Legacy

I miss my mom. She would know what to say to me to make me feel better right now. She could always tell me what my dreams meant. I miss her hands. As a child I played with them quietly while she had coffee with her friends. That memory is slowly obscuring the more recent memory of how frail they were in the days before her death, the skin was transparent and rolled over the underlying tissue and veins like a piece of tissue paper would slide back and forth over a table. I sat by her bed and moved the skin back and forth, marveling at the living tissue that comprises a human body, how frail it is. The life was flowing quickly out of her and I knew it.
In the days following her death, I imagined her body, the one that had given me life, still and forever silent. A soft sound of settling, of cells deflating and organs going slack. I imagined what it would be like to fly through that intricate webbing of tissue that had walked and ran and given birth, had grown out of a single cell. And when I put my hands in the bag of ashes to touch a bone that had withstood the flames, I thought of how strange it is to have only these few pieces of the body that had been my mother. All else was gone. Her silver hair, her blue eyes, her big smile. All reduced to ashes. And when I think of her now, I hear the sound of the wind in the desert. Wind rushing through the sage brush, pushing a few tendrils of sand from one place to another; peace and silence. A silence that tells me I’m going to have to figure my dreams out on my own.
Tick tock, the clock is telling me I should get to bed. But I don’t want to. I want to sit on top of a hill and watch the moon move across the sky. Alas, there are no hills around here. Nowhere to hear the wind scream past my ears. I used to sit at the edge of cliffs and let the wind blow my cares away… or at least a little farther down the road, giving me some space to be without them. It was nice. 97 percent of NM is public lands, one can just roam freely, picnic wherever the mood strikes. I love the harshness of the high desert. Texas is 97 percent privately owned. That’s juxtaposition for you. To picnic here is to risk being shot. Unless you picnic where there are tables and paths, national parks and rest areas. No stopping where the road bends and looks inviting, hauling a food laden basket up a steep rise that affords a good view of absolute vast nothingness. Here, everything is settled and supervised and civilized. Hmmm. Maybe I should go home. Maybe my daughter needs to swing on a rope swing hung by rogue picnickers on a two hundred year old cottonwood tree whose branches span a soft sandy wash. Or snag salmon on a freezing November night, teeth chattering madly. No, her childhood is forming up exactly as it should. A child proofed childhood.