Southern Living

A few weekends ago I was holed up in a hotel room in Durham with my daughters, who were jumping a wild ruckus between the two hotel beds, one recovering from a stomach bug and one doomed to get it that very night in the small hours. But they didn't have it yet and while they jumped, I read "Southern Living", to which I now subscribe. The first time it arrived in the mail, I wondered what the hell had happened to me. Everything went still for a moment and I swayed numbly in a "is this real life?" tilting of the universe. But the magazine is actually a great window into Southern culture, which I am sometimes baffled by, and events around the south, like low-country oyster roasts and music fests that I'll probably never attend, but sound lovely. Also it gave advice onto how to get into a hammock "like a lady" (ankles crossed, julep down) and how to make insults sound like compliments. I am pretty sure this advice was tongue-in-cheek. I am 89% sure. Ok, 72%. Look, I'm pretty sure.

In this issue was an article by a woman who's husband had moved with her from Manhattan to Tennessee and experienced the Three Stages of South exactly as I have. Stage One being a state of giddy wonder--everything is so charming! So quaint! Watermelon Rind Jelly, what is that, I don't know, but I love that it exists! This was me back in July, in a whirl of lake swimming and mountain music jams on back porches and old time street dances on Main Street. But eight months in, her husband was basically examining his own palms in wonder, asking how the hell he got here and telling his wife, "I'm starting to feel like I don't understand anything that is going on, ever". He was also homesick for what I believe the writer referred to as the "straightforward" interactions of places other. This is Stage Two. I'm not sure what Stage Three is because neither I nor the writer's husband have hit it yet, but I'm hoping it involves Los Angeles, or the set of my favorite tv show, or maybe the green people emerge from the forest and dance me into perpetual health and bliss, I don't know. To be continued.


Anyway, it helped me to know that this poor New Yorker and I have hit the same stages, at about the same times. There have been times when I've looked around at this life in awe and wondered how the hell I got here. I'm pretty sure this is a universal feeling. I was talking to my oldest friend A in Sacramento the other day. A took a new job, absolutely knowing it was the right thing to do and now nothing has turned out as she'd hoped and she is frustrated and drained and confused. Sometimes I think back to May, when Noah and I decided to move here. I felt absolutely certain it was the right thing to do. And now, of course, I wonder. I always imagined that as I grew older, I'd grow better and better at trusting my instincts, but in fact the opposite seems to be true. I'm starting to wonder if an instinct is something to be trusted at all, because none of mine seem to come out right. Maybe an instinct is just an impetus, urges meant to keep propelling us forward in life. If that is so, I'll look forward to the next one for that reason alone. I always was a thing that craved change.

Ledges, Tides, Sea-Change

On Friday I felt good for the first time in a long, cold winter. A rainy winter. A winter I spent missing my family and the wide prairie skies with an equally ice-pierced ache.

But on Friday I felt good even though I had no time to write, the barometer my mood generally revolves around. In the morning Noah and I went to an interminable school assembly to watch Indy get an award for "improvement in reading". I am against these nonsense flattery awards, (one girl was given a "princess award" for "liking princesses") but that's another blog. After the assembly I spent the afternoon cleaning, singing to Mamma Mia! (now you know too much about me by far) and listening to This American Life with the windows thrown wide. The sun was out and it was warm, that best kind of spring day, one of the first warm days after a long winter where you feel almost grateful for cold and snow--almost--because it makes these early spring reprieves so damn beautiful, so breath-taking and teary-making. Without the winter would the spring make me feel like my being, my chest and heart, are finding rich soil and blooming wide and fluttering, my center a trembling velvety butterfly wing? Would I feel that I personally am blooming? I don't know but here's some foreshadowing: I'm ready to find out. I am distinctly interested in what life without winter would feel like in my soul.

(But that is another blog, a story in wish stage, not yet written)

I feel so good today, I told Noah in breezy kitchen, looking at the blue sky. Indeed, I felt like the movie scene where the sick patient leaves the hospital, always in the sun, shaky at first but throwing away the cane after a few wobbly steps. I got out of bed, I got things done, my mind spun out stories to write and cracked jokes. Ayla's friend came over and went home and I made cobb salad pizza in the kitchen, flirting and teasing my husband. The weather was set to be good through the weekend and I went to bed feeling light, spirit and body light and beautiful when I stood and enjoyed it in front of the mirror.

And then Saturday.

Saturday came and I knew right away, shuffling about in the kitchen, measuring coffee into the machine, that it was back. Winter's grip on me wasn't over. Beneath it I slump. Depression settles into me physically as well as spiritually and I dragged about the house, heavy-hearted, heavy of foot and chest and brain. Every task seems insurmountable. Even little things like getting dressed, never mind bigger things like cleaning the kitchen, playing with children, pursuing a dream, living with purpose. My brain misfires about everything, asking why bother over and over again. I can't blog, can't edit my book. I can trick myself into writing, which is a salvation but short-lived. Noah took the girls to the park and I slouched in front of the computer, reasoning anything, even mindless web-surfing, was better than climbing back into bed. My shoulders curved around me, my body expressing my sense of total defeat. Eventually I gave in. I crawled back into bed. Why bother why bother why bother. Noah came home and the girls clambered over me like puppies, but I was unresponsive and Noah coaxed them from the room, took them outside to a gorgeous summer-like evening.

While he put steaks on the grill and threw the frisbee to the girls and dog, I got in the shower and couldn't coax myself out of  it. I sat on the floor with the water rushing over me. I made feeble attempts at talking myself out of this one like I've done with depressive episodes in the past. But something in me was protesting too strongly. I was tired of trying to choose happiness. I was tired of trying to fix myself, by myself. For years I have been managing the depression, being without health insurance and unable to afford help, and I've done a decent job. I have sought out spiritual teachings and educated myself about the disease. I have practiced yoga and meditation and what I am told therapists call "thought stopping", teaching myself to cut off the lies depression fires constantly in a brain, to replace them with other thoughts. I have taken my fish oil and walks in the sun, I eat my nuts and salmon and green smoothies. I have done this for more than ten years and sitting on the floor of the shower, I thought about how it feels like plugging holes in a breaking damn. It feels like fighting an unstoppable, ten-year tide. And I realized that depression is not something I have to manage on my own. I have tried, I try so hard, I do a really good job but I deserve to have more than one good day out of every six or ten or twenty. In that momennt of clarity, the clouds of depression cleared in my brain and I thought: On Monday I will make an appointment at the sliding-scale clinic and I will tell them that I need help. That I want medication because I can't do this on my own anymore. And I don't have to.

The decision alone brought some relief. I managed to get out of the shower. I went to the kitchen and told Noah my plan. He agreed, gently, that it was a good idea. I couldn't wait to get to the doctor's office, to get real help, but just making the decision caused a shift in my brain. For all these years I have treated depression like it is a part of me that I am responsible for managing, something that I need to change. I do believe I am responsible for my moods and actions, to some extent my thoughts and emotions but I'd been treating depression like it was my fault and something I was responsible for fixing. It's not. It's an unwanted visitor. It's a monster on the shoulder and it's not my job to talk the monster down off ledges, to self-help it into a prettier, presentable state. No. I want the damn thing hacked the fuck off.

And if I can't do that, I want to medicate it into a stupor so that I can go about my life, unbothered as possible.

So it's Sunday night. I had a decent day. First thing tomorrow I am calling the doctor. I am a little afraid of being denied help and brushed off, I don't know why, I just am. My contingency plan: if that happens, I will get another opinion. I am making this promise to myself, here, at the turning of the seasons. I'm going to get help. I'm going to feel better. I'm not going to go it alone, anymore.

The tide must change.
 

February 27, 2013

I was brutally ill Monday night with a stomach bug that I'd already nursed my two daughters through. Being so very sick made me think about the job I did taking care of them, and made me wish I had shown perhaps more compassion than I did, when, say, Indy asked for a bath at 4 am after we'd both been up since midnight and I told her to wait til dawn, or when Ayla was sick in the car on a four hour drive I made alone and afterwards I made her step out into the cold so I could rinse her hair with bottled water. I don't know. I could have done better. But last night when they got home from school and found me sick in bed, they brought me cups of cranberry juice and ginger ale and petted my forehead and I thought well, they must have learned this somewhere. Maybe from me.

I do hope.

I'm not one-hundred percent myself today, but I wanted something fresh up on the blog so I decided to post these pictures from our trip to Colorado that I've been meaning to share.

Indy and Ayla with their cousins, Eisley and Violet. One more baby cousin due in July.

 

My  girls treated to a shopping spree by Grammy and Auntie Lulu.

A family picture, Tuttle style. Noah and his five siblings, and my sister-in-law Susie there with the finger in her nose.  Then her husband Zach (Noah's older brother), Brett (boyfriend of Sophie), Sophie, Indy, Ayla, Lucy  (the youngest), Carlton, me, Noah, Mercy.

 Noah's second sister Sophie, who reminds us all so much of Jennifer Lawrence, both in looks and personality.

 

Whoopie pies during coffee break.

Susie, Noah's first sister Mercy, yours truly, Indy. God I love my sisters by marriage.

Mercy and I on coffee break, getting photobomed by Indy.

Indy and Noah's youngest brother, Carlton.

Had to throw in this one of Susie so you can get a glimpse of how beautiful she actually is.

Me and my sister, Heather, who will have her third in July.

My girls in this beautiful sister moment.



Now I'm going to go make dental appointments and round up Girl Scout cookie money, pick up the girls from school, feed them something, and nurse my still weak tummy on Mother's Little Savior--Grapefruit Perrier.

Speak

We turn a corner and a flock of red-wing black birds abandons a field and heads for the sky, all at once as if by divine decree. I can't see the poetry in anything, I tell my husband. All I write is clunky prose. My baby sits on my lap in the remembered sun and is cajoled into going to school, Ayla's hair thick as moss on her head as I kiss it, as they run. They have my freckles across their nose though not as many as I have, in the evenings they examine tinctures and oils along the sink and want to know why. For blemishes, I tell them, which you might get someday, though I hope you won't. Ten minutes are spent in a car with a book, gorgeous and lush. The earth is swearing it's going to do spring again this year, as it usually does, and for ten minutes I feel it coming, the gathering climax, the sun and the breeze and the book so warm and earth-rich they make me cry. Like the tiny blue birds, one-two-three, I discovered while gazing dreamily out my kitchen window, the one above the sink, where I spend so much time. In the afternoon Indy and I lay side by side on my bed, belly up like rainbowed fish my father once pulled from the water. She lets me tangle my fingers in her wild blonde hair, her wild child crown, her motherless untamed locks. She lets me gaze at her freckles and pin her across my chest, across my belly, the place where she was magicked into being. Life comes from life comes from life. I chop peppers and garlic. I toss curry powder with flour and shake raw chicken into it. I drop it sizzling into a pan. All night my house will smell like an Indian restaurant. Bathe the girls. Pour the wine. The brain won't stop, it spins as if it believes it's the universe, the whole swift planet. It feels raw and gauche. I have flubbed every social situation I've been involved in the past week, the brain misfires, I have actually blushed. Blushed red as I don't recall having done since college. The creative writing professor. Speak up, he said, Your voice is very quiet. You are speaking too softly. Speak up, he said, but I can't. Everything is locked away like an unloved wife who would rather burn than come out. It builds and builds, churning like thunderclouds while I wash a pan, drink a Perrier. I lie down to sleep and in my sheets is a pleasant, surprising smell. Is that the smell of me? Ayla stands next to me while I'm chopping in the kitchen and for a moment I have the sense I am standing next to myself. It seems I can see myself only in the peripheries, the half spaces, like I dwell in another dimension and can't quite reach me. I lie down to sleep but the mind won't rest, it churns out sensations, images that send me stumbling half-naked, fish-bellied, thighs hushing like powdery marshmallows, down the hall. In the hall, down the night. SPEAK UP, he said. In his hand, he teased a match.

Hooters Not Allowed

Last night I was troubled with stress dreams about the political structure of the south. I'm not bragging, that's just a fact. There was a new sheriff in town, and because some city official was "with the sheriff", we all knew it meant we weren't going to be able to do some fun thing we really wanted to do. The memory of what we wanted escapes me, but that wasn't the point of the dream. The point was that my fears about having my personal freedoms restricted were surfacing. A fear of misuse of government power I have experienced only upon moving here, to the Republican south, to a state that went blue in 2012 but was red this election cycle, that has more laws and restrictions than lately-blue Colorado, for sure. On Sunday Noah and I stood in a brewery discussing the fact that, for all their talk about small government and personal freedoms, I have never felt less free than I do here in the land where Republicans rule. Their laws restrict the simpler things in life, like happy hour and vibrators. Also nipples.

(Never mind that it will probably soon be legal to bring your concealed carry into a bar.)

That was last night, and all this morning, in the dream hour between four and five am, I was harassed with one call after another from the school system letting me know that, because there was some snow and slushy roads, school was cancelled. There is set to be a make up day on Saturday. School on Saturday--if that is not abuse of government  power, I don't know what is. As I said in a rant on facebook, I was born and raised in a state that just legalized recreational use of marijuana, and where, as I told my mom on the phone this Sunday, it feels like you are innocent until proven guilty. Here in the south I feel guilty until proven innocent. Part of me is afraid to even type these coming words, I'll just say I won't go into detail about the constant badgering ALE (Alcohol Law Enforcement) have given Noah and the others at the brewery--a business the community is happy to have, but that the city and county people clearly hate, based on their endless restrictions, taxes, and tyrannical control of things like when and where and in what clothing it is legal for one to drink a beer. I won't tell you about the ALE official who bragged to my husband about their laws being the most restrictive, about their power being the most complete, before going on to make racist remarks that I don't want to recount here on my space. I won't tell you that because my sense of personal freedom here is limited, it sets my pulse raising, it troubles me in my sleep. Is freedom of speech a thing, in Carolina? I roll over in clean sheets and tell myself that the "snow day" is all a ruse, that surely school was cancelled because a gypsy woman gave the school superintendent the evil eye, or because a pregnant woman walked a field west to east at dawn, and that to drink a beer freely all you must do is slay one goat and bury its right eye in a patch of yarrow under a winter moon. In the pale light of dawn, I find myself hilarious.

I'm hoping these are only growing pains. The honeymoon period has worn off. The bonfires have ceased for winter. It is February, after all, and February is difficult anywhere. I won't tell you that Noah says, at work, there is an unspoken rule that no one will talk about their regrets over moving here, because talking won't help. I won't tell you that I told Noah it was time to institute the two-year plan, that in two years all the new hires must be able to run the brewery so we Coloradans can exit en masse. I will just say we are in a rough spot. I want to make it clear that the people and community here are lovely, wonderful, liberally minded people who grow gardens and raise chickens and who have to be really, really careful about getting high, even in the privacy of their own homes, but that sadly the good old boys network has all the power and is running (ruining) everything. I will say that I know these things often look different from a distance, but I wrote this blog because I needed to express what they look like today. Today looks like this: I had plans to work, but the girls are home, the sun is shining, and I need to go look up what mountain loreal rite is required to accomplish anything, because from my point of view it seems like superstition and ritual is just the way things get done around here.

Clouds Like Wings

*photo taken out the car window on the drive from Denver to Ft. Collins. Long's Peak in the middle, there.


I awake every morning to the sounds of the rain forest,  to a great symphony of birds, a riot, calling their stubborn songs to the sky. Nearly every day this last week I have sat at this computer and reached for words to say--there is so much to say--and have come up empty handed, with nothing to show but distance and ache. I wanted to tell it all--how in Colorado the four cousins, reunited, jumped and jived in ponied grace in my sister's living room, where I played Rock Band, drums only, the sole activity I know that makes every problem fade away. How Lucy (called Lupus), the baby of the Tuttle siblings, the youngest of six, backed the massive Suburban into a ditch and how, laughing, her older brothers rescued their tumblers full of whisky before we all stood on the lip on the side of the car and tilted it so that the front wheel would touch dirt and we could drive it again. (Fear not, there was no drinking and driving going on). I wanted to explain about the origins of a picture and the drama that followed it. But I can't tell stories, I can't type or think or write--

I am editing my book for self-publication, and every time I come even close to typing that sentence the walls of my being slam down, the birds go silent, the coffee goes cold. Somewhere in the distance a raven caw-caw-caws, like it knows all my little fears and laughs. Every morning and every evening I lie in bed and tell myself stories, as I've done since I was a little girl, the reason I can never sleep. This morning instead of spinning out a fantasy land I told myself I would wake, make coffee, sit down and edit the hulking monster my once beloved book has turned into, but a voice came to my head and I sat down and wrote other stories instead. Then I came across this poem, and I thought, hell with it: In the spirit of Elizabeth Aquino I will post the poem here (because it made me cry) and you will know what you need to know: that we were all together again in Colorado and had a laughing, sprawling, jolly good time. That I flew home to a place that is not home. That every day instead of posting here I am wrestling with angels (quite literally, the book is called ANGEL FOOD), trying to force them into submission, trying to force myself out of a fearful corner and just get the damn thing done, because I have to, because the unruly child cares nothing about its dirty face and wants to run free.

Great Plains

by Bruce Willard

I could drive for days without fear
of outrunning these patchwork clouds,

bridge lines of cumulus
this way or that towards the horizon,

midway between one place
and another, standing up
to the administrations of wind.

I like a destination which pulls
true, deliberate,
but at great distance. Like

I like the slow, imperceptible
progress of knowing
but not knowing
how far I'll travel today,
where I'll find gas
for the next leg
or when.

*Poem found today at The Writer's Almanac.

A Formal Feeling

We got home yesterday from a trip to Colorado, where we spent nearly every moment surrounded by family, wonderful and exhausting. Noah's siblings (he has five of them) flew in from Huntington Beach and Portland, the first time in years we were all in one place. Energy was high and a bit wild, even though we were there to mourn a death. Maybe because we were there to mourn a death. Noah and his older brother, Zach, cooked wonderful spicy Mexican food, carnitas and pickled onions, beans with chile sauce and tomatillo sauce, the younger sisters and Zach's wife Susie helped clean up, and Ayla and Indy, the only grandchildren, ran among us nearly feral yet looked after by all. We spent a lot of time sitting at restaurants and breweries, gathered around tables with Noah's grandfather who goes by the Czech word  Dédé (short vowels, not long), and Sonja's brothers and sister-in-law. We ate a lot, drank a lot, and laughed a lot, which seemed fine at the time but in retrospect, I worry if it was jarring to Sonja. I don't know. It's hard to know how to be.

In the few quiet moments, I wondered about what I would write here when I got back. The chaos and cajoling love of this family left me filled up and wrung out, both at once. A sort of primal state that saved little room for thought or reflection. It seems there is more that I should say, but I can't tell Scott and Sonja's story. I can only tell mine.

The day after the memorial service, I woke up in Sonja's guest bedroom and saw the morning light on the western mountains. The light was pink like a newborn and I felt very alive, and very happy to be here. I got my coffee and went back up to the window, where I sat on the floor and said a prayer for all the many people this death has left behind. Light a candle, bake a dish, there is so little we can do for the mourning. It was good to see those mountains again, even from Fort Collins where you can't see Mt. Evans or Pikes Peak or the eagle face of Long's. The words of Emily Dickinson dropped into my brain--after great pain, a formal feeling comes--. The sky was the same pink I'd see a few days later, from the airplane, traveling west to east, which, to quote Pam Houston poorly, any old star will tell you is the wrong way to go.  A gorgeous color, even though it was only a faded scarlet, which I'd watch dim to white flying over the curve of the earth with my head back, crying and missing everything, missing home.

January 21st, 2013

Dear friends, my mother-in-law's husband, Scott, passed on Saturday night. He had been fighting cancer in his colon, liver, and spine for the last eleven months. We are very sad, especially for Scott's family and Noah's mother, Sonja, who had been married to Scott only about a year and a half and who was nothing less than head-over-heels in love.

We are flying out to Colorado tomorrow and will be gone for about a week.

Love,

Brittany

Ayla and Indy at Scott and Sonja's wedding, July 2011

Bless My Heart

It has rained for six days, or five, or a hundred, and the earth is shipwrecked. I don't understand why the whole town doesn't just wash away, mudslide down the hill into South Carolina. The backyard is softer than the bottom of the sea. I am from Colorado, where if it rains for more than six minutes we call the police. Everyone is battening down their hatches for two inches of snow, and though it is predicted to clear overnight and be sunny tomorrow, there are rumors that school will be cancelled. What the hell tom-foolery is this? Truly I am a stranger in a strange land.

Bless my heart.

It doesn't happen often, but on more than one occasion since moving here to a state which seems happy to refer to itself as "North Cackalacky" (?), I have had moments where the universe goes quiet, all of it just backdrop, and, like a character in a movie, my own voice-over drops into my head and wonders: What the hell am I doing here? The thought arrives not in anger or despair, but pure wonder. I make choices every day that shape my life into what it is, and then I sit back and stare at it in awe. As if my life was not, in fact, created by my own hand. And perhaps it isn't.

Bless my heart.

Yesterday the rain cleared for a moment, and I put on my pink rainboots and went to tromp the great bayou that was once my backyard. Or the neighbor's property that abuts (ABUTS!) my backyard. We've rescued this dog who is part beagle and part racehorse. She rocketed around me, doing laps along the edges of the field. She used her doggy-snout to toss water into the air. Watching her play eased some of the low grade stress that wears constantly when living in a land so far from your own. It was something I didn't know to expect, the frustrations of all the little things: the inferior and thus infuriating grocery store, site of all my breakdowns, one mass symbol for every little strain about being a western woman in the south. There is a thing people do here that confounds me. They are polite to my face, helping me find the canola oil or refunding me the dollar-fifty that was supposed to come off my ice cream at the register, but didn't. But beneath that pleasant exterior, I get the distinct sense that no one has ever hated anyone as much as this smiling grocery store clerk hates me. They seethe quietly while speaking in pleasant tones. I was not prepared for this. In the west, people are usually either genuinely friendly or genuinely hateful. There are few pretenses at either. This is what I will call the "bless your heart" mentality. Upon moving here, our friends asked those native to Dixie about the rumors we had heard--that people might say one thing but not actually mean it. That the famous phrase is a insult, sort of. Every southerner I heard being asked about it swore up and down it wasn't true. They shook their heads and widened their eyes, promised it was sincere, and I believed them.

Bless my heart.

During that brief break from the rain, I watched Georgia (we're changing her name to Georgia) and thought: six months. That is how long I can live in a place before wishing to move on to someplace else. Even though I love it here, I know here now. I'm sorry to say it, really. I exhaust even myself. Then Georgia (née Ginger) leaped into the bushes and smoked out an entire flock of eastern blue birds, who flew like scattered precious stones up toward the low gray sky. I've never seen so many rainbow-hued things in one single place. For a moment I believed maybe it wasn't going to rain forever. You don't know this because I haven't told you, but blue birds are my own personal emblem of hope.

New

 photo courtesy of Oskar Blues Brevard on instagram



Last night was the culmination of the labor of more than half a year.

I dropped the girls off with some of our heroic friends, put on a black dress, and joined my husband at the brewery just as he was getting off work and the place was beginning to fill with the first of over 1,200 revelers who had scored tickets to the sold-out event. The first time we saw the building, it was a truss manufacturing plant. Since July we'd seen it empty down to a lifeless shell, and then, within the last six weeks or so, begin to fill with shiny tanks and a canning system and kegging lines. A dusty, concrete mezzanine had been transformed to a packed and hopping tap room, with a beautiful curved bar, booths, and a racecar hood with the Oskar Blues Thunderbird on it. It was decorated and lively with Christmas lights and silver ball ornaments hanging from the lights. Noah took my hand and led me up to the bar and introduced me to the women working the taproom in vintage red dresses. I got my first taste of Brevard-brewed, husband-brewed beer and we stood along the railing, looking down on a stage where a local bluegrass band played and what seemed like all of Brevard, including many of our new, dear friends, drank and cheered and danced below us. The whole OB crew was there--the three other families who moved out from Colorado with us and many people from the Longmont location. We posed for pictures and hugged our new friends and shared relieved beers with our old ones, looking around at the throbbing, growing crowd with wonder.

It was so much work to get there. Noah and his coworkers have worked exhaustive hours for weeks upon weeks, hitting and overcoming nearly every bump imaginable. These weeks have been trying for me too, home alone with the tireless daughters day after day, away from my family and my home, missing my husband so very much. We cut a Christmas tree while Noah worked, and hung it with lights. While he worked, we baked cookies and made ornaments. While he worked, I shopped for gifts and went to the post office and bought wrapping paper, often not seeing him for days at a time. A time I would not have survived without the help and friendship of the many people we have met in Brevard. Months, and then suddenly this: the end of the deepest challenges in sight, the firepits and food trucks and everybody in glitter and suspenders reveling in a finished, running, working brewery.

After a count down and kiss, we got home around 1:30 am and the doggie we are fostering was chirping in her crate. I put the leash on her and, in my boots, walked like a prowler across our neighbor's backyard, down the hill on the soft earth, to the place where there are trees and a wide dormant cornfield and a nearby creek, and we could hear the creek telling secrets in the darkness. There was a veil of spotted clouds stretched in the sky, and they raced with velocity across the moon, or maybe the moon flew swiftly through the sky without getting anywhere at all. Then the clouds broke and I turned up my face and felt the moonlight on my pale skin, a wild thing. My breath was in the air. All around us was darkness and corn husks and tall trees, but in the distance I could see my neighbor's porch lit up in the night like an old campfire meant to stay the shadows, and rising and falling over the creek were their voices, near and far away. To the east a long silent path stretched before us, blue and chill, but the dog didn't like it. So we walked on the places where our feet made stones shudder like shells. Everyone was sleeping. There was none but us in the world of frost and darkness, but we turned our noses up toward the moon and never felt afraid. The night aware it was new and everything around us, breathing softly with the untroubled huffs of the earth.