NONFICTION
ELIZABETH GREY
(MY MOTHER) THE SKY
I. Grackle
The root of the word iridescent is iris, Latin for rainbow. When I came into this world, I didn’t cry. You thought I was dead, but my cheeks turned the color of breath and my heart pumped your blood through its tiny ventricles. You held me against your chest. I looked up at you and sighed, that’s the story you tell. Told. I forget, sometimes and still, that you live inside the grammar of the past. I did cry, eventually, when my belly ached for food, and you offered me your breast and I took it into my infant mouth. I long to relive those moments, when it was only you and me inside a cavern of sweet milk and darkness, protected from the world that would bring both of us to our knees. When you brought me home, you wrapped my small body in a blanket you sewed for me when I was only an idea. Soft cotton, white, quilted by hand, the colorful arc of a rainbow bending hopefully across a cloud.
II. Northern Flicker, primary
I dreamed we were beside each other in the prairie and your hair was made of flicker feathers. Golden shafted, glowing like the sea oats and sedges that made our private hollow. You rested your head on my shoulder and I felt the weight of you, so tactile, so tender. So very much alive. And the sea oats turned to feathers in my hands, and the sedges turned to feathers in my hands, and your featherhair fell from your tactile, tender head and I groped at them desperately, and I groped at you desperately. I stood in a prairie with grasses made of flicker feathers, beside the ghost of you.
III. Turkey Vulture
Threshold spaces are when I miss you the most. It’s scary to leap, without a hand to hold. When I was a girl, you held my hand as we walked over the thick glass that separated us from a tank of sharks below, do you remember? I asked you what sharks eat and you said, Oh, seals I think, and I was horrified, having just watched the sea lions give handshakes to their trainers and bounce beach balls to the crowd. A lifetime later, I walked the ocean beach and watched a vulture pick clean the skeleton of a harbor seal, and I thought of your hand in my hand, and of the sharks that swirled beneath us, and how neither one of us knew danger when we held each other close. Time was a thicket then too, like it is again now. You told me once that all of life is an in between, if we believe there is some glorious destination. Or all of life is the glorious destination. You choose, you said.
IV. Pileated Woodpecker
There is a photograph from my fourth birthday in which I am staring at the camera and you are staring at me, and neither one of us appears concerned with the flaming, waxy number four in front of us. I’m wearing a dress my great aunt Jospehine sent from her home outside Tuscon—white cotton, slipped down at the shoulders, embroidered vines and woven ribbons in every color of the rainbow. She used to cross the border into Nogales and buy dresses by the armload for me. The girl, the first, the only. Between my collarbones hangs a slim gold necklace with a charm in the shape of a star. It was yours, when you were a girl. You had a chest full of treasures like that, waiting for me to grow into them. The cake in front of me is covered in thick white frosting, piped at the edges. I bet you bought it from the grocer on Downer Avenue, that one with the old plank floors that always smells of wine. It was your escape, that old fashioned grocery store, the one whose aisles you walked with your own mother when you were as small as me in that photograph. On top of your head is a ruby-colored paper crown. You made it for me, but I removed it from my head and placed it on top of yours, because, I like to believe, I wanted our guests to remember that on my birthday, the person we should really be celebrating is you.
V. Northern Cardinal
Your granddaughter has a wide scar across her forehead, one she earned at just two years old, bold and fearless from the very beginning. She’s adopted, born to a young mother in Michigan, matched to my brother—your son—and his wife, you would love her. The winter after you died, I found a box in the basement stuffed full of quilted fabric and bits of lace, a hand-drawn outline of a Christmas stocking. You planted a few gifts like this, when you knew the end was drawing close. Ornaments, with the year 2011 penned in your hand on the bottom, tucked inside the boxes of holiday decorations, wrapped in white tissue. A voicemail, which, in the final moments, your voice catches almost inaudibly but your voice is my heart so I notice. I love you, sweetheart. And the line clicks. Your granddaughter loves the birds. She looks just like you, too. Tim tells people, She’s a spitting image of her grandmother, and it’s true. I wonder sometimes if she is you, and I watch her coo at the cardinals who nest each year in the shrubs outside their kitchen windows, and I know, of course she is. In the box of fabric was also a letter. An invitation to use the pattern you left behind to sew stockings for a partner for me, a partner for my brother. And, you said, many grandchildren. I sewed a stocking for my brother’s wife and gifted it to her, along with the box of fabric. They have two daughters now, one born just last winter, and each has a stocking sewn by their mother, from the fabric their grandmother left behind. Don’t worry about perfect stitches, you wrote, what makes them special is their flaws.
VI. Barred Owl
Feather edged for traveling between realms. This one and, well, that one you’re in. Have the molecules of you rearranged themselves into some fabulous thing? Are you the spray from the sea and the last leaf of the red oak to shed in springtime and the breath that enters my lungs now and now and now? Maybe when I pull a brook trout from the stream and we share one singular moment before she wags herself free, back into her home current, that is you. And when that woman held the door open for me at the grocery store and said something about how badly we needed rain and she shook her hips and sparkled her eyes and when, later, I walked out of the store, the blue sky has grown gray and I opened my palms to the clouds and tipped my face to the open sky and let the falling water collect on my skin, that, perhaps, was you. And when the barred owl calls at the dusking sky. That, I know, is you.
VII. Blue Jay
My hair was long and wild, down to my waist, curls, bangs. I was learning to let it be free. But that day, I walked into the salon and asked her to cut it all off. Tie it in a braid and chop the thing at the nape. Thirteen plaited inches, gone in an instant. Shorter, I said. Shorter. I left with a bob cropped above my chin, my waves passed on to someone who needed them. So when I sat beside you later that day on those old oak stools at the kitchen counter and you told me you would die, and soon, they said, I rubbed my naked neck raw. I tugged at the short and foreign ends, trying to pull length back out of me like taffy. You went to my brother’s house and I went for a drive. I slid that old Joni Mitchell album into the CD player and sang along, like we always did. Each time I reached a stop sign on those country roads, I rubbed the soft palette of skin between my thumb and forefinger. This is what skin feels like. This is what skin feels like when it is alive. What will her skin feel like when she dies? I wish I had a river I could skate away on.
VIII. Mourning Dove
You pulled a box from the attic and called me into your bedroom. It was wide and flat, wrapped in plastic sheeting, taped tightly closed. With a blade, you sliced open the seams with care, slid the box from its protective sheath, and removed the lid. Beaded silk, ivory lace. You held your wedding dress up to your body, the shape of you changed by time and illness, then held it to mine, and closed your bedroom door. I took off my clothes and stood naked beside you as you unbuttoned each satin button with tenderness. We barely spoke a word. You held the dress as I stepped in, slid my arms into the long lace sleeves, and one by one, you fastened each button closed. The boning held tight to my ribcage. A perfect fit. One last thing, you said, and you placed the comb of your veil in my hair and smoothed the layered lace and you told me, and I knew this, that you sewed the veil yourself. I listened like it was the first time I heard the story. We stood beside one another, mother and daughter, and stared at ourselves in the mirror. A bud vase on your dresser held a single Shasta daisy. I pulled the blossom from the slim neck of the vase and wrapped its stem around your wrist. A corsage, I said, for the mother of the bride. That night, we sat in the rocking chairs on the front porch and drank tea from champagne flutes. What better reason to celebrate, we laughed, than a mother walking her daughter down the aisle.
IX. Black-capped Chickadee
You made the most of the green shag in my bedroom. It wasn’t worn old carpet but grass you saw, and you lined the baseboards with a border of wallpaper—five-petaled scarlet flowers and eager spring grasses bending in some unseen wind. On the ceiling, you painted the sky. Baby blue and so many clouds, the hopeful ones, the ones that make shapes against the faraway landscape of the heavens. In the corner, above my bed, you painted one cloud in the shape of a heart. For weeks I didn’t see it until one day I did, and then I held onto it. I searched the sky for other secrets. When your friend, a muralist, offered to add more life to my world, I asked her to paint me a tree. What kind of tree? she asked, and I told her I didn’t mind as long as there were birds in the branches. What kind of birds? she asked, and I pointed to your sweatshirt, faded gray with two chickadees perched on a branch laden with winter fruit. That kind, I said. And the chickadees made their home in a proud old oak, under the sky you dreamed for me.
X. American Robin
I asked a group of young people once if they had favorite birds and they mostly named the raptors. Eagles, hawks. One said he loved blue jays the most. But one girl, you would have loved her, waited until the others had spoken and said that while she too loved those other birds, her favorite is the robin. People don’t even notice them, she said, because they’re so common. But have you ever listened to a robin sing, like really listened? It will change your whole life. Her eyes were the palest shade of blue, just like yours. It’s fall now, and the birds are mostly quiet, but the robin’s autumn song is an elegy of everlight, his lament a solo in the chorus at dawn. I listened to him sing at daybreak today and thought of the girl with the pale blue eyes, and I wondered if you can still hear the robins sing and if it’s possible to change your life when you’re already the whole sky.
XI. Barn Swallow
We read many books together when I was young, my love for black ink on the page early and fervent and true, but none as often as The Wind in the Willows. Your voice lingered on words like murmurous and hitherto, and I asked you to repeat them, watching the flesh of your lips create the song of your voice. Again, I said, and then, I repeated the words with you. I matched the shape of my lips to yours. Murmurous. Hitherto. Do you remember the chapter—I know you do, you must, the way you cried each time at Water Rat’s clinging to his desire for sameness—the one where the swallows depart? They feel their wings twitter, their birdhearts stir. They love the pond, the eaves, the bugs that have given their lives for them, and they know they cannot stay. Water Rat’s restless heart breaks when he angles his body southward, to that place he cannot follow the winged, and in that moment, he understands there is a whole world beyond his horizon. The unseen was everything, the unknown the only real fact of life.
XII. Northern Flicker, rectrix
I am walking down the pebbled beach, the one where the deep gorge is lined with cedar trees, where the shallow stream flows on its way to the great blue body. The lake’s horizon is no different from that of an ocean, no more reachable, no more knowable. In the pockets of my overalls, stones, round and smooth, clatter against each other. I bend down, pick another up. It is the color of salmon, flecked with black. Syenite, igneous, born of fire. I drop the stone into your hand, but it falls through your skin and back to the beach. From my heavy pockets, I pull a smooth puck of basalt. You hold two hands out this time, but the rock, again, falls through you and hits the earth with a quiet clap. You reach for me, your horizon. You shake your head and your blue eyes release a single tear before you slip back into your speckled, feathered skin, fan your gilded tail, and dive back into that place you call home.
Elizabeth Grey is a writer and facilitator based in Oregon. Her work has appeared in Ocooch Mountain Echo and Five Minute Lit, and she is currently seeking representation for a full-length memoir. You can find her at greyelizabeth.com.