Week 12

Nine Mile Run, Pittsburgh, PA

It is surprising when our class gets there how decrepit it looks as we walk through the beginning. It feels static with its concrete and unnatural blue-green water running through. As we walk further through, as the concrete disappears and the creek shrinks and winds, rocks lining its bones, I feel more like I am in New York, specially Harriman State Park.

I want to ask the lady leading us around about weeping willows. I have heard throughout my childhood that willows are “water-hoggers.” But I keep quiet. 

I am used to the quiet. As we walk, I lean towards the trees and want to wander off the path, but I keep to the class. I keep quiet. I follow and watch the ground as I pass the pebbles by.

April 6th, 4:35 p.m.

On my way home from work this morning at 10 a.m., I saw what looked like the beginnings of daffodils. Long, lean, yet sturdy stalks and bright green like new growth. No yellow peeked through. 

I am tired. This is the third 4 a.m. morning shift, and I want to drift into the other lane as I  drive around curves. But I can’t take that risk. Not after totaling my previous car this past month. A fact I wanted to bury; I didn’t want anyone to know, to be another privileged white grad school kid whose parents do all they can to set me up with a new car.

The one opossum (in the opposing lane) on Crafton Blvd has been hit again so that he now tilted on his side. One paw points towards the sky. I wonder how dry the pads on his feet are. If it had been colder this past year and it had snowed, would the salt spread on the roads had coated its paws and dried out what was already dead? Or would the plows have shoved his body aside, negated any future thought I would have had, since out of sight, out of mind?

I sleep the rest of the day and work on my publishing class work. Mark works on his truck, and we get ready to visit his mother’s apartment for pizza and internet. Since Mark has yet to get his pay raise, we have held off on getting internet. 

Outside now I can see the green grass poking through the layer of grass. It is a startling green, bright and alive compared to the nearby ivy that is dark green, which blends in with the background unless I stare hard and look for it.

It is warm outside, and all I hear is Mark working on his car underneath the hood and a small dog breaking its high-not bark. I think as I step outside how sometimes when I take in a huge inhaled breath, I smell spring. Spring smells like grass and wet and life and all of these I believe help us all get through the mental depression, the oppressive weather of winter.

279 North reminds me of Nine Mile Run the way that cars funnel through these concrete walls and asphalt road. I feel unnatural as Mark drives. I feel unnatural as the road curves in a jerky way.

As I sit here and try to figure out what to say, what to end on, I decide there is no need to end. Spring is a beginning. That should be enough.

Week 11

Brick Township, New Jersey

Brick was (and continues to be, to my disappointment) a large central Jersey town of developing stores and retirement villages and malls and gas stations. Whenever my mother took me to the high school football games while I was in elementary school (attending a private Catholic school, not the public school we lived nearby), I was always told Brick Township was the guys we were playing against, the guys we booed. 

It didn’t make sense to me, though, why I went to a school in Brick when they were the bad guys. My mother said it was because they had better schools, but our football team was the best.

My school was a tiny church near the highway (a large oak fence blocked the playground from the small field that led to the road) that expanded itself with trailers parked in the wide expanse of parking lot. I remember the lame chain link fence and the open space that blocked us from the Stop N Shop next door.

It was quiet, surrounded by pines, and when I was in first grade, adjusting my navy skirt and my white tights, I knew it was a great place for me: not too hot, not too cold, just there and just right.

March 30, 11:20 a.m.

I am sorely disappointed by the weather, by the way it rained heavily yesterday (a sure indication of spring) to the way I woke up to find it had snowed again. I don’t mean to be redundant every week, but I’m fed up.

This week my car threw on the Check Engine light, and I had to bring it into the Toyota Service Center and then rely on their shuttle service to get to and from m internship. The man who drove the shuttle was nice and chatted with me while we were alone; whenever someone else came in to be transported around, he’d always bring up how horrible of the winter this was, how last year it wasn’t this bad.

As I sit in Mark’s broken-down Rabbit, Mark screws away and pulls at various parts of the engine. The white hood is up, but all I can see are his Pep Boy jacket and, if he bends down far enough, his nose.

There are more cars outside passing us by, more people outside than I expected. You’d think they’d be as fed up as I am and boycott the outside.

The wind blows at that awful slow winter pace; every gust of wind is painful when it hits you. I see Mark’s pale hands every now and again.

As I told Mark when we woke up today and he said the ground was covered in snow, I’m sick of this bullshit.

There are only little hints of snow on the ground now, the kind that looks like dusting of sugar on dead yellow grass and dead brown leaves.

Mark bought a bag of baby onions, yellow and purple, almost three days ago. I pointed out to him as he got the sheer grocery bad that two of them in the bucket had started sprouting green on top of the bulbs. He said it didn’t matter to him.

When he went to cook with them the next day, the greens had shot up centimeters. And last night, he put them in soil, and this morning, they are almost an inch now. When I touched them, they feel solid, hard, “like rock,” Mark said.

A jogger passes by. I simultaneously pity him for needing to exercise in this weather and label him as a moron for needing to exercise in this weather.

Another jogger goes by. He is not as hunched over as the other guy, but I still think he, too, is a moron.

Now that the wind has settled for a bit, I can hear birds chirp (and Mark mimic them). They sound so distant, so high up in the trees, and so far away. I wonder how cold it is for them, how hard they have to hang on in their nests when the wind rocks the slimmer branches. Do they curl up into what they know and ride out the bad weather, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute? It sounds miserable to me.

I’m sure Mark would say something about how they react differently to such weather, being constantly exposed to it; they can’t stay curled up forever because they have to feed and sing and move for warmth, too.

I remember during first grade an Asian traveling performing ground come to my school and dance in our gym. We all sat on the floor and watched the ladies shuffle gracefully around in their kimonos and wave beautiful paper fans. I remember one lady telling us how she loved mimicking bird movement, how she had to move her whole body to see, not her head. Most birds don’t have necks and can’t turn their head to the side to see like we can, she said, so they have to move their whole body.

I don’t remember why I remember that part, exactly, but it seemed important at the time and still in a sense does.

Week 10

Crafton Boulevard, Crafton, PA

“It’s the curse of the Dead Opossum on Crafton Boulevard,” Mark had said to me one night while at 11:30 p.m. he was driving me home from work. I had looked over at him from the passenger’s side seat and felt concerned, wondered if I had pushed him too far by asking him to pick me when I could have been a nice person, when I could have looked up the bus schedule, when I could have taken the two buses, and when I could have gotten home past 2 a.m.

Mark calls where he lives “Crapton.” The people drive on his road like they’re going to die and this is the place they’re going to, so they think they might as well do it on a road they’re familiar with.

At first I didn’t know what opossum Mark was referring to, but then I remembered seeing the dead one not more than 20 feet down the road from his apartment. It was a big hunk of a thing, its fur the only thing moving as cars zoomed past the two curves in the road. 

I felt bad as we had passed the dead animal in the daylight, dried blood scraped across the asphalt; it reminded me of how whenever I pick my skin too deep and minutes or hours later realized it had bleed badly and smeared on me and then it dried a deep red brown. 

The opossum’s pink intestines nearby the rest of its body; you could almost mistake it for blood, but blood doesn’t clump that badly after death.

I felt bad for the thing. Normally I wouldn’t care. I’d think, good, one less furry beast I have to fear in the dark of night; but you’d think that my being the owner of three smaller, equally tailed rodents would make me more sympathetic, more of a bleeding heart to see a member of their supposed animal family die. (I find later that opossums are marsupials; rats are “rodents.”)

Normally I wouldn’t, but seeing it during the day, thinking about its possible opossum babies, now more likely than before to die before the real warmth of spring, I realized how awful it was.

A day ago, on my way to my internship, I see another dead opossum, not even a mile away, on the other side of the road. His white-furred face and closed eyes are the first things I see  when I round the curve. I feel an awful pit in my stomach.

March 21st 7:30 p.m.

I am on the flatbed of Mark’s truck, once an RV and now stripped down to bare frame in the back. I sit on the deck boards that he lined up, screwed to the metal frame, and made a sad platform out of. I tell him we need to put a sign in the back window that reads, “Honk if you love eyesores.”

Cars pass, slowing down before the curve and also so drivers can turn their heads and watch my back against the road and watch Mark work on his vehicle.

Birds are all atwitter around us. It’s slightly cold, not cold enough for me to see my breath but cold enough, apparently this morning, for it to have snowed; yet not warm enough for it to stay past two hours or so.

As Mark works to unscrew one specific board, an addition on top of the other boards, the only way I am guessing he could transport it, I skip over to the one window my eyes can reach (considering my short height) of the abandoned house. The blinds are drawn, and all I can see are the shapes of door frames, other windows. I am afraid if I keep looking I might find someone in there, as Mark has been hinting at these last couple of weeks.

Mark sings to himself, improvising lyrics to the tune of Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Y Control,” the last song we listened to on the way home.

I hear a couple coming up a path that runs parallel to Crafton Boulevard; I wonder if what they’re walking on is a trail. I have seen many joggers, many reluctant dog parents in pajamas follow behind their eager pets. I can’t tell if it’s purposefully made for that, as some of the trees that separate the path from the road are spray painted with a green dot on them. Some have a orange/pink plastic flag on them. I wonder if they’re just going to bulldoze it down and make the road wider.

I turn to look at the couple. They’ve walked to the end and are coming back around. They’re two men actually. One spits.

I think about opossums and how they are spelled so oddly, how I meant to look them up in the library and couldn’t find them on Wikipedia because I spelled it as “possum.” I wondered as I sat there getting frustrated with the Internet why I was only getting results for large marsupials in Australia.

The Australian ones have taken cute pictures, their babies on their backs, their eyes large and frozen. Once I have the correct spelling, I watch a video of a “tamed” opossum cuddled up in blankets on someone’s windowsill, watch how he is given a strawberry and, jaws wide and teeth marvelous and many, simply chomps it down, switching it from one side to the other.

It’s kind of cute. Except that jaw scares me. 

My rats, in my biased opinion, are much more cute when they eat; they hold their food in their two front paws (“so human-like,” Mark said when he watched them eat) and nibble. They have only four teeth (two upper and two lower) that are constantly growing, which is why they gnaw constantly. I don’t think marsupials have the same problem. (Fun fact: the name “rodent” is derived from the Latin verb “rodere,” or “gnawing.”)

Opossums also have opposable thumbs, which if rats had -- we as a human race would be in trouble and might as well get used to rats. I personally would be delighted. 

Opossums that we are familiar with are common opossums (Didelphis marsupialis) and are found also in North, Central, and South America; the opossums we are familiar with are also called Virginia opossums and were considered a distinct species (or Dipdelphis virginiana).

I also am intrigued by the origin of the name: “opossum” comes from the early 17th century Virginia Algonquian word “opassom,” derived from “op” (meaning “white”) and “assom” (meaning “dog”). Which is funny as most dictionaries describe opossums as “cat-sized.”

Mark asks me to help him in the basement with holding wood as he cuts it. The saw keeps kicking back because I don’t know how to keep the long five foot board still. I think Mark is frustrated with me.

It’s dark outside now when we come back out. Only Mark whistles a tune, probably Cat Stevens. The birds are quiet, the only chirp a distant one. I strain to hear some animal presence, some animal something, but the cars that pass, while not frequent, nevertheless pass when the previous car, its engine and tire noise almost fading to nothing, are almost out of earshot.

I look up at the face of the house, the door and its awning I consider an open mouth waiting for visiters and the windows two frozen eyeballs, and watch the flicker of car lights against it. It must be lonely to be an empty house.

I think of the house I grew up in in Jackson, New Jersey. I think about how I visited it after I had moved into several other houses, none as equally loved as my childhood home. I think about the condemned papers on its door, how one of my friends peeled the screen door open and declared we could go in.

I think about these things too much.

I look at this abandoned house in front of me and try to image the spirit of the structure. It must be forlorn. When I moved into the Squirrel Hill apartment, I thought it would be like the house in New Jersey, an old place I wanted to pour myself into and fix and let know was loved.

I realize how fragile and naive those ideas are. Sometimes I am sure that is what my poems are like. Sometimes I am sure that is not what my writing is like. Sometimes I am sure it doesn’t matter what my writing is like. 

Sometimes I am sure I know what it is to write. Sometimes I think too much about rodents and perhaps not enough about marsupials. Especially those in Mark’s backyard.

Week 9

March 16th 3:02 pm

I am going out through the basement door and am greeted by cobwebs, now on my knuckles, stuck to my knuckle hairs.

I am outside now, walk on the dried leaves, finger in my pocket the key ring holding the one key I now have to the new car in the driveway. I am lucky, but mostly I feel sickly in the pit of my stomach, at the back of my throat.

I have much to do in the next couple of days, and I have gone through much in the past week, and nature is, unfortunately, the last thing on my mind right now.

I walk behind the houses and notice weird droppings that look rather rodent like (an observation based on cleaning up after my own rats. But these are not jelly-bean-shaped; one end is not completely rounded. I feel gross needing to observe these dried-up pieces, all neatly dropped on a dried leaf.

I hear a bird flitting through the bushes, back and forth, before I see her again and mistake him for a robin. She is brown, not red. I wish for spring as my fingers ache with cold.

I hear Mark calling for him, but I don’t see him. I hear a thud and leaves rustle, and he is there in front of him; he claims he dropped from the kitchen window, doing the opposite of what he did days ago, climbing in through the kitchen window to see if he could do it.

“Were you scared?” he asks me when I had found him in the kitchen. “I could have been a burglar.”

“No,” I say. “I knew it was you.”

I know he did not drop from the window; he came in from the front door and jumped over the wall.

Mark is ahead of me now as I walk to the back of the abandoned house. Suddenly a bird chirps a peculiar call (three rising notes four times) as Mark gets closer. He is probably getting close to the bird’s nest. Mark mimics her; she doesn’t relent.

I walk to the large blocks of thick-width cement that make a pathway further down. They are sturdy, surprisingly. Perhaps a week ago, when the weather was at sixty degrees, it would be a different story with loose, wetted soil.

I come close to this low-level tree, its trunk curved back to the ground as if holding some heavy weight. Mark says he wants to look at this tree, which I notice is covered by something similar to the winter creeper, but seems to grow out from its vines.

I notice further down a neighbor has a pile of wood, topped with a dull-colored Christmas tree; it’s underneath that worries me, as I see a black hole, where anything might live.

I am worried as Mark is not careful as he stomps around in his moccasins, breaking twigs and rustling leaves.

I notice soil underneath the debris of twigs and dead October leaves that are still green, just torn off by the wind from a storm. I pull more debris back; there are no bugs, just dirt. I am intrigued by how thin the layers of leaves are.

Days ago, a neighbor raked off the leaves from the lawn of the abandoned house, leaving clumps of grass underneath exposed. Within the next day, as the temperature dropped again, the soil hardened and the grass lost color.

“Here’s a scary thought for you,” Mark says from above me. “The window on the other side of this house is open. The window is cracked; you can fit your fingers underneath, maybe open the window.”

I am unsure of how to react to this.

“Do you think there are squatters in there?” he asks. “We should find out how much that home is.”

Mark picks up the brick near his feet. “Oh look,” he says. “A brick from Bridgeville.”

Before he drops it, I look at the writing on the side of it.

“C.P. Mayer / Brick Co / Bridgeville, PA”

I think about this, about tracing the history of this brick, but I am overwhelmed at this moment, at how we then walk up to look further at the house, how the door to its basement is gray-blue, peeling, and the doorknob is rusted over; how the electric wires in the cable box are plugged out; how it looks like there was a doorbell there, once.

“You’d think they had heaters in the basement to utilize heat,” Marks says. “And it looks like it has a better foundation than the place we’re in.”

I tell him I don’t know. I don’t know.

Week 8: About Humans in Cold

376 East, in Robinson Townsip, PA

Thursday night, when Mark and I are on our way to pick up a five-dollar movie at Walmart, his 1981 Volkswagon Rabbit starts making noise, metal rattling, and Mark pulls over on our drive. As I sit in the car, my heart panicking and racing, and my brain trying to figure out what I know about cars so I can try to help, I can see him open the front hood, pull at certain things, pull out this metal rod, then a cap, which he frowns when he looks at. He puts some liquid in and shuts the hood.

When we continue going, he rattles on and on about what could be the problem, terminology and words just coming out of his mouth. I can tell he is nervous from the way he speaks even more calmly than normal. I am silent.

We go to Walmart and pick up Stanley Kubrick’s Fullmetal Jacket. As we leave the self checkout, we pass a McDonald’s. I say how I wish they had a hot drink I could buy (they seem to be like Target and are quickly phasing the winter things out to in order make way for warmer-weather items). Mark says we should be fine. He states all the reasons why we should get home: the car did not rattle while we sat at a light, etc. etc.

Returning, we are on the highway for two minutes before the engine blows. 

In a creative nonfiction class with Lori Jakiela in undergraduate school, I learn that sometimes when in an essay, action that is dramatic, tense, occurs often the sentence structure reflects this, becomes short, choppy. Description becomes sparse. Action becomes the primary focus.

I think it is my first cohesive thought after the engine gives out on 376 East.

The engine sounds like a gunshot.

Loud. Quick. Then silence. No more rattling. 

With the engine dead, he pulls to the side, calls AAA. We then huddle in the car in the below-freezing weather. There is no heat. We are wrapped in Mark’s old work clothes and have to wait for two hours before a flatbed comes.

Sunday March 2nd, 11:38 a.m.

I notice how differently I feel about the cold as I stand out here, the snow from the mega-storm everyone has been talking about for the last week clumping onto my hair. The house looks more worn and compact than normal. I know I am cold—my legs, fingers, and nose ache—but I am also numb and don’t feel the panicked urgency I have to get warm immediately. I feel differently, but my capacity to feel is the same. It’s hard to describe.

My fingers are red. I have left my gloves somewhere, but I don’t have time to go searching for them. I want to capture this.

My boots are buried in the snow. The snow falls not in as great of clumps as it had last time; they are little specks of Pollock paint that, despite going in their own direction, nevertheless look overall like the same moving image, repeating, repeating.

Everything is not entirely coated yet. I still see the vines and winter creeper on the fallen trees, little blips of color.

While I was taking my shower earlier in the hour, I debated with myself on what to focus on this week: squirrels again, the history of the town of Crafton? I decide, despite running the risk of not going with the theme of Nature Writing, to talk about humans, about humans in the cold, about what happened to us that night when the engine blew.

The people who drive today take their time traveling in this weather and yet their tires are coated, and the body of their cars jerks back and forth no matter how hard they are trying to remain in control. I can see one white SUV-type of car go down the hill, how the person inside, a silhouette whose edges are muted and rounded by winter gear, tries to steady the wheel.

I am calm as the car passes. I know I am cold, but I don’t feel it anymore.

Mark is doing something to the other vehicle he has, the one he has to drive now: a 1983 Toyota Dolphin RV without the RV part now. It is bare in the back, no floor or anything, and the snow coats the outline of the body frame. 

Today, I have to take him in to work as there isn’t enough weight on the truck to get it out of the driveway.

Today, I will watch him in his thick work boots and think about the night his Rabbit died, how he wore cutoff jeans and moccasins, no socks. I think about how my feet, shoved in my improperly insulted boots, had gotten so cold they began twitching and pulsing in pain, further escalating my agony; how parts of my body began freezing, outlines of the pain so distinct that if I had feelings in my improperly insulted gloves, I could take a pen and draw along the edges of what was and wasn’t warm.

I think about how Mark experienced the same I did, with less clothes, and sat ramrod straight the first hour, keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror, waiting for the flatbed, counting all the ones that passed us by, did not stop.

Only one person stopped to see if we were okay. We told him we already called AAA. He got himself out of there quickly.

A day ago, Wednesday morning, I was able to pick up a morning shift at Target, a short shift that basically required me to take the mounds of clearanced napkins and paper plates and move them to the card section, to make room for the patio and outdoor furniture being assembled for display. As I piled designer napkins onto shelves and imagined someone filling their cart with all of these napkins I called my misery, my coworkers talked about weddings and wedding cakes. One manager talked about how his boyfriend, I presume, made a designer wedding cake that, despite several steps, one of which required overnight milk soaking of some kind, nevertheless was supposed to taste like store-bought cake.

The other manager talked about this one couple who wanted a HoBo wedding (Homeward Bound, I believe). I mistook her for saying a “hobo wedding” and joked about making garbage bag gloves and thrift-store fur trains. They laughed. I said, why would you want a hobo wedding? 

She said they thought it was cute.

I said I see hobos all the time on my drive to work. What are they going to do, locate it under the bridge? Won’t they have to fight for territory rights for prime space?

It’s true. I see a camp of homeless people nestled in garbage bags and old winter coats, all under one of the highway ramps. There are two people there; I only saw them once, during the single-digit temperatures we had weeks ago. I haven’t seen them since.

Despite my joking, I told Mark I felt bad for such people. He said, “Don’t. They’re probably like that because they can’t function in society, whatever their vice may be.”

I think of my mom last year, when my honors society went to Portland, OR, for a conference, and she joined us, how as we tried to figure out the public transportation systems, a homeless man came up to us and asked for money. We all claimed we had no change on us, and my mom pulled out a handful of gold dollars and gave them to him with the promise he would buy food with it.

“You sure, ma’am?” the man asked tentatively, his eyes steady on the gold but his legs shifting.

“I don’t need these stupid dollar coins,” she said. She dropped them into his shaking hands. “I don’t know why the machine gave them back to me like that. Now, go buy yourself food. No alcohol, promise me.”

“Of course, of course, thank you, ma’am,” he said, unsteadily holding the mound she gave.

“I’m serious,” she said sternly. My friends and I laughed. My professor looked nervous as she smiled along. “I’ll be watching you. If I see you going into that liquor store over there, I’ll hunt you down and take my money back.”

He giggled and promised, walked hurriedly along. My mom watched him before she lost sight of him.

“Did you know Portland is the city with the highest population of homeless people?” our professor said. “It’s one of the cleanest cities.”

A part of me felt like a fool after that.

I thought about how with this week, I had homeless people on my mind more often than I normally did, how as Mark and I walked to a restaurant, I said to him, “How do they do it? How do they survive the winter?”

“You get used to it,” he said. He was in his shorts again. He told me to watch out for glass and broken wooden planks as we crossed an empty, weed-filled lot.

“I could never do it,” I said.

“Think about it,” he said. “This temperature is too warm for some planets to function.” 

I was silent; I honestly could care less about other planets; I thought it was a shame they demoted Pluto from being a planet to something else less significant. That was it.

“Did I tell you,” Mark said as we continued walking, “about how the time I was a kid and my dad paid me to clear the homeless people from his work’s property? I would wander around, but I didn’t really see any one. I found a camp and threw some rocks at it from a safe distance, but there wasn’t anyone there. Except one day. I found a man; he saw me and screamed at me. I thought he was going to chase me. I ran back. I was terrified.”

He was staring ahead when I looked over at him. I don’t think the irony is lost on him that he just started his new job at that same facility, that same place he had to wander around to clear away people who weren’t supposed to be there.

But I don’t think he wants to talk about that. As I leave my mind, I realize I am still standing in the same spot in the snow. Mark is clearing the snow from my car. I think I could possibly stay out here forever and keep writing, keep listing all of these memories, events, moments I have that relate to this topic. I could go on. I look back at all I wrote so far and wonder if any of it is cohesive or simply a bunch of rambling. I wonder if I should just scrap it and start over again, focusing on squirrels or on the stillness of everything around me, everything but the snow and Mark as he moves around.

We are and aren’t nature. I am sure of it.

It isn’t much of an answer or a defense, but for now I think it’ll do.

Week 7

Crafton, PA

One early, early morning, around 2 a.m., Mark comes home from work and wakes me to say, shakily, it sounds outside as if a rabbit is being eaten. I don’t know what he means, and I am barely awake to process this and try to hear for myself. 

I say, “Oh,” and go back to sleep.

Last night around midnight, as we both lie down in bed to prepare for the busy day we have tomorrow, we hear a noise. It sounds like squealing, loud, high-energy. Immediately, I think, my god, something is being eaten.

I lie still, rooting myself to the spot on the blankets, envisioning—despite my best attempts not to—a skinny, winter-starved wolf-like creature clamping on the spine of an equally thin rabbit, the wolf’s head angrily swinging from side to side, hoping to disconnect the spine and get on with the meal but too ecstatic with the catch to actually feast.

Mark finally says, “What the hell is that?” and gets up to open the nearest window to us, one that faces the backyard where it sounds like the noise is coming from. It now sounds like piglets squealing and its mom snorting, digging its snout through dirt and branches.

I am confused, and Mark is, too. He suddenly barks, a low, deep ruff like a St. Bernard, and scares me, and scares whatever animals are out there, too. All is silent but my heart’s racing.

But after a minute, the noises resume like nothing. Mark barks again, and it is silent for a couple of seconds before the noise continues again, now undisturbed by the noise--perhaps familiar, used to the noise of other dogs, who at first sound like a threat but are nothing more than an annoying background noise.

Mark gets up to get a flashlight, buried somewhere in another room. After a minute, he returns with a tiny one, opens the window more, then opens the screen, and then shines the light outside.

At first we see nothing. I am convinced at this point it is a family of pigs a neighbor has; Mark whispers that he thinks it is animal with its neck snapped, whimpering and squealing in pain and agony, slowly, slowly dying. I say, no, it’s a family of pigs.

He points the light at the ground; there’s nothing there. I say, it’s further back, and Mark mistakes what I mean and points it at the trees.

“Look!” he says. “See?”

All I see is a small blob of yellow light shining back at us, two eyes probably (I don’t have my glasses on or my contacts in at this point), and when Mark points the light a little further right, there are two distinct lights shining back, lights that move up the tree.

As the pig noises continue (I still have no idea what they were), the larger of the two sets of eyes disappears as the smaller goes further up the tree. Mark shines the light at the ground, he having never missed where the animals went, and we watch as the bulk of a cat, its ears pointed backwards, slinks quickly and unhappily away. 

Mark points the light back at the tree. The squirrel, I firmly believe it is, is gone.

February 22nd, 9:50 a.m.

It is 9:50 a.m., and I don’t want to be awake. Mark has gone to work hours before at his new job, started less than three days ago, and I am up after a night of writing a paper, one I forgot about.

I am starting to feel like it’s obvious to everyone to me that my life is chaotic, a mess I have let fester in the winter, one started ever since I moved back in July. My prized collection of CDs, the majority all work by Tori Amos, my emotional and lyrical comfort, is strewn all over the front and back seats of my car, some without cases, some now with cracked cases. (Whenever I park in an area that is less than safe, I joke with my friends, “Oh, no, somebody better not break in and take my entire collection of Tori Amos CDs. My precious!”) Sometimes I look at my backseat as I am backing out of a parking space at work and see them and sigh.

I just don’t care enough right now to pick it up and bring it inside before it gets even more damaged.

Weeks ago, when I offered to give a ride to my classmates in my publishing class to go meet with a printing place, I was embarrassed by the state of my car and spent several minutes grabbing garbage by the clumps and throwing it in my trunk.

“Whoa,” one of the girls said jokingly. “Driving Miss Daisy much?”

I’ve also been having trouble perfectly adjusting my rearview mirror. It feels as if every time I look up to see if a car is behind me, I have to adjust the mirror.

I am tired, and I need the free wifi from the McDonalds down the road in order to email my paper in. I am not happy with the work I’ve done so far for school, but I am desperate to sleep before I have to go into work tonight, so I unlock my car door, computer unsafely in my hand, and put one leg inside.

A branch snaps, and I turn my head. There is a deer, startled, at the bottom of the hill. She stares at me as I try to get into my car. I am startled, too, and we both stare at each other.

Her eyes are large and black, her legs apart, and I am amazed at how we both seem to be equally startled and afraid.

But I lose my fear quickly, as I have encountered deer quite up close before, and reach inside for the phone I hastily threw on the passenger seat. I quickly get a picture, but at this point, she has shifted her stance and looks ready for flight.

I focus the camera on my phone and take a couple of steps around the thrown-open car door window and closer to her. She keeps jerking her head toward her left, as if unsure of whether to run or keep staring. 

She keeps staring as i slowly walk forward, pull my hood down (thinking it was freezing when in reality it is quite warm, at 43 degrees). As I take pictures, I think maybe she will not be afraid of me if she sees I have hair, I am good, I am human; I think, feeling stupid, maybe she will recognize me.

But at this point I have gotten too close. She is scared and jostles away, her white tail in the air (I have been told it is a defense mechanism for deer, that if you can see the white fur, the other deer nearby can see it and know there is danger nearby), and I see there are two other deer with her, having effortlessly blended in with the surrounding. I think, it feels like October, before the chill comes, and yet they all dart away.

There are many things on my mind as they disappear into the brown of the surroundings. I think of the deer I saw when I visited my family in New York weeks ago—how they were quite fluffy, the young ones still growing, not having matched the size of their mothers, more fluffy than I’ve ever seen deer before.

I think of the deer my mother found wondering the neighbor; it had a bright red Doritos bag stuck on its face. After calling Animal Control several times, she patiently followed the doe as she stumbled along grass and twigs. A cop eventually showed up, stopping at my mother’s insistent waving, and he tentatively walked up to the deer and, reaching out, snatched the bag from her face. The doe, blinking several times, licked her lips and slowly made her way back into the forest. My mother talked to the man for several moments after; he said how terrified he was to approach the deer, fearing she would panic at his making noise so near to her and start kicking hooves like crazy. He was amazed at how calm she was.

I think of high school, needing to wake up at 5:30 a.m. every weekday to catch the bus by 6:30 a.m., how it was pitch black in the mountains, how one day as I was walking along the curve of the road, a hoard of deer, twenty does led by a buck, quickly crossed the road where I had not seconds ago walked across. I continued walking, more briskly, terrified as I realized how enormous they were, how sinewy and yet bulky the muscles under their fur were, how pitch black and large their eyes were. None of them stop on their crossing; they keep going, heads forward, never acknowledging me.

I think of a poem I read while I was doing research for my paper. I was disappointed to see the winner of Calyx magazine’s Lois Cranston Memorial Prize: “Crane Woman” by Mercedes O’Leary. 

I thought, how typical: there is a female crane; she is beautiful but aggressive.

Then there is a dream of being the crane woman.

Then the crane woman comes and wants something of the author, who cannot give. 

She turns the crane woman down. She discovers something about herself.

But as I looked at this deer here in Crafton, I feel desperate to make a connection with her, make her want to come closer and not be afraid. But why? 

I don’t understand, but I decide maybe I’ll dream about it one night. Maybe then I’ll understand. And write a poem.

Maybe one day.

Week 6

1:19 pm Sunday the 16th

There is a wave, the anchorman said on Channel 11 News (“the bad news,” he called it; the anchor lady next to him, dressed in a purple dress with abstract white and black lines crisscrossing around her chest, says, “Yes, give us the bad news first”; I don’t remember them giving the ‘good’ news afterwards). There is a wave, he said, of snow for those of you who can’t stand snow—but it’s just fluff, about an inch, don’t worry—”

The snow consists of large flakes, so large I can see the lines of the crisscrossing frozen water. They all look the same to me, even as I sat in my car earlier, trying to take a picture of how large they are. I brush the large cottony blobs of broken snowflake arms and tinier broken pieces crushed into tiny balls like dotted ice cream, the Dippin Dots kind they used to only sell at  amusement parks.

The snow falls on my paper, creating blobs of water that soaks into the paper, blob stains now that when my pen goes over, creates a watercolor effect of black bleeding.

My feet are cold again (I can feel the cold radiating off of my crappy boots), and I notice that all is quiet besides the cars that go by—so quiet I think of the squirrels, small-sized rodents that everyday, despite my refusal and stubbornness, remind me more and more of my lady rats.

When I visited an old college roommate who lives in Elk county, a tourist trap now she made it seem like for those who like the idea of getting away to place with no service, we went to an Elk center, into a room full of animal skulls and bones. There I saw a squirrel skull, large yet looking tiny and delicate and thin of bone—but the teeth. I stared at the teeth, stained orange-yellow just like my rats; I remember them fondly lifting their heads up, noses first to sniff for food, and I’d see their teeth, exposed since their lips don’t close all the way, two large incisors orange. Since rodent teeth are constantly growing, rats and squirrels and other rodents must keep gnawing—wood, nuts, bark, antlers, anything—to maintain them properly.

I think of my old roommate now, how she loved the rats and would baby-talk them and feed them—I think of how Mark, when building his new living room coffee table from an old restaurant table top and large, thick beams of Home Depot wood (“Did you see that Jesus was here?” he said when I walked in one morning to see the beams resting on the couch), how he built his table and then took the net from his old RV and made a hammock for the rats under the table, then putting in a water bottle and a tea cup to store food in.

My mind races here in the cold where it feels like nothing is going on, yet I am hypersensitive to my surroundings. The cars race, tires mushing through the slush, down the hill, and my car is running, humming, and Mark is shoveling snow from behind my tires (nearly everyday this week I have gotten stuck in my parking spot). He asks me where this black electrical tape patching a piece has come from.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Your uncle? It wasn’t here yesterday.”

“I don’t know.”

I think again of the squirrels, my cold feet, and I wonder where these rodents are in this cold. Where do they go? Do they each designate a tree hole or a good clump of branches? Are they warm where they are? How warm? Do they huddle together even if they can’t stand each other? Do they sleep all day?

I’d like to sleep all day, wrapped in fur. I look at my rats sometimes and see them bundled together, nearly all day every day, sleeping the day away—every so often one will break from the pack and sit curled at the top level, simply there to get away from the others.

Mark is holding onto his shovel, dragging it behind him as he goes up to the abandoned house and looks through the first floor side window.

“Can you see in there?” he asks. “Have you seen in there yet?”

“Yes,” I say, partially telling the truth. I have looked up to the second story recently and saw it looks like someone left a refrigerator door open. And another night on my way from my car to his place, I thought I saw snow foot prints coming from the front door. But not going in.

“It doesn’t look that bad,” he said. “It looks like they were halfway through a remodel. See? The wall in the kitchen is blown out (mine would probably look nice if that was done). Looks like someone might of given up, or maybe my landlord did buy the place and start remodeling it and just lied to me.”

He walks away, saying all of these things it seems like at once, then stands next to me.

“I think it would be nice to find a place and fix it up, get a mortgage, and not have to pay rent.”

“Well,” I say, never letting my pen pause on the page, trying to write everything he says down. “If your landlord ever bought the place, you can see if he’ll let you move into the place and have you fix everything for a couple month’s rent free.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

We decide, since my family has come out for the weekend, to drive his car instead to meet them. Everything is quiet except for Mark as he drags the shovel behind me to create a path in the snow for me.

Week 5

Chester, NY, was the first place I moved away from what I considered my home in New Jersey. It was deeper in the mountains than I realized at the time, a place nevertheless populated with developments that were spaced out just enough, a place ideal for people who want to be close enough to others without needing to ever interact with them. Needless to say, my dad was content with the place; my mother wasn’t.

It was here in this house on a hill, tremendous boulders jutting from the side where vultures, I have been told, stand on and sun their enormous wing span, here where I met the brutal face of winter and enjoyed it.

In New Jersey, it was a kid’s miracle to get snow more than an inch in the winter; here, in New York, it was a daily occurrence from late October to late February. I loved it then, bundling in layers (and reluctantly more layers while my mom made me), and playing by myself on the side of the house; sometimes I’d take my dog, whose leash often effortlessly slipped from my mittens, and yet who enjoyed me and licked the snow off my face when she wasn’t lapping the melting snow off her black nose.

I would trudge up the tiny hill with my plastic pink sled, panting and rewarding myself by eating snow when I got to the top, and then I would tumble down the hill again, a process repeated over and over until it was time for dinner. 

I liked it when my dog was with me, bouncing through the snow and exhausting all the pent-up energy everyone else in the house resented her for having; but simultaneously, I didn’t want her with me: as soon as a squirrel made any move in a mile radius, she would notice and bound off, leaving me too exhausted from playing to chase after her.

It is the one solid memory I have of the place: my being alone at the bottom of the hill, my calling out to her, my realization how huge my backyard was, full of snow I indented, and still an isolated area, parts my feet will not touch. 

12:04 am, Saturday, February 8th

I have timed this quite poorly.

Desperate to get more hours at work at Target, I agreed to take some shifts only to leave myself no time to do my twenty minutes of observing. So I resign myself to the fact that I will have to use some of my sleeping time to do so.

I’m curled into my winter coat in my car, every now and again turning on the engine so the lights will come on and illuminate the dark. However, it is not pitch black. But it is eerie at night, especially in winter since there is snow on the ground and I can see the spaces between the trees. Despite how I feel I can see better with the snow on the ground, better highlighting the trees and whatever else in out there, I am more nervous and apprehensive and expect a creature, two beady eyes of light, to stare at me from far away only to creep closer and closer.

It is lightly flurrying out. With my car lights on, the snowflakes look more like flashing lines of light than the compact, uniquely designed specks of frozen water you see when you google “snowflake.”

I decide I can’t keep quiet in my car; I can see the look Mark would give me (he is working a closing shift at his job) if I told him what I did, how I stayed snug and secure in my car and did not simply stick it out like I am sure many, if not all, of my other classmates do. I feel guilty and open the car door.

Last Monday, while I was working, I decided enough was enough: I was done hiding and remaining unwilling to answer the phones or call boxes, I was afraid of the apprehension I was going to be fired because I was doing said hiding. I forced myself to answer the phone calls that go on throughout the day, customers on the other end of the line expecting to know if this particular brand of microwave is on sale and do we have any in stock? Are we carrying the Target-exclusive chocolate-covered Lays potato chips, how many do we have left, and where are they located in the store? (I don’t have the heart to tell the people asking for the later that it is the equivalent of a snack-sized potato chip bag that runs around a dollar; the Lays are $3.45.)

I try to avoid such calls as I feel like people can simply do their own research online and come into the store themselves. And I also feel that when I pick up the phone, I can never tell when the line is connecting and when it has already connected. I hate wasting my polite introduction script on air only to have to repeat it again with the same sincerity.

But last Monday, I decided to be a team player. I grabbed the bright red phone near the produce section, dialed the appropriate extension, and waited for the line to connect.

Suddenly I heard, “Target of East Liberty, how can I help you?”

Somehow the call had reconnected to the store operator, and as the seconds ticked away while I processed this, I heard again, “Hello?”

I panicked, felt frozen, unable to move my mouth and say what had happened and wasn’t it ridiculous but funny how the phones often were temperamental?

“Hello?”

But I couldn’t. Carefully, afraid he could hear my breathing, the rustle of my red shirt, I hung up the phone.

I am outside my car now. The snow has an icy hardened outside layer that I normally (or at least normally now for the week) and purposefully slam my feet into on the way to Mark’s apartment. The sound the ice and snow make against my sneakers sounds like the keys that jingle in my hand as I get them out of my pocket.

I hear a branch creak, high above in the trees, then another, farther away. I think it’s squirrels, restless, but I can’t recall if squirrels are nocturnal or perhaps so cold they cannot simply crawl into a tree hole and sleep.

The sky, if I stare at it hard enough, looks like a reddish dark gray.

I hear more branches creak. I am very still; I can hear the apartments here, how the space they take up in a sense vibrate with the sounds I image are of heaters working and pipes pumping. Despite this, there is much rustling in these trees. I can hear the distant car pass along roads miles away.

I am cold now and still slightly terrified, thinking of the raccoon I nearly ran my car into a couple of weeks ago. I decide to go inside, as it has been precisely twenty minutes. As I reach one food out and make noise, an icy crinkle, I feel like J. Alfred Prufrock, asking no one in particular: do I dare disturb the universe?

I nearly slip several times on the way inside and am glad that it is half past midnight and that for the mean time I have no friends with me; I can be content with the idea that nobody saw that.

Week 4

Mark feeding cheese rinds to my rats. The dumbo (bottom) is Constance Chatterley. The top (with the darker brown fur) is Charlotte Bronte. You can see Jane Austen's tail near the blue- and green-colored rope.

Whenever I tell people I own rats—more often than not reluctantly, as I know the reaction is going to be one of disgust—normally the second thing I am told (after the first, which normally is a question like why rats?) is I would fit perfectly in New York City.

I have never seen a wild rat, an undomesticated one. I have three domesticated pet rats, each covered predominately in white fur. Wild rats are normally larger, browner, and they live only half of the lifespan of a lab rat. Nevertheless, a rat is a rat to people. Either is a pest and filthy.

On our recent New York City trip, when Mark and I descended the stairs leading to the subway, Mark’s friend Bryan says, “So I heard you like rats. There’s plenty down here.”

In the subway station, Mark and I obediently stand behind the yellow line (a way to avoid falling over and being hit by a train; ‘don’t be a statistic!’ a sign will say on the subway car). Bryan is blending in with the other city residents and peering dangerously around the tunnel corners looking for the car lights, and I can’t help but look down to the subway railings littered with garbage.

“Where are the rats?” I ask, trying to get as close as I can to the edge without crossing over the yellow line. Mark holds onto my hand tightly and has to keep yanking me back.

“Down there, normally,” Bryan says nonchalantly. He glances over the grime below. “See? There’s one right there.”

I am excited and stare hard, willing any street vermin nearby to make a sudden recognizable movement. But I don’t see anything. They blend in well, and I don’t blame them for learning to be sneaky: people are not kind.

A subway car, its screech of breaks and rush of wind echoing and stunning our ears, quickly goes by. The debris below flutters. I am amazed and try again to look for rats, but still can’t find anything.

How can any creature tolerate such threat and noise? Rats have sensitive hearing, a sense heightened because of their poor eye sight (albinos have even worse eyesight), and they have very sensitive tails, which are not only for balance but also temperature control. I can’t imagine being such a creature, scrounging around thrown-away McDonalds, dodging thrown Mountain Dew bottles, scarfing down food as subway cars fly above you. One false move and either its your toe, you tail, or your life.

On our way from Brooklyn to Manhattan, we wait for a subway car near an office, the West 4th Street Supervisory Tower, where people actually sit and, presumably, monitor the subway cars. I look around me; we are nearly two stories below ground, and this place is filthy, filthy enough and maintained as such for rats to be fed, plump and happy (as I’ve been told the rats here in New York City are quite large). I can’t imagine using the transportation system occasionally, let alone working down here daily.

West 4th Street Supervisory Tower. I don't know if I was allowed to take a picture of it. But they didn't stop me, so...

Needless to say, I am horrified by this but also disappointed I don’t get to see any rats.

Later in the day, as we journey back to Bryan’s place, the subway car stops long enough for me to see a sign that reassures me that “CAUTION: This area has been baited with rodenticide.”

I am equally horrified by this effortless killing of animals deemed pests, by chemicals no less, until I notice the date on the bottom of the sign: 11-9-01.

January 1st, 3:10 p.m.

It’s another gloomy Pittsburgh day. It doesn’t help that it’s the first day of February. While I was attending Pitt-Greensburg for my undergraduate studies, I dreaded this month, trudged through it and saw no end in sight to the cloudy days, wet snow that clung to the grass and just refused to melt and simply go away, and the need to keep on my jacket even while inside. 

It is a permeating cold, and I just want to will it away.

Despite the fact that the arctic cold has left us and the weather is somewhere in the fifties, I nevertheless feel cold again. 

Mark asks me earlier this morning if I’m okay. I tell him I feel like shit.

“Shit as in sick, or shit as in depressed?” He looks at me concerned, and I tell him my throat feels horrible. Now that I am outside, I think my answer would be ‘shit as in depressed.’

Inside the apartment, it is cold—62 degrees to be exact. Mark asks me to keep the temperature at that.

“I’m poor,” he says when I pout. “And the heat vent downstairs has fallen off. Ian told me this happened before. It’s cause the landlord used wood screws for the stone wall and stone screws for the wood.”

He makes it sound like it’s obviously a bad choice. I don’t get it, don’t know why each screw is different. After a trip with Mark to Home Depot in which I opened and closed every drawer with little plastic baggies of different screws, I decided I wasn’t ever going to get it.

I am outside now; my car says it’s 54 degrees, but it feels much warmer. Even in my winter coat with no gloves and only one pair of socks on. Mark has left for work ten minutes ago, saying as he walks to his car, “It feels like spring! You should come outside.”

And it does, even as I sit in the shade of this house, my boots having collapsed through the still white slush of snow. But I don’t move them, let them nestle there in the cold. Just as I sit down on the concrete tire blocker, I see a squirrel, huge and fat, his fur more red than grey. He dances across one of the fallen trees quite calmly. Maybe he is dancing for spring, for the warm weather. Maybe he isn’t a he and is really a girl.

I hear a cough and turn to see four professionally dressed cyclists, heads down and flanks off of their seats, glide up the hill. It reminds me of my dad, how he woke up at five every morning to cycle for two hours before he’d have to come home and get ready for work. It also reminds me of the Pitt cycling uniform my mom got him once in honor of me. He never wore it.

I feel as if there is movement out of the corner of my eye, yet there is nothing when I turn my head.

I hear many more birds—it’s actually overwhelming how many birds I hear, many sounding shrill and high-pitched like chicks—and hear the wet slop of snow melting off of things, houses, trees.

I see another squirrel. This one is grey, quite tiny, his fur put together a little more compactly compared to the first one I saw. He tries to leap half-heartedly from the ground onto a fallen tree trunk but misses, his paws instead on the edge. He stands there, doesn’t seem embarrassed by the miscalculation.

He hops fully onto the log and disappears before I then see him climbing, hugging it seems, another tree. He is perched now, near the top, his head turning, then still. His tail hangs off of the branch he is on.

I see what looks like a tiny magpie without the plumage—tiny, tiny, grey and black. Then more birds dive across the air; they look like little specks.

The largest of the trees I now can see has dark outside rungs against a lighter bark; it might be a birch of some kind, but it’s hard to tell because of all the hairy vines. The next largest tree looks like an oak of some kind with thick vertical cascades of bark.

I hear the squirrel as he climbs across a rickety branch, chasing playfully another squirrel, who moves through the winter creeper leaves in no hurry, then to another branch, and then gone from my sight. I can still hear the squirrels, am amazed how they hurl themselves across branches—I wonder what it’s like to effortlessly go through the trees.

A car pulls up where I’m sitting; it’s the middle-house neighbor.

“Hello,” I say as he slides out of his car without any jacket on, wearing a bright green t-shirt.

“How you doing,” was his reply, almost as if he didn’t care enough to form it into a question.

I feel like a dork now. 

I see a squirrel far off dig into the snow, chew on something with his two front paws, then run up a tree.

It has gotten warm enough for most of the snow to melt, leaving way for the ivy to bounce up again. I can hear the ivy scrape against the trees, its leaves a deep reddish brown with light green veins. I can see the leaves that died and fell in October. They have all flattened and melt into each other like a blanket. (The winter creeper’s leaves are a consistent green, even in the previous arctic chill.)

There are no hints of the animal tracks I found last week, as the tires from my car and the warming temperature have obliterated most of them. Thank goodness I took pictures.

The animal tracks I have found nearly all show a migration from one side of the road to the other. Nearly three deer (I am guesstimating here, as I honestly couldn’t tell how many there really were) crossed from the other side of the road, which I forgot to mention is quite a busy bend many go past the 30 m.p.h. limit. At the time I found these tracks (Tuesday or so), the snow was still thick on the ground, so I had to peer into the holes to see the two hoof marks.

There were wide arches, scraps against the snow from the deer having to lift and swing their legs around the height of the snow only to fall into it again. 

The other two tracks I found, the first from weeks ago, make the same journey from the woods at the bottom of the backyard of the abandoned house up, hugging the house and the ivy attached to it, to the driveway to disappear across the street. 

The first set of tracks occurred overnight while it had flurried (they weren’t there the night I drove there and appeared in the morning while I was getting ready to leave for work), so I was able to see a nice outline of the five plush toes and wide heel of the paw. It resembles a cat’s paw in a way.

Skunk prints! In the bottom-most print, the left one is the back leg (because it's larger and has that scrape to it in the back).

Deer tracks

Raccoon prints

From the nocturnal nature of the animal with the print, I immediately assumed it was a raccoon, yet it was strange how the paws were: two lined up equally at an equal distance, like someone had lifted the animal up and left clean prints every so many inches.

After much Internet exploring, I found that the tracks were from a skunk, the black bodied kind with the white stripe. Yet it didn’t make sense how the prints were so neatly in pairs. But it wasn’t until I looked closer at the picture that I realized one paw, alternating every print, was larger than the other, suggesting a back leg rather than two front ones. Mystery solved.

The other set of prints I noticed from this week were most definitely a raccoon’s: long, thin heel and four little fingers in the front that climbed quickly up the hill to rest on the cement block only to then race across the road.

I look at the disintegrating snow where these prints were clearly marked earlier in the week. My feet are too cold for me to ignore now. I go back inside Mark’s apartment but not before I linger around and try to find any dry place to sit and any excuse to stay out longer.