What the Dirt Knows

The memories persist, forty and more years counting. My father, a faithful mushroomer. The season had come, and he grabbed a stack of brown paper grocery sacks to head for the woods. North of town in the trees surrounding the property of some family friends he would hunt. It can’t have been rough terrain as his prosthetic leg wouldn’t have allowed it, but I remember being deep in the cool damp of an enchanted Illinois timber, the perfect clime for morel spores to float from the magic that occurs near the carcasses of dead elm, ash and poplar trees.

            Wrapped in the shade of a green canopy we would venture in where the sun splashed through in puddles, the land rising and falling in gentle waves of rich black dirt. Always, in my memory, a clearing and the distant babble of water over stone. My father looming and the dawning realization that we were surrounded by a sea of morels so dense that to walk was to risk trampling them.  Progress could only come by plucking their hollow stems gently from the forest floor. Our brown bags heavy with the weight of so many, the bounty a kind of rainbow’s end.

            Once home it was the cleaning and dredging through flour. Hot oil in a cast iron skillet, the pop and sizzle of mushroom meat, crisping and browning to palate’s delight.

            Then ketchup, forgive the sacrilege, but it’s there, in memory – a memory so powerful that in a childhood full of sadness and sorrow it persists like a radiant warmth.

***

            This time, a new memory. My home a speck of real estate in the grander universe. Simple, a little tired and worn, but mine. A man I love. Different than my father. Different than the ones before. Writing a new history, again. Hoping this time to get it right. The woods not as enchanted: steep ravines, fallen timbers, a debris-clogged creek with soaked muddy banks. An exceptionally wet spring brought on a blanket of vegetation like a sheet over the floor of the woods.  He on one rise, me on the other, walking stick in hand, parting plants to peer beneath their leaves in search of the elusive morel. When suddenly, there one was. I squealed in delight. Held it up for him to see, feeling somehow blessed and chosen. Soon, more became visible and I added them to my plastic grocery sack feeling the weight like a gift. I held them aloft, delighted. He smiled, held up his bag, fuller yet than mine. Like stepping into a mystery we hunted and gathered, more energized with each discovery.

            Later, the man gone home and a son now here. I’m ready to cook them up. Though twenty-five and an avid outdoorsman, the son has never tasted a morel. Never known the fuss. “Just you wait,” I tell him.

            He lifts one, still too hot, from the paper towel. Nibbles. “Hot, hot.” Yes, but good. He smiles. “You need ketchup,” I say. This still sounds like a sacrilege to me, but I know what I know.

            He dips, bites. His face transforms. “That’s got to be one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.”

I smile, rewarded. Keep cooking.

            When I have a sufficient plateful, it’s my turn. Will the build up and anticipation outweigh the experience? Will I remember? Will I know that’s it? I hesitate, the image of my young father a few paces ahead of me, leading the way.

            Then bite. From outside of me sinks in a wonder. What begins on my tongue soaks into my flesh all the way back forty or more years into a recess so deep and locked away that it’s a secret room I’ve forgotten. It’s there again. That loamy fungus that doesn’t taste like anything else except what it is, somehow borne of earth and memory, mystery and sparkling black dirt.

            The sinking-in gave way to a rising swell and within me crested a wave of emotion I could not suppress. It crashed up through my chest, riding a tide of memory and lament that broke through my eyes and fell, spent, down my cheeks. I could not fathom from where that came, only that it was here and I was suddenly between two me’s: the child-me, small and frail, who does not yet know that she is not loved and that life will hurt in ways that will destroy but never kill her, and the now-me, bullet-scarred and worn survivor.

            My man-son witnessed and knew it was a sacred moment, wrapping his arms around me, shoring me up with his strength.

            I do not know why, only what was. Rather than try and make sense of it, I am grateful for the visitation, for the realization that whatever sorrow it delivered was connected to something, however brief, that was happy. Brief, not fleeting. It lay dormant more than forty years and when it came calling again I recognized it like an old agony, a lost lover, the ghost of a presence whose existence I’d long ago surrendered to being a figment of my imagination. But there it was again, as real and as alive as the air, making a believer out of even me.

“Work in the perfect confidence that: 1) it is going to be harder work than you have ever done; 2) it will not yield its secrets easily; 3) it will drive you a bit crazy until it surprises you and even then the surprise will have other complications that will drive you a little more nuts; 4) it will open with perfect simplicity like a flower in sunlight in the first fresh morning of Spring, and then close on you like an iron door manned by six guards of the inquisition–and, 5) all of this being true, you cannot truly hurt it. You can only make it necessary to do it again, get into its little dark grottoes and work it, and let the opening and closing and the secrets and the falterings take place knowing that you cannot hurt it. You absolutely cannot ruin it. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. You cannot permanently harm it. It is not made of glass, but of LANGUAGE, that sweet and glorious possession, that is there like a guiding spirit, wanting to give you everything. Just be worthy of it and don’t expect it to dance on command. It needs to be courted, gently cajoled and caressed. Trust the beauty of it, and don’t over worry it. It WANTS to yield its treasure. You only have to be patient, and quietly stubborn.” ~Richard Bausch

A year ago my therapist called me a survivor and it made me angry. The very word smacked of a solicitation for pity. I didn’t want to be a survivor, nor did I believe my circumstances were necessarily reflected in the word. What fit better? I don’t know: outliver, extant, remainer, alive. To me, survivor is more befitting a person who, for whatever reason: horrible accident, dreaded disease, inexplicable act of God, stared at death’s door and maybe even rapped their knuckles on it before walking away, back into the light. Mine hasn’t been such. If I’ve survived anything it’s the mere act of living. If I have faced any adversity it has either come to me on waves of my own stupidity or the selfish, stupid acts of others. If I have survived anything, it has been ambivalence. That I repeatedly have found myself in situations where I am not wanted, am in the way, am only good for the muscles in my back, is not an admission of self-pity. I promise. It’s simple fact. Of course like so many of us, I am sometimes given to bouts of self-pity, but recognizing that my past is fraught with schemes, paths, designs, traps, call them what you want, which are designed to render me powerless, has been elemental in energizing the forging of a new path and nothing akin to pity.

My therapist’s label made me angry, and that anger is what I needed. Fuel. Tinder. A bellows stoking the flame..

“I don’t want to be a survivor,” I told her. “I simply want to live well, but to this point that has been impossible.”

She said, “Like it or not, it is who you are.”

For the last year I have been working my way into that skin. Trying to find how it might fit, how it might work to my good or, dare I say, the good of others. What has come from it is this book, an exploration of what brought me here, forty-eight years after my birth, to this unlikely place. And that made me angry too. Still. So much of it isn’t fair. But life’s not fair, princess.

What I find most intriguing in my reflection is that I can’t give up. I have tried, but then an awful hope takes hold, grabs me by the collar and yanks me back to my feet. I want to surrender to cynicism, to fatalism, to nihilism, to that blessed chasm of ambivalence that will allow me to rid myself of the burden of care once and for all.

It never happens.

And sometimes I think good doesn’t happen either, but that’s where this whole survivor thing kicks in. Try as I may, I can’t surrender. Whatever I’m hoping for has yet to manifest. I don’t even know what it is that I’m hoping for except proof that all of the hard stuff has been for a reason, a good one at that.

I’ve encountered good along the way. I count my blessings. I take nothing for granted, not the heat from my furnace, the canned goods in my pantry or the backup toilet paper in the bathroom. I know the fragile gift of life and am grateful each day for the health and safety of my four children. I feel infinitely blessed to have, after twenty years of longing, found a home in the country that provides incomparable solace. Each day affords new opportunity to express to God my litany of thanks.

But that doesn’t mean I have a clue what God is doing. Something still isn’t right and maybe that’s just another way of saying that I’m still alive. As long as I live and breath and have my being there will be difficulty, self-inflicted or otherwise.

The Angry Chick’s Guide to Survival is not advice. It’s my story, what’s written of it so far. It made me angry to live it; I got angry writing it; I am angry still. But I have changed. I am not who I was, and know I can never go back. My anger has changed with me. It evolved out of victimization into indignance and finally ushered me here, to a place of steeled resolve.

Life is not a given, a constant. With it comes no guarantee. I am making peace with the word survivor. Instead of saying I am forty-eight years old I say that I have survived for forty-eight years. And anger has become the most positive force I know. Fuel. Tinder. A bellows stoking the flame.

~ A destructive raccoon threatens to dismantle a house and a marriage; a desperate woman sows a seed of impossible hope; a mute girl wrestles with vocal demons, and a wife whose husband outweighs her by 300 pounds struggles under the weight of an even heavier burden. In Cyn Kitchen’s stories, life isn’t easy or pretty. Her characters are by turns frightened, ugly, violent and insane, but they also possess an equal capacity for light. Funny, dark and raw, TEN TONGUES is anything but hopeless because Kitchen believes the best gift to give her characters is the space they need simply to be who they are.