Arriving
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We brought exactly one plant across the country, from the dry and mild Bay Area, my home of the past 16 years, to this former farm on what used to be called Orchard Hill. The plant was one clipping of the dozens of spider plants that we propagated over the years. My eldest daughter named it Arnold and we thought we would name its progeny alphabetically, in the manner of hurricanes (Arnold, Betty, Clancy. Darlene). I think of my Venezuelan friend who told me that in his country spider plants are called “bad mother plants,” because they throw their babies away. All those spider plant babies, hanging by a thread, tossed overboard from the land their mother claims for herself. Maybe I feel an affinity to these bad mothers now, having thrown three of mine away. Maybe I want to catch all the babies I can, now that I’m coming to terms with having the living two of my own and no more. This is the mother I am, and the mother I can be, in this one life. Spider plants are easy to raise, and endlessly forgiving. I hope to clip Arnold’s babies and babies’s babies until no one remembers that this is not their native ground.
Jesse, in that other reality you are here with us, traveling, strapped in the back seat with a full mouth of teeth instead of up here with me in a tiny box. You would be turning two years old. You would be pointing at trains out the window. You would be grinding goldfish crackers into the cushions and bickering with your sisters. You would be moving across the country with us, away from the only home you ever knew and into your future. How I wish I could show you all of this, this whole enormous land. The high desert, the mirages, the mountain ranges.
Now that we have arrived, I can’t believe that a place like this exists and I am actually able to live inside it. This landscape is the stuff of poetry, but it also manages not to be a metaphor: the changing leaves, the solid stone walls, the hill with the heritage apple trees. The old oak trees raining down acorns and the young wood that has grown on the former crop land. The house is everything I dreamed of and I wonder if I actually dreamed it. I’ve had strong feelings of deja vu already. Standing at the coat closet, looking over our piles of boxes, I had such a feeling of familiarity: I know this place. I have entered this door hundreds of times and hung my jacket here. It’s like I was flooded with the years waiting for me, all those years to come, filled with a hall of mirrors of me, here, hanging up my coat. Placing myself exactly here. This house was on the market for over two years. I both do and don’t believe that it was waiting for us. I walked into the kitchen last summer, sat on the window seat, and felt like I was home, like the house and I sighed together ah, yes, here you are.
The previous owners lost a child. The woman who lived here is a social worker and specializes in infant and child loss, which we only found out after we signed the sale contract and googled her name. “I wonder if they lost a child,” my husband and I said to each other then, and our suspicions were confirmed by the handyman who stopped by to remove a memorial stone from the back meadow. Eerie, that connection. The space readied for our exact sorrow. There was a child who should have grown up here. And now ours too. We did a sage smudge the first day here, encouraging malevolent energy to leave and kind spirits to stay, but I’m pretty sure it is not haunted, except maybe by two grey cats: the one we brought and the one who stayed with the house.
All of this to say that with so much of my life in upheaval, I'm finding the memory of Jesse strangely grounding. His loss was the fulcrum upon which this second half of my life can balance. This move felt inevitable once my life cracked open, in the same way that my last child felt inevitable ever since we lost Jesse. I’m grateful to be just down the road from a cemetery, the oldest one in town, founded the same year (1765) as this homestead. There were no cemeteries in our former city, no graves on that the old island sandbar.
Jesse’s box is inside for now, looking out of the second floor window on the old orchard and the apple trees. He is among all these living things. His sisters, the cats, the one token plant and all the future growing things. He is home, with all of us, the living and the dead.
Emily is the mother to two living children and a son, Jesse, who was born still at 38 weeks gestation. She plays and teaches music for a living and writes whenever she can.