Ancient  chipmunk hole below the pin oak

This burrow has been used for many generations of chipmunks.

Early moonrise in my backyard

Taken in Pennsylvania

View of the Kiskiminetas River through a stand of trees, springtime

Taken in Pennsylvania

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Elizabeth is thirteen years old and enjoys writing and photography. Capturing the magic and beauty of nature is a talent she hopes to be able to expand to its fullest potential someday.

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Jenna is a rising 9th grader with a specialized track for Medical Services.  Jenna hopes to study medicine and become a neurologist. In her spare time she enjoys volleyball, travel, photography and hanging out with her friends.

“Look, here’s Fezzika,” my mother said, bending down to point out the Woodhouse toad tucked under the garden stone. We had discovered the amphibian’s house a few days earlier, and I was fascinated by the placement choice. She had dug into the soil under a cornerstone edging the flowerbed beside the main path through the garden. The stone is flat, shaped a little like a boomerang, wide and bent in the middle, providing a convenient entrance and shelter.

The first one or two years we lived here we simply dug plots of soil to plant our garden in and sometimes hired someone to till up an area we chose. But the second time we tilled, my mother discovered two toads that the tiller blades killed. One had missing limbs and made it as far as the surface of the tilled soil before dying. It was heartbreaking that these benign creatures had been injured in our yard where we tried to protect and encourage toads and other creatures.

My mother decided to try things a different way. We went up to a nearby gravel pit and gathered rocks from there, transporting them to our yard. Using these stones we built raised beds to plant our garden in, making an almost-grid around the new flowerbed and then shoveling soil into the beds, mixing manure and compost in as well. With this new approach to the garden, we had no need to till the plot.

Soon after that, toads readily swarmed to the garden, coming out of secret holes at night and hopping through water puddles that the sprinkler left. They squatted in the plastic container of water my mother placed at the south end of the garden, a little “toad spa”. Some nights, there would be two or three toads soaking in the water at a time. When any of the family walked through the garden at night, we had to be careful that we didn’t step on a toad sitting in the path. Oftentimes I went barefoot, partly so that I would feel more easily if I disturbed an amphibian.

Over the six years we’ve lived here, the behavior of the toads in our garden has changed. They accept our garden as an ideal environment, traveling to stop at our water puddles, foraging in our area, burrowing under the black plastic and wandering around the garden. What my mother did not expect was that the toads would begin making permanent homes under the stones of the garden bed. This year, when my mother was in the garden, she realized that one of them—Fezzika—had dug a homey burrow to live in. This toad is an especially large female Woodhouse toad, as jumpy as any other when we walk around. My mother decided that we could name her “Fezzika” in honor of the giant in The Princess Bride because the toad is so large.

She wasn’t the only toad who moved in. Not long after we found Fezzika, we discovered that another toad had similarly excavated a spot under another flat stone in the herb bed. Slightly smaller than Fezzika, it had dug a sideways tunnel against the rock only a few inches away from our lemon thyme. It also seems that some of the toad homes are community burrows. A couple years ago, there was a gopher hole under one of our peach trees. Not only one toad lived in here. There were one or two others, and even a tiger salamander that shared the burrow with them.

Before Fezzika had moved in, the toads had generally only dug into the softer soil of the garden, first in the tilled soil of the old plots, then into the shovel-turned soil in the raised beds. They sometimes hibernated in the beds, and they liked moving in and out from beneath the black weed barrier. We would often find holes in the beds where one had spent the day in a burrow. Our garden was clearly a good environment for them, with plenty of water and insects to support their diet. The only slight downturn was that our cats prowled the garden and sometimes batted at them, but our felines usually left the toads to themselves. They certainly never ate them.

One reason the cats leave the toads alone (besides our chastisement) is that toads produce a gland toxin called bufotalin. This toxin is stored in large sacs slightly behind the Woodhouse toad’s eyes. It’s a milky substance that, if it enters the bloodstream, can cause increased heart rate or other heart problems because it has effects like digitalis, or Foxglove. It also has a distinctly bad taste.

Female Woodhouse toads are generally bigger than the males, and they can be as long as four inches. Once, when I was at a pond with some friends and we were catching toads, I caught a large brown toad that was possibly a Woodhouse. It had the characteristic light dorsal stripe but was a brown color, something I had never seen in Woodhouse toads before.

Just down the street from us is a large pond formed by runoff from the irrigation sprinklers in the alfalfa field above. From March to July, we can hear the male Woodhouse toads in the pond. The males emit a long, wailing call that can be compared to a sheep with a serious cold. The males use these calls to attract the females to ideal breeding waters.

Woodhouse toads deposit long strings of eggs numbering from twenty to forty eggs per strand in relatively still waters. Once these hatch, the tadpoles feed on debris in the pond, gradually maturing as they grow legs, lose their tails, and finally become tiny toads, no bigger than the nail of my little finger. From there, it takes three years for the toad to fully mature into the sizes of those amphibians now inhabiting our garden.

Unlike frogs, toads have a thicker skin that they can absorb water through. When the toads sat in the plastic container of water during the night it was to have a drink through their skin. Once they mature from tadpoles, the toads can wander as long as they like, being sure to stop at puddles and ponds to stay hydrated.

Now that the toads have come as far as digging rock-roofed homes in the garden, it doesn’t seem likely they’ll leave. My mother hopes that sometime we’ll be able to build a pond of our own, a little piece somewhere in the backyard that will encourage the toads even further. They’ve become year-round neighbors for us and interesting creatures to study. Toads eat a large assortment of insects in our garden, everything from flies to slugs, when slugs appear. Their presence is a welcome addition to the garden ecosystem.

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Val K. is thirteen years old and lives in a house in the Utah desert with her family, her carnivorous plants, a dog, five cats, and several toads. In between the times she spends writing, she works on crafts involving building, embroidery, gardening and more and also takes time to read incredibly long epic novels. She spends what is left of her free time writing fantasy stories and has a book written and a sequel in the works.

Boy: I can’t see anything!

The mayor: We must do something!

All: But what?

Town folks: Ask the king!

Mayor: Not the king!

Boy: That is a good idea.

Mayor: The king does not rule the skies.

Narrator: So, everybody thought…

Boy: We could ask the wind to blow the dark cloud away.

Town folks: Good idea!

Boy: Wind!

Wind: What.

Boy: Could you blow the cloud away?

Wind: If the king lets me blow down whatever I want.

Mayor: I’ll go ask the king.

Narrator: The mayor reluctantly goes to the king’s palace. He tells the king what the wind wants. The king agrees to the plan. So the wind blew the cloud away. But from that day on the wind blew things down.

End.

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Virginia is 10 yrs old and she wrote this for school. She likes reading. Her favorite thing to read is a series of books called Warriors, by Erin Hunter. She likes catching fireflies, too.

Okay, maybe they’re not doing it like that.  (But oh, what I could have and would have done with such technology in my wild child days!)  In fact, maybe they’re not going out into the Mystery much at all, if Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods gives an accurate account of how children and nature have fallen out of love.  But there must be some kids still getting out there, developing lightning-fast reflexes from chasing lizards, solving the whole-body puzzle of climbing a tree, honing their future driving skills by walking on logs across creeks, etc.

It’s in the hope that nature children still exist somewhere that Wilderness Interface Zone is issuing a call for nature poems and short essays written by children.  The works may address any aspect of nature and the child’s relationship to it.  Poems should be 50 lines or under and essays 150-1000 words.  If you have a budding nature photojournalist in your family, we will consider posting his or her photos.  Children ages 6-18 are invited to submit work to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com from July 6, 2010 to July 31, 2010.  Depending on how many submissions we get, we’ll post them in batches off and on July-August.  Parents and kids: Please review submission guidelines here before submitting.

April 22, 2010, Earth Day and M’s birthday.  Twenty-four hours have passed since the doctor put his words out there.  I’m still hot with anger and grief, still breaking into sobs at the slightest twinge of thought.  I’ve examined M repeatedly for signs that the doctor saw something I’d missed.

Our whole family has traveled a difficult road to buy her the safety and time she needs to make what she can of her outraged life.  Over the years, I’ve spent thousands of hours lying beside her, searching her body with my eyes, questioning it with my fingertips as I’ve struggled to discover causes—and relief—for her episodes of suffering.  With my voice—singing, asking, offering, praying—I’ve reached into her pain and distress and felt the arms of her trouble wrap around me.  Intense involvement and careful inquiry has been the only way to approach understanding and to help her.  It’s the only way to reach many of these children.

Her problems are legion, many have gone unsolved, but to my eye she appears as anchored in life as ever and a good deal more so than during her earliest days.  Her level of  awareness of and involvement in the world around her is at an all-time high.  After a few hours of doubt, I trust my eighteen years of twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week care and surveillance and douse the worry the doctor’s words sparked. M’s life is precarious—yes. The doctor’s appraising question about whether or not we had considered how to arrange her end had been premature at the least.  But I’m fully aware that worry over her condition is not the whole fire his question ignited.

Every Earth Day now I head to the cliffs of Crossfire Canyon to spend as much of the morning as I can sitting at the edge of how far I can walk in that direction.  Many qualities of the earth-air interface that cliffs offer single them out as sterling locations for observation and thought.  Especially on a day like this.  Thunder showers that began yesterday just as we left the clinic cooled off the region.  Walking toward the spot I have in mind, I take in the rain-washed day.  Overhead, scraps of the storm—flat-bottomed cumulus humilis clouds—float the flax-blue sky, drifting WNW.  At my feet, raindrops shimmy in low-growing clusters of white-petaled phlox, shining back the sun.  On the cliffs, a bit of a bluster huffs through on water-scraped winds. With it comes the scent of rekindling wood—juniper, pine—warming in spring sunlight.

The morning has a high polish, wind, water, and lightning having buffed it to a gleam.  Since I was last cliff-side, the green smoke of emergent cottonwood leaves has billowed up more thickly.  Looking straight up, even without sunglasses I see cloud vapor stretching, curling.  Cloud shadow falls into the canyon then pulls off, a tumble of sunshine filling the hole it leaves.  I watch a shadow approach my sunlit perch.  The stone goes grey as the shadow’s leading edge draws its chilly blanket over me.  Down in the canyon, the same shadow’s back edge flows off the cottonwood trees and their green cloud lights back up.

The canyon is very quiet, surprisingly so.  The occasional distant cluck of a raven twangs against canyon walls.  Usually by this time in spring the air is a-glitter with swallow and swift flight, their vocals jazzing up the stones.  But beside the raven and wind snagging on trees, I hear only the changing voice of the snowmelt pumping through Crossfire’s main artery, the rise and fall of its murmur, a chorus of energies braiding up into canyon-cutting flow.

Above the cumulus clouds spreads a feathery layer of cirrus fibratus (mares’ tails) looking like frost on a window. I glance up in time to see a rainbow appear in the pane of atmosphere where they’ve formed.  But I’m doing more than just “seeing” it. If sunlight refracts through ice crystals and there’s nobody with ocular organs to register the phenomenon sitting on a cliff at a happy angle to the refracting medium, does the rainbow shine?  The bow has a waxy burnish to it, the red hue smoky.  At the edge of the cumulus clouds closest to the cirrus bow, thin skins of vapor flush pink and green—bubble colors.  This nacreous bloom fades quickly.  I’m glad I happened to tip my head back at that moment.

Again, cloud shadow turns me grey and cold.  The warmer back edge of the shadow slides toward me, but the clouds seem to be growing and spreading, thickening the chill.

In the airspace directly ahead I see no flying insects, so maybe that’s why I’m not seeing swallows yet.  Today, the clouds—stretching, doubling back on themselves in an airborne taffy pull—those seem to be the things to watch.  The sun finds an opening and through clothes and skin I drink a draft of warmth.  But the next shadow is only a thousand feet away running like Mercury straight toward me.

I catch sight of a golden eagle very high up turning slow circles.  Which reminds me.  This last week and a half has been vibrant with bird migration.  The hummingbirds returned to our yard last week, some old hands showing up at the feeders.  Turkey buzzards arrived in their first wave.  Driving into town this earlier this morning, I forced a grudging, skin-headed pair to abandon their rabbit roadkill prize.  Mountain bluebirds have been back for a while but brightening the yard more this past week.  Larks have ramped up their jingles.  Little yellow and black birds—tiny things, very innocent and mild-mannered—have shown up to feast on our dandelion seeds.  These birds arrive every spring for the dandelions then move on after two or three weeks.  My neighbors’ barn swallows are back, flinging themselves into the wind above the fields, blue-black backs glinting in the sun.  From mid-April into May, San Juan County gets its wings.

The cloud vapor continues to churn, fronds and sprays and entire clouds whipping up like mud stirred in a creek.  Winds up there must be very strong.  Down here, air currents continue to pick up speed, growing more constant.  My fingers become chilled and stiff, uncomfortable, cold going into the joints.  When I notice their condition, I realize that my whole body is bunched against the wind.  Glancing south, my eyes alight on the Chorizo Mountains sixty or so miles to the south in Arizona, framed between Crossfire’s canyon walls.  New snow lies in creases between the mountain range’s highest ridges.  Behind me, I hear a woodpecker, tickbird of the trees, tap-tap-tap-tap-tapping.

This winter packed the Abajo Mountains and Cedar Mesa just north and west of here with a record heavy snowfall.  Crossfire’s head is an important water valve for the southern flanks of the Blues.  Here it is, the end of a cold April, and already the creek has gained water muscle mass.  The stream crowds to the edges of beaver dams, the main current pulling itself together to curl over the earth-and-wood structures in white chutes and spray, its leavings eddying around rocks and curling into the sides of push-up ponds.  It really is ingenious how the beavers garden the creek, harnessing the current so that ponds form but the watercourse trots along at near normal flow.  Alas, poor beavers.  This year, they’ll have their work cut out.

But maybe they know that.

Beavers have been back in the canyon just three years.  A neighbor tells me they were a constant there once but suffered wash-out in the late nineties during a flood.  Since their return, they’ve changed the canyon’s look and sound dramatically.  The creek used to flow rather quietly, its existence bound to springtime.  July’s heat pressed into the canyon and sopped up creek water, a dry sponge dabbing sweat off a brow.  I haven’t lived here long, but before the beavers returned, I saw the creek sink back to just a few spring-fed puddles during the hot months.  Everything else turned to mud then baked hard.

Another neighbor, an older man who works as a groundskeeper for the local LDS ward and stake houses, used to ride his ATV in the canyon with his family before the BLM closed it to off highway vehicles.  He hadn’t been down to the creek since just before the beavers made obvious their intentions.  When I told him they were building dams again, his face lit up.  “Beavers make the canyon beautiful,” he said.

They’ve certainly rewired it. Under the beavers’ influence, snowmelt and spring-fed waters last a little longer into the summer and flow a little further, much to the benefit of many species living in Crossfire and the cattle rancher who summers a herd of catlle.  At the height of the runoff in past years, the dams filled the canyon with a sound like water turbines as the beavers channeled the current to constricted points along the dams’ lips then sent it falling in a roar two to four feet into the creek bed below.

I told a friend, another long-time local resident, about the beavers’ return to Crossfire.  He expressed pleasure at the thought but cautioned me to prepare for tragedy.  ATV riders, he said, would likely dynamite the dams when they backed water “over their precious trails.”  Fortunately for the beavers, the BLM closed Crossfire to OHV travel just as they began damming the creek, greatly reducing that risk of their being undone via explosion.

Years ago, I watched a TV documentary about the history of Yellowstone Park.  I can’t remember the show’s title, who produced it, or really much else.  If I recall rightly, it focused on the history and development of America’s national parks. As I remember, the documentary told how during the park’s earliest days it suffered a series of incompetent park supervisors ill-equipped to consider the intricacies and majesties of the park’s environment.  These men committed strange acts upon the land.  In one case, park management decided to remove beavers from some of Yellowstone’s streams, thinking their presence somehow detrimental to the landscape’s aesthetic appeal.  The idea was that the actual draw for tourists—the money-making draw—was the sight of Yellowstone’s big mammals: moose, bison, elk, and bear.  The beaver dams were thought something of blemish on the face of otherwise stunning vistas and prospects.

Getting rid of them was a cosmetic decision that brought down trouble.  Once the beavers were cleared away, the waterways’ condition altered dramatically.  Streams silted up, threatening native fish species. A chain reaction occurred. Elements of the changes in streams’ lotic systems resulted in adverse effects upon others of the park’s animal populations, big mammals included.  Somebody somewhere worked out the error. Yellowstone management backtracked and reestablished the beaver population.  It turned out that the buck-toothed, paddle-tailed, tree-felling, overgrown water-rat-like critter kept matters open for everybody else.

That’s how I remember the show.  I’ve searched the Internet trying to find the reference and check memory against script but so far haven’t succeeded.  Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, point me to a source, or contribute additional information.

So.  Here I am now, sitting at the edge of how far I can bodily go.  But visually, cognitively, I’m able to extend presence of mind to the beaver ponds below, whose broad, smooth faces draw my eye.  Softened by grief and sharpened by anger, I let events of the last couple of days and loose thoughts about the ponds wind up together.   I’ve understood for a long time that people cannot achieve better behavior in the natural world as an isolated concern—as a special “treat your Mother Nature well” gesture.  What human beings do in natural environs is merely extension—sometimes more extreme, sometimes not—of what they do to each other.  The boundary between nature and the man-made, hardly more than imaginary in the exterior world, dissolves completely in the interior landscape of the human soul.  On the map, we might be able to draw or point to a line: This is where city ends and countryside begins; here’s where Old Man Smith’s spread ends and BLM begins.  But within us each of us there is no here or there, no north or south, no true better or worse.

If I’m disposed to exploit or control others, arrange them in my thinking to my liking, either to shore up my wanting life with comfort and wealth or to protect myself against loss or fear, I’ll be that same person when I enter the most breathtaking canyon and find myself face-to-face with nature’s “resources”.  I won’t look to see what’s in front of me but to determine what it does for me.  If I’m unable to look across at other people to see what’s there and meet it, I’ll filter each spectacular natural view through the same aversions, fears, and longing that I do when I glance at family members, friends, strangers and acquaintances.  I’ll look for the same opportunities and avoid the same questions that I do when I’m at church, at the mall, at work, or engaged in my favorite cause.  I’ll stamp my own image upon the land, using it to buttress my beliefs, seeing even a favorite place in my own terms.   If I’m inclined to hold my aesthetic sense against others I deem to fall short of “what’s beautiful,” I’ll confirm my thinking in every vista, forest grove, or cluster of claret cup cactus blooms and ignore or rephrase aspects of extraordinary truth that don’t support my usual take.   If I’m a nature writer, I’ll carve my initials into growing trees and old stone faces with the language I use when I write about place and about other species.  Whatever language it takes, I’ll hold tight to my position, ignoring evidence that there is anything—in me, in the human world, in the natural world, or in the divine—that lies beyond my sight or the grid I’ve imposed upon heaven and earth.

The wind picks up,  more pressing, cold, and constant.  My body wants to move to shake the chill.  The sun breaks through a chink in the cloud ceiling and a flash flood of warmth drenches the cliff.  I stay until the next cloud shadow arrives.

When I finally start for home, I come across a lightning-blasted juniper tree, just its wooden bones.  The bolt rent it years and years ago.  Its fallen limbs radiate out from a blackened, hollow trunk.  Juniper tree wood, contortionist by nature, has a sinuous, silver beauty when bared.  Looking at it, you can see the twisting currents of its growth.

Raindrops still glimmer in ground-hugging phlox, this time, a purple-tinged bunch. The sight of the blossoms—their pale, lilac petals sporting lucent beadwork—further cools my mind.  Feeling around inside, I can tell I’m not so sensitive to the touch of my own thoughts.  Movement feels good.  I’ll recover.  But there is no way I’m going to let those words alone: “If she ever does develop pneumonia, have you considered what you might want …” In her condition, as disturbing as it is, this child is a lodestar of cosmic event, an oriel opening onto so many mysteries.  And here was the doctor, the only prospect visible to him the prospect of her death, speaking to us as if we were entertaining the idea of remodeling a room and he a salesman inquiring into our preferences in language marked with the polite hunger of a sales pitch.

The words came too close and for no good reason.  I’ve heard variations on them for as long as I remember from folks trying to wrest away part of me.  They’re common and persistent and dress up as sympathy and concern.  They assert interest in human welfare and dignity.  They trim themselves in ornamental rhetoric meant to draw the eye of our deepest interests: “only thinking of what’s best,” “prevent suffering,” “for your own good.”

It’s the language of imposition.  Sheltering itself, as Martin Buber says, in disconnection and separation, the mind pressing it seeks to hold every matter to its own level, especially those extreme questions that ask too much, like my daughter.  A relationship with someone like her constantly springs leaks that let in the unimagined and the unsettling.   The mind that advances itself by way of  such words attempts through them to exert control upon the endless face of expression, whether it be nature’s face or the changing face of mankind.  Such language paints every window opening onto mystery with a silver back, making its pane over into words that can only mirror, the better to see its own, plain-faced image everywhere as being beautifully what is.

But that doesn’t really work, either.  Somehow or another, what’s out there shoulders its way through.

Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand,
Wer is die Schoneste im ganzen Land?

Frau Konigin, Ihr seid die Schonste hier,
Aber Schneewittchen uber den Bergen
Bei den sieben Zwergen
Ist noch tausendmal schoner als Ihr.

My translation, applying poetic license:

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who is the most beautiful in the whole land?

Oh Queen, you are the most splendid here,
But Snow White over the mountains
With the Seven Dwarfs
Is yet a thousand times more splendid than you.

Two days earlier, as I cleared my desk and bookshelf, I was happy to find an old-fashioned booklet containing photographs of me when I was a toddler.  About a year ago I took possession of it from my mother, who kept it in a box under her bed.  I promptly lost it in my muddle of a workspace.  Three of the booklet’s eight photos document an event I don’t remember but that show opening steps in my lifelong dance with others’ not only expressed but also acted upon concern for the quality of my life—a dance that swept me up before I could walk.

The first picture shows me sitting in the kitchen of what I think is my parents’ apartment in Hopewell, Virginia.  I’m about a year and a half old. That’s my Aunt Pat there on the floor.  You can see the large bandage covering most of the left side of my face. Aside from the 1950s-era apartment kitchen floor plan, appliances, and related artifacts, that’s the most interesting feature of the photograph.  (For larger view, click into photo.)

Next photo.  That’s cute me, sitting in the high chair shown stage left in the previous pic.  I’m dipping my left hand (interesting because I’m right-handed) into a bowl of cereal or some other finger food on the chair’s tray. Again, the focus of the photo appears to be the bandage on my face, held in place by white hospital adhesive tape applied voluminously back then.  Check out how the tape wraps over my nose and under, leaving a slit so I can breathe.  Wonder how removing that felt.

In this third photo I’m wearing the same shoes, possibly the same shirt and socks as in the other two pics.  I’m touching my head—those thin baby curls—bandaged left side of the face camera-side once again.

So what’s under the bandage?  A surgical wound medical science inflicted in an attempt to remove an eye-catching nevus flammeus—“flaming birthmark,” also called a port-wine stain or blemish—before I grew old enough to suffer because of it.  It was a generous effort undertaken in my best interest, covered by insurance and encouraged by doctors intent on improving the quality of my life.  Since I was two years old or less and completely unaware of the problem, others with unblemished experience made the decision for me.  And so the bandage covers the spot where they’d frozen my face with nitrogen and then tried sandpapering off the port wine stain.  Sandpaper!  Am I a piece of wood?  I must be, since the doctors resorted to crude carpentry to try to raise in my face a more aesthetically pleasing grain. My mother remembers that doctors at the Richmond, Virginia hospital bound my arms in splints to prevent my pulling at the bandages.  I like to imagine that made me look even more like a wooden doll.

Unfortunately for nearly all the school photographers to come, the doctors’ attempt to un-blemish me failed.  The sea of dilated capillaries that gives the birthmark its red color extends well beyond skin deep.  Faced with a highly-colored (blond hair, blue eyes, red birthmark) and apparently visually confusing subject, several school photographers, without asking, tipped my clean right cheek lens-side and took my photograph in near-profile. I find these pictures interesting for what they try not to show, my oblique history with school photographers and their standards for not only what is photogenic but also for how to arrange subjects.

The usual pose

During my senior year at Oil City High School, I received the proofs of my senior class portraits and received a shock.  The portraits were taken at a local studio in Oil City, Pennsylvania, where my family transplanted itself in the mid-70s.  The proofs showed me looking to one side of the camera, like many of those portraiture shots do.  The birthmarked cheek was turned away from the lens to match the pose of my classmates, all of us focusing on something to the lens’s right side—our futures, perhaps. But somebody post-sitting performed photo-surgery on my portrait, removing the birthmark without my knowledge or consent.

Senior portrait, birthmark removed by photographer

It’s obvious to my eye that other touch-up work was done here, too.

As I examined the baby photos for signs of what I might have been feeling at the time, I thought about abstracts for medical articles and other pages that I’ve read arguing the virtue of one treatment for removing birthmarks over another.  Some birthmarks are associated with syndromes and do require treatment.  The extra color I sport on my face is not dangerous, causes me no pain, and poses no health risk.  Yet many articles presuppose suffering in all cases of visible birthmarks and some assert that a child’s birthmark should be removed before she or he becomes conscious of it and begins to suffer because of it.  Some articles document how children have suffered.  From what?  Bullying.  Public humiliations of various sorts.  The trouble of standing out in a way that startles people, prompting them to act badly before they can stop themselves.  In other words, where a child’s birthmark does not threaten health, any discomfort the child feels rises from the actions of others and those actions’ effects upon the child bearing the mark.  Which means the birthmark isn’t the problem—others’ responses to it and how the bearer feels about what happens combine to give rise to trouble.

I have myself enjoyed the blessings of many unsettling moments.  I’ve experienced profiling—almost literally, in the turning aside of my birthmark so that a cleaner profile showed to the camera lens.  Also, I’ve experienced Dick-Tracy-style criminal profiling by floorwalkers in stores.  (If you don’t know who Dick Tracy is, try Batman, where criminals all sport deformity highly tinted with insanity.)  I’ve discovered that people suppose me to be miserable or unbalanced; some have told me that I must be.  Some have assumed I’m of low intelligence, if for no other reason than that I haven’t had the mark removed or buried it with makeup.  Children (and some adults) accost me in stores, asking in alarm, “What happened to your face?”  I didn’t date in high school, I thought—stoically—because my birthmark rendered me unattractive.  The funny thing I see now is that I never lacked male companions.  It was just that dating seemed like the yardstick of desirability, and spending half my life with boys in my backyard or theirs wasn’t dating and didn’t demonstrate in obvious ways social appreciation for what I looked like.

As a newly minted Mormon, I remember in my teens learning about prayer—ask in faith, nothing doubting.  I did.  I petitioned God to remove the birthmark out of his no doubt great concern for the quality of my life.  He did not, perhaps out of the same concern.  When I was about twenty, I heard a lesson in church about blacks, skin color, and mark of Cain. Privately, I asked my Relief Society president if she thought my birthmark meant I had done unacceptable wrong in the pre-mortal existence and been similarly branded.

Very few doctors have shown enough restraint to pay the birthmark no heed and stay out of my face.  Most have hounded me with this question: “Does that thing hinder your social life?”  I suspect some of the disregard for my observations and the outright hostility I experienced talking to doctors about my brain-injured daughter happened as part of their responses to my coloration.  Dermatologists have shown no thoughtfulness at all—all have been at least as bad as those school photographers who tipped my face out of the light to hide its truth.  Before embarking on a second pregnancy, I went to a dermatologist for a skin problem I wanted cleared up.  The doctor was completely uninterested in the rash.  Without so much as a “May I?” he lifted my chin with his fingertips and rolled my head to the side, saying, after brief inspection, “Too bad we don’t have any special programs going right now or we could get that taken care of for you for free.”

“Even if you had a special program that would take care of it for free, I wouldn’t enter it,” I said.  He seemed not to hear, caught up, perhaps, in a dermatologist’s ecstasy.

There’s lots more, but this is sufficient to explain the questions that rose to mind as I looked at the baby photos: Did I suffer?  If so, was that bad, or was the suffering severe enough that my parents, their doctors, or later, my self ought to have taken every step to prevent it?

I suppose I did suffer, but not as deeply or as often as others imagined.  I can’t recall the suffering itself. It doesn’t flood back when I revisit the memories.  The suffering—if that’s what it was, rather than self-pity or some other breakdown of imagination on my part—has faded into the background of an adventurous, often highly unlikely and still wildly unfolding life—a life made possible, in part, by that pesky birthmark of which so many people have tried to relieve me, including, in occasional fits of madness, myself.

Me, age 14, birthmark caked with makeup, ick

Life has been such a success overall that when I look back on what seemed the many embarrassing, frustrating, humiliating, frightening, painful, violating and intrusive moments associated with my coloring, I interpret them differently from how I did back then.

Instead of seeing myself alone, in unhappy state, a victim or target of others’ bothersome behavior, a more complex picture emerges.  I see myself in intimate situation with others displaying their fears of pain and isolation that the nonconformity of my appearance touches in them.  I see discomfort wrestling with wonder in their unwillingness to look questioningly into another’s eyes, because offering themselves in question feels risky.  What if the answer is not what you expect?  What will the difference ask of you in return?  I realize now that many faces bore the strain of the belief that exterior conditions could be arranged like furniture to satisfy their pursuit of self-safety, static comfort, and the aesthetics of the familiar.  I ought not to have been there, a bolt of the unexpected, clashing with what’s agreeable.  Desperation—that’s another one.  Before some could quench it, desperation sparked in some peoples’ faces over mysteries in their own hearts.  I fell into the habit of averting my eyes politely to give people privacy to reflect.

The past consists of events plus the meanings we ascribe to them.  Reach new understanding of an event, shape it into newly seeing language, and you change the past, even to the point of redeeming it.  Because I see matters differently now, in every single one of those old moments, my past, with its black-and-white stills and seemingly fixed meaning and pushpin fate, breaks out into free-wheeling and open-ranged destiny, a still-moving story that has already exceeded anything I could have imagined to ask for.  No one—no one—is taking that away.  The choice to hide or lighten the birthmark or to keep the whole of my to-the-eye appearances remains.  But if doctors had succeeded in cleaning me up, they would have stripped out of my life tremendous adventure—one that came with some suffering, yes.  There’s nothing wrong with a healthy portion of suffering.  Fear of suffering, aversion to it—those lead to exertions of control, to the writing of one’s life story, and apparently others’ life stories, into safe corners.  In my own life, nowadays, the deep feeling and the chaos and pain of suffering have come to signal a rising surge of energy and accompanying strenuous movement forward into something new.  Come what may, I’m keeping the story open—the birthmark stays, for everybody.

So as I looked at the pictures that day, tilted as they were into shadow cast by the overhanging doctor’s appointment for M’s SSI physical, I mused on the presumption of suffering as reason per se to alter or end one’s own or another person’s storyline or to impose other controls in order to reduce suffering. “Suffer” has become a money word, a word that sells solutions that may or may not work to quell problems that may or may not exist.  Many of us freely bandy about the word “suffer” when we fall into “quality of life” chatter in water cooler estimations of someone else’s condition.  What we don’t speak of knowingly is how circumscribing in such language the viabilitly of another person’s life reflects back to us our own anima—fears we don’t wish to face, the nervous strain of avoiding movements in our own soul that we don’t wish to give in to, and risks we strenuously avoid taking, including the call to adventure Joseph Campbell rightly says results in grave illness should we strenuously avoid answering it.

Very often, in judging another’s quality of life to be to one degree or another Lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life,” we are inextricably judging the quality of our own existence, because quality of life is not the mere matter of individual condition.  Life is the whole nerve mass of our connections to each other and to the world around.  Each person’s “quality of life”—such a slick phrase!—is not the simple sum of how much he or she can or can’t do and how much he or she suffers or doesn’t.  We live in the depths of relationships entwining us—how far we are able to reach to touch and hold with each other, body through soul.  How far we can go into being with others.  In these constantly turning, changing, and unfolding places between people and the states they give rise to, such self-limiting and controlling  phrases like “quality of life” fall to the wayside of actual living language.

These thoughts crossed my mind two days before my husband and I took our daughter to the doctor for Social Security’s mandated examination.  They are part of the reason why his question struck so deeply.  It was not a new question, not for the family of man generally and not for me personally.  We still live in an ancient mindset where a child even like the one in the photos is believed bearer of some form of evil eye or simply too big of a draw on the community’s resources and so is abandoned on the grassy hillside of God’s will or is in some other way driven off or killed.  The language with which we mark each other out is the blood we paint on the boundaries of how far beyond ourselves we’re willing to go or how close we’re willing to allow approach. I’ve heard that doctor’s question a hundred times, in different forms, in sympathetic tones of kind concern or in presumptuous ones—directed at me.  It’s a question that turns my attention sharply, where in the asker’s eyes I catch sight of common hunger to end it all rather than take just one step more and see where it leads.

Age 16, my favorite school photo

Many readers know I have a severely disabled daughter.  A virus crossed the placenta when I was pregnant with her and destroyed about a third of her brain. Doctors said it found her brain stem especially cozy digs.  Like bad renters, when the virus particles moved out, they left behind a trashed interior space and my daughter at extreme risk.  In a last guffaw, fate—or destiny—pricked me into labor on the evening of April 21.  She was born in the early morning hours of Earth Day, 1992.

This past Earth Day “M” turned eighteen.  She receives Social Security benefits, so her eighteenth birthday triggered an intense round of filling out forms with the same information we’ve provided every year.  This year Social Security required a doctor’s say-so that her degree of disability still rendered her incapable of gainful employment.  The regional SS headquarters, located in Durango, Colorado, automatically scheduled an appointment at a doctor’s office in Grand Junction, Colorado, a five-hour round trip.  My husband Mark negotiated, winning permission to take her to a local doctor here in SE Utah on the day before her Earth Day birthday.  All that was needed was a doctor’s (re)confirmation of M’s status as permanently disabled, a conclusion easily reached upon the slightest inspection of her frail person, distinguished by severe microcephaly accompanied by stunted growth, scoliosis, bouts of clonus (the rapid contraction and release of muscles that characterizes cerebral palsy), and other obvious problems arising from a “severe insult to the brain.”

Taking M anywhere in the car poses challenges, so on Monday we began preparing for the Wednesday appointment. We bathed her—always a difficult project because of her cerebral palsy.  We collected the necessary paraphernalia.  We planned and mentally braced ourselves for the six-mile drive to the clinic.  When the time for the appointment arrived, I asked M if she wanted to go for a ride in the car.  She shrieked in delight.  Her body went rigid with excitement, triggering a round of clonus.

Mark carried her to the car.  With much awkward shifting and rearranging we buckled her into the car seat.  I climbed in back with her to help keep her calm.  When the car moved she startled repeatedly and went rigid, splaying her arms as if she felt she were falling.  I laid my arm across her chest. “It’s okay, I’ve got you,” I said.  She relaxed a bit and smiled.

At the doctor’s office, we were led into a tiny exam room that barely fit, Mark carrying M.  I noticed the arm M pressed up against Mark’s chest turning blue from its circulation being cut off.  “Let me hold her,” I said. “Her arm’s turning purple.”  Mark handed her to me and the nurse helped me settle myself into a chair.

The doctor entered and began asking questions.  At the sound of his voice, M, already anxious, went rigid, setting off several powerful waves of clonus.  Under those conditions she becomes stronger than I am.  I was forced to stand up.  Despite her frailty and small size I could barely hold her.  Could she speak, the doctor asked, could we communicate with her, so on and so forth.  Was she on a feeding tube?

“No,” I said. “I feed her by hand three times a day.”

My arms ached from strain and burned from the lactic acid buildup caused by trying to hold a wildly spasming child.  I handed her off to Mark.

“Has she ever aspirated stuff and developed pneumonia?” the doctor asked.

“No.  She has an excellent choke reflex.”

“If she ever does develop pneumonia,” he said, “have you thought about what you’d want in the way of intubation …”

“Intubation?” I asked, perplexed.

“ … intubation and respiration and …”

I realized what he was saying.  “You’re talking about end-life care,” I said.

“Yes.”

* * *

The grammatical structure we call the question is sui generis in human language, not only for its inbuilt invitation to engage and respond but also for its sexy qualities as an all-terrain vehicle for uncertainty and seeking.  Lively inquiry is right up there with metaphor for its boundary-crossing fluidity—for how it transports us.  Like a good metaphor, a good question can be a provocateur of consciousness.  It can elicit a wide range of responses—in a single person.  It opens matters up.  A good question can get us across.

Experiences with M have suggested that the brain is encoded to recognize the music and inflection of spoken queries.  Back when she began making her way out of to us past her cerebral cave-in, my questions to her were the first language she responded to vocally and consistently.  She didn’t understand my words, yet her badly injured brain registered that the musical phrasings with a rising lilt at the end that marks most uttered questions called for her reply.  She answered—reflexively?—with soft, affirmative hoots to nearly every question I asked, even ones asked within her hearing not directed to her. I found ways to build on those responses, eventually offering her choices and teaching her to make her preferences known. Now she displays an impressive array of affirmative answers.  The hoot endures, but when she’s feeling especially interested, she’ll speak, in a soft, breathy voice, a very lovely, very generous, “Yeah.”

Working with M’s answer tick has raised other questions.  Suppose an ability to recognize questions and a compelling urge to answer are indeed built into our brains.  Could this suggest that interrogatory language opens a door to our attention that we might find difficult to close at will?

Also, I found it intriguing that M’s default answer to any question was affirmative in tone.  Are we wired to say, “Yes,” perhaps as a basic reflexive confirmation of our listening presence? Possibly, many of us feel a strong impulse to answer, even when we don’t find the query per se very interesting.  Which might cast light upon why so many sales pitches open with questions, especially ones that amplify a listener’s natural “yes” response: “Do you want to save hundreds a year on your car insurance?”  “Would you like to help a kid stay off the street and out of trouble?” The question—particularly the spoken-aloud question, which travels on a strong current via the ear to a person’s consciousness—might just have a straight shot into the human mind, laying it wide open.

* * *

Our trip to the doctor was supposed to answer a simple yes or no question: Does M still qualify for Social Security benefits?  Somehow, that question had tipped over into one having no bearing on her eligibility for benefits.  It also queried conditions not in existence. Where had it come from?  My mind suddenly found itself teetering on a tightrope of responses, one of them rapidly focusing, very cold anger.

Distracted with trying to keep M arranged comfortably, my husband had missed this bit of conversation.  He started talking about something else.  “He’s talking about end-of-life care,” I explained, alerting him.  To the doctor, I said, “Naturally, we want to keep her alive as long as possible.”

The doctor pressed the issue a bit more and Mark took up the matter.  At that point, I lost focus on what either was saying.  I rubbed my arms to relieve the pain from holding M and sighed, “Gosh.”  The longer the discussion went on, the messier, the more painful, and the more precarious I knew it would become.  “We can’t make such a decision until the circumstances arise,” I said, ending it.  Mark asked the doctor a few more questions about meeting Social Security’s requirements.  We gathered M up and got her out of there, both Mark’s feelings and mine chafing rawer by the moment.

In the car, I wondered, “Why doesn’t anybody ever ask us the good questions?”

To explain what I mean by “the good questions,” allow me to reveal a fantasy I have, an imaginary conversation with a dream doctor.

Just like this real doctor, my fantasy doctor asks, “Is she on a feeding tube?”

I say, “No.  I feed her three times a day by hand.”

Rather than saying little to nothing about this important bit of information, my fantasy doctor says, “That’s rather unusual.  How does that work?”

Me: [da-da-da-da-da … explaining how it works]  “… Then when she was about three and a half, she lost her swallow reflex.  She came very close to having a tube implanted.  But I discovered a way to re-stimulate that reflex and got her swallowing on her own again.”

Looking really interested, the doctor asks, “How did you do that?”

Me: [da-da-da … explaining how I did it.]  “… At first, it took about two hours per meal to get enough into her.  Gradually, we worked out a routine and she started taking her formula at a faster rate.  Now we’re down to about half an hour per feeding.  Oh, plus the wheelchair rides I give her before and after each meal to prepare her mentally to eat and to aid her digestion.”

This very attentive doctor says, “You said, ‘formula.’  Is she on a completely liquid diet?”

Then I explain, “Yes, one my husband developed.  It uses high-quality ingredients, including cream-top, live culture yogurt.  She used to suffer severe reflux, often throwing up her last meal in frightening, middle-of-the-night episodes.  But the live culture yogurt put a stop to that.”

Doctor says, intrigued: “But why a liquid diet?”

Me, excitedly: “It pretty much eliminates the risk of her choking and aspirating solid food.  If she did that, she’d almost certainly have developed pneumonia by now, possibly more than once. I think the liquid diet also helps avoid other serious problems.”

Completely fascinated now, the doctor asks, “Back to the reflux—you were able to stop her reflux without the use of medications?  Just yogurt?”

Me: “Yes, it worked for us.  My husband thought about the problem and wondered if live culture yogurt might help.  He added the yogurt to her formula and the nightly vomiting episodes stopped immediately.  She still has occasional mild trouble, but nothing at all like those awful, middle-of-the-night episodes.”

And then the doctor says, animatedly: “Interesting!  Some of what you say could help other patients.  Would you mind if I ask more questions?”

Me, hungrily: “Please do.”

“Has she ever suffered seizures?”

“When she was a baby she seizured several times a day—petit mals.  But we found a way to control and then stop them …”

On and on.

The real life medical professionals we’ve encountered have not proven to be anywhere near as attractive as my fantasy doctor.   When the ophthalmologist pronounced her blind and I countered that she wasn’t, rather than ask me to present evidence, he said, angrily, “I’ve been doing this for a long time” and threatened me with home monitoring to “find out what’s really going on.” One of her primary therapists declared, “She has no interest in interacting with others” and dropped us from the physical therapy program, just as M was beginning to form a bond with her—her first outside-the-home relationship.  Medical techs and other interested parties told us firewall folklore that rationalized abandoning her in the wilderness of God’s will. Once, when Mark reported my observations of M’s behavior to one of her doctors, the doc confided to my husband, man-to-man, that “Mothers are the worst observers of their children’s conditions.”  Some of the questions we’ve been asked have been accusatory: “Are you keeping her from returning to her Father in Heaven?”  And now: “Have you considered what stance you might take in ending her life?”

None of these care providers wanted to stir one toe beyond whom they already were and what they thought they already knew to engage with her.  M, on the other hand, crossed great distances under nearly impossible conditions, bringing with her exhausting but inexhaustible gifts of insight and awakening.  Her circumstances provoke, frustrate, take my husband and me to the very edges of our known universes and then beyond.  Again and again she has opened up my thinking, drawing me past my own bounded awareness.  In turning to meet her, I’ve gotten past and over and over and over myself.

In other words, she is a great question.  She’s a brilliant question, of the sort that, asked of the right people, gives rise to the development of new vaccines, surgical procedures, and rehabilitative therapies.  She’s a poser that, confronting alert and interested minds, could draw back the curtain on the nature and development of human consciousness.  She is the adventure that that changes everything and that costs us our lives as we know it.

Before heading home we took her on a drive along the highway to give her a taste of speed.  As we approached sixty mph, I saw her focus turn inward to the sensations she experienced as her center of gravity tipped and rolled gently and shifted into turns with the movements of the vehicle.  She was interested and engaged.  Little smiles flickered across her face.  Through my arm spread across her chest, I felt her body relax more than it had at any other time during the outing.

“Do you like going for a car ride?” I asked, just to touch her with my voice and to feel her touch in response.

She hooted a soft “yes.”

So wonderful to see her at ease.  My body, on the other hand, bound up tighter as I brooded over the doctor’s question.  My arms and hands, stiff and strained from holding M during her spasms, shook uncontrollably, as if they’d absorbed her palsy.

We went home, unloaded M, and sorted and settled everything out.  I looked for Mark and found him sitting at his work desk.  “I want to scream,” I said, walking into his office.  He said something that I couldn’t hear. But he reached for me, and I understood that.  We met in an exhausted embrace, him weeping against my sweater, me crying into his hair.

To be continued …

The kids fetched a box and I warmed towels in the dryer.  The cat—white with black spots, including oval black spots on each white shoulder—looked totally out of it, eyes closed, blood dripping from its mouth.  We drive a Ford Expedition.  My husband said the accident sounded like a solid hit and he suspected the creature had suffered a serious head injury and wouldn’t last long.  How could collision with an Expedition turn out well for such a soft body?  He wanted to give the cat somewhere comfortable to die rather than just leave it lying in the middle of the road.  We put the cat in the box near a heater and it understood right away that this was where it needed to be and settled in.  It could barely open its eyes.  We covered it with the warm towels.  The kids talked to it and petted it, avoiding its obviously injured head—a broad, square head, suggesting the animal was a tomcat.  We all went to bed wondering if we would find him alive when we woke the next morning.

I rose first the next day and found the cat still in the box and yet alive—a good sign and better results than expected.  But he barely moved to any touch, and from time to time both husband and thirteen-year-old daughter had to lay a hand along his side to determine if he was still breathing.  After talking details over with husband and kids, we made a guess as to whom the cat belonged and I braced myself for a sad phone call to my neighbors.

The neighbor was disappointed about her cat being hit but not surprised.  Out here, we’re all pretty pragmatic about our cats, which we lose frequently if we let them outside at all.  We have lost one cat ourselves to its being hit by a car and two others to unknown causes, which could include anything from foxes to coyotes to coyote traps to kids with guns to big hawks and owls.  The neighbor told us the cat’s name was Oreo.  I said that if it was all right with her, we would like to keep Oreo at our house and watch over him for better or for worse.  If he died, we would bury him.  We did indeed suppose we were keeping a deathwatch and that the cat deserved to die in peace instead of in the home of the owner where he might possibly be subjected to pokings and proddings from numerous kids, including a baby.  That was fine with the neighbor—she really didn’t want to deal with the problem, didn’t want her kids upset, and wanted to talk to her husband to decide what to do, but he was away getting job training and was unreachable.  The big question, of course, was whether or not they could afford to take Oreo to a vet and find out if he could be treated for his injuries.

So with my husband and two ambulatory kids checking often to see if Oreo was still alive, we continued our deathwatch. At about 3 p.m., my daughter petted Oreo, and much to everybody’s astonishment, and without lifting his head or moving in any other way, he purred.  A little later, he raised his head and cleaned some of the blood off his paws.  He started talking to our cats, especially the Munchkin Sisters, the two short-legged, unspayed female cats we keep in the house (we have one fulltime outside and two part-time outside cats as well).  Around 5 p.m., Oreo began standing up in the box to change his position more frequently, each time lying back down and falling instantly asleep.

At 7:30, he suddenly stood up, stretched, stepped out of the box and walked to the door.  Thinking he was too weak to go far, I told the kids to let him out, he probably needed to relieve himself.  Once he achieved freedom, I realized I’d made a mistake.  He ran off, dodging the kids trying to catch him with amazing energy for having been so recently mostly dead.  He holed up beneath one of the sheds we have in our front yard—the burnt-out refrigerator box of a delivery truck—and wouldn’t come out. The kids tried coaxing and prodding him, but he refused to cooperate. When darkness and cold descended, I called kids in because both were ill, telling them, “We did the best we could, Oreo’s on his own now. I’m not putting you guys at further risk.”

I called the neighbor and told her, “The patient recovered fully … but he … um … escaped. Hopefully, he’s on his way home, please keep watch for him and let us know if and when he arrives.”  Although my neighbor seemed more amused than anything by this surprising turn of events, I regretted losing the cat.  After everything, it would have been nice to return him to the owner myself.  But we had taken good care of Oreo, providing him comforting touch and a warm place by a heater to not die.

The next morning I went outside and climbed into the cat-crunching SUV to leave for yoga class.  I looked over my shoulder to back out of our dirt driveway and caught sight out of corner of my eye of something strange up on our roof.  It was Oreo.  He had somehow climbed up there and jammed himself into the rain gutter on the NE corner of the house.  I stopped the SUV and went over to talk to him.  He meowed back but looked completely miserable.  Spring here scrapes in on abrasive winds, some of which were blowing hard at that time.  Dark skies to the south and east promised even worse weather to come.

After thinking the situation over, I guessed that he would keep ’til after class and I went on my way.  Even if he did come down from the roof, given that he hadn’t gone far after escaping, I figured that he knew he still needed help and would stick around the house where he had already received it. Everyone inside was still sleeping and I didn’t want to disturb them with clanging ladders, etc.

When I returned home after class I saw that Oreo had indeed maintained position hunkered down in the rain gutter.  I woke my daughter, who has a fine way with cats.  I warmed some leftover chicken and with my daughter went out to see if we could coax Oreo out of the rain gutter.  He could smell the chicken. We talked to him a little, he talked back, then we raised the ladder.  As soon as the ladder touched the roof, Oreo grasped the situation and worked his way along the edge of the roof to the ladder.  My daughter went up while I held ladder steady with one hand and balanced the tantalizing chicken with the other.  She petted Oreo, then picked him up, backed down ladder, handed the cat to me, and came the rest of the way down.  We took Oreo inside and fed him the chicken, which he gulped down with gusto.

At that point I wanted to get Oreo back to his home before we either lost him again or became too attached to let him go.  I called my neighbor and told her, “We got him.  We’ll be over with him in a few minutes.”  We put Oreo in his box and my daughter held him while I drove.

At my neighbor’s house, we took the cat inside and let him out of the box.  Right away, he knew where he was and obviously felt very happy about being home, winding himself around and through my neighbor’s shins.  She was quite appreciative of our taking care of Oreo while he got back on his four feet.

It was an unexpectedly happy ending. And now we understand better where those nine lives stories come from.  In Oreo vs. Ford Expedition, Oreo came out far better than expected, and what we supposed would be a tragedy turned out to be an amusing and educational adventure.  Husband was deeply delighted he didn’t kill somebody’s cat and agreed when I said, “Isn’t it nice to have a success like this?”  My thirteen-year-old, who expects to be a naturalist one day, mused repeatedly on how our first animal rehabilitation effort had turned out very well.  A follow-up call to Oreo’s owners a week later found the cat alive and well and apparently suffering no complications from his run-in with our tank.

The midnight rain ended soon,
Leaving clean the outside world
I glanced through a crack to catch a glimpse
Of  Nature’s hallowed view.

Crisp, Clean, Calm the scene lay before my eyes.
Each tree that stood was a glory to itself
Unstained by human hands,
They did not need nor did they want
Help from tainted man.
Their holiness from nature came
To that I could not add.

The air itself was pure, pristine
I could see it had been cleansed.
To be outside would be bring great joy;
To be rapt in that;
To be in Nature’s arms
I feel would clean me too.

The mountains loomed, lords of all,
In fearful, frightening stare.
The driven snow adorned their caps
Unsullied by man’s cares.
To be in their view held me in awe;
The giants of the world.
They had naught to be ashamed
As pure as the snow they bore

I looked upon this scene and wondered:
Could I find something such as this?
How can I, tainted as I am
Embrace this holy view
That I might hold forever,
That I might grasp and make it mine,
That I might have it too,
To be washed clean from filth and dirt,
That I might be pure too?

Then I looked at my child
This Innocence in my arms.
I realized then I had something
That the World refused to find.
Her purity can not be matched
Except by one small Lamb;
And I can hold her innocence,
And love her all I can.

_______________________________________________________________

Travis has always wanted to write poetry and prose but never seriously did anything about it until he took an Introduction to British Literature class and read the Romantic, Victorian and Modern era British poets. Inspired by Wordsworth, Hardy and others, he finally began writing while he continues to finish his Bachelors in History. His current project is an epic poem written specifically for Latter-day Saints, which he hopes to have published within two years. He currently resides in Montana with his wife of 6 years and two children with a third on the way.

*Contest entry*