A Fork in the Road, A Spoon in the Sky

on a road, somewhere

This morning I’m not on the road. I’m in a bed down low in the valley, surrounded by hills and sheep and ducks and goats and the best guard dog in the world, Kudzu. Last night, long after I had put the animals to bed, I read about the parade shootings and mall shootings and heard in the not-so-distance the loud banging odes to this country. Weird to have anything celebratory, but you already know this. Weird that fireworks are not just a message between the worshiper and their glory, but also to everyone around them. 

Yesterday. I check in with my friends. They’re still alive, for now. My grandma texts me Happy Fourth and I avoid calling my dad for the same reason. I text my mom a picture of a tattoo I want —sometimes she is Mother and sometimes she is my mom.. 

Last week the plane touched Michigan skies and right away I began writing sentences in my head, long lines of Mother like smoke creeping out of a chimney. Bird’s eye view. Mother down there, soaking in a tub or whatever else she melts into. Her sadness can’t reach Oregon. The coastal range, the forests, the coral one hour out and several feet deep—all blocking the winds of my mother. 

It’s a pile down there, one I’ve left for quite a while. Maybe because part of me was tired of writing about it. But Mother is not a person, it’s where I’m from. Mother, I’d say. We can move the piles. We can start again even if I have to lie down on the wood floor, surrounded by nothing. Let me come home.

Lately my friends say I have had hyena energy. I calm it down by solving sudoku puzzles. It’s not social media, it doesn’t matter, and I can’t talk while solving them. I just keep talking if I’m not solving anything. I speak to solve. I want to light fireworks with unpatriotic messages. I want to not care so much if I’m right or wrong, but learn from being neither. Like sometimes when I’m driving and I don’t notice that I forgot to take a turn, way back, and I think, this is good Jo. You’re letting go. And I correct the error eventually, because all roads have to end at some point.