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.