Transparencies

Mother

My mother’s theology is looking out at water: clear, endless blue. She would lay her sixteen-year-old body on her family’s wooden dock at the bottom of Meguzee Point. When she could not bear the bursting heat, she would jump into the water, climb back up onto the dock, and lay under the sun until she dried again. 

My mother grew up in a small town in northern Michigan. Elk Rapids is surrounded by water. The town  is on a peninsula that edges up to the eastern arm of Grand Traverse Bay on one side and cradles a large lake called Elk Lake on the other.

My mother was born in Ferndale, Michigan, which is a suburb of Detroit. Her parents owned a collection of small cabins on Bay Beach in Elk Rapids. In the summertime, her family would live in a cabin and manage the rentals. Each week after vacationers left, my mother, under the caring eye of my grandmother, would make the beds with clean sheets, folding and tucking the corners tight. 

When my mother was twelve, my grandparents moved my mother, her sister Mary, and brother John to live in Elk Rapids year-round. They bought a yellow farm house at the top of a hill on Meguzee Point, next to Elk Lake. The lawn ran down to the wooden dock where my mother spent her summer days sunbathing. In the winter, my mother could walk across the frozen lake to school.

My mother’s theology, I think, forms around two blues, Bay Beach, and Elk Lake. Her faith is always so sure.

I wade into the Michigan water, which is free of the brown of Minnesota’s gritty lakes. I swim with my sisters out to the raft on the water. The raft is anchored at my great Uncle Robert’s beach side property, right next to Bay Beach. After moving to Elk Rapids, my grandfather sold the Bay Beach cabins to a couple, who sold the cabins to developers, who made the property into mammoth condominiums. My grandfather kept about one-hundred feet of land to keep as a buffer between the condominiums and his brother beach house. He eventually sold the property to Uncle Robert. It is vacant, now, a plot of empty beach grass, succeeding in its intent to stop the encroaching tourists, but not the water. The water at the bay continues to rise, shrinks the sand a little with each year we visit. By now, the water has inched to the line of tall, brittle grass, erasing the beach. 

When I reach the raft I shakily climb the aluminum ladder and lay down on my stomach. My face presses against the green plastic turf that coats the surface of the floating raft. My sisters do the same. We lay on our backs until our shoulders begin to pulse with heat. When we flip over, our bellies and foreheads are leprous, bits of kelly green turf and sand stuck to our skin. 

I am not a strong swimmer, but when I am swimming in the bay, I am my mother at sixteen.

Light (ONE)

There is bright, white light that shines out of snow. The light is blinding, but also illuminating, and clarifying. It is the tundra light of sun hitting snow, opaque and flat with a crystalline sheen. It is the light you step out into at the parking lot of the sledding hill, the light embracing when you step outside on a snow day. The light you squint towards as you ready yourself to shovel snow. The light stings, then turns the air clear. It is freezing. Your eyes hurt. The light burns in your lungs. There is clarity, there. There is vigor. There is no sleeping. 

We trampled downhill at the Royce’s cabin through the woods to a frozen lake, covering a half-mile with a foot of snow. When we reach the bottom of the hill the woods open up, stopping humbly in reverence to the silent field of snow.

Light (TWO)

There is yellow light trapped inside the gray Oldsmobile, after church on Sunday in the parking lot. I am twelve-years-old. The air outside is translucent. Snow settles in drifts here. There, it is dense and stacked into parallel rows along streets by the snowplows in the early morning.

That sunlight            

makes the car warm. The walk through the emptying parking lot is biting, but our car is a gentle with heat and light. It is loving light, for the girl after church in the wild cold of Minnesota. 

I lean my head back on the plush upholstered seat, closing my eyes the whole ride home. 

Blue

He knows too much now. He knows I am not his mother, or his father. It is his knowing that makes him fussy and clingy, makes him throw his little body to the floor when I take something away from him. It is the knowing, the knowledge of Adam and Eve, that makes him difficult. When I try to sooth him to sleep he arches his back, twisting and crying. The crook of my arm where his head rests is sweaty. I assume his head and neck are sweaty as well. So we are caught in this unwanted, sweaty embrace. 

When I pulled up to the house that day there was a bright blue mark painted on the usually taupe fence. Next to the fence the neighbor’s newly painted, bright blue garage stood jauntily.

I could see the same bright blue in the sky later that day, framed in the upstairs window as I rocked the baby to sleep. The bright blue was soft and striped by chartreuse and lime green trees of summer. 

It was right before I sat down to pee that I saw the contact lens stuck inside the bowl of the toilet. The contact looked blue against the white porcelain and clear water. When I peed, it was blue against yellow.

Flies

In late summer my house was infested with flies. They descended in the August heat. My roommate and I killed them with our sandals, following them around the house and smashing them. She would kill them in the morning before work. I killed them in the afternoon. In the evenings they quieted.

When I smacked them their bodies exploded with a yellowish paste. It stuck to the walls and windows and was difficult to clean. 

I opened up the trash to find it writhing with maggots. I threw out the trash bag, then hosed down the trash can in our yard. By mid-September the flies disappeared.

A few weeks ago, in January, a fly buzzed around my bedroom. It was the size of a jelly bean and flitted between the lights in my room. 

I wondered if it was a survivor from August, grown copiously fat over winter. I followed it slowly around the room with the slipper my mother bought me for Christmas. I caught the fly in the corner of my room, by the door of the closet. Its body dropped to the carpet. I left it there until the morning because I was tired.

When I walked to the fly the next morning, it rose up from the floor. Alive, like Lazarus. 

2020