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.

Week 3

I’ve had mixed feelings about New York City ever since I was a young Girl Scout making my first trip by boat to circle the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was beautiful, magnificent, large, and simply awe-inspiring from a distance. On an island stuffed with so many people with ‘places to go and people to see,’ how could it not be a great place for learning and exploring?

Yet whenever I step onto the street outside of Penn Station or whatever parking garage my mom chose, I was horrified: filth, grime, fossilized flattened gum, spit, wrappers, gloves—whatever debris you could think of—it was there. And the people were even more terrifying: the ‘normal’ people with coffee mugs in hand and heels and briefcases and simply no time to make eye contact; and the dirty, possibly homeless people, covered in layers and layers of clothes, who did make eye contact and made you feel just as scummy, just as abandoned and cold.

Overall, my fear won out over my fascination with the city. I often wanted nothing to do with the place, and when I did go, I clung to my mother’s coat for dear life, fighting the wave of people who seemed desperate to elbow me and shake me loose. I could never figure out what they wanted from me. Should I curl up further and take up less space? Should I cling tighter? Should I shove back and hope my mother walks fast enough for me to avoid any retaliation?

Or should I let go and figure it out on my own?

January 28th 10:35am

When Mark and I drove in from New York around 4am, it was negative three degrees. He said he wasn’t going to bother at that point with bringing anything in from the car, so I clung to my purse and toiletry bag (Mark changed his mind and brought in the pillow and blanket I brought along) as we trudged to his apartment from the car.

I wasn’t thinking about nature. At that point, I didn’t care about nature. It was being a dumb little bitch, throwing this arctic-vortex-freezing-cold-whatever-may-have-you temper tantrum, and quite frankly, I was done with all of it.

But I woke myself up early this morning. I left Mark to sleep and creeped to the outside window, craning my neck to see the backyard of the abandoned house. It looks the same as how I left it on Thursday morning, I with the intent on being a good student and getting my work done before my trip. All I wrote for the five minutes I was out there was “freezing cold. no animals. snow.”

I wonder as I sit near the heat-blasting vent if I should even pretend I went outside. I am desperate to avoid going outside at any cost, so I decide there’s no point in hiding it: today I observe my nature from the security of a warm inside. It’s probably zero degrees right now. Surely my instructor can understand that.

I hope.

I decide to finally identify the vine that is covering the majority of the trees outside. After searching desperately through the internet, I find a forum dedicated to this type of plant identifying. A woman is desperate to find out what is plaguing the trees in her backyard, and after scrolling down to avoid the backstory, I find what I am looking for: winter creeper.

It is a perennial and an invasive parasitic vine native to east Asia with a thick, hairy base that attaches itself to trees (sometimes even overtopping them) and with leaves and flowers—“small greenish” ones, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation; I’ve never seen them before—and spreads by the well-meaning birds. At least, I think they are well-meaning.

It is tolerant to nearly everything natural: harsh conditions, shade, sun, except “extremely wet conditions.” (Nearly everything quoted in here is from the website of the Missouri Department of Conservation). While it apparently “occurs infrequently” throughout the United States, when it is present, it is “very aggressive,” growing rapidly and stealing the nutrients and sun from other plants and trees. Because it is so awful to the surrounding environs, the “most effective control is to totally eradicate the species [….] Invading individuals should be pulled and removed as soon as possible after recognition.” 

I think to myself that is quite a harsh reaction. I wonder if I should let Mark know. He has already taken it upon himself to unclog the basement sink and replace the lint trap of the washing machine. Perhaps his landlord, once informed of this, will be willing to negotiate something with him for the removal of the winter creeper. Although the last time I attempted to enlist his service, it was to get him to help my father put a french drain into the backyard—for a fee, of course—and I don’t believe he was too happy about it.

“I used to do french drains all the time,” he said. “As soon as I was able to carry a backpack, daddy bought me one of those backpack leaf blowers.”

I soon afterward dropped the subject.

I can see from the window that, of the leaves that survived, it is the kind I found on the internet: nearly oval, with a point on the end, flat and dark green. I look at the fallen trees, slumped across the yard, covered in jutting and hairy branches, bark covered by a tangle of the winter creeper, now as dead as the tree itself.

The winter creeper (a.k.a. Euonymus fortunei) was named after Robert Fortune, who worked for the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh and, after the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, was tasked with collecting the various plants of China. As one can assume, the Treaty of Nanjing was simply the first of many British treaties in which China was exploited. While the treaty did end the Opium War, it did not end British attempt to continue its reach further east. Years later, Fortune, under the blessing of the British East India Company, went back to China disguised as a Chinese merchant and was able to successfully transport tea to India; one cannot forget the fact that it was, of course, declared illegal by the Chinese government for Fortune to have bought the tea plants. (All of the above information on Fortune can be found on Wikipedia.)

In “The Signing of the Treaty of Nanjing” painting, only one man looks, as I can tell from my small computerized preview, to be from China; the rest are nearly all clean-shaved, military-uniform-wearing white men, their heads lined in a row, each indistinguishable from the other. 

I look at the clump of ivy choking the trees outside and then think of the axe my father used to cut the thick hairy vine that permeated our backyard trees in both New Jersey and New York. I think of my lame attempt, oblivious to the plant’s history, to put these ideas into a poem. The first version, titled “Scars,” went like this:

Thick scar wrapped around his knee, 

a different color of skin, 

smooth with its own wrinkles

like the parasite on the tree,

vine-like how it clutches the trunk and hauls itself

further up towards the light.

Axe in hand, he’d swing at the bottom, 

near the soil, panting, desperate 

to keep it from scarring the bark.

My poetry mentor at the time said of this poem, “I know what you mean about scars having their own wrinkles and how the parasite it like the scar, but no—this isn’t fully realized, not finished yet. Give it some time—don’t edit it right now—and then try again.”

So I, embarrassed and frustrated by this attempt to write about nature, let it rot in the depths of my computer files. I think about it randomly, but I don’t feel ready just yet to try to write about it again.

I think, maybe the next time I stumble upon it I will be ready. But not right now. Not right now. I need time to clutch on before I feel ready to let go.

Week 2

The Jersey Shore. A term never used before the hit TV show “The Jersey Shore,” full of a cast that mostly hail from Long Island. When someone says, “I’d love to go to the Jersey Shore,” I get cranky. “It’s called ‘the beach,’” I say. “Don’t be such a Benny.” 

(A Benny is an acronym for obnoxious tourists from Bayonne, Elizabeth, New York, and those near such northern areas. When I was eleven, we moved to New York, but I refused to believe I was no longer from the beach.)

As far as I was concerned, Bennys, however obnoxious and prone to cut you off, visited paradise; I lived it.

I like to think I grew up exclusively on the sand and not thirty minutes from Island Beach State Park. My mom and I swatted the green biting beach flies and scrubbed our skin in the public beach showers, scrubbed with our fingernails the black particles of sand that clung on the hardest. I collected beach glass and scallops (not the large clam shells that are remarkable only for their size and ability to survive, compared to other, more beautiful shells).

My freshman year of college was difficult for me because I felt so alone and away from people who cared about me. I think the saddest moments were when I’d walk to my College Composition I class and, passing over the bridge over the creek protected by the state, I’d mistakenly think I could smell low tide. While not the most pleasant of smells, it was welcoming, and I was simultaneously afraid of breathing in air that did not smell like it anymore and of missing any more of the scent. 

It wouldn’t be there when I took another breath.

January 18th 12:35pm

I am trying to think warm thoughts as prepare to go outside. I put on the only pair of long, over-the-knee socks I have left.

“Do you want to climb out the window?” Mark asks.

He is already dressed; he has his hat, gray sweatshirt stained with slashes of red paint, cut-off-at-the-knee pants, pull-up socks, and moccasins. I have only my “post-fall but not quite winter weather yet” jacket. I anticipate the freeze, especially since I lost the most expensive pair of gloves I owned, costing me $22.00.

I tell him, no, not particularly, but if he’d like to do so, he was more than welcome.

“Then do you want to go out the front door or the bottom basement door?”

“Door in the basement, please.”

I am trying to be more adventurous, so I follow him to the basement, where he first inspects all the cracks in the walls. Pen in hand, I follow and focus on a webbed spider hole in the crack in the window. I linger and remember how I would pass by bushes, especially after rain, and look for such holes, the large, crouched spiders within. This particularly hole looks abandoned; its webs are covered in dust and plaster shavings.

We go outside, Mark already stomping through ice-crusted and snow-covered ivy. I can hear a distant neighbor’s TV, the vibrations and echo of the sound. I wonder if he even realizes how obnoxious it is.

There are sticks instead of bushes coming out of the ground, and I follow Mark as he pulls out his Tao Te Ching pocket book and sits down on the concrete steps that lead from the slab that divides his place from the neighbor’s.

I notice a green-painted iron railing that might have been for steps that would have gone further down. They leads my eyes to the large tree that has fallen parallel to the road. 

It is enormous. It looks like it has been cut, and yet at the end, there is rotting on the inside where I stare and see ivy has manifested in there as well. There are also unidentifiable bushes—or, more accurately, sticks that were bushes in the summer—that curve protectively over this dead tree. It’s remarkable to me how they are so thin yet they bend so firmly, unmoving, without any snow on them.

I suddenly feel conscious of where I am standing. I don’t know if we’re allowed back here, so I stay still and wait for someone to tell me to get off immediately. I look back at Mark; he is standing on the fallen tree and whistling at the trees, perhaps hoping to conjure interest for animals to take. The only reply he receives is the scraping off of ice from a nearby car.

I see a lone squirrel jump his run in the distant, but he is oblivious of us. I wonder if it’s true that squirrels don’t retrieve half of the nuts they bury.

Mark jumps off of the tree and walks up the lame set of concrete stairs towards me.

“Do you see that paw print?” he asks, pointing to a lone print in the snow, small and indistinct. “Is that a raccoon?”

I scowl at this. I wonder if one of the reasons he asks is an attempt to get a rise out of me. I hate raccoons. 

It all started when I was five and so easily taken advantage of by my mother and father, who one night decided to tease my narcissism and say, “Miss Kate, there was a raccoon last night who came up to the backdoor, knocked politely, and asked if you were there. But we had to tell him you went to bed, and he was very sad.” Naturally, I went around and told my kindergarden classmates and my teachers. Years later, I was told this never happened, and I was quite angry at them, embarrassed I was not told before I then told the world how special I was.

And it started again one night two weeks ago when I came to Mark’s apartment from work. As I pulled into the abandoned parking space, a giant raccoon raced into my view, darting from across the road and pausing near the door I had to get to.

Terrified, I called Mark.

“There’s a big fat raccoon outside!” I squealed. “He’s, like, huge! Can you come outside? I’m afraid he’s going to claw my face off.”

Yet simultaneously, I was impatient. I quickly grabbed my purse and started shuffling across the pavement, clutching my possessions to my chest and holding my phone out in front of me, the lame light shining on snow. As Mark searched, as he told me later, for an appropriate weapon, I thought I saw the raccoon and nearly fainted. Mark came to the door with a wooden spoon. It was just a bush.

Trying to forget this moment, I ignore the paw print in front of me and look above and try to catalogue the three distinct bird sounds. The nearest-sounding one, coming from the largest tree, is a constant, high-pitched chirp; then there is one that is a distinctly rhythmic three beat; the third one has stopped. I’ve lost it.

As Mark sits down again with his Tao, I slowly walk through further ivy and snow.

Looking down, I see that the largest tree is covered in a hairy vine, the kind my father used to hack away at with an axe.

When I asked him why was he doing that, he’d grunt, “No good for the tree.”

I look around and notice that all of the large trees, and some of the young ones—probably not even twenty years old yet almost as tall—are as well. The young ones that are not burdened by the weight of the ivy sway in the light wind, almost, I think poetically, rocking themselves to sleep. Some of the younger trees nearby still have dead orange-brown shrilled leaves hanging on, each one swaying at its own accord, jerky, twitchy; some leaves sway with the branch they are attached to, and others move on their own, still trying to wiggle off, independent of the tree itself.

I can’t feel my fingers now. Half of the time my pen works. I look up at the abandoned house and the windows on the top floor that are encrusted with ice even as they sit in the sun. I am jealous of Mark in his hoodie sitting on snow-covered concrete.

I walk back towards him and notice that someone has hacked at a thick pice of the vine near the house, but there are baby vines that slowly seem to crawl up towards the windows. Its leaves are black against itself, I notice, but against another object, I can better see the green.

“When the wind stops blowing,” Mark says, “do you notice how neutral it becomes?”

He’s talking about how cold it is, how I’ve complained several times about how I can’t feel my fingers. I tell him I’m done, and I walk back to the basement door without waiting for him. 

Inside the warmth of the apartment, he says, almost as if continuing the conversation I wanted left outside.

“What about Mr. Raccoon? Doesn’t he get as cold as you? His feet are smaller.”

“But he’s fat and has fur. I can’t help him anyway.”

“Well, who says you have to?”

I pause at this, but the tingling in my red fingers, signaling the blood trying to pump back through, is distracting. I look out at the backyard from the kitchen window. Mark says he thinks it’s supposed to reach zero again this Tuesday.

“Do you think all the birds die if they come up from migrating too early? I’ve been hearing a lot more lately. Do you think they’re going to die?”

I say, “Well, I used to hear some when it was snowing bad out like two weeks ago.”

“But what if those ones are dead?”

I don’t have an answer for him. 

“If you don’t like the cold, then how do you jump in the water? Do you?”

“You mean the ocean?” I say. He nods and waits patiently for my answer. “I do; I mean, I jump in that water. It just depends on my mood.”

“Then what’s the difference between going outside in this weather and going in the water?”

I think the answer’s simple: everything.

Abandoned House: Week 1

January 13th 2:05pm

He says out west is goregous. I wouldn’t know: I have always lived in the east and skipped over ‘the west,’ flying straight into Portland, Oregon, for a English conference. During those three days, I wasn’t convinced.

He says Nevada was a new place for him after his attempts to live—and die—in Pittsburgh. A clean start. No Internet, hardly any cellular connection, no beds. It was sleeping in tents in snow, showering in KOA facilities, wandering the area when there was nothing else to do. He shows me pictures, a long computerized reel, of him and his chainsaw crew. They saw down bushes and trees, creating a fifty foot circle around a sapling of a specific species, a type of pine I can’t recall, and flag with orange plastic strips the trees that animals live in.

It looks dusty there; the white shirts the crew wears that appear new in one shot are brown by the next with sawdust, dirt, and sweat.

I don’t like the pictures of the snow, the large clumps that float down seemingly harmlessly onto their tents. I can feel myself start to shiver.

“How did you survive?” I ask.“It looks freezing cold.”

“The tents were right on the snow,” he says. “And you know me. I never get cold.”

It’s true: he radiates heat. He walks barefoot on asphalt in November and leaves windows open in December. I simply have to lay my hand on his t-shirted arm to thaw off.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see him as a silhouette of red, bright red, like blood freshly oxidized. When I put out my arms, closing my eyes and reaching for him, I am white. I am a clean slate ready to be dipped in dye and dried somewhere warm, bending and hardening how I please. At least, that is what I hope.

He is 24, turning 25 in July. He has seen and experienced more of the world than I ever will. I believe I am missing out, spoiled by inexperience and fear. 

What is there to be afraid of? I can hear him say. Go out and try it.

It’s drizzling—the only way I can tell is by the sound the rain makes against the leaves that coat the ivy and that disintegrate into one another.

The place I’ve chosen to write about is here, in Crafton, PA, on the street where Mark, my boyfriend, lives. On this road, there are three houses clustered together, hardly ten feet from the road it feels like. 

The furtherest one is Mark’s. He lives on the first floor; his neighbor, Ian, lives on the second. I’ve never seen Ian, only heard his steps above and the guitar he plays obsessively for an hour or two once a week. And I know that apparently he doesn’t mind if Mark forgets his laundry in the dryer.

I don’t know the people in the middle house. I once saw a black man standing in front of the gold car that’s always parked crooked. It forces me to walk on the busy road whenever I bring groceries to Mark’s place. The man seems to keep to himself; I feel myself liking him already.

It is this last house I am fascinated with. It is abandoned. Mark’s landlord has been trying for years to buy it off of the owner, who asks for more money than it probably is worth. So abandoned it sits here. I always park my car in the two parking spaces meant for the house’s owners. I often get out of my car and stare.

Now I am sitting next to it, squirming on cement blocks that keep my car from going off the hillside. I look at the ivy, seeing no movement from drops of rain. The ivy crawls up the stone siding of the house and hangs off the basement door in great clumps trying to find a way in. Why? I wonder. What is there inside worth getting into?

The front door of the house has a great curving strip of ivy that makes it look artsy. I tried to take a picture of it once, but it kept coming out crooked. I gave up after three shots.

Near the front door is a window that the ivy has already gotten through. It curls more tightly on the inside, clinging now to the wooden frame. Again, why? Why even bother going inside?

I keep my eyes away from the nature here. I see the blinds inside the house are turned inward, how my mother normally would prefer to have them, to better block the light while letting it in.

But there are some windows, to the back of the house, that have nothing covering them. I wonder if the curtains fell, if the blinds were ripped off, if perhaps there was nothing there to begin with. 

The rain has stopped for the moment in its drops, the kind that are singular and heavy. And now there are birds chirping—I hear various noises from them. I look up into the tree tops but see nothing. Mark keeps calling them with his whistles, but they fall silent, one by one, as the rain picks up again.

I asked Mark to be a part of this, to keep me on track.

“I want to know what you’re writing about,” he says. “But I don’t. Do you notice the bark on these trees? They look like stretch marks.”

The trees here seem massive, but really it is because there is ivy that clumps onto them. They ivy looks different than the kind that creeps into the house, almost like holly but the leaves don’t look spiky or waxy. 

There are some squirrels now. I hear their clicking and see some clump of a tree shake towards the top.

A medium-sized bird swoops down low—a robin, I notice now—and titters and hops along the ground, eventually blending in with the bricks that litter around. I lose sight of her (the breast was not brilliant red as I remember the males having) quite quickly.

There is garbage here: Dunkin’ Donuts clear cups, pipes jutting from the tangled mess of ivy and leaf, tires caught and suspended by the brush.

Despite Mark’s encouragement, for now I won’t go down and further to the backyard slope. I am determined in the idea that I will save that and the plant identifying for another time.

“I have another twelve weeks,” I say. He doesn’t seem impressed.

There are many things here and so little eyes and hands of mine to do it all—to dig into the compost of leaves and see what’s under; to brush back the ivy and see what plants it crushed the life out of; to identify the trees, old and sapling; to most importantly to me, not fall in what seems now like mush and cold; to not disturb what is here; to not put projections on this place when really all I want to do is steer away and write about things I do know.

It is cold here, not the Arctic cold from the week’s before that threatened to keep my car from running, not the naked cold from being in an RV overnight with no heat. Just wet cold, wanting-to-give-up cold. What is there to document or catalogue here in the now when there is the past? The holly bushes in Jackson, NJ; the pygmy bunnies in Nevada Mark nearly killed with his chainsaw; the boulders and vultures in Appalachia, in my backyard in New York—all of this to agonize over?

Mark looks at my notebook full of scribbles. I am ashamed of my rant now. I turn back to the ivy and think, oh, but I must try. 

The rain seems to fall harder.