Digging, by Stephanie Green Smith
Digging
By Stephanie Green Smith
All photos property of the author. Used with permission.
I am on my hands and knees in the front yard, digging. This moldering ground cover is a foot thick, mildewed and rank. I pull against it and it comes up like an old shag carpet, clouds of spores billowing out from underneath.
It is almost three years to the day since we moved into this house, and it’s my first attempt at tending this neglected garden. According to our neighbors, the previous owner of seventeen years rarely spoke to anyone, rarely came outside except to speed in reverse down the narrow driveway on his way to work. The garden feels every bit of twenty years ignored.
The ground cover comes up in one piece, revealing a perfect, downy spider egg sac and a length of heavy rusted chain with a hook at the end. I relocate the egg sac under the overgrown camellia and the chain to the growing pile of debris behind me. It is 35 degrees and I am sweating.
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My son has been picking at his skin, a nervous tic that leaves pink splotches and small red scabs on his cheeks, lips, nose. I keep his fingernails trimmed short, though he clenches his small fists and tells me no.
"Why won’t you let me take care of you?" I am frustrated and anxious. "You don’t have to fight me. You could just say, 'okay mama.' "
He hides his hands from me. He is frustrated and anxious. "I wish I was like that, but I’m not, " he says.
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I am on the internet, digging.
- 4 year old picks at skin
- How to tell if your child is ready for kindergarten
- Sensory issues in children
- Best seamless socks for kids
- How to help a child with anxiety
As I read, I am holding my younger son while he sleeps. He will only nap on me or my husband, despite the fact that he is our second child and we are supposed to have sleep stuff figured out. He is almost two years old and we have given up trying to figure out his sleep stuff. He won’t want to be held like this much longer.
My older son watches television next to me, and out of the corner of my eye I watch his hands return to his face again and again. I count the seconds between tics: one, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five; one, two, three; one; one; one.
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I’ve been afraid to tear up the garden because I don’t really know what I’m doing. Are these ancient, diseased irises worth saving? The withered sword fern maybe isn’t so bad. This leggy, pale rhododendron still puts forth a few delicate pink flowers for a week or two each year, before the petals fall off like a lady dropping her handkerchief. I worry about waste. I am a fixer.
I’ve been afraid to tear up the garden because we are transplants, hesitant to put down roots. But my husband has landed a new job here, with subsidized health insurance and paid time off and a 401k. All the things we’ve been struggling to live without for the past three years. So I am on my hands and knees, making a commitment. I unearth some stepping stones, from a time when someone’s feet moved through flowers, someone’s hands cared for this space. I work my fingers under the tuberous roots of the irises and pull them out. I don’t have to try to fix everything that is broken.
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I am holding my younger son while he sleeps and scrolling on my phone. Social media is a grave I fall into. At the bottom are stories of children in cages, children molested, children stolen from their parents and then lost. Police have killed another black boy and no justice will come of it. Michael Jackson is certainly guilty and certainly dead, and we are left holding this single sequined glove. One friend says anti-vaxxers are idiots, but another friend’s baby had a seizure at four months old from her DTaP shot, and the mandatory vaccination legislation moving through the State of Oregon says that isn’t enough to warrant an exemption. Another friend says we should trust science, but there are at least two sexual predators sitting on the Supreme Court, and the EPA is headed by a coal industry lobbyist, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to believe that everything is not for sale.
This morning, my son said, "I love this earth and never want to leave it. " I said, "Me too, baby. Let’s stay here forever. " A little later I am sitting on the rug, playing with his baby brother, when he says in a shaking voice, "What if this earth is just kidding? " He has tears in his eyes. I lean over and grab his hand. "This earth is for real, baby. We are here on this earth and it is real. " I have not told him about climate change.
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I will plant a lilac here. I make a list of plants I love: rosemary and lavender, cosmos and chamomile, alyssum and nasturtium. I think about my son and unearth memories from childhood, how I used to worry about earthquakes, and then that if I thought too much about earthquakes I’d make one happen. I still think about earthquakes. I have waking nightmares about the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the giant Douglas Fir out back falling on our house when the big one comes. I imagine it uprooting, crashing through the ceiling of our bedroom, and try to decide if it would be worse if the kids were in our bed or down the hall in theirs. But at least now I believe the universe is indifferent, and nobody is listening.
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Years ago, I read a study in which mice were taught to fear the scent of cherry blossoms by associating the fragrance with a mild shock. The babies of these mice grew up never knowing the smell of cherry blossoms, but when exposed for the first time, they became anxious and fearful. When the mice were bred again, these sense memories extended to the next generation.
My older son has inherited my face, my build, but I have been careful not to bequeath him my childhood. My son has not breathed cigarette smoke in the car, windows rolled up to keep out the rain. He has not known shouting, has not tiptoed over dishes broken in anger, has not known a turnstile of men in his mother's bed, or his father's absence. My son has never felt the southern California soil shift and rumble.
My husband and I have built our little family on stable ground. We are sunlight and water, deeply planted stakes for tender vines to wrap themselves around. We are gentle hands awaiting the unfurling. And yet. And yet. My son's small body seems to tremble with aftershocks from mine, a fault line in molecular memory. Cortisol seeded in my body, switching on genes in his, echoes that tell him to fight, to flee, even where there are only cherry blossoms.
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I am distressed by the marks on my son’s face, but I also know this tic may pass on its own, like his last one. For a couple of weeks his hands would reach out reflexively, grabbing something invisible from the air in front of him. He seemed unaware he was doing it. When I asked him, he said it felt like an itch he had to scratch. I watched out of the corner of my eye as I read him Green Eggs and Ham. Reach, grab, reach. Oh, and Dr. Suess was a racist, by the way.
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Last week I buckled the boys into our double stroller and pushed them six blocks to our neighborhood school, where my older son is slated to enter kindergarten in the fall. The school is more than a century old, a three-story brick gothic surrounded by concrete and chain link. At three-thirty there were still children on the playground, a tangle of metal slides and climbing structures surrounded by wood chips. Some bigger kids shooting hoops on the basketball courts near the parking lot. In back, a large open field with thin grass clipped short and nothing else growing.
I held my younger son on my hip, my older son by the hand as the school administrator took us on a tour of the library, the gymnasium, the cafeteria. We finished in the basement, where four kindergarten classrooms anchored the corners. The tables were low and round and the windows were too high to see out. Tennis balls were stuck to the bottom of the chairs’ metal legs, meant to soften the sound. It was hot and the air felt like warm breath and my palm holding my son’s hand was sweating. I took in the construction paper flowers taped to the wall, the children’s names written in their centers where pistils and stamens would be. I pictured the room full of five-year-olds taking cover in an active shooter drill. The sounds that can’t be softened. I shifted the baby on my hip and asked the administrator if the building had been earthquake retrofitted. She smiled and shook her head, " No."
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Last month, our whole family was sick and I barely left the house for three weeks. What would I do without social media? It fills the hole where a social life would be with funny stories about what my friend’s kids said, and beautiful essays about the past, and pictures of big-eyed dogs. I don’t talk to anyone on the phone because I am holding my younger son while he sleeps, and my older son needs me to go to the bathroom with him because he accidentally saw Michael Jackson turn into a werewolf in the Thriller video. Now there’s more than one reason that I wish I’d never introduced him to Michael Jackson videos. I need to bury this sequined glove where no one will ever find it.
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We drive to the coast to go camping. I have packed everything in the house. I have memorized the tsunami evacuation routes, and mentally rehearsed leaving all our possessions behind and driving, fast as we can to a high place. I have imagined getting swept away on Highway 101, the car filling up with water, cutting our seatbelts with the combination blade / window breaking device that we keep in the center console. I have imagined holding on to my children in the crushing flood.
After we set up camp, we walk over the dunes, through the tall grass drowned in golden light, down onto the broad, empty beach. My older son slips his hand from mine and runs toward the water, a black silhouette against the sinking sun, arms outstretched, his figure growing smaller in the distance. I kick off my shoes and bury my feet in the cool sand. I am finding the balance between holding on and letting go.
On the drive home, we pass expanses of clearcut forest along the highway, jagged stumps sticking out of the earth like the ruins of a city. Where trilium, bracken fern and dwarf bramble once grew in the shade of the canopy, now lupine, yarrow, and foxgloves clamber toward the sun. The understory erased, but these new blooms riotous, reaching into the arc of a new story.
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I stand up and survey the area I’ve cleared. The bare ground looks better than it did before, even with nothing growing. I can amend this soil, I can nurture something here. What can we do, but make room for possibility? What can we do when the earth shakes us, but hold on to each other? So we will hold on, and try to make something beautiful from the wreckage. We will come into the garden and pick flowers, crush rosemary and lavender between our fingers and breathe.
Stephanie Green Smith earned her MFA in creative writing at UC Riverside Palm Desert. She is completing work on a memoir about growing up in a cult in Los Angeles. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and children.