Flowers, muskmelons, a screen of dancing fruit.
Journaling my way through the South and postpartum sadness.
“Things sure smell fresh. Some hot nite. Flowers beautiful. Ruth bought muskmelons.”
“D & I out to cemetery toward evening. Flowers frozen. We are alone tonight.”
“Fine snow rabbit got away. I took picture of the frost ever where beautiful.”
In Aug 9 - Fog, a journal found at an estate sale is cut, edited, arranged, and then rearranged into something that feels ethereal, disembodied.
There is beauty in the simplicity–the subject, verb, object, as well as the scarcity of words on the page, the unpinnable accounting of a stranger’s once life.
Before me as I share this journal / letter / essay / ode lies another form of accounting: seven pages of service history for a house on an unnamed base we were slotted to live in (or were until this week).
Small pane on French doors broken by kid, a/c not cooling.
Back-inside pane broken in sunroom.
Disposal leaking.
Moisture issues.
Here, there is no life between the lines, and as I found out on a recent trip to the house, no life on the installation where the house sits or in what surrounds its perimeter or along the highways to it or in the country the highways run through.
When we planned a roadtrip to see this home, I had felt less than enthusiastic.
Aoife: desiring to be held less and to play more.
Me: hitting another hormonal dip, experiencing moodiness and severe fatigue, and now exclusively pumping, a kind of invisible labor.
Our would-be home: a house on a base.
Despite this—or maybe in light of this, I decided to journal as we moved through much of Florida and Georgia to visit our soon-to-be new home. Scratching away little sentences until the ruts grew into valleys, streams into rivers. Fatigue drawing lines across my face.
Day 1
If I could write this entry to summarize the day, take account of what was seen–done–in a way that was ethereal, punctuated, it might read:
Leaving the green, great open, blue. Picnic in the sun with A and T, or a Lovevery playmat, a Publix median, a shared deli sub.
Ticker tape of asphalt. Burger King parking lot. Plastic straws and bottle caps flowering in chainlink. A sign that reads, “I am a the way, the truth, and the life. - Jesus.” A screen of dancing fruit.
Stopping to pump, pumping only to then stop, pumping and storing, pumping and (the pumps to warm) dumping, then a respite. Holiday, Comfort, Inn, Suites, Express, by, Marriott, Hampton, Lodge. Tired baby, tired mom, tired hands. A tired tired.
Perhaps tomorrow, I can have the energy to explain.
Day 2
Having barely recovered from a trip to Illinois where I hand washed bottles and pump parts under scalding water every two hours for seven days, I am now having to pump on the road throughout the day–shimmying my bralette down to pull up my pumping bra over and over again at truck stops, in Starbucks’ parking lots, under a visitor center tree, at a “Florida” shop featuring twirling chandeliers of “Floridian’ shells made in China, “Floridian” coconut pigs made in Thailand. This repeated action, exhausting.
As we drive, I also take on a new role as resident entertainer. For Aoife, I shake a plush avocado with a bead-filled belly, crinkle a fake firefly’s wings, yoyo an oversized cube via an elephant’s nose, and search endlessly for ‘Hey Bear’—sensory videos of dancing fruit. Redirected to HeyBear.com too many times in a rush to quiet my unruly audience, I now know more about bear safety than anyone should. Make noise. Don’t spread out. When you leave a carcass in the open and for a long time, carry a colored, lightweight tarp or space blanket.
Early in the day, we stop at a CVS to use the bathroom, where I buy pull-n-peel twizzlers to cheer me up. Me: pulling the lanky pieces off the candy, spinning them into pinwheels, rolling the pinwheels into my mouth, as if this will cure my new sadness, fatigue.
Later in the afternoon, we stop at a Publix so I can take a call with my psychiatrist.
'Hypomania' she says flatly, then sings, “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Lamictal” off a piece of marketing collateral, and I cry.
This coming after I explained to her the month that preceded this month.
What preceded this month, this fatigue, anger, exhaustion: me working multiple projects and cross-pollinating workshops, working out and not needing to eat and staying up late to read and buying clothes for me and clothes for Aoife and books and more books and more books. Me feeling: invincible, neon-like, godful, impossibly creative, exultant, exuding.
After my call, T and I split a chipotle chicken sub in the Publix parking lot, then I pump–feeling depleted, my joints achy.
Two hours later, we pull off the road, and I shake the feeling—if only briefly. Passing through a pecan farm that doubles as a gas station, I am reminded of an earlier life in California, of almond trees lining its roadsides, fresh cherry stands dotting its roadsides, that roads can/do/should have sides.
Excitedly, I buy sugar-free chocolate-pecan cups, milk chocolate-covered pecans, a single slice of pecan pie in a Ziplock bag, then take a photo of the siding of the gas station, a photo of a line of yellow and mint green and sky blue garbage cans denoting the start of the farm.
The pecan trees’ branches look a little like hair standing on end and I think of the Emily Dickinson quote “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” And, they are like poetry: the rows of trees running like railroad tracks, growing infinitely closer but never touching.
As the sun begins to set, we three get back in the car as an older man pumping gas smiles at Aoife, calls her blessed with a thick Southern drawl, and I feel in love and heroic and bursting all at once.
Later, as we pull into the area outside our new home, the onceness is gone.
Directly off the base we intend to tour: run-down strip malls, a spotting of more branded hotels, one Mexican restaurant whose walls are a dark, dripping green, smell thickly of cooking oil.
Day 3
We visit the unnamed base–the point of our trip–and tour the house we are slotted to live in.
It checks all the boxes of being a nice home, but then we are told we can get a standard chain link fence around it, and I begin to notice all the chainlink we pass and also that there are no people on the streets—that the streets are emptied of people. And, the more streets we pass that are emptied, the more the installation feels somehow false. Truman Show-esque in make. Severance-like in feel.
In the middle of the campus in the middle of the day, we find ourselves at a truckstop-like cafeteria with a Panda Express, Burger King, Qdobo, where we order quesadillas oozing with cheese and eat orange chicken and broccoli out of styrofoam takeaway boxes.
I grow upset at the table–feeling badly about the shape my body is retaking, then just upset.
Here there is no place to pump comfortably.
The parking lots devoid of trees, the streets devoid of trees, the complexes and buildings and houses naked for all to see.
I convince T to drop me and baby back at the hotel, where Aoife can feed and I can make her milk.
The hotel: a chain. The room: a “suite” with an obscenely large oak desk cutting across its middle that looks like it belongs in a mock Oval Office, one high-backed chair on a swivel pushed against it.
There, me and Aoife hole up in the corner, surround her with pillows.
There, I pump only to find the storage bottle is covered in edamame hummus and as I attempt to clean it, I knock over recently expressed milk, losing several ounces. I burst into tears then message my friends.
One texts me back telling me it takes focus and: “literally causes crying over spilled milk.”
Another shares a meme of RuPaul, Frances Bean, and Kurt Cobain. Frances is labeled “me,” RuPaul “my supportive friends,” and Kurt, in a striped boatneck tee and red glasses— “overwhelming sadness.”
Day 4
I work in the morning writing emails for a lifecycle consultant while drinking burnt coffee, eating overcooked bacon that could easily be rubber, an egg omelet shaped like a half-moon—perfectly waned to fit a plastic package.
We have decided to drive to the city 20 minutes from where we are—to see if this might be a better option for us. The desolate strip malls give way to bustling strip malls and then to a small downtown.
Immediately, upon entering the historic district, riding along First Street, I feel lighter. Lofts and apartment buildings line the river, cafes and restaurants and candy stores line the main street. There is even a coffee shop in an old bank with shortbread and chocolate-pecan cookies, cheddar-rosemary biscuits, crystal chandeliers, people.
Walking the streets, I see a friend share a post about where tax dollars went last year.
$5,109 for militarism and its support systems, including the Pentagon and war, veterans’ programs, deportations and border militarization, and spending on federal policing and prisons.
$2,974 for the Pentagon, more than half of which went to corporate contractors.
$1,748 to militaries in other countries for weapons and military housing.
I message her to say I wonder where the tax dollars have actually gone as we pull away from the city near the no-named base and I pull out a ziploc bag of flanges, backflow stoppers, tubing.
Several hours later, the rolling green hills and Spanish moss of rural Georgia give way to Floridian swamp and our little threesome stumbles upon the holy grail of roadside hotels, which are really just a constellation of known hotel brands of comparable price points screaming with comparable fluorescence.
As T plays with his hotel apps, counts his hotel points, I play Aoife Hey Bear on repeat to stall her tears.
In one video, a pineapple winks, then shimmies and shakes with two halved oranges. In another, two turnips wearing square sunglasses jump around, their tops of green jostling about. In a third, a conga line of fruit appears—at first small then growing in size, closeness.
Taken by the colors, music, she squeals.
I smile but am tired. Have become a hand.
Day 5
Baby girl is now getting her milk “fresh from the tap” which simply means, I am barely making enough to feed her at each feeding. My supply at its lowest, and I may be at my lowest. I am exhausted. Exhausted by the chains and the brands and the similarly floral scented water coming from all the similarly fitted bathroom faucets and the gas station coffee and the bags of chips and nuts and the saturated fats and my body and the shape it’s retaking and all of its obligations physical, emotional, mental. My mind—taxed, heavy, sore.
As we drive, I see a poet post about MIT co-opting John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famed “War is Over” message, calling for an apology from MIT, reminding it it is a significant contributor to the American Military-Industrial Complex.
In another time and place, I would be worried that our family would be perceived, too, as feeding this Complex.
In this and in this place—on a road that is a tiring metronome of corporate images, in my overrun postpartum body, I can’t help but think we all—in living here, being here, staying here—are complicit.
I wish I could write more but this is where the thought ends.
Day 6
My pumping is abysmal (very little milk), but I feel what can only be described as a lightness.
We have made it to the Keys, a strip of black and gray (highway) running like a zipper through deep greens and light blues (ocean).
Surrounding much of the highway much of the time is low brush, distant mangroves. The ratio of asphalt to nature–now in reverse.
As a final piece of punctuation to our trip–before we get to our island home, we stop at Keys Fisheries in Marathon. Here, T and I split a grouper sandwich special and I drink a local IPA—happily talking to the others around us about the Keys, Miami, the weather, the catch, the impending shoulder season.
As we leave, Aoife and T take pictures in a photo stand-in, or T—with his face in an oval—holds Aoife up to an oval as I snap. T transformed into a mermaid, Aoife: a blue fish in a chef’s hat, her heart-shaped face smiling, giddy.
For a fleeting moment, I feel a little less tired, will myself to type it down unedited—accounting.
A single piece of wood, the sun, paint. Happiness.