What the Japanese Know

Someone told me that in Japan there are gardens, little sanctuaries dedicated to lost babies. I want to find one. I like the idea of a place where Magnolias bloom in late winter casting shadows over magnificently raked gravel, where water pools and moss softens the edges of white stone. I like to picture delicate plum blossoms, a symbol for courage to the Japanese, fondly testing the morning air, bravely offering their petals year after year to the new season.

For women like me, there are no such gardens that I know of.  No place to visit the memory of an almost-person, a baby that is more cloud-shape than human, to whisper to a never-born child, sing to it, look for it.

Portland winters are sometimes grey as a tarpauline, the city covered over by cloud; we live in a house of mist for months. This is hard for me, and harder still this year. After Christmas, when my family left for their homes in southern Oregon, Der and I left too. Someone had suggested we go to Hawaii to escape sadness of losing a baby, many even offered to help us "get away." But there were financial matters to think of; there was work to be done. So we took our memory of the baby into the field of gray. We drove through the still, ashen-colored buildings of Portland, the rain-sodden trees, out past St. John's bridge, the Linton Feed store, Sauvie Island, farther and farther until the landscape was unknown to me, until the damp world slid by in a monochrome wash.

Our destination was Astoria, and the Cannery Hotel. We spent three days looking at the bridges, watching the tide shudder and swell, the birds become indistinct from the waves and then burst forth flying. On the last day we drove over a bridge spanning the wide Columbia. The sky was rubbed charcoal, with flirtations of blue streaking through. We drove out to Cape Disappointment, the false end to the journey of the Lewis and Clarke expedition, and did not even discuss the irony of the name.

We reached the terrifying mouth of the river and the dark stones that protect the slim shore from its massive force.  We climbed out of our car and over the cold basalt slabs, stood on the slick boulders that compose the levy and were made mute by the pounding waves and the raking wind. Our jackets flapped and billowed; my eyes teared. Bits of rain needled my face. My hair tore around my head reckless and electric.  The water sucked and roiled with such great, thundering force that I could feel the raging pulse of it rising up in the dark slots of my bones.  I could hear the rocks as if they were moving or echoing or rolling.  It was a sound the color of basalt, an impassive gray, a simple mineral cry.

We stood there for no more than five minutes looking at the wild, thrashing water. Our instinct to retreat was too strong. Without a word, we climbed, slipping, back over the dark, hulking boulders, crossed the dun-colored sand threaded with sedges, back to the safety of our car. It was no Japanese garden, but it was something--the shuddering pulse of the harsh, cold mouth of the Columbia, the battered landscape twisting and shoveling unthinkable tons of water, not thoughtful, just massive heaving and thundering with a terrifying, awful momentum. It gripped me, that force, challenged my specialness, delivered me to myself.

In the car, blood started to return to my face and hands, to my ears. The blueing sky dilated and showed through briefly.  The trees stood still, unmoved, cantankerous and grey, protected from the wind and waves by the height of the levy. Der kissed my hand with his cold lips and we left without ceremony.

The Memory of a Peach

Think of peaches
Think of nectarines.
Winter's bare branches are a stiff denial, but fruit--
think of that dream color,
a happy detour
into the possible, how now
the summer seems improbable
and geese
are always heading North.
Buildings in the city ruminate
and decay while
the memory
of summer haunts and tempts,
toys with the imagination
like a dream.

Boats in Water

The longer I live, the more alive I feel, partly because of what is gained, but mostly because of what is lost. Every time I lose something, a new layer of the human experience is revealed to me, a new layer if myself. I've learned that nothing is tidy and I've come to think of life as a sweet and awful mess, a gorgeous, horrifying mess, in which survival means, at the very least, endurance, at most, epiphany, maybe revelation, perhaps even beauty.

I don't know whether children are born with joy, pure and unbroken, then are set to sea, and if life is a series of storms that batter each human boat until it forgets its native shore, loses all sense of direction and must set course for some entirely new destination, or if we are lost to begin with and encounter myriad opportunities to restore our commitment, to refine our internal compass, to see ourselves made and remade by events that my either capsize us or bring us, in the end, safely home.

At 35-years-old I find, to my shock and amusement, that I am fine. It's strange to accept the simple fact that a single, unalterable loss does not capsize me.