May 2024

There’s a fire lit for Beltane. Wet wood, lemongrass, bergamot, and mugwort. No one jumps over it, the small offering that burns quiet, more smoke than flames. 

It’s not just herbs and magic she’s burning. The girl feeds it the cardboard puppet theatre from the front porch where she once played Macbeth, and the tuxedo cat has since taken to napping inside of on afternoons when he can catch the sun like a black hole, hungry for light. 

After the fire, the mothers come. A mother is a human who builds another human being, brick by brick, inside herself. And then the mothers send them off, I suppose, to finish building themselves. That’s what my girl is doing here, finishing herself, while all the mothers visit, flowers and food in hand, to test with quick, embarrassed hugs that the foundation is still good. As though they could fix it if it weren’t. 

I can’t tell the girl how I was built, dug and baked and laid from the cellar up a century before all this. How I had a man, who I suppose was my mother, only I kept him inside of me. How he left like the new-hatched birds on the porch. How he doesn’t come back. How the trees he planted still reach out roots like fingers in the ground looking for him. 

The girl leaves too, up the mountain for ten long nights. It’s just me, my bricks, the plants in the sill, the spiders in the corners, and sometimes the cat looking for the theatre that isn’t there anymore. She’s away every night to care for another house, and other cats, and try her hand at seeing the northern lights. 

It’s almost like flirting, seeing her only in the broad light. Lunch hours, daytime, clothed and buttoned up and almost shy about wandering in to see me, familiar hands on my handles, after so much time away. 

What an extraordinary privilege it must be, to see me in the morning. To crawl out of my sheets, to shuffle in socks down the stairs, to kick on the gas stove for toast and coffee, and to listen for the choiring bushes from the open dutch door. 

What love. To be seen like that. How silly that she ever closes her eyes. That she ever leaves. 

That she ever packs up early in the day, only to tumble back into me, glittered and gay and ask, too tipsy for sense, that I tell her a story before bed this time. 

How silly, 

the apple house