by Margot Kahn
At dawn I open my eyes to find Papá standing in front of his dresser. Shadows grip the room, clothes pile high on a chair, and in a corner my two suitcases gather dust. A shoddy homemade bookshelf sags under the weight of too many books. The cramming all around makes the darkness more encroaching. Through the chaos I feel Papá’s calmness. He contemplates a framed image of Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes and silencer of demons, a gift from Abuelita he told me when I commented on it upon first entering the room. In shock I realize he is praying.
I pretend to sleep, but my heart gallops. That morning I learn that Papá is my Abuelita’s son after all. And I learn that he is small, small like I am. We are both finding our way in the world, starting over again and again. Through him I recognize that to reach the fullness of light after deep darkness requires both bravery and humility. Like the thawing after winter, the softening that allows tiny crocuses to cut through soil, something melts inside me.
2004. I am married again and the mother of two little girls. Twenty-nine years have passed since my sister and I took down the Virgins above our beds. Now, a framed icon of Monseñor Romero with the inscription, “Mi amor es el pueblo,” hangs in my small office. Next to it, images of Our Lady of Guadalupe fill all available wall space. Roses, sequins, cherubs weave in and out of her robes, her head is slightly tilted to the right. Gently she holds her hands together at her chest in a gesture of prayer.
One December afternoon while on vacation from El Salvador, Papá visits me in my office. I sit at my desk; he stands in the doorway and points with a bony hand to a framed photograph of the Virgin. Where did I get that one? he wants to know, his stance gentle and inquisitive. A gift that my husband bought for me in Albuquerque, the photo is of Guadalupe painted on a garden courtyard wall.
Etched on Papa’s face is the topography of time’s passing: the shores of an arduous life visible in his hollow cheeks, the meadows of forgiveness around his softer eyes. He is no longer the man I feared.
“Esta bien bonita verdad!” I say, holding his eyes. I don’t defend my actions; don’t explain that I find solace in prayer, that in her image I find my compass, resilience and hope.
“Asi es,” he says nodding softly. The suggestion of a smile registers on his face and though I cannot see it, I know, it also registers on mine.
Claudia Castro Luna is Seattle’s first Civic Poet (2015–2017), a King County 4Culture grant recipient, a 2014 Jack Straw Fellow, and VONA alumna. Born in El Salvador, she came to the United States in 1981. Her poems appear in print and online in publications such as the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, La Bloga, ARCADE, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She is the author of This City, a chapbook of poems. She lives in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
The Leaving Season
Kelly McMasters
There is always something to hunt in northeast Pennsylvania. There is squirrel season and beaver season; grouse and bobwhite quail season; mink and muskrat trapping season; bobcat and buck and bear season. There is both a fall and spring season for wild turkey. And you can shoot crow from July 4th through April 5th, but only Friday through Sunday. Starlings and English sparrows are fair game all year round, except during spring gobbler season, when these small birds can only be shot before noon. But, according to the state’s 1843 Songbird Protection Law, you can never kill an Eastern bluebird, or you’ll face a $2 fine.
Since moving here from Manhattan—first as a weekender for six years, then as a full-timer once I got pregnant with my second child—these are the rhythms to which I’ve grown attuned. Who is hunting what, who is harvesting what, and which chores need to be done. The old man down the road starts splitting logs for next winter on Memorial Day. St. Juliana’s, the creaky wooden 150-year-old Catholic church around the corner, begins selling homemade pierogies mid-winter; the stooped and withered church ladies huddle together in the steamy warmth of the church kitchen a few evenings a week to make them. The camp traffic starts in June, shiny BMWs and Lexus SUVs speeding like dusty comets down the dirt roads, leaving an entire summer economy in their wake. During all of this, no matter the time of year, gunshot cracks break across the backs of the hills that surround our small farmhouse, echoing through the sky like an old-fashioned call and response.
They are the music to which I shake out autumn’s last load of laundry to be hung on the line out back, and the beat I keep to as I thrust my thumb into the ground over and over and plug the holes with bulbs of garlic. Most of the men shoot bolt-action rifles, and the gunfire chirps in staccato pops throughout the day. My head spins in the direction of the shots automatically; left, right, left, right, over the hill beyond the summer camps, across the way near McGarry’s swamp. The short bursts shake me out of naps and force my eyes to blink. Jerry, a neighbor who as a kid used to work the farm on which we now live, comes over and trudges deep into one of the old fields out back with M., my husband, to test out his .44 Magnum on our makeshift practice range of old tin cans. Jerry shows off his homemade bullets, melted and molded silvery nubs. M. is a good shot, and is thinking about buying a gun. I can barely lift the cold dark metal to my shoulder.
When we first moved from the city to the country full-time, it felt as though we were let in on a secret. Instead of cracked sidewalks or manicured lawn, my bare feet sunk into soft patches of clover and alfalfa. Instead of daily trips to the corner bodega for small bites in plastic packages and containers, I found food on my own land: sandy-webbed puffball mushrooms, strawberries the size of my fingernail, tart stalks of rhubarb, handfuls of delicately-haired raspberries that bled the same color as the scratches the thorns gave me on my arms. Instead of grocery store bouquets wrapped in clear plastic, the table bloomed with wild daisies whose stringy stems had fought to stay in the ground; tall curled clutches of garlic scapes, elegant and stinking; and, just once, bulbous heads of purple milkweed, teeming with black ants.
For a while, everything felt golden and magical. On top of turning our weekend dream into reality, we also had that hopeful first-home glow; although the farmhouse acted as a second home, it was really our first. Knowing we’d never be able to afford an apartment in Brooklyn or Manhattan, we’d set our sights on the country, pushing farther and farther out on the map until we were sufficiently far enough away from the city to make the property affordable. Three hours from the George Washington Bridge and just over the New York–Pennsylvania border, the 1860s farmhouse on the hill felt insulated, a small space on the planet that was untouched by time. Safe. Our water came out cold and clear from an underground spring. The property was tucked back off two dirt roads, so three cars passing our house was a busy day; I could open the door and not worry about letting my toddler run. In the city, I wouldn’t have let him out into our building’s hallway on his own. Late summer nights, instead of sirens and city sounds, the frogs were so loud we had to close the windows. In the morning, sharp bursting chirps from chipmunks or hysterical-sounding gobbles from roving packs of wild turkeys woke us. During walks, we collected bits of our new landscape and placed them on our bookshelves like evidence: soft spotted feathers, sweet wild roses, driftwood-like curves of spring-shed antlers. We learned a new lexicon of beauty, a new way of making home.
A vacation house is like an affair, I suppose. A weekend or summer house offers excitement, possibility, and contrast. Instead of being with a different person, you are with a different house. When you choose to be with a person other than your partner, and usually for small bits of time compared to the time spent with your main partner, part of the allure is the freedom to be a different person yourself. The same happens when you are with a different house. Sometimes that fantasy feels so real and so much better than what you’ve already got going on, you leave your partner for the affair. But ultimately, you still have to figure out how to pay bills and who is going to make sure the propane tank is full and who is going to change the toilet paper rolls. Suddenly, the person you ima
gined you could be is eclipsed by all the same small worries that took up your time before the switch.
Marriage is also a kind of fantasy; in my mind, in our farmhouse we would write and paint and raise our children with intention and integrity, surrounded by the beauty of the natural world. I’m embarrassed to admit this now, and it sounds so childish, but it is true. I imagined our new home would have a dollhouse quality, with our worlds taken up by moving from one room to another and another, a tiny galaxy of four planets held within our creaking walls.
But the longer we lived full-time in the farmhouse, the farther away from one another M. and I drifted. By our second summer there, neither of us were finding the work we’d hoped and the aging house required more funds to keep it running than we’d planned; our mortgage was an unspoken weight yoked between us. M. spent more and more time away from the house, taking the truck we shared and visiting the woodshop or barn where the local men spent their days, downing cans of watery beer and talking about spring fishing or ice fishing, their horseshoe league, their dilapidated cars, their pole barn project, hunting. He bought his first gun. Then another.
In a way, when we moved to the country, M. fit in so well that I stopped recognizing him. He has a feral quality that always made the city a bit difficult for him—he couldn’t hold a normal job because he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) bear to show up at the same place day after day or be told what to do, so he spent his days painting pictures. He couldn’t read menus, couldn’t keep track of bills, and his phone was always getting disconnected. He slept on the floor of his painting studio, bathed in his sink, traded paintings when he was short on rent, boiled hotdogs for dinner in his percolator one night and went to a five-star restaurant with his art collectors the next. He allowed other people to buy him shoes and winter coats, stole toilet paper from public restrooms. There was a wildness to him, and this was one of the reasons I was so attracted to him when we first met; he was like a tiger prowling the city streets, beautiful, untamed, out of place, and different from anything I’d seen before.
But in the city, being a painter often became the excuse for some of his strange behavior (“He’s an artist; what did you expect?”). In the country, the other men—mostly a band of similarly feral men living alone and scraping by in rented, rusted single-wide trailers tucked away in the hills—recognized him as their own, accepted him, brought him into their fold. Being an artist was something they tolerated (read: lots of gay jokes), whereas in the city it was the reason people put up with what were seen as his eccentricities. His wildness became compounded, and although he still painted, it didn’t define him as much. His studio in our old dairy barn was as full of power tools and chop saws and 2x4s as it was paint and canvas. Not having a job or income, patching things on the house yourself, day-drinking, shooting guns, burning garbage, wearing the same outfit five days in a row—this was all status quo in the hills. After a while, he crossed over, was so in his element, that I stopped recognizing him. In a way it felt like I was Wendy Darling, watching a sleepwalking child from cobblestoned city streets find his band of lost boys in the forest.
Many of our friends who lived in the city and had weekend or summer houses in the country had warned us about making the move full-time. Living in the country was for storybooks; it was something out of A Year in Provence, and even Peter Mayle’s move wasn’t permanent. We imagine, somehow, when the place is still just our vacation house, how much better life will be there, how happy we would be if that could only be our every day, if only we didn’t need to return to our real life. But the reality is, vacation homes feel magical because they truly are: going to a vacation home is like playing house, where we put on different clothes, cook different food, have sex in different places or positions, fall into different routines. There are elements of high imagination and low stakes that allow us to fool ourselves that we really are the make-believe characters we are playing for the weekend. But then we go home, to our real home, while that fantasy bubble remains intact and separate. Once you make your vacation home your permanent residence, in a way, you lose your real self. This can, it turns out, be very lonely and rootless. You don’t recognize yourself. And everything that once gave you joy suddenly feels like a noose.
As I looked around, I realized there were many other couples who’d tried the same thing. Nina and Eric had moved up to their country house after the birth of their second child so she could write full-time. Eric planned to work as a carpenter, but quickly realized what felt like “experience” in the city just held him on par with everyone else since the locals here grow up fixing everything themselves. They stuck it out for a year and even started their son in public school, but left after Nina contacted the ACLU over a flier for Sunday school came home in her son’s backpack and caused quite a stir. “Thank God we kept our lease in New York,” Nina said. “Otherwise, I guarantee we’d be divorced right now.”
There were our friends Paul and Bill, whose gorgeous house I’d written about for a magazine and whose home decor shop was one of the most successful stores in town. But they hadn’t quite moved completely either; like Nina and Eric, they also still kept a small apartment in the city and they both returned to the city periodically for consulting jobs for weeks at a time. Micki and Graham had two kids and a rambling old Victorian, but Graham drove the daily three-hour commute to Manhattan to work as a lighting designer on Broadway most of the year.
Before we’d decided to move to the farmhouse full-time, M. and I had been to dinner at another couple’s house a few towns away. I approached the evening as a science experiment, gathering data on yet another potential model. This couple, an artist and an advertising executive, also split their time between rural Pennsylvania and Manhattan, like us, though the wife had moved up to the house full-time and only the husband went back regularly to the city for work. She painted large canvases full of birds and lizards and, from what I knew of her, she chose the peace of isolation and the opportunity to live within the natural world over the city and constant presence of her husband. I was hoping to see how she was faring.
They are both tall and spindly and own a very small car, and they look folded up, like a sheet of ticket stubs, when they drive around town. They were standing outside of their small A-frame house tending to the barbeque when we pulled up in our truck. They left the chicken and steak and sausages on the grill and took us up the rickety front steps and into their home, which was like a little blue birdhouse perched on a cliff. Bits of ribbon and feathers were tucked into wooden slats that made up the kitchen ceiling. The four of us stood out on a small deck overlooking their pond and watched hummingbirds dart around some flowering bushes.
“Once, I came home and a hummingbird was stuck in the screen door,” the wife said. She was from South Africa and her c’s came out like g’s, her r’s non-existent. “His beak was like a little dart through the netting. I plucked him out and he just shoomed away.” She fluttered her long fingers in the direction of the pond.
We sat on the deck picking apart a cluster of delicate, tart table grapes and grazing on a cheese plate while the meat smoked on the grill. The wife identified different flowers in her garden for us, and when we turned one way we noticed a doe close by, munching on a bush. Her tawny down looked soft and shiny in the light, and she stared up at us for a moment with her dark black eyes.
“Uch. I hate them! They are teak boxes!” The wife cursed at the deer, with a vehemence that surprised me.
“Teak boxes?” M. asked.
“Tick boxes,” her husband translated.
“They’re the one animal I could imagine shooting,” she said.
There is a brutality to the country, and to part-time country houses turned full-time residences. There is so much that you miss when you click on your alarm and drive down the road back to your real life elsewhere. You can choose to miss the piles of snow, the icy roads, the constant black-outs from electric lines down from wind or trees, the smells when something dies in your wall, the scorc
hing summer days where the heat makes little waves dance on the metal roof. You have somewhere else to go. But when the place where you hide from the real world becomes your real world, you suddenly realize you have nowhere else to go.
Then there is the way the paint blisters on the house in the sun, the sudden stink of a septic system revolting under the strain of regular use, the unrelenting smell of dank earth emanating from the dirt basement. There are the swarms of ladybugs coating the walls in masses too thick to be sucked up by the vacuum; the heavy orbs of carpenter bees at work on the front porch; fleets of angry sleek-bodied wasps hiding in the folds of the unopened patio umbrella, the soffits of the poorly executed metal roof, buzzing behind the thin drywall inside the house. Pat, a dairy farmer and retired corrections officer from down the road, stands in our three-bay English barn and pokes at the piles of sawdust created by the powder post beetles boring structurally compromising holes into the beams and says, “Everything’s gotta have a place to live, I guess.” Yes, but if this place belongs to them, what belongs to me?
Then, of course, there are the myriad varmints that are tolerable on the outside, but demand to come inside the house: the mice and the rats, the snakes and the bats, the blind felt-soft opossum babies stuck to the glue traps in the kitchen with their small searching snouts quivering. And there is the jewel-blue Eastern bluebird I scoop out of the cinders in the belly of the wood-burning stove one summer morning, who got trapped in the stovepipe trying to start a nest and couldn’t make it back out. Not everyone can make it out here in the wild, not even those who are wild to begin with.
