Winter 2024

The baby bird lay twitching on a bed of pine needles while the hot morning sun beat on its nascent wings.

My brother Daniel and I watched as its chest rose steadily amidst the occasional spasm, which was accompanied by a reedy whistle from its damaged lungs. For such a little bird, a
lot of blood coated the pine needles. Daniel was small too, and I’d made him bleed a lot.
I was eleven and Daniel was seven and it had been a pretty successful year of “jodiendo” as my parents called it—a game in which I bothered Michelle and Daniel, and by extension my parents—all to ensure I was never overlooked in the family. With my parents’ attention split between me and my brother and sister, I was jealous that I was no longer the center of attention, and so I concluded there was no other role I could play in this family other than to joder. I saw the wounded baby bird as another great opportunity for me to joder.

It was losing my girly parts—outsides and insides—to cancer that threw me into early menopause.

Now pessimism, moodiness invade my brain. So, I run. I run from anger. I run to clear my head. I hate the bitterness, and I hate running, but I can’t stop.
I blame-thank my husband for my running addiction. In my late twenties, I complained to him that my fat pants didn’t fit. Matt, an avid runner, suggested I try running. “It’s healthy and will get you in shape.”
“Me, run?” I said with a laugh. I was a high school cheerleader in the eighties, when it was about the skirt instead of basket tosses. Perspiring wasn’t anything I had ever aspired to do.

At the end of September, at ten in the morning, I throw a crab trap over the side of our sixteen-foot Smoker Craft into Netarts Bay on the Oregon coast.

I gather up the buoy and nylon rope and toss them in after the trap. In the stern, my husband pulls ahead twenty feet, throws the second trap, settles back in his swivel chair, and lights a Marlboro. It’s low tide, so a lot of line floats on the surface. We’ve caught eight crabs so far. Not great, but at least we won’t get skunked. We’ve thrown back all the females and
undersize males. The last three pulls were so heavy my husband helped me heft the trap
over the gunwale and dump it on the floor to sort.

My daughter finishes her first summer with sunbleached hair, lighter than the dead grass in our yard.

She plays within my arm’s reach, but I can already feel her slipping. Something about the way she fights my hands as I rub in another layer of sunscreen. Her skin glows with that
grease. It makes me think of us—the “us” that spent summer days a little too far from
home for a little too long. You and me and so many kids we knew.
Our summers were hot. The smell of tar thick in our brains, the kind that held the imprints of our hands and stained our palms. Red welts rose on our legs from sitting sweaty in the crabgrass. We picked bubbling paint off the splintered picnic bench and laid it on our
sticky skin—molting our scales to go inside, but little flecks stuck in our hair like stars. Do you remember how hot it was? Lying in bed sweating, sitting in the car sweating, eating
Otter Pops sweating, hugging and throwing and kissing and fighting and plotting and sweating.

Halfway through Jacques Cartier’s exploration of the St. Lawrence, headlights flashed along the David Cassidy poster plastered to my wall.

The bang of the truck door, the squeak of snow, then the thud of boots on the kitchen floor told me my father was home. With my mother on the mainland taking a course for her teaching certification, I closed my history book and heeded the warning bells that summoned me downstairs.
My father stood in the middle of the kitchen still wearing his work coat and boots and holding a Sobeys bag. Stumbling as if the floor had moved, he steadied himself against the wall, snow melting in a puddle under his feet.
“Where’s Brenda?”
“Upstairs.”

No matter what my mother held up for review, my
answer remained the same, “Trash.”

I am either the best or the worst person to assist with a basement cleanout. As I saw it, my parents’ basement contained no forgotten treasures. It was a place for mice, moldy file boxes, and equipment for sports no one had played in a decade. My mother is no hoarder, but she fears the crushing regret that comes from one day needing something she’s tossed. I understood, but not when the objects in question were a broken VCR, headless rocking horse, and my brother’s clay rendering of a boat shoe.