trees Archives | The ManifestStation

The Arboretum

May 13, 2022

If you saw it, you’d agree: It’s the gem of our town. Not as big as the one in Vellum Heights, but clean, well-designed, with paved walking paths, a pond full of vibrant, speckled koi, and a climbing apparatus built just for the kids. Its half-mile circumference holds five hundred trees – towering oaks and regal sycamores, luscious magnolias that flower in spring, beeches with smooth grey elephant skin, papery birches and prickly ash.

Some of us are old enough to remember those trees – not those trees of course, but ones like them, that grew in our yards and in the neighborhood park, a mute green watercolor backdrop to our lives. We remember the smells of fresh-cut grass, and rain, and mud, and the breeze on our face. Indescribable now, like the sky when it was blue.

Now we all wear the mask. For the sake of our kids, we pretend not to hate it as much as we do, but it makes no difference; our kids refuse to put it on. From the moment they exit their sleeping pods, after every meal and every bath, we are reduced to chasing them around the house like ogres out of some macabre fairy tale. We hold them down as they kick and scream, force the nozzle over their nose and mouth, tighten the straps at their temples and jaw. It’s not pretty. It’s not what we imagined for them. They claw at their heads and call us terrible names. They say they can’t breathe, which of course isn’t true.

We pine for what the big cities have: renovated, airtight, oxygenated schools and offices and condos, amenities we can’t afford. The arboretum, though – we lobbied for a year, went door to door, convinced the mayor to sign on. We spoke at town hall meetings to unanimous applause, though some high schoolers gave us a run for our money. Julia Meyers, sixteen at the time, stormed up to the podium, flanked by four of her friends. “People are dying and you want to build a park?” As if we’d asked those people to come to our town, with their makeshift tents and sprawling filth. Yes, we knew their children had died. Of course it was sad. And we’d let them stay. Occasionally we saw them roaming our streets, dirty rags tied around their noses and mouths. Some rattled cans, and we gave them change.

We told the youth, some problems are too big to fix.

From afar, the arboretum’s domed-glass roof resembles a snow-globe embedded in the ground, an alluring green planet in the center of our town. The earth’s bounty shrunk to a fraction of its size. We love it. Without it, we’d lose our minds.

Today we have come for the Live Butterflies, and the line extends around the block. Our kids fidget, shift from foot to foot, bounce on their toes as we wait to get in. Connor Watson pokes his little sister in the back, tugs the end of her sash, undoing the bow. “Stop it!” she wails, her hands grasping at the crimped, dangling ribbons of her dress. Her eyes narrow through the porthole lenses of her mask. She kicks him hard in the shin. He slaps her arm. “Cut it out,” their father says, “or we’re going straight home.” In our masks, we all look like giant anthropods with oversized black heads and elongated snouts. Bug-eyed creatures, an alien race. The line inches forward, in shuffling steps. We move as a herd, bovine with exhaustion, the kids like puppies straining their leashes.

From behind the entrance window, the security guard – Jeremy Knowles, the mayor’s son, slumped, unshaven, bored out of his mind, as if his mask-free job were not coveted by all – waves us through the first checkpoint. We pass into a wide vestibule, a large steel box with hydraulic doors. The floor vibrates through the soles of our shoes as the air is sucked out, hermetically sealing us in. Then through a smaller set of glass doors, into the crystal-cool chamber of the dome.

It’s like stepping into the great outdoors, a green so lush it hums in our teeth. The kids are now beside themselves. We fumble with the child-safety locks on their masks, an impossible array of buckles and clasps. So close to freedom, they wriggle and whine. We try not to curse. “Would you just hold still?”

Their masks come off. We let them run – bare-faced and wild, ferocious with glee, torpedoing towards the center of the dome where the jungle gym looms like a skeleton god. Beams and bars and tunnels and slides, they lose themselves in its vertiginous maze. They move in a charged and zealous blur, and something inside us moves with them.

The relief, as we loosen the straps of our mask, breaking suction, peeling the rubber from our face. Our pores exhale, our sweat evaporates. We gulp the cool air. It’s a thirst, and we drink. The humid, heavenly scent of leaves and loamy earth and linden blooms. Sawdust and pine and soft damp moss. Each breath we take returns us to ourselves.

Here we are: sallow and prematurely grey, defying extinction for better or worse. We sit on the benches and watch our kids play. At least our kids still know how to play. They are making do, like the bonsai in its pot – stunted, pruned, inhabiting tiny truncated lives. We water them, we clip their leaves. We don’t tell them how many of us there once were.

Their screams and laughter echo through the dome. More families stream in – our neighbors, our friends – our din pulsating like the chambers of a heart. There are strollers everywhere. Our masks are scattered like empty chrysalides. Lina Hernandez, a mother of two, is squinting worriedly into the crowd.

The crowd, as if by magnetic force, is moving, rippling, parting to make way for a scarecrow of a man who is lurching down the path.

He reeks of sour, festering rot. His face is raw and stippled with a rash. His eyes are bloodshot, his hair a greasy pelt. He could be thirty or sixty-five. He weaves tipsily among the trees, approaching the teeming mob of our kids. They don’t see him, not until they hear our shouts.

“Izzy!”

“Jackson!”

“Get over here, Taij!”

They scatter in confusion, into our arms. Because we are frightened, so are they. We pull them close and give the man a wide berth. He lies down on a bench and closes his eyes. Our children stare, at the labored rise and fall of his thin chest, the dirty sweat on his brow. Two park staff approach – Ravi Price and Jeff Sanchez, young men, acned, visibly sheepish. “Sir?” The stranger opens one eye and mumbles, annoyed, like they’ve come to him in his private backyard, woken him up from his afternoon nap. When they try to help him up, he turns over on his side, his back to us, and wraps his arms around himself. Like Liza, our beloved childhood dog, when she crawled under a porch and wouldn’t come out. Refusing food, growling at whoever came near. We didn’t understand that she’d gone there to die.

Two security guards appear, masked, wearing protective gloves. We flinch as they pull the man to his feet. He splutters in protest, then begins to cough, a croupy bark that wracks his frame. They hold him up by the armpits as he spasms, retches, his vomit splashing at their feet. We hold our kids tighter, try to cover their eyes. Spellbound, they push our hands away. Pink spittle dangles like a worm from his mouth. His head lolls, feet dragging as they take him away.

Already, the kids are wriggling out of our grip. Jeff and Ravi start to clean up the mess, and the kids gather around to watch the spectacle. “Stand back,” we warn. They are like dogs, drawn to the most revolting things. We are glad when the job is finally done, our eyes watering from the sting of disinfectant in the air. Gladder still when Elsie Cho’s four-year-old daughter points down the path and shouts, “the butterflies are here!”

Another staffer – Julia Meyers, all grown up now, having abandoned her needling adolescent righteousness – has appeared with a small mesh cage full of them. They are Holly Blues, lab-hatched upstate. The kids surge around her like a bubbling tide. She releases the swarm, an azure whirlwind. The children shriek. The butterflies rise, a cloud of glitter dispersing in the air, the kids leaping, spinning, chasing after them.

At least we have managed to give them this. Pig-tailed Jenny Ames beatific on her father’s shoulders, the butterflies grazing her outstretched fingertips. Little Elroy Carter toddling about, flapping his arms and squealing with joy.

Within an hour, the butterflies carpet the ground like fallen leaves, having lived their entire lifespan before our eyes. The kids pick them up, study them in dismay – the paper-thin wings and half-crushed legs, the powdery dust coming off on their hands. “Next week,” we say, ushering them back to the benches, where our masks – and the inevitable tantrums – await. “There’ll be more next week.” It is closing time. When we leave, wings stick to the bottom of our shoes.

This essay originally appeared in Call Me [Brackets].

Talia Weisz lives in Brooklyn, NY and is the author of two chapbooks: Sisters in Another Life (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and When Flying Over Water (Plan B Press, 2009). Her short fiction appears in Entropy and Call Me [Brackets].

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, memories, storytelling

The Ever-Expanding Story

April 24, 2022

I don’t discover the broken tree limbs until weeks after the ice storm. By then, my family has weathered not only the most snow and ice Louisville, Kentucky has seen since the 90s – we’ve also gotten through Achilles surgery, a child’s fractured pinky finger, and a $9,000 bill for a roof coming apart at the seams. I’m not even surprised when my husband returns from taking the boys to school one day and says, “Did you notice we lost some branches?”

I follow him into the backyard shaded by the abundance of trees planted on our small plot. I love our home like it’s another member of the family, our permanent address a respite after years of ever-rotating rentals. It’s where we have movie nights on a couch the size of a city bus, where I’m making my way through Wendell Berry’s collected poems in the living room we converted into a library, where I write, where I feed the blue jays and chase off the squirrels.

I clutch my coffee tighter against the chill still in the air. It’s the first official break in the February gray and sun streams across everything like someone threw the curtains open on the world. The rays of light dance across our one remaining pine – another ice storm our first winter took down its twin – now missing two enormous limbs. My heart aches for the damaged tree at the same time my brain starts running the numbers on calling someone to clean it up versus buying a chainsaw, like a self-respecting Kentuckian. Everything costs money.

It’s a few days before it occurs to me that my dad heats the rural home he shares with my stepmom and niece with firewood. Every fall, right around my birthday, he hooks the carryall to the tractor, rides down the big hill into the woods, and gathers firewood for the winter. I don’t have to close my eyes to imagine the wood pile that sits near the house. It stands so tall we could climb it when we were kids. If anyone has a chainsaw up for the job, it’s him. But I’m not in the habit of asking my father for things. Outside the refuge of my home, words don’t come easy in my familial relationships. There’s nothing noble about my silent suffering, the way I swallow everything because it’s easier to avoid someone I love than it is to tell them complicated truths.

A year ago, I probably would have made the drive to the hardware store for the chainsaw and tried not to break any bones getting down the massive limbs, one still attached ten feet up the trunk. But a lot can change in a year. I text my dad a picture of the tree and ask if he has time to help.

I prepare myself for it to be days before he texts me back, like when I sent the rare vulnerable text around the one-year anniversary of my brother’s death and asked him not to drink his way through grief. But this time his response comes back quickly. He fires off questions about the tree, but also the roof, my husband’s physical therapy, my youngest’s pinky finger. He tells me we can get this done, no problem, do not hire a tree service, he wants to help in any way he can.

Survivor’s guilt goes from concept to experience as the thought darts through my head: He has time to help me because my brother’s dead. Even if it’s true that my brother’s addiction and the resulting costs to my father’s time, money, and resources impacted his ability to help me, it’s not as if I would have agreed to pay that price to have his help now. Not even for the way something blooms in my chest when I ask my dad for help and get an immediate yes in response.

The words dad and father have such different connotations. My dad cuts down the wood that heats his house. My dad and I take my niece on hikes and tell her stories about her daddy. My dad has a chainsaw I might borrow. A father, on the other hand, is mostly an explanation. I’m estranged from my father – that’s the formal line I used to tell people to explain his absence. Writers care about diction and connotation because the right words help us tell our stories. The reader feels different things if I use the word deadbeat or mysterious or long-lost to describe my father. They feel the frost in father and the warmth in dad. There is no alternate word for daughter; only the one.

The story I’ve long told myself about my father uses straightforward words: my father stopped seeing me when I was in middle school and my mom and stepdad raised me through the hardest years on their own. A chapter in the story might read like this: The last time I asked my father to come to Louisville and help me with something it was 2010 and he said no.

Long before the Veterans Administration and an unprecedented streak of stable employment allowed me and my husband to buy our home, we rented an 1,100 square foot bungalow five miles west. It was 2010 and we were still feeling the effects of the post-2008 fallout. It turned out our landlords were, too. They were forced to sell their home and we (the colicky newborn, the toddler, and two over-degreed and underemployed adults) were forced to accept the grim reality that we could not afford a new place. Instead, we would move into my mom and stepdad’s small brick ranch.

The day we moved out of the rental house, when it came time to hoist the washer up the basement stairs, the tight fit took some of the original 1920’s doorframe with it. The white-painted frame splintered and exposed raw wood, like flesh tearing to reveal bone. We will never save up enough for a new place if we don’t get our deposit back was my only thought as I stared at the wounded doorframe. Neither my husband nor I are what you would call handy, especially then (this was before you could look up anything on YouTube). I was desperate. I flipped up my Blackberry Pearl, composed a text asking for help, and used the new camera feature to send a grainy picture to my father. We hadn’t spoken since my second son was born. I don’t remember exactly what he said back, but I know it could be summed up as no. I called my mom in tears. She brought over putty and paint and we fixed it enough to make it unnoticeable.

I never asked him for anything else. At least that’s the story I told myself.

My dad arrives to help me take down the broken branches on a sunny spring day. He brings his chainsaw, my stepmom, my niece, and donuts. He’s dressed in the working clothes I associate with cutting up wood – jeans, denim long sleeve shirt, work boots, and a hat to block the sun. If not for the lack of hair under the hat and the lines that now run across his face like creeks through earth it would be like no time has passed since I was a child trailing him around the farm.

My husband is working, the once colicky newborn and toddler are now older and away at (middle) school, and my stepmom’s attention is on my six-year-old niece, so it’s me and my dad left to tackle the tree. In another life my brother might have come down too, like we helped with the firewood when we were kids. Sometimes I think about how my whole adult life we poured our love into my brother but not each other, and how these moments, just the two of us, are like a consolation prize, when you get something nice but you still lost.

We get to work, breaking only for pizza or to admire my niece’s theatrics and occasional demands for attention. We fall into an easy pattern – he cuts, I carry. We work like that for hours. We don’t talk a lot beyond the job. We couldn’t hear each other over the buzz of the chainsaw anyways. But even in the quiet lulls there are no serious discussions about the past, or my brother, or the conversation we have both tucked into our pocket like a buckeye you save to worry with your thumb: the what happened when I was a kid? talk and the what’s your side of the story? conversation.

They’re conversations he says he’s eager to have. When I sent the text on the anniversary of my brother’s death and he finally responded a few days later, he casually mentioned he read an essay I published about him under a pen name back in 2017. At the time we barely spoke unless there were updates about my brother’s various legal troubles and addiction relapses, or the dutiful invite to one of the boys’ birthday parties. In the essay I wrote about how my father was a stranger, a ghost. Four years later, as we texted about that very essay, he said wanted us to know each other, wanted to fill in the gaps. I didn’t text back all the things I have learned about him since I wrote that essay: that he likes the way walnut casings smell, that he has buddies who play bluegrass with my favorite musicians, that he found his youngest child dead from an overdose and survived it.

Today we are both content to keep those conversations tucked away awhile longer and do something we haven’t done in almost thirty years: work together. I wonder if other people realize the small miracles found inside the basic act of doing a task with their dad. Painting a room. Doing the dishes. Moving a dresser. We’ve never done these things together. In the past year we’ve spent more time with each other than in the previous thirty, but mostly on hikes or sitting around a table talking. This act – this doing – feels different. Like my whole adult life, we’ve been strangers visiting but today, today we are a dad and his daughter cleaning up a mess.

The truth is growing up I was a daddy’s girl and I basked in his attention like a seedling in spring weather. Dad, read the poem I wrote. Dad, look at the snake I caught, caught him right behind the head so he can’t bite me, like you showed me. Dad, can we play baseball after dinner? Dad, watch this.

What is it about our parents that makes us revert back to our youngest selves? My friends describe this phenomenon, too. How after five minutes with their mothers they go from self-assured middle-aged woman to the irresponsible child flushed with shame, or how the presence of their father can take them from easy going adult to willfully obstinate adolescent for no understandable reason. It’s as if our bodies remember the time when our parents were our whole universe, and what it took to break away and make a universe of our own. Maybe that’s why almost every essayist and memoirist writes about our parents. Maybe it’s muscle memory.

Like the sun makes its arc over the yard as we work, casting us first in silver and later in golden light, the passage of time also casts things in a different hue. Before the ice storm took down the tree limbs, I was working on another essay, this one revisiting my brother’s eulogy. I reread every one of my brother’s letters in preparation. I found new details for the essay, but the two letters that stayed on my mind long after I’d put the box back on the shelf had little to do with my brother.

One was the first letter my brother ever sent me from prison, dated August 2009. I saw the date and did the math. My brother was locked up off and on for ten years, a tidy decade, age twenty-two to thirty-two. Holding the letter, I realized our dad spent a decade with an incarcerated son. The new beginnings and relapses, lawyers’ fees and court costs, commissary deposits and phone cards fell on him. When I was asking him to come to Louisville and repair a piece of splintered wood, he was fresh in the early days of trying to figure out how to fix a splintered son.

The second was a letter from my father, written in 2012 (two years after the infamous no). I flushed with shame when I realized I held his response to a letter I wrote asking (begging) for money. We’re more of a generational trauma than generational wealth kind of a white family, so no one had anything to spare. Except my dad. He sent a check for $75 (more than I got for hocking my vintage dress collection) with the letter I now held in shaky hands: Glad to help, keep us informed and we will help when possible. I enjoyed seeing everyone at the birthday party. I am very proud of you and your family. We love you and hope to spend more time with you.

I forgot about the letter and the money, my memory cutting out what didn’t fit the narrative. I forgot my dad has never expressed anything but pride in me. When he found the essay I wrote about him the first thing he did was compliment the writing. When I wanted to write about the things that killed my brother, he gave me his unconditional blessing. A year of quarantine and grief had already made me question the story I told myself about my childhood, especially the one-dimensional main characters: mother – hero; father – villain; daughter – victim. And now I held in my hands tangible proof of a glaring plot hole.

Sometimes it feels like the narrative of my life is crashing down like the big limbs in our backyard, unable to hold under all the weight of something new.

We writers (and readers) want tidy endings, or at least emotionally satisfying ones. When I wrote about my dad before, I said There is no word that explains how girls love absent fathers. Maybe I got that right; sometimes there is no word. There’s only an ever-expanding story.

It’s fitting that something as ordinary as wood split in two could expand ours. I only have to close my eyes and I’m eight years old, riding the carryall down into the woods to get the firewood for the winter. I’m scrambling onto the back with my brother and lining up on the L-shaped lift, as good as any ride at the county fair. My belly flips as we rise in the air. There are no helmets or belts. We whoop, we holler, we hold on tighter for the descent and hope the worn wood doesn’t give us splinters. The air is thick with the contrasting smells of decaying leaves and fresh sniffs of split wood. The sun shoots through what’s left of the canopy in perfectly defined beams; they warm the crown of my head as we work. Our annual tradition falling right before my birthday makes it feel special even though it’s simply preparing for the next season before the current one slips away. When my brother dies eight days after my thirty-seventh birthday, I will think of the way I’ve always felt autumn in my body, deep in my chest, like something I love that I’m going to lose, and I’ll wonder if I always knew.

Once the branches are cut into pieces and stacked in tidy piles my dad loads the chainsaw back into their car. My stepmom and I bump elbows and my niece jumps into her booster seat with an unceremonious wave. The normalcy of the afternoon leaves disbelief in their wake as they drive away. This, then, is what it can be like. This is what can happen when the branch breaks and you use what remains to start a fire, to warm something new.

We finally got a clear view of the damage once we’d cut our way to the last of the second branch. The biggest of the two, it was still attached to the trunk. With most of the mess cleared we could now see the deep wound three feet tall, shiny and thick with sap congealed like a scab where the branches broke and took big pieces of the trunk with them.

As we stared up at the injured pine, I asked my dad if the tree was going to make it.

“Maybe,” he said. “The wound is pretty bad. But even if you lose it eventually it’s still got some time left.”

Lucie Brooks is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. You can read her work in Catapult and Taunt.

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Writing Cohort Opportunity

Circe is offering: Crucible – A Year-Long Writing Cohort

Let by Gina Frangello and Emily Black, this cohort is designed for writers seeking to spend a year deeply immersed in writing or revising a book length work.

Cohort Includes:

Once monthly class meeting over Zoom
- 2-3 members will have their pages workshopped per meeting (each participant will be workshopped twice)
Every other month individual/private meeting with Emily or Gina over Zoom (participants will have a chance to work with both)
Ongoing online communication between members of the cohort to share resources and ask questions in between sessions
Writing prompts
100 manuscript pages read and reviewed by Emily and Gina

Email info@circeconsulting.net for more information

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, healing, Mental Health

Humans Need Trees

July 24, 2021

by Dez Hill

Numerous people in this world have encountered some form of conflict in their life. How these conflicts are dealt with varies from person to person. Many people have traumatic incidents that they endure also, which can cause a disorder called PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). The traumatic events that lead to post-traumatic stress disorder are usually so overwhelming, and frightening that they would upset anyone. When your sense of safety and trust are shattered, it’s normal to feel crazy, disconnected, or numb, and most people do.

Let’s explore different ways to deal with PTSD. Self- soothing activities is the most popular way to help keep your emotions under control. If you are unfamiliar with what self-soothing activities are here is a quick summary for you. Self-soothing activities are a source of decreased arousal, pleasurable sensations and calming feelings. They are characterized by: slow, gentle or rhythmical movements; softness in texture, tone and hues; quietness in volume. They include but are not limited to the following: • Calming breathing • Gentle holding and rocking • Calming self-talk • accessing calming sensations: e.g., warm baths and showers, warm drinks, soft textiles (blankets, bed socks, soft toys, hot water bottles), calming music, soft lighting walking, gardening or swimming therapeutic process.

These activities are an incredible way to deal with what symptom’s you may be feeling in that moment; but I want to explore a different route. Let’s think outside the box; trees.

A symbiotic relationship exists between trees and humans. Humans breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, while trees breathe in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. There are many similarities between humans and trees. For example, let’s take the American Hardwood tree. These trees are like humans in three distinct and profound ways: Both are mostly water; both have a peak life span of approximately 80 years and both are completely unique. The most important similarity between humans and trees is that each tree, like each human, is unique and beautiful in its own way.

People need trees. They need to see leaves from their windows, to sit in green spaces, and to play in the shade. Trees draw people out from behind walls of brick and glass. Nature restores the mental functioning in the same way that food and water restore bodies.

Man-made environments take away from us, nature gives back. . Forests, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans demand very little from us, though they’re still engaging, ever changing, and attention-grabbing. The difference between natural and urban landscapes is how they command our attention. While man-made landscapes bombard us with stimulation, their natural counterparts give us the chance to think as much or as little as we’d like, and the opportunity to replenish exhausted mental resource.

Choosing Nature is always the best way to go.

Desarae “Dez” Hill is a Californian, Amateur Writer and Poet who has been published in “Timeless Voices” and in “BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON”. She is a huge advocate of Mental Health. She, herself, suffers from chronic PTSD and has been searching for ways to help not only herself but to also help others who suffer from PTSD.

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Although each of Jenny Offill’s books is great, this is the one we come back to, both to reread and to gift. Funny and thoughtful and true, this little gem moves through the feelings of a betrayed woman in a series of observations. The writing is beautiful, and the structure is intelligent and moving, and well worth a read.

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Guest Posts, Nature

Where Do We Go?

June 28, 2021

by Kristine Kimmel

I live near an ancient forest. I know that it’s ancient because there is a small placard as you enter that reads “Ancient Forest.” My favorite species are the Coast redwoods, which tower over Sago palms spreading their stiff green arms, and the Australian tree ferns, which show off feathery plumes like proud strutting peacocks. Even through my mask, the woodland balm- a mix of warmed bark, musk, and spice- (a scent I am continually searching for in perfumes) loosens my shoulders and untangles the knots of my mind.

As a forest dork, I am fortunate to be tucked into a hillside with an abundance of nature. Monterey pines in which hawks nested for the last three mating seasons and a Coast live oak, recognizable by her razor-sharp leaves that resemble dead beetles and make going barefoot impossible. But it’s those redwoods in the ancient forest that inspire me to use words like transcendental, metaphysical. Spiritual? I’m going to stop because I’m starting to sound like a box of tea. But only when I walk among them do I think to myself, Okay, maybe there is something to this God business.

In Japan, a researcher named Dr. Qing Li studied the benefits of spending time in the forest. He encouraged something he termed “shinrin-yoku.” “Shinrin,” means “forest,” and “yoku” means “bath.” Forest-bathing is “taking in the forest through our senses.” According to his research, trees release phytoncides- antimicrobial essential oils that purportedly boost the immune system. In the early days of Covid, I placed a blanket on our front porch and asked my two eight- year- olds to join me for forest bathing. They were perplexed. This is boring. Can I bring my iPad? When does the bath part start? It reminded me of a time years ago when a friend in Austin sent me some Reiki to help with my neck pain. A few weeks later, I called her: “Did you ever send that Reiki you were talking about? I haven’t gotten anything in the mail.”

In August, my husband and I rented an RV and took our two kids on a four- hour drive north to Santa Cruz to stare at something other than screens. The kids loved the RV, but I advise parents to skip this house on wheels set-up. There is a kitchen and, with that comes a constant expectation of food preparation. The sleeping quarters are akin to folding yourself into half or thirds origami-style, so you might fit into a suitcase or the trunk of a Toyota Corolla. As we walked among the old-growth coast redwoods, I felt humbled and awed in the presence of these venerable elders. Coast redwoods are a deep rich auburn, and their bark resembles fur. They are impossibly soft like a fuzzy sweater or an animal’s downy coat. I said to my kids, “You know, the next time we come up here, these trees could be gone.” My daughter looked up at me and said, “Can I look at your phone?” Less than a week later, one of California’s massive wildfires swept through Big Basin Redwood State Park and threatened some of the trees, which are among the tallest on earth. Luckily most of them survived, but how much longer can these ancient trees withstand the devastation of these annual fires when 2020 saw over 4 million acres burned? And how much longer can I?

I worship California. Despite the crushing traffic, the constant threat of “the big one,” and years-long droughts, she has been my purest and most enduring love. I’ve never, in nearly two decades in my adopted state, thought, “Gee, I wonder what it would be like to live in “FILL IN THE BLANK.” Never once have my eyes wandered from her blooming jacaranda and palm-lined sunsets.

That is, until last year, after our third time nervously eyeing Twitter updates on the latest giant fire’s progress. All the while, thick yellow smoke obscuring our mountain view, our car nose- out in the driveway, go-bags packed. We’ve never had to evacuate, but we’ve had more close calls than I’m comfortable with- my comfort level on close calls with evacuation orders being zero close calls. Many nights, struggling to sleep, I’ve turned to my husband and asked, “Are we doing this wrong? I feel like we might be doing this wrong.” This year, the wildfire season and the pandemic brought a double quarantine. We couldn’t go outside because the air was at toxic levels, and the entire state was in the same predicament. Oregon, which I’d always considered my backup state- aka California Two- had it even worse. Climate scientists predict a growing number of autumn days with extreme fire weather over the next 80 years. Am I on board for keeping my children inside days and weeks at a time because of toxic air? Or scarier scenarios I’ll imagine tonight at 2 am when everyone else is sleeping?

I’ve noticed I have friends in two camps. The ones who don’t want to face this. I see their eyes gloss over or a slight tensing of their jaw. Why is she talking about this? I imagine them thinking. I don’t want to worry about this right now! I am worried enough about Zoom school and my marriage and Covid, and it’s not fair of her to bring up this climate catastrophe crap when I just want to drink my rosé and talk about how hot Adam Driver is! Yes, I am the bummer Zoom hang; I am a surprise screening of the documentary Blackfish when you thought you were going to Sea World. Then there are the other parents who are putting their houses on the market, reconsidering moving back to the states where their parents live, trying to convince themselves how hip Toledo is now.

I’m researching Vermont lately and Maplewood, New Jersey. I’ve never been to either place. Vermont because I suspect it might be the second most beautiful place in the United States and Maplewood because my friend Jen is moving there with her family, and she says it’s “the new Brooklyn.” I already don’t want to leave California, so New Jersey is a hard sell. Leaving California feels like breaking up with my boyfriend for him because he doesn’t have the guts. “California, I hate that you are making me do this,” I’ll say through my snot and tears. California, head hung low, like a dog that just peed on the rug, will reply, “I know, I’m the jerk. You’re great.”

I realize how lucky I am that I can worry over this. I’m not standing in line at a food bank, worrying about how I will feed my kids. I’m not forced to put myself and my family at risk as an essential worker. My family is safe, so far.

The night Pennsylvania was called for Biden, a heavy downpour drenched our region. The next morning, shrouded in a comforting fog, I pored over the news on my phone. Maybe the fire season was finally over. I threw on a warm coat and returned to my ancient forest, with an eight-year-old in tow. As we entered, we pulled down our masks, but the familiar smell I longed for was gone. Instead, crisp cold winter invaded my senses. I could see my breath. I pulled my daughter’s hood over her head. She promptly pulled it down, because don’t you try and tell her what to do. I placed my hand on the first redwood we encountered in greeting. My daughter joined me. I asked her what she thought. “Feels like a puppy.”

We found a bench, and she opened her notebook and began sketching. Mine remained tucked away in my backpack. I allowed my thoughts to float freely with the wind rustling through the treetops. I was bathing in the forest just as Qing Li advised. I focused on my eight-year old’s sun-lit copper tangles as she huddled over her aquamarine flip sequin notebook. A shift had occurred, and it was beyond the temperature change. The forest felt more settled, more secure. On a rational level, I knew that none of the West coast’s forests are any safer in the coming fire season than the last five seasons. But a tiny voice inside me looked upon my ancient forest and thought, you are protected. I had the sudden urge to throw myself on the soft earth and sob in relief because it no longer felt like the fate of this forest- all the forests, all the people suffering, my own children’s safety, and my own mental health- was all on me.

“Look, Mama, I drew a redwood.” A giant tree took up the entire page. At the bottom, two tiny stick figures spread their skinny arms wide on the redwood’s massive trunk.

Kristine Kimmel is a Los Angeles based writer with multiple television credits. She has an MFA from Antioch University and a memoir currently out on submission. Her work has been featured in Dame, Mommyish, Motherlode, The Establishment, and more.

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Stories of parent/child relationships can be complex, and Emma’s Laugh, The Gift of Second Chances, is no exception. Convinced of her inability to love her “imperfect” child and give her the best care and life she deserved, Diana gave Emma up for adoption. But as with all things that are meant to be, Emma found her way back home. As Emma grew, Diana watched her live life determinedly and unapologetically, radiating love always. Emma evolved from a survivor to a warrior, and the little girl that Diana didn’t think she could love enough rearranged her heart. In her short eighteen years of life, Emma gifted her family the indelible lesson of the healing and redemptive power of love.

Read Diana’s ManifestStation essay here

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Click here for all things Jen

Guest Posts, Health

My Dead Branches

December 7, 2020

By Kayleigh Shuler

It was an overcast and particularly taxing morning in May of 2020, dealing with my fear of the unknown and my frustration with the uncontrollable. Going on New York City’s third month of quarantine, things had shifted from “Ah – an opportunity to bake!” to “When will this end?!” rather drastically in the last week or two. I decided to get myself moving by hand-washing one of my favorite sweaters, making myself some tea and going to look at the (still) nearly-barren tree outside my window. It was May, and all of the other trees around were dressed in green, full bloom. My poor tree was adorned with the occasional bud and leaf, but otherwise looked lifeless and tired. I felt rather lifeless, too, most days. It felt like we watched one another everyday and were saying, “You’re still here. I’m still here. We’re still here. That’s all we need to know.”

Her roots live in cement between a parking lot and a sidewalk where drunk men “play” at night. She has been spat, peed, and thrown up upon. The base of her body has been doused in beer. And despite all that… there she stands, day after day, outside my window. During the day she’d let her green baby buds sway in the wind. Her branches are café tables for chatty birds that I loved listening to. She was bare, but she was more than enough for me.

I was in the kitchen when loud sounds from outside brought me into my living room holding a sopping wet sweater, a cup of tea and what felt like the weight of the world. I looked out the window at the tree, and watched as one of her branches came crashing down. My eyes darted to a man with an electric saw standing on a roof behind her. Then, another branch came crashing down. They were disposing of her because she couldn’t bloom like the rest, I suspected. She had been deemed useless; a waste of space in a potential construction zone. I thought how selfish they were… how unfair it was… how empty she was, now. She never had a chance. They had violated her, only to cut her down and leave her to rot. They left her looking even more naked and kind of lop-sided. I figured all of her buds would be dead by morning.

My eyes welled up with tears and my face got hot. My throat and chest constricted and my hands went a little numb. I was so angry. Anger, rage and sadness welled up inside me and came out, finally, as I let myself and the sopping wet sweater and the still hot cup of tea fall to the floor and feel loss, for a while. Of course, I realize now that I was grieving much more than tree branches. Seeing the tree branches fall was just the trigger I needed for release. I let myself feel and cry, and eventually got myself up and trudged through the rest of my day, loathing all of mankind and feeling helpless in a cruel, unjust, and out of control world.

Not a week later, she started blooming green like I had never seen in two years here. She began growing, expanding, getting so full of life, now. I thought something was being taken from her and that she’d be left to rot, but it was actually just what she needed: to trim the dead parts of herself and grow. A couple weeks later, there was a full moon in Capricorn during a Lunar Eclipse. I don’t claim to know much about astrology, but everything I read about it in the days leading up indicated that this was a time of… wait for it: shedding what no longer serves us. Letting go. Leaving or re-evaluating relationships that we have outgrown. Trimming the dead parts of ourselves, so that we can grow and be full of life.

I’m looking at her outside my window, now. She and I look at each other all day long as I work; my desk is purposefully positioned that way. In a place like Brooklyn where the view outside my bedroom window is a wall, a big, beautiful tree outside one of my windows is a luxury not to be underappreciated. It makes me smile to look at her and write about her triumph; I feel proud. She’s beautiful: full of dark, green leaves and even those little bright green things that always fall on the sidewalk. My dad taught me to peel back the edges and stick them on my nose so I would look like a rhinoceros. I still do it all the time. That may have been the only thing my dad taught me to do that I still do (on purpose). I do plenty of the things he didn’t mean to teach me all the time.

My memory of life with my father is not “mostly good with a few bad moments”. I remember it as mostly bad with a few good moments. I can probably count the number of times I felt true love from my father on one hand. That’s okay, though, because I’ve learned not to need it. I’ve learned not to expect, or feel I deserve, a lot from him. He learned that from his father, as well. Many people find ways to avoid the hand life dealt them. For my father, it was music, first and foremost. A master of the art, he could get lost playing, dissecting or writing a piece for hours at a time. When music wouldn’t cut it, however, he turned to something stronger. Eventually, music fell by the wayside, and so did the artist and man he could have been.

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One night in early February of 2020, I found myself in a delightful martini bar in the West Village of Manhattan. I had been at work all day and wasn’t feeling ready to go home, quite yet. I had been obsessed with martinis at the time. Reading about them, looking at pictures, comparing reviews and recipes of different variations. I felt, now that I was 25, it was time to sample New York’s finest and try my first real martini.

So, there I sat in the dimly lit and (now unthinkably) packed bar on a weekday evening, sipping my first martini and pretending I enjoyed it. It tasted salty, nutty and like rubbing alcohol. It must have been excellent, just not my thing. I finished it and talked to the bar tender about a different option for my next. He suggested a gimlet, saying that it was lime based and a little sweet, and I was sold. So sold, in fact, that I had four.

I sat there, becoming woozy and soft in my mind, like a massage to my brain. It felt so good, like I was melting into the corner I had tucked myself away in. I was a fly on the wall, people-watching and invisible. I overanalyzed interactions betweens guests, tried to guess what people did for work, created backstories for everyone there. I began writing on my phone and was, honestly, overcome with emotion at the sheer brilliance of my creative genius while intoxicated with all of this lovely gin. I sat there, thinking: This is what he must have felt.

After a while I became bored and lonely, and those are not good things to be when you are highly intoxicated. I went to write again, but the high had left and the low had entered. Writing was no longer an escape from loneliness; it was accentuating it. I looked at what I had written before. It didn’t make sense. It was all just a bunch of fancy words and ideas. No through line, no purpose, no direction. Just spatterings of what felt like creative genius just fifteen minutes ago. I suppose a lot of people would be able to laugh at this, their silly drunken writing. Maybe I could have, too. Except I was bored and lonely and highly intoxicated, so instead, I sat there thinking: This is what he must have felt.

When the thing that gave me creative genius tricked me like that, I felt so embarrassed, because I had deceived myself. In my experience, alcohol taunts what’s already there. It brings the shadows to light but doesn’t make me feel strong enough to face them. So, I’d drink more and a little more “genius” would strike, and then fade. So, I’d drink more and a little more “genius” would strike… etc. The thing that always troubled me with alcohol was that it seemed to have no positive lasting effects, only bad ones.

The morning after the four gimlets, I had a rehearsal for a very exciting project, for which I was hungover. Getting up that morning was laborious. Being at rehearsal would have been great, except, I wasn’t fully there. I was tending to a hangover and, worse than that, my guilt. I felt so guilty for arriving in this professional environment feeling sick and unworthy. I was not up to the task. I left that day feeling ashamed and tired.

I began to think about my relationship with alcohol in a more critical way. How do I feel before drinking alcohol? Impatient, excited and fiery. How do I feel while drinking alcohol? Subdued, relaxed, and happy, at first. Second drink I’m feeling good, buckling in, and I start “saying it like it is”. Then around the third drink, I begin second guessing everything I say, and I start getting emotional. If I make it to the fourth, I become very analytical, and dark thoughts and reasons why I shouldn’t feel good start filling my brain. My brain always, inevitably, leads me to something that doesn’t feel good, because I think that the most hurt parts of me still believe I don’t deserve to be happy. Truly happy with no exceptions.

When I realized that alcohol was a gatekeeper to dark thoughts and inhibited my ability to defend myself from them, I began to question whether or not this could be a long term relationship for me. I always felt like I couldn’t go to battle with the dark thoughts; I’d just wave my white flag and have another drink.

When I say “go to battle”, I don’t mean telling myself things like, “Go away bad thoughts! Stop! Stop!”. That wouldn’t help because I wouldn’t be addressing it, just commanding it. Dark thoughts and, especially, trauma don’t work like that. Dark thoughts need to be told that they are not allowed in the driver’s seat and why; they stem from our childhood and are as reckless, naive and irrational as the children we were when we first formed them. They don’t respond well to panic. They need calm and clear direction. Direction can look like asking these dark thoughts questions, such as: Why does this keep coming up for me? Why do I always feel angry when X happens? How could what I’ve been through in the past be showing up in my life now? What would make me feel better right now?

I’ve worked on this piece slowly over four months. In that time I have shed old parts of myself so that I can grow, but not without many tears and the digging up of old, rotting roots. Like that tree, losing half of her arms at a moment’s notice, the changes I have undergone have left me feeling stripped and shell-shocked. The unknown became something I didn’t need an answer to, only something worth exploring. I haven’t had a drink since that last gimlet.

And here I stand: blooming. Not fully there, yet. Not like some of the other trees around me, who’ve weathered this storm and stand taller because of it. But my baby buds are swaying in the wind and I am on my way. Growth lies in the unknown, the uncomfortable and the, sometimes, terrifying. Everything that most of us were taught to avoid or control is unavoidable and out of our control. Perhaps it’s best, then, to make peace with this fact, shed the old parts of ourselves and grow. Why not me? Why not you?

Kayleigh Shuler is a writer/screenwriter living in Boston, MA. Kayleigh writes and directs custom scenes for actors and loves being a part of anyone’s creative and spiritual journey. Follow Kayleigh on Instagram at @kayleigh_shuler.

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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