Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love
The post To Catch a Sunset appeared first on The American Scholar.
It’s my first full night in Homer, Alaska. I arrived in Anchorage last night, sleeping fitfully on an airport massage chair. Now I have a cabin all to myself, a desk with a window view, and the company of five other writers for the month of June, all of us here for a writing retreat. Our residency is on the coast of Cook Inlet, a crescent of sloping forest with the Kenai Peninsula to the east. The mountains across the water are etched blue on blue, capped in brightest white. Really, these mountains are volcanoes, Iliamna and Augustine, part of the tectonic Ring of Fire. We will soon learn to distinguish the volcanoes’ active steam from the ambient fog that drifts with the wind.
The artist residency employs a chef, who cooks individual lunches and communal dinners, and we’re in charge of cleanup afterward. At the welcome dinner, we do the usual surveys: your genre, your proposed project, your actual project, where you traveled from, who is partnered, who has kids. After the last clatter of plates being hand-dried and silverware being sorted, the other residents clear out of the main house. I sit on the couch longways, my feet pointed toward the row of bay windows, and stare, hoping to spot some wildlife. We’ve already glimpsed our first bald eagles soaring—“doing thermals,” or flying into convection currents, the residency’s coordinator explained.
I have a book in my lap, but I’m not reading it. Instead, I notice distinctive patterns of movement on the water, halfway between the piny tree line and the horizon. A blow of mist and then a gray swell. A blow of mist, a gray swell. Mist, swell. Mist, swell. I recognize these rhythms: a small pod of humpback whales is making its way in front of the residency. I am delighted, and sad, because I am remembering. There is only one other place where I’ve seen whales.
Within an hour after my arrival, I met the chef in the kitchen. She lined up three products on the counter: a tub each of nondairy butter, nondairy feta, and nondairy yogurt. “What do you think of these options?” she asked. The look on my face was probably not good. She was excited to bake for me, to work around my allergies, to provide so many options—
“Please don’t ask me to eat these things,” I blurted out.
I didn’t know how to explain 40-plus years of training my body to be on high alert for the colors, textures, and tastes that these foods were meant to mimic. How impossible it was for me to find them appetizing, even if I knew on a rational level that they would not harm me.
Fortunately, she took my response in stride. “Everyone’s got their thing,” she said, “when it comes to food.” We talked about where I keep my EpiPens. She asked about how an allergic reaction starts, what my symptoms would be.
When I got back to my cabin, I was tempted to call my mother. She would have laughed at this terrifying mock-milk parade. Commiserating is what we often do during our phone calls. We replay. We vent. Though she doesn’t share a single one of my food allergies, she knows them better than anyone else.
But I didn’t want her fretting over me for the next month. I could instead hold off and send her snapshots of the meals to come: massaman chicken curry; acorn squash garnished with quinoa and chorizo; coho salmon brushed with raspberry barbecue sauce, pineapple-wasabi salsa on the side; green goddess soup; ratatouille; pork chili verde. I could tell her about the chef and her assistant taking turns bringing us bento box lunches, each midday meal a mix of skillfully reimagined leftovers and fresh crudités, delivered in picnic baskets to our cabin doors. No milk, no eggs, no cashews, no shrimp, no cucumbers, no mango.
In 2011, I published a memoir about growing up with food allergies and dedicated it to my mother, referring to her as the one who “taught me the balancing act.” She taught me how to navigate the world with my allergies, how to express my needs plainly, how to toggle between fruitful risks and necessary precautions. But now, in my adulthood, I am trying to disentangle her good life lessons from the damaging ones. The downside of learning a balancing act is that you also internalize, along the way, that your life is being lived on a high wire.
I believe my mother is an anxious person, which is counterintuitive because she goes extremely calm when something is truly wrong, as do I. The first time I heard my husband frame one of our evenings out in terms of managing her anxiety, I was jolted both by his frank take and by the lack of judgment in his voice. For him, planning around his mother-in-law’s moods is a practical matter. For me, this sparks a question of causality: am I an allergic daughter, born to an anxious mother? Or am I the daughter whose allergies made her mother perpetually anxious?
Nature primed the pump for my mother and me to intertwine psyches. My first allergic reactions were to her breast milk, which my body couldn’t process. In my preverbal years, as my parents cautiously determined the safety zones of apple juice, rice, and creamed turkey, my mother was my primary interpreter of hives. Later on, when I came to view a reaction as something to be dreaded and hidden if possible, she was the one who gently pushed me to report an itchiness in my throat or a creeping inability to breathe. She was the one who wrangled ordering at restaurants and the annual bureaucracy of the school clinic’s intake forms.
She managed these responsibilities as well as anyone could in the 1980s, before a marked rise in the prevalence of food allergies increased mainstream understanding. Then, right as my sister was born in early 1990, my father’s service in the Army Reserves began to intensify under Desert Shield, then Desert Storm. The second decade of my memory, the first 10 years of my sister’s life, would be pitted with his absences.
Solo parenting might have felt manageable had our other support structures stayed intact. For much of my childhood, my grandparents’ house in McLean, Virginia, had been our refuge. My grandfather Carl Pruett—my mother’s father—puttered in his garage workshop, where he polished stones and made quirky little sculptures out of driftwood and shells collected from his Navy travels, figures accented with pipe cleaners and acrylic paint. My grandmother Jean kept a tidy garden of peonies and hydrangeas. They had an outdoor swing on which they sat in summer, and a screened porch with a stove where they sat in winter. The wall by their central stairs was decorated with photographs and clippings from my grandfather’s days as a medical doctor with NASA; adjacent stood my grandmother’s china cabinet with a collection of Wade Whimsies, animal figurines collected from boxes of Red Rose Tea. But in January 1991, my grandfather died from the variety of bacterial pneumonia known as Legionnaire’s Disease.
My grandmother lived until 2018, never remarrying. Her final years were marked by increasing disorientation, causing her to be moved from the home she loved. Of Jean’s three children, my mother lived closest to the care facility. She took her mother weekly lunches. She had to break the news of my grandfather’s death over and over and watch for bedsores or unexplained bruising. She had to constantly explain to her mother, You live here now.
A friend has asked me to contribute to an anthology on grief in poetry. I knew that I’d send her some of the poems written for my grandparents—Carl, elegized in my first collection, and Jean, elegized in my fourth. Lately I’ve been talking to my undergraduate students about reclaiming our grandparents on the page, about saying screw that to anyone who ever tells you that it’s too sentimental a topic for workshop. In addition to three poems, I am supposed to include a 500-word essay. This is the first thing I turn to writing in Alaska.
I roll my chair into position behind the desk and look out across the inlet at Augustine. Rereading the poems I plan to submit, I discover a funny thing. I usually refer to the contents of my first book as “heart-poems”; there’s little point in denying the conflation of speaker and poet. But this elegy for my grandfather, when I look at it again, is distinctly an act of persona. Sure, the speaker riffs on the same magazines that I pored over as a kid in my grandparents’ sunken living room. But she also must be an adult, because she signs paperwork at the hospital.
The speaker, I realize, is a projection of my mother’s voice layered over my own.
How could I not have noticed that?
While my grandfather was in the hospital, unopened Christmas presents waited, still wrapped, in my grandparents’ upstairs closet. After his death, his subscriptions to Reader’s Digest and National Geographic and Time were not immediately canceled, and the magazines piled up, unread, on the coffee table. My poem’s framing conceit, the 1889 Johnstown Flood, came to me from one of those publications: the 1968 Reader’s Digest condensed book series featured David McCullough on the flood, which killed about 2,200 people. By the time my mother was the age that I am now, she had an infant daughter, an older daughter with significant medical needs, a deployed husband, a father newly gone, and a widowed mother. The water was high.
Back in September 2018, I traveled with my family to Kinmundy, Illinois, for the interment of my grandmother’s ashes next to those of my grandfather. Their plot in Evergreen Cemetery is part of the larger constellation of Pruetts, spanning multiple generations. Carl’s father and mother are there—Walter S. Pruett, born in 1883, and Bertha Wilhelmina Pruett, born in 1887. Years ago, my mother first told me the story of Walter and Bertha’s first daughter, my mother’s namesake: Roberta, born in 1914, died at the age of three, after falling through a flimsy well covering on the family property. In Kinmundy, I found the small stone commemorating Roberta Eloise, born and buried before Carl arrived. That he and Jean would later give Roberta’s name to their youngest daughter was both sweet and slightly eerie.
From my desk in Alaska, I pull up The Kinmundy Express death announcement for Roberta Eloise Pruett. Though brief, the notice leads me to one important additional detail—Bertha was pregnant and gave birth to Carl’s older brother, Walter, just two days after the accident. I picture a three-year-old able to toddle away into the yard, unchaperoned. When I dive more deeply into the Kinmundy Historical Society’s archives, I am even able to find two photos of snub-nosed baby Roberta in a white gown, her awed eyes looking straight at the camera.
In one of the photos, Roberta sits on her father’s lap while her mother leans in from a nearby piano bench, sheet music in hand. I hadn’t known much about Bertha other than that she was German, born Bertha Wilhelmina Steuber. Now I know that she played piano. I wonder whether she thought future relatives would inherit her love of music, or whether she could have fathomed her great-granddaughter thinking about her 105 years later, in a cabin 4,000 miles away from Kinmundy.
I have a hard time shaking fear around my allergies. When I serve myself first, I take more than I have an appetite for, just in case the person after me cross-contaminates the whole dish. When I serve myself last, I hawkishly eye the dregs left in the dish, afraid that they’ll disappear from the fridge before I have the chance to enjoy any the next day. Where others see endless possibilities in a crowded shelf of leftovers or a drawer full of sandwich fixings, I perpetually hunt for the One Safe Thing.
My mother did not teach me to be this way, not intentionally. But she has imprinted on me her worried expressions, her sharp intakes of breath as oblivious dinner guests carry knives from one serving plate to another or lean across the table with forks extended. When we discovered a brand of oatmeal raisin cookie that I could eat as a child, she bought packages by the dozen rather than risk not having any on hand for my school lunches. Her pantry still overflows with triplicates and quadruplicates of food items past their expiration dates because I’m no longer there to eat them.
Going into the residency’s quiet weekend, when the staff will be gone, the chef warns that the main house is running out of storage containers; more are on order. In my cabin’s minifridge, I’ve hoarded seven lidded servings of this and that. Plus a cling-wrapped sandwich bun. Plus a cling-wrapped chicken thigh.
I turn away from my grief essay. I pull out the containers and make a plan to quietly clean and return them to their rightful place. The almond soup, which has begun to separate into layers, is drained into the disposal. The souring curry salad is emptied into a Ziploc bag that I surreptitiously trash. The blood orange slices go into my water for the day. Garlic-lemon tahini gets a fresh stir to check consistency. The cherries are hanging on. The chicken thigh is sliced, reheated with a scrap portion of spinach linguine and tomato sauce, and eaten for my breakfast.
I have visited the Hawaiian Islands five times. The first two, I traveled as a daughter, with my parents and sister. The third, I flew as the guest of a friend who had a timeshare and enough mileage points to cover my ticket. The fourth was for my honeymoon. The fifth time was as one-fourth of the unholy quartet of me, my husband, and my parents. That trip took us to Barking Sands, the military base on Kauai where my father did consulting work for the Pacific Missile Range.
My husband and I couldn’t afford plane tickets to Kauai on our own, much less rent a beachside hotel, so we agreed to fly over with my parents and share a cabin. My gut churned at the thought of the four of us traveling the island crammed into one rental car, but I packed my bags. Making a playlist to pipe through the rental car’s speakers, I stuck mostly to slack-key guitar, nothing too dear to me. I’d learned that lesson years before, when my beloved cassette of Pet Sounds had become the soundtrack to my parents’ 40-minute fight as we backtracked along a winding mountain road in—Maui? the Big Island?—while my sister and I sat silent in the backseat. I’ve forgotten the cause of the fight, but I remember the ever-deepening blues in the sky. We were missing the sunset, which made the fight worse.
If you were to ask my mother what she looks for in a vacation, her answer would be the sunset. Maybe also a particular museum, or time to read. Maybe a good meal that she doesn’t have to cook. But mostly the sunset. This should be a modest request. Yet when our family gets to that museum, maybe it’s a pain to find parking. When we try to find a good meal, maybe the early tables are taken, and my allergies eliminate fast-casual options. Next thing my mother knows, she’s counting down to a 15-minute window when we must be seated, the sky in optimal viewing position, our wine already poured. If the window closes, a fight commences. Every day brings a new sunset that my mother is in danger of missing.
One of our first days in Kauai, my husband and I joined my parents on an afternoon boat ride that cut through the waves at high speeds, taking us past spinning dolphins and gamboling mountain goats. We also got doused in chilly spray with no dinner plan for after. Disaster was averted in the form of a modest fish camp a block from the dock, where I found Sandra-safe Kalua pork amid the fried options. My husband was happy with shrimp. My dad was happy with a cold beer. My mother was happy because we’d make it back to base in time for the sunset.
We made it all the way to the military base’s entrance gate, where checking identification cards should have been a quick formality. The young guard squinted at my driver’s license. “District of … Columbia,” he said, clearly unfamiliar. “Is that in the United States?”
We assured him that D.C. was, in fact, the capital of these United States. He asked us what state it was located in. Then he called his supervisor, who was all the way at the other end of the base. My father smacked the steering wheel, then settled his gaze into a resolute stare. My husband and I looked at each other. The sun proceeded to set while my mother sighed and sighed again.
As it turned out, the base would not allow any of us to come and go without my dad and his military ID. The plan my husband and I had of venturing out on our own fell by the wayside. We would have to sit in the backseat behind my parents, or stay in.
On the days we stayed in, Barking Sands offered a nearly empty beach with crashing waves; a TV; a post exchange store with good deals on tequila, vodka, and mixers; and near-daily sightings of humpback whales. One morning, I noticed a subterranean rumble beneath my mother’s mood, a too-heavy pour in the juices we’d both been spiking. I suggested to my mother that we fix lunch, something starchy—something, as she quickly picked up on, to take the edge off her blood-alcohol content.
Her voice got loud. She said I couldn’t know how hard it had been, caring for her mother day after day. How lonely. Her voice got louder. She slammed a door. My father took the car and left. My husband stepped into our bedroom. “That’s not okay,” he said, “the way she’s talking to you.” He gripped my forearms while my body shook.
Fight or flight, they say. I hadn’t wanted to fight and had no option for flight. A few years later, a therapist would explain that there is a third survival option, freeze, and then the frantic energy release that comes after.
I went to a picnic bench in front of the cabin, in the grassy middle space between rough lawn and pure sand. After a few minutes, my mother walked past me, carrying a folding chair, which she forcibly plunked down by the water. She paced. At first, I thought she was on her cellphone; then I realized she was talking to herself. I retreated to the front porch. Soon she came swerving up to me, leaning in to hiss that I didn’t understand a damn thing, and I flinched.
Several mothers I know, when I mention this later, tell me that they understand where my mother was in this moment: she had simply hit her limit. I don’t know how to reconcile these moments with my sweet mother, who sends me birthday cards with $20 bills tucked inside in case I need emergency cash, who picks out holiday-themed socks for me, who decorated my childhood bedroom with glow-in-the-dark stars accurately aligned to the constellations, who mails me clippings of every article about poetry in The Washington Post. My mother, who offers to bake Sandra-friendly applesauce-spice muffins every time I go on a long road trip, in case I can’t find food on the way. My mother, who sometimes—in ways I may never fully understand, having chosen not to have children—hits her limit.
By nightfall, we were all trying to act like nothing had happened. My father eventually returned. My husband and I cooked dinner. There wasn’t anything worth watching on cable TV. We sat woodenly on the slumpy couch and stared out the window at the ocean, tracking the humpback whales that swam parallel to the horizon line.
A blow of mist, a gray swell. A blow of mist, a gray swell.
In Illinois, after my grandmother’s interment, we had just enough hours left of sunlight to look for the graves of her parents. The larger group from the memorial service split, some going back to the hotel. The rest of us drove the half hour to Orchard Hill Cemetery, just off Vandalia Road in Louisville.
Jean was the daughter of George R. Kepley, born in 1896, and Pauline Farrell Kepley, born in 1904. George died in 1959, but Pauline lived all the way until 1991, at one point remarrying and taking the last name Helmick. I have a faint memory of meeting her once, visiting her retirement home as part of a road trip with my grandparents to Disney World. That time, my mother and I rode in the back seat. An antiseptic smell rises unbidden in flashback. As a child of seven or eight, I was transfixed by my great-grandma’s earlobes, which seemed to droop low toward her shoulders—a consequence, I was warned, of wearing overly heavy earrings in her younger days. I vowed never to do that.
We found my great-grandfather’s place in the Orchard Hill Cemetery mausoleum, his name inscribed in crisp black against the white marble square set into the wall. A crystal bud vase with pink nylon flowers sat on the ledge, and a small American flag stood upright. Our group added a red rose carried over from my grandmother’s memorial service.
Pauline was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, she had sold her space in the Louisville mausoleum years ago, with no intention of being buried in Illinois, but my grandmother had decided to overrule her wishes. Where was she?
We fanned out over the cemetery, covering each hill to find her before twilight set in. I’d almost given up before spotting Farrell on a family stone, just shy of the road that defined the cemetery’s edge. She had been buried adjacent to her parents. A ledger stone marked her individual grave: Pauline Farrell Kepley Helmick, 1904–1991. In a photo from that day, I am bouncing in the toes of my black Mary Janes, a 38-year-old woman with fingers clasped. I found you, I found you.
She is the source of my middle name, Farrell. Beyond that, I have only a shadowy sense that my great-grandmother was a difficult woman. She had one child, at age 20, while everyone around her went on to have kids in threes and fours. She is said to have passed along the dramatic skills that her daughter took to an actual stage—Jean performed with the San Diego Civic Light Opera, which put on shows at the Starlight Musical Theater in Balboa Park—while Pauline remained, simply, a “dramatic” person.
I can’t imagine what my grandmother thought when her mother remarried and moved to the coast—daring to reinvent her life—while her mother-in-law modeled 27 years of stoic widowhood. Or, rather, I guess we have the answer. Jean brought Pauline back to the Midwest plains to be buried in the same cemetery as her first husband. Just as my other great-grandmother, Bertha, never remarried after Walter’s death, my grandmother Jean never remarried after Carl’s. Evidently, she wanted her mother, Pauline, to be forever remembered as George’s widow.
At some point in the weeks after Carl’s death, I stole a peek at my grandmother’s calendar book. On the square for the day he’d died, after a month-long hospitalization, Jean wrote, in calm ballpoint script, Carl died. Life is over. At only 10 years old, I couldn’t understand being so tied to someone else that his death felt essentially like dying yourself. Was this, I wondered, what love should look like?
A few days into the retreat, my fellow writers and I board the Danny J fishing boat, which ferries us across Kachemak Bay to Halibut Cove on Ismailof Island, where a boardwalk staggers along the coast above the sea. On the way, we loop around Gull Island, a bird preserve, and for the first time I see puffins in the wild. I try to take a photo, but the camera lens turns the puffins to black blobs low in the water, their orange beaks hidden from view.
As we make our way across the bay, I focus on spotting sea otters, which are much bigger than the freshwater variety I’ve seen at the National Zoo. This time of year, late May and early June, is peak birthing season for sea otters. They don’t have dads, at least not in the practical sense. Each mother otter takes sole responsibility for her pup, and for much of the six-month period after its birth, she carries the small creature on her belly. When she needs to hunt for food, she swaddles the kid in a raft of seaweed to maintain buoyancy. I dig my binoculars out of my purse as six otters—mothers plus pups—bob 10 yards from our boat.
If a baby otter is making a racket, the mother will lick its head to quiet it and, if that doesn’t work, place a paw over its mouth.
I do not refer to my mother as a “mama otter” in my memoir. I refer to her as a lab scientist, a detective, and a contracts lawyer. I chose to focus on her heroism, which felt good. The truth is more complicated. If she hadn’t had to be a scientist, a detective, a lawyer, a nurse, and a hero, maybe she could’ve enjoyed being a mother more.
Our last morning at Barking Sands, I moved back and forth between packing my suitcase and clearing out the kitchen. My father was at a loss for how to deal with the groceries we’d accumulated. When he was there by himself for work, he’d buy sashimi-grade tuna and slice it straight out of its Styrofoam tray and into his mouth for dinner, with a handful of Maui Style potato chips on the side. But my mother had overstocked the fridge for her allergic daughter. We had boxed spinach and bacon and frozen peas and linguine and jarred salsa and, and, and.
My father urged us to dump what was open into trash bags and leave the unopened stuff for the cleaning crew. Maybe I would have done that if we had been headed to the airport. Instead, we were headed to Princeville, where our hotel rooms would be outfitted with much fancier showers, but no stovetops, and I was fighting to quell the worry that our trip would end in an anaphylactic reaction at some restaurant. I swept the kitchen for anything that might survive the car ride and the half day’s wait before we could check in. My mother surfaced occasionally from my parents’ bedroom. We were not quite back to speaking.
I only had a single Tupperware, which I’d used to bring a pilaf for the long flight from Dulles to Oahu. What to salvage? I decided on the pack of masago we’d bought at the Japanese fish market. While my husband wrestled with where to stash our swimwear, still wet and stinky from the day before, I boiled a bag of rice. Minutes before being pushed into the car, I layered the fish roe on top of the rice and packed a fork.
The next two hours were a muddle of errands and a prolonged check-in. Everyone’s stomachs rumbled, but we were determined to make it up to the hotel rooms that, blessedly, were not conjoined. While my husband pondered the room service menu, I turned to my plan.
I peeled back the lid to reveal a gelatinous mess. Still-warm rice had steamed the fish eggs to bursting, congealing all into an orange brick. I gagged.
So much for planning ahead and being self-sufficient. My stomach growled, and I felt a rising anxiety, a stiffness and clenching in my shoulders. I dumped the Tupperware contents into the toilet, flushing several times over, and asked whether we had any honey-roasted peanuts left. Soon, it would be time to meet with my parents and find four chairs. The drinks would be poured. We had a sunset to catch.
Carl died. Life is over. The force of my grandmother’s words makes it tempting to reduce her widowed years to those dimensions. In fact, at first, I do exactly that. “She tended her hydrangeas, was active in the church choir, and babysat her youngest grandchild,” I write in my essay for the anthology.
I hit send—and then, minutes later, email an apology and a corrected version: “She tended her hydrangeas, was active in the church choir, went abroad with Shillelagh’s Travel Club, and babysat her youngest grandchild.”
The difference to anyone else is probably slight. But how could I have forgotten about her years of sightseeing with Shillelagh, the affordable “country club of the air” headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia? In his Navy days, my grandfather had been the adventurer. He’d brought back dozens of souvenirs, from delicate hand-painted fans to a walking stick with a hidden blade. In the too-short stretch of his retirement, he and my grandmother had traveled together, and he’d filled his pockets with seashells for sculptures and rocks for polishing. But his death didn’t mean the end of her trips. She went to Prince Edward Island, Ireland, and the Great Wall of China. She even came all the way to Alaska.
My mother is a painter. Sunsets frequently show up on her canvases. But for many years, while my sister and I were children, she did not paint. Preserving the time to even watch a sunset would have been a victory while organizing a day according to everyone else’s needs. The cruelty of children is that they may be the ones who beg you to show off your creative side, all the while making it impossible to do so.
Once or twice, my mother specifically mentioned that I was allergic to something in the materials she used for oil painting. Years later, at one of the first artist colonies I attended, a woman my mother’s age called that a flimsy excuse for not painting. But even had I not been allergic, how could my mother have had the time?
In my teenage years, I was relentless in my efforts to jumpstart her art making, thinking it would bring her some happiness that I couldn’t quite name as missing. I gave her watercolor pads and travel paints, brushes, Conté pencils, book after book of other people’s art. During my high school talent show, when my mother was expecting me to sing, I went out and read poems instead—including one about her blank canvases, her not-painting—oblivious to how that would make her feel, sitting in the audience.
I wrote about that experience for The Washington Post, and I’m writing about it again in this moment. At every turn, my mother made art a valid thing for me to pursue, and so I did. But because I was around to pursue my art, she didn’t get to pursue hers for years and years. I am trapped in a variation on that Francisco Goya painting Saturn Devouring His Son. Except in this incarnation, I am the one with mouth wide open and teeth sharp: the ravenous child.
On the drive from the Homer airport to the residency, I saw my first moose. The residency coordinator pointed it out, and I jerked my head to the window just in time to see the animal’s preternaturally tall shape, a horse with humped shoulders and shaggier hair. I was surprised when we didn’t turn the car around for a longer look. “You’ll see plenty of them,” the coordinator assured me.
She was right. “Moose,” I said, the first time I saw one at the head of the residency driveway, grabbing my phone for a series of quick snapshots.
“Moose,” I said, another night, when I stepped outside the main house for the 10-foot walk back to my cabin, but no one was there to hear me. “Baby moose,” I said, seeing a second join the bigger one. I reached for my phone, but it was not in my pocket; I’d left it on the kitchen counter.
“Moose!” we frantically alerted each other many times over in our group text all throughout the first week, sometimes with a grainy photograph or shaky video. There seemed to be a mother, a baby, and another that hung around the residency. The chef explained that the midsize third moose was probably the previous year’s baby; once they become yearlings, their mothers abandon them. We became aware of spots where they liked to rest late at night, and where they’d feed midmorning. Their hulk and bulk shook the ground. A telltale thump accompanied their approach.
One night, while I was working, the other residents had the first sighting of all three moose at once. I only learned this later, seeing the chatter of 20 texts when I picked up my phone before going to bed. A grainy snapshot. A shaky video. A week before, I’d have been bereft to have missed the sighting. Now I trusted that the moose would be back. The next day, they were.
A voice in my head often whispers that the refrigerator is running low, and our shelves are running empty. That to prove you’ve done the best possible job of loving someone else, you have to turn yourself inside out. That you should make a show of having no love left for yourself. This voice says there can be a mother-artist or a daughter-artist, but not both. Unless we drop everything for the next 15 minutes of watching the sunset, we have failed this day entirely.
Except the sunsets are so long in Alaska, in this month of the summer solstice. A person could spend hours watching the skies turn pink and then purple, cook and eat dinner, put the dishes away and come back—and the sunset would still be there. I want my mother to see this abundance. I am trying to figure out a way to bring it home to her.
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