication adjustments, her bipolar disease came under control. She saw a specialist for her foot ulcers, started appropriate vitamin supplements for her malnutrition, and received medication for stomach ulcers. I addressed the chronic pain and neuropathy, continuing the focus on tapering opioids.

She made it difficult, coming to appointments prepared: too many things to discuss in the time allotted, filling up the space with words and problems and, when the time for the visit was used up, asking for her opioid refill. No time to address the necessary taper and put up with the resistance, the arguments, the blame of not caring about her and not understanding her pain.

Eventually, I began addressing the pain first, getting the difficult part out in the open, making it the center of conversation. Although she continued to tell me I just didn’t understand how much opioid she really needed, we had been successfully tapering without her pain increasing.

Until the day I entered the exam room to find her asleep, head lolling back against the wall.

“Stella?” I began, “Hello?”

“Unh?” she responded, opening her eyes.

“How are you?”

“Oh, my pain….” her eyes closed and head slumped forward.

“Stella, are you okay?”

“My pain is just so bad and….” It was difficult to make out the rest because her words were slurred, lips hardly moving and her eyes kept rolling shut.

I was beginning to be alarmed when she mumbled something about her methadone dose being high.  

Methadone? She was taking methadone?

“Stella,” I asked, “how long have you been going to that clinic?”

She became more alert when she realized her slip. “Well there is so much pain, and I had to do something about it, and you weren’t treating it, and I had to take care of the kids, and….” More sleep. 

Her controlled substance agreement specified that she would get no prescriptions for opioids from anywhere but our clinic. It also prohibited other behaviors I had been trying to ignore: chronic marijuana use, and missed appointments. By rights, I could dismiss her from the clinic, but we had come so far. She kept more appointments than she missed; her mania was controlled; her physical symptoms improved, and her chronic conditions stabilized, for now.

Most importantly, she had told me she trusted me, and she continued to return. Did I squander her trust by turning her out, following the “rules”? It was possible the tapering opioid dose had driven her to methadone. Was my greater responsibility to help her get clean—which, in her more lucid moments, she told me she wanted?  

I was willing to accept her anger, interspersed with cajoling for more medications and accusations of my not understanding. I wanted to show understanding for the hard work she had done to this point, and encouragement for her continued improvement. But, more than that, I wanted her to want it, to not take the easy way out, to work with me. And she kept me hooked by the occasional glimpses of her true desire to be free of the yoke of opioids.

“Stella,” I said, “you have to decide.  I will continue to work with you here, but you have to stop the methadone.  You cannot be on both drugs.”

She looked at me blearily.  “I want to come here.”

“Then you have to stop the methadone.”

She actually agreed, and I believed her when she discussed her continually decreased doses. On the day she told me she was done, she allowed me to call the methadone clinic to confirm.

She had freed herself of the other drug, but I just could not get her below a minimum dose of opioids. It was time for a new approach.

She steadfastly refused going into treatment, and we had seen methadone’s effects. That left buprenorphine. I was one of the few physicians in the Twin Cities with training to prescribe this medication, known by the brand name Suboxone. Although it is another opioid, Suboxone has a "ceiling effect"—it stops working at higher doses, giving it lower abuse potential and less overdose risk. There is none of methadone’s drugged drowsiness. The positive effects I saw on patients’ lives convinced me it was a valuable alternative. They described “feeling normal” for the first time in years while taking Suboxone. At our last visit before this Christmas Eve, I presented Stella with this option, hoping she too could feel normal, and not need to continue wanting higher doses.

While she was dubious of other options I had presented, she seemed particularly wary of Suboxone. She didn’t think it would help. She was "too far up in her pain” for it to be effective. We’d done this dance before: her telling me the negative effects of opioids and her need to be off of them, then resisting a taper or other options. 

  “What options do I have if it is not effective?” She asked. “What if it won't work and I have to suffer? Can I get something else for the pain if the Suboxone doesn’t work? I don’t want to go through it again.” A hint of panic in her voice.

I knew what she really meant—what she wasn’t allowed to say but finally did: to start Suboxone, she had to be off the opioids for two days, otherwise starting it would send her into full-blown withdrawal. She had to start the withdrawal process, have the first hint of shakes and nausea, before Suboxone could help her.

“I don’t want to go through it again,” she repeated.

I didn’t want her to suffer. I needed her to hear me when I said, “This is not to punish you or cause you more pain. I think you will feel better. You can feel better.” I don’t know what she heard, but I suspect her anxiety spoke louder than anything I could say. 

“I know this will work,” I said, then knew I couldn’t guarantee it. I know it will work.  Easy for me to say. It’s what the literature says, and I had watched many patients change from fear of withdrawal and the self-humiliation of begging for pills to functional people, who felt good. And, yet, I wouldn’t be there if the joint pain and shakes and sweats began. I would be comfortable in my office or in my bed while she vomited. 

I wanted to make her hear my confidence that she would be okay; I wanted her to believe it as much as I did. I wanted to convince her of my good intent and ability to keep her from suffering. Then I wondered if I was again talking when I should be listening, paying more attention to what I had to say than what I had to hear.

She was aware I would not prescribe opioids again. She could have chosen to try the Suboxone, or to go elsewhere. Or have agreed to take this option and still go elsewhere. Or have refused, and found the opioids so readily available on the street. She had reluctantly agreed to try the Suboxone.

Now she was my last patient on a very busy Christmas Eve, when all I wanted was to go home, and didn’t feel like fighting. Shaking myself out of the past, I focused on the exam room door in front of me, wondering what lay on the other side. 

Stella did not look happy as I entered, arms crossed and a scowl on her face. 

“Uh-oh,” I said with a smile that I hoped was a little pleading for patience. “You look upset.” 

She had run out of Suboxone. Four days earlier she came to the office for her refill, our time to check how the Suboxone was working. When she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—provide a urine sample, or give blood to check for other controlled substances, she left without seeing me. Another blatant violation of the substance use agreement.

“I’ve been struggling,” she began, angry. “I just feel sick. And my pain…. You just don’t understand my pain. It got so bad, I had to take something. You tricked me into taking Suboxone. You didn’t tell me I would have to give urine and come in so much.” 

Not true, I knew, but arguing wouldn’t accomplish anything.  I looked at her in silence, waiting.

“The Suboxone didn’t help. You wouldn’t prescribe it again and I ran out. My pain came back. I was in so much pain. My family saw it, they saw how much I was suffering, they said I shouldn’t have to be like that.  My aunt told me I needed something. She gave me one of her Percocets…“

She looked down at the floor, and the next look I saw was pleading.  “I took it, because I didn’t want to be sick, I didn’t want to be in pain. I ran out of Suboxone and you wouldn’t give me more.” She looked up at me accusingly.

This was when I was supposed to say, “You violated the opioid use agreement. You used a non-prescribed drug. We can’t continue your treatment here.” Once again, I had to decide to follow the “rules” or offer support to get her through the hurdles of transition.

“I can’t do it,” she pleaded. “It doesn’t work. The pain… I had to start methadone last time when I couldn’t take Suboxone. I kept getting sick and had to take more Percocet.”

This was new information for me. I considered options for a long moment. Then, “What would it look like to succeed?” I asked. 

She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure, she said—she had never succeeded before. Finally, “I would be off of the medications,” she offered looking up from lidded eyes.

“How would you do that?” I asked.

“I would take the Suboxone.”

“How would you be able to do that?”

“I would come in for the appointments and not take any other medications.”

There was more.  She laid out a hopeful future of success, and I repeated each statement encouragingly.

“You can do it,” I told her, making up my mind. “You can succeed this time. You will do it—we will do it, together.”

The “we” meant understanding failure as a part of success, allowing for grace and forgiveness as part of treatment rather than adherence to strict rules of conduct. It meant truly working together as a team. 

I wondered if I wanted it more than she did—whether I was requesting more effort than she would be able to sustain. I sat in silence, not knowing where we would go next. 

Then I wrote the Suboxone prescription and offered it to her.

She peered up at me from under lowered eyelids, tears in her eyes, then took the prescription.  “Thank you,” she said.  “Thank you.”

As we stood, we met in a hug. I held her tight, her smell of old sweat and hair gel filling my nostrils. Letting go, I wished her a Merry Christmas. She wished me the same. 

When I finally left the office, it didn’t matter that I was late. I drove into the snow-filled dusk aware that I had been given my first Christmas gift. I knew the journey wasn’t over. We hadn’t yet arrived. But for that day, the one step felt like a Christmas miracle.

The Vicodin-imprinted weights hung heavily as I walked toward the trash. No amount of benefit was worth their weight.

Sandra Hager Eliason is a retired Family Practice physician who has turned to full time writing. She has published creative nonfiction pieces in Minnesota Medicine magazine, where she was the winner of its 2016 writing contest for her essay The Vacation. She was published in Brevity blog, September 26, 2019 https://brevity.wordpress.com/?s=Sandra+Eliason. As well as writing stories about medicine, Dr. Eliason is currently working on a memoir about her time as a family practice doctor. She lives with her husband in New Brighton, Minnesota.

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We had just cleared the ticket booth when my nine-year-old son, John, spotted his father in the natural history museum’s Great Hall. Everywhere stroller-hoisting dads, diaper-bag laden moms and children of all ages stormed the stages filled with dancers and puppeteers and clustered around tables with educational materials.

“There’s Dad,” John yelled over the cries of babies, fluting panpipes and beating drums.

My twelve-year old daughter, Sara, her ten-year old friend, Daphne, and I followed John, as he threaded his way through volunteers handing out maps and children skipping and dancing like they were high on sugar. Sara and John had been fired up for weeks. This was their first members’ night—a rare opportunity, according to the brochure we’d received in the mail, to explore the museum’s off-limit back halls and behind-the-scenes storerooms. To sweeten the deal, Daphne, their mutual school friend, had been invited to join us at the last minute.

Josh said he would be “by the elephants,” and John guided us to where his father was waiting by a pair of life-sized stuffed African elephants displayed on an elevated platform.

“We brought Daphne,” John announced as soon as we had all gathered together. 

Josh and I exchanged glances.

“Hello there, Daphne.” Josh smiled at her.

Daphne was speechless as she gazed into the vast space where cheerful docents circulated with carts packed with animal bones and turtle shells

“This is the first time she’s been to a museum,” Sara explained.

Daphne, in well-worn corduroys and flannel shirt and with a dark tangle of uncombed hair tumbling down her back, gave off the untidy air of a child who spent her time playing outdoors. Still, under the plain clothes and tousled hair, she was a willowy swan of a fourth grader, “future model material” a catty mother at school had called her, and as she took in the Mardi Gras atmosphere, I couldn’t tell whether she was disappointed or overwhelmed.

“Well, you picked a good evening to try one out,” Josh said as he bent down to take John’s hand.

“What’s over there?” Daphne pointed to a stage wedged between two Ionic columns where dancers costumed as human-sized lizards and exotic birds swayed and leaped.

  “Dancers, I think,” he said.

“I want to see them,” she said, grabbing Sara and John’s hands and plunging back into the crowd.

The good stuff was supposed to be upstairs, so after we watched the dancers, we headed in the direction of the center staircase, pausing at a display table where a naturalist held up spoons and drinking straws to show how the shape of a bird’s beak corresponded to its food. At an adjacent table, a tiny boy read aloud from a pamphlet about bears to the earnest accompaniment of his mom’s “good jobs.”

“Who wants to play a game?” the naturalist at the bird table asked after he’d cleared away the tweezers and nutcrackers.

Daphne brightened and pushed her way to the front of the gathering. When she was belly up to the table, she grabbed three illustrated game boards. Then she gestured to Sara and John to join her. Perhaps she expected something that required drawing or acting or jumping up and down, but after she scanned the accompanying cards’ lines of text that she couldn’t read, she tossed them aside. She disappeared into the multitudes, and when I caught sight of her, she was half way up the ornate iron staircase. The four of us followed after.

+

Until that evening with Daphne at the Field Museum, “living in your experience” was just another impenetrable expression my children’s teachers threw out at parent-teacher conferences. John and Sara attended a Waldorf school where the teachers spoke in riddles. “Stopped up will” was why Sara struggled to play the recorder, her teacher claimed, a state of affairs easily remedied by feeding her green algae. A friend’s child’s speech disorder, allegedly the consequence of a “leaky gut,” could be put to right by sprinkling salt and sugar on strategic points of his tongue. Then there was the faculty’s practice of seating the children according to “personality type,” a notion based on the ancient four humors. The teachers believed that placing an individual of one personality type next to someone of the “opposite temperament” brought out the best in both of them. Bad luck for my sweet, “sanguine” son, John, whose desk couldn’t be changed even after his “choleric” seat-mate pinched him hard enough to make him bleed.

The school attracted the offspring of healers, crystal readers, and reiki masters as well as artisans like doll makers, wood carvers, illustrators, and shop owners who peddled handmade wares. One family raised bees in a hive in their apartment attic, a fact I learned after Sara was stung at breakfast following a sleepover.

Not everyone made their living in unconventional trades. Josh, for example, worked in technology, and I was a learning specialist at a rival alternative school. But even among my fellow parents who were teachers, architects and social workers, many adhered to the school’s advice like dressing their children in “natural fibers” or ensuring their kids didn’t watch TV or agreeing to postpone formal reading instruction until after the third grade. Still, if you scratched below the surface, what most of us shared, including me, was that we were desperately seeking a refuge.

Sara thrived at her unusual school, and I was grateful. We’d tried other schools, including the one where I worked, and it broke my heart when Sara stopped talking there after she failed again and again at what seemed to her impossible tasks. At Waldorf, she could do what was required, and Josh and I tried to respond in kind. Our only television, a black and white set, languished in the basement, to be turned on only in case of national disaster or a tornado warning.

Still, I had an analytical side, and much of what the Waldorf teachers preached sounded like horoscope predictions. My children’s teachers did not welcome being questioned, so when either Josh or I inquired about what exactly was “stopped up” about Sara’s “will,” they were irked. Suspending our critical faculties felt like a dereliction of parental duty, and we often wondered if we needed our heads examined for sending our kids to a place where we were urged to just have faith.

Yet I loved the way the curriculum nourished my children’s imagination. Where else would they parade down a city street singing and carrying homemade lanterns on the darkest day of the year? Or paint with those radiant German watercolors or model brightly colored animals from honey-scented beeswax? Where else would they burst into verse when I asked: what did you learn in school today?

Most of all, I was blown away when both John and Sara learned dozens of Grimm’s fairy tales by heart. When it came to the oral tradition, the teachers’ skill rivaled the blind bards in Homer’s time. They had a way of telling a story with such verbal beauty their words entered my children’s bodies like food for the imagination. One afternoon, when Daphne and a few other friends from school were playing at our house, I overheard the group of them spontaneously acting out such a moving, un-Disney-fied version of “The Seven Ravens” that, from the kitchen, I felt the smart of every stinging nettle the ravens’ sister stitched into her brothers’ magic shirts.

If the kids at Waldorf excelled at making stories come to life, the teachers attributed it to their ability to “live in their experience,” a mysterious capability the school cultivated, akin to a heightened form of empathy or perhaps Stanislavski’s method acting, where a child experiences the character’s feelings with such immediacy that it could be happening to herself. It was why the teachers rarely read books aloud, particularly picture books, preferring to tell the stories orally so the way the kids visualized the story wasn’t influenced by the illustrations. On the surface, “living in your experience” was as easy to dismiss as the teacher’s other mushy conundrums like “stopped up will” or sanguine personality types. That is until I recalled how listening to Sara, John and Daphne recreate The Seven Ravens moved me to tears.

+

The only reason I agreed to take Daphne to the Field Museum was because the afternoon carpool fell to me.

When I started carpooling with Daphne’s family, a friend warned me: “Don’t ever let Sara or John sleep overnight there.” Perhaps unfairly, I never did. Rumors intimated Daphne’s dad had a drinking problem, but until Daphne asked to come with us to the natural history museum, he never gave me a moment’s pause. True, he was a taciturn character who’d concreted over his back yard to make room for his burgeoning collection of jalopies, but I appreciated how promptly he picked up the kids, and how he made sure they were seat belted in.

Still, when I compared Daphne’s family’s commitment to the school’s philosophy with mine, we were dilettantes who showed up for the storytelling, whereas they were devotees who signed on for a whole way of life. In addition to giving up TV and delaying formal reading instruction, Daphne’s family consumed unpasteurized milk from a special farm, worshipped at a school-affiliated church, and were looked after by the school doctor, whose diagnoses sounded like the teachers’ riddles.

Once at a school meeting, Daphne’s dad asked me if I was worried about the school moving into the building of an abandoned tuberculosis sanitarium. At the time, classes were held in a cramped rental on the top floor of a Catholic School, and the prospect of taking over a larger building with ample playgrounds didn’t concern me at all. But where I saw breathing room, Daphne’s father saw ghosts. Even if the former TB sanitarium was completely renovated, he leaned over and told me, those incarnating consumptive souls would never leave the premises, and wasn’t I concerned about the effect on the kids? When it came to befriending Daphne’s family, I imagined it was like having Amish neighbors. There was only so far you could go.

But what could I do? All the way home from school, my two kids talked up members’ night as if it were a mash up of Halloween and an all-night birthday party. Daphne begged, she whined, she cajoled, so by the time we hit Fullerton Avenue’s stop-and-go Friday traffic, I would have agreed to take her anywhere.

By the time I pulled up to Daphne’s house, and her father emerged from under the hood of a station wagon parked out front, my heart was racing. He was a tall, bearded man with dark framed glasses whose austerity brought to mind an Old Testament prophet or a hero in an Ingmar Bergman film.

“I’ll be right back,” Daphne called after she bounded out of the back seat.

It was late May. The car windows were open. I made out the cadence of Daphne’s eager voice, her hopeful expression, followed by her father’s more adamant tone and then he was standing by the driver’s side window.

“So something’s going on tonight at the Field Museum?” he said, drawing out the vowels in field museum in a way that made me uneasy.

“Members’ night,” I stammered, self-righteousness bubbling up. After all, what I was proposing was an educational outing, not a trip to a bar. “The museum stays open late and has special activities. I told Daphne she was welcome to come if it was ok with you.”

Clearly it wasn’t, and in a way, I understood. When it came to natural history, the school was all for young children experiencing nature in an idyllic, Rousseauian sense: romping in the park with daisies entwined in their hair, constructing dolls from acorns and twigs, battling imaginary enemies with wooden daggers and pine cones. But woe to any child’s developing imagination, the school maintained, if you added a little realism to her natural history. Even photographs from the National Geographic were deemed too realistic for the below-fifth-grade set.

Daphne tugged on her dad’s shirtsleeve. The two of them moved a little way up the sidewalk.

She put her hands on her hips and stared him down. He had a forbidding demeanor, but I’d seen him give in to her demands before. “I’m going and you can’t stop me.”

He returned to the car.

“What time will you be getting back?” His lips were drawn into a line of resignation, furious at me, I supposed, for putting him in a position where all he could say was yes.

“Oh, before ten, I’m sure. I can come back and pick her up at 6.”

He gave Daphne a quick nod, turned, and disappeared into the house.

+

We left behind the Greek temple of the first floor and emerged into a rabbit warren of hallways. Daphne revived as she and my children joined the throngs streaming through the claustrophobic back halls into laboratories and storerooms. Gone were the Ionic columns. The soaring arches, the four marble muses gave way to a Darwinian circus of taxidermied birds in specimen cases. Frog skeletons. Shellacked Scarab bugs packed like colored lifesavers under glass as the customary museum code of etiquette was turned on its head. Instead of don’t touch, it was: Step right up. Touch me. Feel me. Wear me. A boy loped by holding a pair of deer antlers pressed to either side of his head.

By the time Josh and I caught up with the three of kids in a laboratory at the end of a corridor, a suffocating odor I recalled from high school biology burned my nostrils.

“This giant octopus is one hundred years old,” a curator called, as we filed past the cylinder-shaped tanks filled with sea creatures pickled in formaldehyde displayed along benches.

“Is it dead?” Daphne asked, when she came face to face with the colossal octopus.

“It’s not alive,” the curator answered. “It’s preserved, though, in chemicals. That’s why its skin and eyes haven’t decayed.”  

As I watched the kids’ excited faces, I felt redeemed. Maybe their teachers would have objected to all the facts and statistics the naturalists were feeding them, but they would have approved of the evening’s spirit.

The five of us had just rounded a bend in the hallway when a wall-to-wall crowd blocked our way.

“What’s going on?” Daphne strained to peer over a group of boys who pumped their fists and cheered like fans at a sporting event.

“I’ll be right back,” John called as he shimmied his way through the crowd.

He returned in less than a minute, his eyes wide.

“Hey guys,” he said, waving for us to follow, “you won’t believe this.”

+

If I took the school’s position on delaying reading personally, it was because I was a learning specialist, and I’d seen what could happen if you put off teaching reading for too long.

The truth was most kids at John and Sara’s school did learn to read even without much instruction. Take Daphne’s older brother, who in 4th grade picked up a children’s novel and spontaneously began to read it for the first time. But for many others, like Daphne herself, this graceful slide into literacy never seemed to arrive no matter how many times she transformed herself into the sister of the seven ravens.

What puzzled me was why my children’s school was so certain intellectual development and imagination building were dichotomies. I mean: couldn’t a child develop two different capacities simultaneously without putting either one at risk? As far as I could see, actively teaching my kids to read hadn’t hampered their imaginations. The way I saw it, teaching them how to read at home had offered them the best of both worlds: literacy and the school’s story telling.

Once I got called out at a teacher/parent conference for teaching Sara how to read in the second grade.

“Who do think you are?” My daughter’s teacher’s face flushed and livid. “Do you think you have some special knowledge I don’t have?”

I thought his anger was over the top. How dare he tell me how to raise my kids? Still I could have taught them how to read and not mentioned it to anyone at school. I didn’t need to flaunt my views. But at the time, I was on a crusade, and I was certain I was right.

+

A metal table was set up in an alcove, and as I moved in closer, I felt as disoriented as if the seven ravens had sprung to life. My God, what was going on?

The corpse of a real live bear lay on its back, the creature so enormous, its furry limbs flopped off the sides of the table.

Two scalpel-wielding naturalists skinned away the bear’s coat, unzipping the wooly covering as if it were a piece of duct tape, until an intricate pattern of blood red muscles came into view.

After the bear’s internal organs were revealed, several horrified families filed out, but it never occurred to me not let my kids watch. Hadn’t we come to learn about nature? And here was a scene as mesmerizing as staring into the heart of fire.

The two naturalists conducting the dissection didn’t mind how close the children got to the bear, and as they cut in deeper, excavating the bear’s heart and stomach, a group of boys cheered and whooped. By now, my children had inched their way up front, and Daphne reached out and stroked the creature’s claws and the remains of its thick fur.

I held back with the other adults, willing to watch but reluctant to move any nearer. I admired the naturalists’ scientific distance, how they reminded us the bear hadn’t been sacrificed for our viewing pleasure. It had been roadkill scooped up from a western highway and flown to the museum to serve a final educational purpose.

“Pop out the eyeball!” a boy who was standing next to the bear’s head sang out.

Pretty soon, all the boys took up the chant, intoning the request like a mantra. At first, the naturalists tried to ignore them, but then the man working closest to the bear’s face got a devilish look, and in a frenzy of slashing, one brown globe was liberated from its moorings. 

+

We left after the eye popping, and as I stepped off the center staircase, I felt as though I’d returned to Earth. There was a buzz in the room, and a woman, at a nearby table, read aloud about the hibernation habits of bears, making me wonder if bears were supposed to be the theme of the night. As the kids passed the displays, they asked if we could stop for “just a minute more.”

“Hey, Mom,” Sara directed my attention to a picture of a koala bear. “Listen to this. Did you know koala bears are related to raccoons?”

While Sara and I settled down to read, Daphne alternated between flipping through the pamphlets, “accidentally” brushing against other people’s chairs, and wandering over to check out what John and Josh were doing. She was bored, and I attributed her wound-up behavior to the fact she couldn’t read. I vowed to leave soon. All I know is I lost track of the time for no more than five minutes when John tapped me on the shoulder. 

“Mom, look at Daphne!” he said, pointing in the direction of the stairs.

Daphne had reared up, her arms and hands curved into a perfect likeness of paws, her murderous claws calling to mind the ones she stroked on the dissecting table. There was nothing mystical about what was happening. I wasn’t hallucinating. The legs I saw were a young girl’s legs, and the face I witnessed was a child’s, but Daphne’s wild expression, her blazing eyes and the way she moved made her appear so lifelike she seemed beyond pretending. 

As she lumbered forward, her legs fleshed out into bear limbs and her delicate features melted into a snout and rapacious wide-open eyes. Daphne was a predator. The tables, the fact sheets, those literate children and their doting parents were her prey. She would annihilate them, and as she charged, a growl crescendoed into an echoing howl from deep inside her diaphragm.

“Grab her,” John yelled, tugging on Sara’s sweater. “She is going to wreck everything.”

John and Sara reached her before she upended the first table and led her back to where I was sitting. Strangely, no one in the hall appeared to have noticed what had happened. Not even Josh, who, at the moment Daphne changed her shape, was rummaging in his briefcase for his keys. True, Daphne’s transformation was over in a minute, and the noise in the hall could have drowned out her growls. Yet when I gathered up Daphne in my arms to comfort her, her heart beat wildly through the fabric of her shirt.

We left the museum soon after, and if she ever told her father about the dissection, he never called me out for letting her watch. It was late when we dropped her off, and, most likely, she went straight to bed.

Not long afterwards, John and Sara changed schools, but not before Daphne’s family asked us to dinner. The invitation surprised me. At one point, right before we tucked into the vegetarian lasagna, Daphne’s father asked everyone to hold hands. Then he closed his eyes and broke into a new age-ish benediction, concluding with: I hope everyone around this table can stay together forever.

After we had finished eating, Daphne’s dad and I were alone in the living room, waiting for Daphne’s mom and Josh to join us, when he made a surprising announcement.

I was right about the school and reading, he began. Then he paused, his nostrils flaring like on the day Daphne asked to go the museum.

As far as he was concerned, he continued, the school had betrayed him, and Daphne was going to a different school in the fall.

I didn’t know how to respond, so I just said something about everything probably working out.

The following year, my kids lost track of Daphne, but I never forgot that evening in the museum. For the longest time, I’d been certain Daphne had turned into a bear from a position of inferiority, but after a while, I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps it wasn’t shame that motivated her to re-imagine herself, but a power she’d gained through listening to her teacher’s stories. Looking back, I wished I’d had the courage to tell her father about how she’d changed herself into a bear if only as a way to reassure him. Perhaps her reading is a little rusty, I might have said, but if you’d seen how glorious she was. How after she’d watched a real live bear stripped clean, she’d transformed that knowledge and brought it to flesh, rearing up, primal and pure, as her skin melted into fur and sinew. She was no longer Daphne then. She was one with that creature, suffused with more understanding and empathy than any book could teach her.

Marilyn Martin’s work has appeared in Catamaran, Third Coast, Gulf Coast, Lake Effect and elsewhere. She is the author of a nonfiction book about nonverbal learning disabilities, and her work has been twice cited as notables in Best American Essays. Learn more at: www.marilynmartin.me

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