Rachel Richardson
Taking the Loss
This morning I’m thinking about trees, and my neighbor Marlene. My former neighbor, that is, since I’ve moved two-thousand miles west of there. I sold the house; I took the loss—how many ways can I say it to convince myself it’s gone? But she’s shown up again anyway, in my head, two years after I last saw her.
She’s assessing the oak tree at the edge of my yard, where it joins her driveway. She’s clucking around the base of the tree, pawing the dirt with her toe to prove the roots are exposed, then tipping her head up and running her gaze along the trunk, hand shielding her eyes from the sun, silently measuring how far it leans. Her frown deepens as she goes.
That’s how I remember her, mostly. On nicer days, she’d be there in the upper part of the driveway, spending the afternoon hours on a lawn chair reading a crime novel under the shade of that leaning oak. She hated the tree, but couldn’t do anything about it because it was our responsibility, being on our side of the property line. That oak rained down acorns on her husband Wally’s Miata, and Marlene was sure it would fall in the next thunderstorm and take out half the block’s cars.
Why did we keep it? We liked the shade. We hadn’t wanted to butcher eighty-year-old trees. Nor, truth be told, to pay for their dismemberment. We’d thought our stance was the pacifist position, but it was also the laziest option. And no, that tree didn’t fall—that’s not where I’m going with this. But its lilt didn’t earn us any friends in the neighborhood, which is why she’s on my mind: cheery Marlene with the touch of metal in her voice.
Marlene in her terry bathrobe in her bright white house, with her husband Wally—who would later total his Miata and then disappear for a few months, then return as if nothing had happened, and a few months after that be found dead at 61—back to smiling Marlene bustling around the yard planting pansies at the first sign of spring, planning her Bible study curriculum, cooing to the cats who twined between her legs, and Wally contentedly polishing his guns on the porch.
When Olivia was a baby, I carried her from room to room in our wintry house, sitting to feed her or stroke her hair, circling the spaces like an animal memorizing the shape of its enclosure. One afternoon I was nursing her in the living room, in an armchair by the window, taking in the pallid March light, wondering if she would nod off now so that I could finally put her down. Her eyelids drooped, her rosy face softening. I looked out the window to see Wally on the wicker loveseat, on his white front porch with the Carolina blue ceiling, clicking the pieces of his hunting gun back together, running a towel along the oiled metal, the barrel tilting directly toward our faces.
It wasn’t sinister; that’s not quite what I mean. Though I did jolt upright and clutch my child and scurry half-dressed to the back of the house, which seemed safer from bullets. And I did peek out the door more often, for months and years, even after he was gone, before letting my children toddle into the front yard.
* * *
I’m thinking of Marlene because I don’t especially miss her, but I miss you, Nina. You would have known how to be a kinder neighbor, and what to do after her husband died (even if he was possibly becoming her ex-husband, even if he once sourly inserted into a polite front yard conversation, while I was pregnant, that he disliked children). Then you would have milked this story and made it far funnier, and made me understand how I should have loved Marlene all along. How lucky I was to have this life in its gangliness and beauty.
You were an avid student of how to live. You took detailed notes on everything: children swordfighting in the backyard. The younger brother icing his black eye, giggling as he moans. A casserole burned and dumped, still steaming, in the trash; beers and fish sticks plunked on the table in consolation. You basked in the glorious mess of daily life, holding it all close, while I dreamed of walking away, my pockets empty, into a great silence.
And that’s where you are now, I guess, in the great silence, where all my texts go unanswered—
hi, I miss you, can you just come back please for one minute?
* * *
I want to talk to you about so many things. Like the tigers: how weird it was to know they were just up the road, off Lawndale Avenue. They were always a bit crazed, pacing in their cage at the Science Center, that diminutive zoo plopped in the middle of a suburban Southern neighborhood, separated from backyards only by a halfhearted fence. I still think of them there, and then always you.
You loved those tigers; you knew their names. You understood the pacing of the creatures was the cancer waiting to jump. It leapt from your breast, broke your back, then clawed into your lungs. Now I can’t stop thinking of my own tiger, and my children’s. They’re held in our ribcages, sleeping for now, but any day could pounce.
* * *
Nina. I’m trying to remember how to love my days. Would you have cut down that tree to appease the neighbors? Or would you have said screw it: let the roots burrow and crack Marlene’s driveway, and if it falls, it falls? May there be no one walking underneath, and may the neighbors have good car insurance.
But it’s too late to ask you—and anyway, I’ve deeded it away. The tree is someone else’s now, and the house, and the front yard full of fibrous Bermuda grass. Also, the mushrooms as big as melons that sprouted magically overnight from the oak’s base, and the shady patches where we found a whole thicket of four-leaf clovers.
Someone else will measure the slow degrees of tilt—is it leaning a hair farther this spring? Is the shadow just slightly more ominous in its creep across the sidewalk and street? Someone else will linger on the sidewalk in front of his property, squinting up at the trunk, and Marlene will sidle up to him from her driveway, smiling pleasantly.
It’s definitely getting worse, she’ll say, shaking her head, but she knows a good arborist, and she’d be happy to take the firewood off his hands.
* * *
Your dying was a long slow tilt, until it was a sudden collapse—no voice to answer on the phone, no little ellipses rolling along the text window to indicate you were working on a reply.
It happened in early spring. Bright pollen silently coating all the rooves and cars. You died just before dawn. My mouth opened and shut again when I heard, 2000 miles away, as I tried to understand the empty space where your life had been.
* * *
Now rain pelts the roof in the house where I’m typing this, talking to you still, in a different suburban lot, in California. Here we worry about earthquakes, morning glory choking the olive trees, and colonies of rats that roost in the live oaks and have teeth strong enough to eat through a concrete foundation. There’s a whole network of them across our backyards—in the trees, houses, underground. You’d love this: an immortal rodent city within which we humans are just oversized squatters. Maybe one day we’ll leave it all to them.
But this morning I’m thinking about those trees, our shaded front yards, the sway of a hanging lantern, the particular spring rustle of the wind. You rocking on your porch beneath them. Those tiny movements of a life that look like stillness, until one day they stop.
Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poems, Copperhead (2011) and Hundred-Year Wave (2016), both from the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. Her poems and essays have appeared most recently in the Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at St. Mary's College of California and serves as poetry advisor for the Bay Area Book Festival.