The Wind in the Willows

TW: themes of suicide and pregnancy loss

The way to my house

Is always the same but I

Who live there am not:

A matter beyond control

Which of me there or missing

-excerpt from Complaints and Celebrations, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan Riley

There is only one leaf hanging in the maple tree outside my house when the police show up. My mother lifts the blinds at the window, breathes fog onto the glass.

“What’s going on out there?” she asks.

“It’s probably Alan next door,” I tell her as I upend the shoe bin in search of the panda stuffed animal my three-year-old can’t sleep without. “He’s ninety-five and has health issues.”

I don’t say what I’m really thinking: that something has gone horribly wrong. I feel it in the cold of the day, a finger skimmed across a knife’s edge, the scrape of winter that has arrived too early, trees naked and still alive to know their shame. Instead I keep everything on my skin as if I’m wearing a rain shell, watch the facts pearl on the surface, slick them off with shaking hands.

A wail cuts through the air between us, and I can’t tell if it’s my children or a quickly approaching siren, or some unique hybrid meant to exacerbate the crescent migraine that chronically forms above my right eye.

“That’s a lot of cops,” my mother says as she returns her attention to the window. The words hang as both statement and question, another pearled fact I flick off from just above the beat of my heart.

I’m late for my son’s school conference, my mother here to watch the kids while I meet with his teacher. If I stop, let anything absorb past my skin, I won’t go, so instead I hang everything in that tree – the giant maple that stands between Alan’s house and mine – the one that peppers our yards with fat, molded leaves. Neither of us rake them; he too old, me too busy with young kids.

I find the panda behind the couch, kiss the top of my daughter’s head, dash out the door, giving my mother a hurried thanks.

Outside: ten cops, eleven.

That’s a lot of cops. The thought returns and drops into me like a stone. I pick it up quickly, hurl it back outside of myself. I zip up my rain shell, nail everything to the hanging leaf of our shared tree and pray to Jesus the wind doesn’t blow me down before the day gives out.

I have my family to take care of.

---

Speak as if silence

Is a thing we ought to prize

And words are holy

-excerpt from Complaints and Celebrations, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan Riley

Alan and I meet for the first time in 2020, the same week Covid arrives to our corner of the world. Out at the mailboxes we linger, hungry for human connection – both of us quarantined long before the world catches up – him bending forward over his walker, me bending backward from the weight of a very pregnant belly. It’s our shared maple that pulls us together, towering above us – half on his land, half on mine.

Alan looks up at the tree reverently. “She’s really something, huh?”

“Yes, although these leaves,” I gesture toward the mess of them at our feet, and then toward the blackened circle of dead grass in my yard. “I was worried you thought a witch moved into the house next door.”

In the fall I had ambitiously raked some leaves into a neat pile, but had to run back inside when my son woke up early from his nap. Weeks later, when I finally pulled the compost bin around, it was too late – the grass beneath had been suffocated by the pile of heavy, wet leaves. It left behind an ominous ring of dead grass.

“I’m really good at first impressions,” I tell him.

His laugh is phlegmy and muted.

He shakes his head and looks up to the tree again, hands braced on his walker. “The developers have been knocking. They want my lot. But I won’t give it to them. I won’t give them my trees.”

His land is a wooded miracle in the Seattle suburbs – more than a half-acre of untouched forest, purchased with pocket change when he and his wife were young, and now worth a literal million.

“I won’t let them have it,” he says again. “Jo – my wife…my late wife–” He’s fumbling, looking up, lost in the trees above. “…she and I helped write legislature to protect the trees out here. We built a non-profit together. She and I really raised hell during the Clinton Administration…” His words are a happy dream, reverent like incense – his life story less for me, more for the trees.

I remain silent as he tells me about Jo, JoAnn, the love of his life. They never had children – the trees were their own, their family.

Eventually my phone interrupts him – my motion detector alerting me that my son is awake from his nap.

“I’m so sorry…” I tell Alan.

He waves me off, and I leave him there, lost in the trees above.

“You should all come by for tea some time,” he calls to me.

“We’d love that,” I call back.

---

The age of talking

Has overcome listening

Our thoughts incomplete

We shout over mere fragments

Defeat the joy of searching

-excerpt from Complaints and Celebrations, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan Riley

While away at college back in 2007, I decided to volunteer at a Ukrainian orphanage over the summer. In preparation, I attended a mandatory training weekend. There was one team-building exercise in which I was chosen to call out directions to my teammates from across the length of a wooded glade, directing them toward where I stood at “the finish line.” They were all blindfolded and would only know where to step based on my instructions. And then the twist: several other teams were sent to the same area, all of them instructed to do the same thing, voices overlapping in a web of ever-loudening chaos.

In the end, we gave up, the noise too much, the task impossible. My teammates said they could hear my voice screaming above the din – but nothing coherent, just noise.

Later, one of the organizers told us the point of the exercise was to work with the other teams; it was never declared a competition, and as such, if we worked together and used just one voice, everyone could have made it to the finish line.

How can I adequately describe this memory – the one no one else would have reason to remember, so small and insignificant – truly more like an annoying game of blind man’s bluff, discarded from the memory bank by dinnertime. And yet, this memory haunts me. It feels irrevocably relevant – like a foreshadowing I am never quite able to shake, a sweat that clings: the sound of my shrill voice.

There are words everywhere, talking, yelling, screaming. Everyone has a square of glass in their pocket, flinging it up for all to see, shoving ahead, the light failing to illuminate what is held too tight in so dense a crowd, and now with blood on the hands. And over them all, my voice – the me that is screaming gibberish, a whole field of people gawking, a spectacle, the cause of tinnitus.

I just want quiet. Peace. I want it so much that I consider dropping these words, grinding them into the earth, planting them as seeds instead. Maybe they would grow as wildflowers and say more coherently anything I could shape on a page, the black and white stutter with all the wrong dashes, commas, and question marks traded for the velvet curve of color, the movement of wind in the willows, the smell of jasmine, lilac, of blooming things on summer’s eve.

Maybe, for that, we’d stop.

Listen.

Hear it all.

---

We choose to fail

Do it again and again

We ungrown adults

Siren songs call from the shore

And we plunge into their sea

-Excerpt from Complaints and Celebrations, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan Riley

It is only a couple weeks after meeting Alan that our water heater gives out. We are deep into the Covid quarantine – Clorox-wiping our packages, groceries, and doorknobs and stitching our own cloth masks – the ones I’ll need for my appointments in the maternity ward at the hospital. So when the repairman arrives to fix our water heater, I take my son out of the house, to the neighboring creek.

The trails are muddy, cold, squelching beneath our boots, with steep embankments leading down to a narrow shoreline, and a thunderous, winter-thawing creek.

It is raining big, cold drops, but we are used to this in the Pacific Northwest – the woods a breathing, thirsty thing that is all shivery movement with blackberry bramble for hands.

Amidst the patter of rain, I hear hurried footsteps and a dog’s collar tinkling on the narrow trail ahead – our parties on a collision course as we approach a bend.

Instinctually I pull my son up on my hip, pressing him around my pregnant belly, trying to make the monstrosity of us small – three bodies pressed into one. I take a step to the side just as a woman rounds the corner at a jog, mere feet from where we stand. I hear her startled intake of breath.

The ground gives out beneath me.

I go down hard on my side, slide down the embankment, stopping just shy of the creek’s foaming mouth. I manage to keep my son on top of me, absorbing his fall into mine, but panic sets in fast as I remember the other child I carry – the one I haven’t braced for.

I look up the embankment where the woman watches in mute horror. My son crawls to his knees to crouch beside me. I hear him crying out, but his voice is distant, as if underwater, as I watch the woman above, the fear in her startled eyes pulsing and familiar.

I recognize the look, close my eyes because I know what happens next.

When I open them, she is gone.

I am a present-day leper – but this time the disease is Covid, and all we’ve been told for weeks is to keep six feet of distance from one another.

“She has her family to think about,” I tell my son.

From the ground, my body trembles.

---

The miracle is

The fact we are here to ask

What miracles are

-excerpt from Tackling Elephants, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan Riley

The hospital is overrun with dying Covid patients, all from the first major US outbreak at our local retirement facility. My doctor has done everything in her power to keep me away from the building during my final trimester of pregnancy, cancelling my scheduled appointments and having me monitor my own blood pressure from home.

But here, now, a nurse takes me in warily, ushering me through a side door since the Covid patients use the main entrance. I am taken into triage, only a curtain securing my space.

“Where does it hurt?” the nurse asks.

There is mud still up to my jawline, bruises forming like storm clouds on the side of my body, and yet, the only words I find: my baby.

She peels my soggy shirt up and straps a monitor to my belly.

There is static stretching for miles, a quiet so deep and long I fear it will consume me – the discordant soundtrack of a black hole, me shaking fiercely at its magnetic lip.

And then, as if getting jerked back, a thump. I gasp like I’ve just come up for air.

A whirring heartbeat.

The nurse lets out an audible breath.

I cannot speak, so say the only words I have, again and again, my baby.

A few weeks later, masked, in those awful heights of a worldwide pandemic, the miracle arrives – a healthy baby girl.

---

I leave no gravesite

For the young to make love on

The rest to ignore

I sailed words into the wind

Hoping someone might catch them

-excerpt from Tackling Elephants, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan Riley

I don’t find out until I return from my son’s school conference later in the evening, a few cops still idling in front of my house, that Alan has ended his own life with a gun to his head.

I stand in my yard in the yawning dark. The single leaf falls from the maple tree above.

I trudge back inside, sit in my room that nearly kisses the edge of his.

It was his deceased wife’s birthday.

I think of the time I knocked on his door, one kid wrapped around my leg, a new baby at my hip.

He never answered. And me, so busy with it all. I had my family to think about.

I never knocked again.

---

What has your life taught

Or were those lessons wasted

As you sped past them

Shame deserves full attention

Crawl inside open its book

-excerpt from Tackling Elephants, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan Riley

My friend had a dream about me, back when we were roommates in college, that same year I went to Ukraine. In it, I was trying desperately to speak, but had no words, choking to death by some unseen force. I fell on my side, dying on the ground before her, helpless. And when the fight was over, my hands clutching my useless throat, the color drained from my face, something shifted. A tree erupted from my skyward ear – took root in accelerated time from the ear pressed to earth – me its nursing log. This, my prophecy – how words don’t come from my throat, but rather my ear.

How listening, in the end, might be the only thing to save me.

---

I prefer beaver

Coyotes, lark, eagles and moose

For nearby neighbors

The neighbors I have know that

Which is why I prefer them

-excerpt from Complaints and Celebrations, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan Riley

Dave and Susan, our neighbors from across the street, have bought Alan’s house, fighting off salivating developers, and paying a cool million to a distant relative who lucked upon an unexpected inheritance.

Dave and Susan are older, a bit daunted by the task ahead, but face the house with squared shoulders, a reverent bow toward the trees as they enter the property. Dave plans to multiply Alan’s home by two, renting the upstairs and downstairs as separate units to help address the middle housing crisis in the Seattle area. He’s vowed to keep the trees – every last one in the half acre of wooded backyard – untouched.

I can’t help think: at last, a neighbor among us.

Susan lets me up to Alan’s attic where he kept a filing cabinet full of 3x5 cards filled with one-lined sentences, fodder for the poetry he was writing. All this time, Father McKenzie, writing his sermon in the attic among the swaying crowns of trees.

Susan gifts me some of his poetry: three chapbooks – self-bound collections of haiku and tanka. I read them reverently, fingers to page, tears down my neck, walking the way back to my house.

The maple between our yards is naked, limbs flailed, the hard notches like nails in the wood. I put a hand to my throat in the cold, scared. Scared to speak. Scared my truth is not enough, too shameful to repeat, and much too loud in a world already reaching its breaking point. Easily disputed, slashed with a word, ugly, raw, too simple, already spoken. I’m scared how easy it will be to kick at my exposed underbelly, roll me away like a dead thing, a festering log in the forest.

I read the last stanza of Alan’s poetry, written in 2007 – the very year I lost my words somewhere over the Atlantic between home and Ukraine. It is the same year I underwent throat surgery after inhaling an airborne parasite at Russia’s edge, and felt the vice of a shadowed hand at my neck for the better part of a year. I recovered my breath, my voice, but never fully my words, the shape of them curling back inside me like a moonflower at daybreak, scared of an inhospitable and overcrowded world, no gentle moonlight to grow.

I set Alan’s chapbook down, leave the page open to the last stanza.

I slip into my coat, walk beneath our maple tree once more, breathe in the cold that carries the barest hint of earth, of movement, of growing things.

I listen, and hear it: the wind in the willows, the rushing pines, the evergreens that will keep, despite man’s best effort. The work of a single good neighbor.

I clear my throat.

Rake the leaves.

---

The thing I hope for

When I let my words fly free

Is you take them in

Then reply with some of yours

We should fill the sky with words

-excerpt from Tackling Elephants, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan Riley