I follow rivers
On the search for home
I go to the window, drawn by sunrise. For a minute, I can hardly believe the view. It’s nothing extraordinary, but the sense of beauty, and relief, is almost shocking to my system.
In our old house, the sun rose just outside of our bedroom window. I’d pull up the blinds each morning trying to locate the sun that was stuck behind a endless procession of identical houses. One gray structure after another, all the way into the horizon, each with big windows staring back at me like rectangular eyes.
Here, though, the the sky greets me with arms so wide, so open, I feel so wholly, so effortlessly, held.
I’m home, I tell myself. Relief melts into gratitude like pinks melt into blues in the sky. I’m that purple haze in between.
My hand reaches for the window lock, pulls it up, pushes the glass pane out. Cold air hits my skin, opening my lungs. A sharp opening, it almost hurts. I cough, as if adjusting to some new way of breathing, some new amount of oxygen.
Also, I smell fire. It isn’t until I walk into the living room that I realize the fire is ours. Alfredo is up too.
“It’s not so cold this morning,” I say.
“Nah,” he says, “But this is nice isn’t it?”
***
While looking for a new home, I searched only by map, always drawn by the blue shapes. Sometimes lakes, but usually rivers. I followed rivers all over this country. Put stars on places that had rivers running through them. Sometimes there wasn’t even a house, just rich earth with that curvy blue shape. When there was a house, I found myself breezing through the maze of walls looking for the back door.
Run deep, run wide,1 we followed them here. To this tiny pinpoint on the map. This little plot. This barely-even-a-blip on the planet.
And yet how substantial it feels. To be here feels like a small miracle considering how lost we were. Or so I thought. Maybe we weren’t lost after all? Maybe for some of us the grand plan involves a duration of wandering like stray animals? It certainly raised more than a few eyebrows from people who could not understand what we were doing, or what we were even looking for.
It was this. This feeling in our bodies we never could explain. This feeling saying, Yes. Here. You can stop now. Take off your shoes and sink your blistered feet into this soil.
The funny thing is how much we resisted it. How many times we tried to say no. Because in many ways it just doesn’t make sense.
Does it have to?
***
Every evening, the boys come home covered in mud. Items of clothing are always missing. Ask them where their pants are, where their new baseball cap is, their only pair of sandals… they just shrug. These things don’t stick to them like the wet grass and earth do. I’ve learned to send them out with just their skins, but often they slip away on their own.
Even Rio can’t be kept indoors. He still doesn’t walk, yet with the deftness of a cat, bolts off on all fours, squeezes his body through the slightest crack of a door. Once outside, he stops to look around. What the ever might be tickling his curiosity today? Ah yes, that. He smiles to himself.
I catch him doing it all the time. His eyes focusing in on some tantalizing object to taste or touch - a purple flowerhead he’s never noticed before, that big leaf holding a pool of rainwater, the butterfly glinting in midday sun - then his face softening into a delighted smirk.
And I follow him out. Our Rio baby. I follow him just as he expects I will. I follow him down staircases, across unknown territories, to the river’s edge. I follow him even when I don’t want to, when I think I have better things to do. I follow his blind trust, that wild spark, like a thirsty dog with my tongue hanging out, panting.
***
xx
Beth
These are fragments from a larger work titled (for now), TRACKING THE ANIMAL. You can read a few other excerpts here. These here are compiled around a similar theme, but but the forthcoming work is about many different aspects of life.
A line from Lykee Li’s song, I Follow Rivers (Wounded Rhymes, 2010).