Buoyancy

So, the Fall catalogues are coming out, and I let the teeny-tiny, little-girl princess in my heart flip through the pages while I wait for my tea water to boil.  I thumb past the shirt dresses, the cashmere two-piece sets, the trendy A-line skirts and flannel tunics with barely a glance.  These clothes mean nothing to me. I like the styles, but no way  am I going to pay $70 for a flannel shirt or $100 for a linen tunic.  I lick my thumb and chuckle in superiority as I turn the glossy pages of these catalogues featuring pictures of beautiful, healthy-looking women who look nothing like me, though we’re both classified by the fashion houses as “Plus Size.” Actually, the women in the catalogues qualify as “Plus Size.” The only significance I have to houses of fashion is as a grotesque, a cautionary tale, certainly not as a woman, not as a consumer of fashion, not even as a person. 

I turn one more page and it hits me. I heave my annual Fall Sigh. 

Boots.

These are “full-figure” models, and yet not one of them is over a size 10, maybe 12.  Need I say, I am not a size 10 or a 12?  Not even a 14 or a 16.  But it's not their bust size, their waists, their hips or their thigh measurements that deflate me. It's their calves that make me long for that which will never be.  I stare wistfully at the boots. I can almost smell the fresh, clean, new leather, and I imagine how it would feel to have an extra 2 inches of solid heel to look down from without wobbling.  Knee-high boots are popular this season--they usually are in Fall catalogues--and in nearly every picture, the model is wearing a pair of knee-high boots. In the pictures where she's not wearing boots, she's wearing leopard-print stilettos. I got over those a long time ago, but the teeny-tiny, little-girl princess in my heart still goes all dreamy-eyed over those boots.  Tan rough-outs with a 1-1/2 inch square heel.  Smooth, dark chestnut calf skin with a 2-inch stack heel.  Or the ultimate: flat-soled hunters, forest floor brown, in soft, pliable deer skin that laces up and ties at the back.  Another sigh. 

I have to tell that little girl no again this season and, indeed, every time the fall boot season rolls around because the reality is, I will never wear knee-high boots. Not even mid-calf boots. High-top sneakers are about as much as I can manage.  You see, I am what a drunken friend quite generously called “voltuptupous.”  Nah, let's tell it like it is.  I’m heavy-set. I'm a big girl. I’m fat.  I am very likely to start a grease fire at the crematorium upon my demise. I am a member of what another friend calls the “Junk-in-the-Trunk Sisterhood,” but even if I weren't, I couldn't wear those boots because, even if I lost weight to dangerously low poundage, unless I had muscle mass actually shaved off my calf muscles in a ghastly surgical procedure to decrease the diameter of my legs, I would never be able to fit into those boots.  My legs have very little taper from hip to ankle, even without the overlying layer of fat.  They are giant sequoia legs. I will never be able to carry off one of my favorite ensembles of all time—boot cut jeans with real cowboy boots, a chambray shirt and a denim or canvas jacket.  

As the teeny-tiny princess settles down into yet another disappointed slump, I try to figure out what to tell her because I want her to feel good.  When she's not happy, I'm not happy, and not being happy is not good for my waistline, which is a problem for reasons more important than fashion.  I want her to know that she's all right just the way she is, that I wouldn't have her be any other way because there is no one else exactly like her and all that other hoohah.  She doesn't fall for it.  She's heard that speech several times before, after all. The tea water boils, I pour it over my chamomile and go back to my desk to do those adult things I spend so much time on like wage earning, paying bills, making appointments, playing computer solitaire, etc. I can still hear the princess kicking around behind a file cabinet in my mind, throwing her tiara up against the wall, whacking my mental inbox with her royal scepter that, it turns out, is not a magic wand after all.  She's not a brat; she’s just frustrated. Understandably so, but it's my job to teach her a better way to deal with it than maintaining a Rapunzelesque loneliness, trapped in my mind, held hostage by an unachievable vision of prettiness. 

The other morning, I think I hit upon the answer.  It has been a searingly hot summer, and I've been getting up before 6:00 a.m. to take the dogs out for a walk in the fresh of the morning.  It's still, quiet, cool and the air is calm.  My mind surrenders to the zen of dog walking—I must focus on the dogs, and all my senses are taken up in maintaining our safe forward progress.  But I find the clean smells of morning sage and freshly watered grass, a crushed aspen branch, desert dust and the scent of dry pine on the breeze come through to me on top of the diligence with which I attend to crosswalks and poop patrol.  The rhythm of my footsteps, breathing, heartbeat, the pattern of stop and wait for the dogs to smell the place a jack rabbit was moments before and then move on again, all calm me and allow my mind to expand in ways that 90 minutes on a treadmill just doesn't accommodate.  It's as though my body and mind have made a deal: Keep the body busy and the mind can get some major work done.

It's so quiet at this hour, but I find that when I tune in to the sounds around me, it's the wind in the pines on the mountain miles away that I hear.  But this morning as I walk with my small terrier—trying out his harness for the first time, which I am pleased to see that he regards as a super-hero outfit rather than a straight jacket—I hear above me a huge exhaling sound.  Bigger than any animal I've ever heard except a whale, and there aren't too many whales in the high-desert sky.  Not in Wyoming, at least.  I hear it again. I look up and about a quarter-mile above me, there's a gorgeous, rainbow-striped hot air balloon making the most of the rare quiet skies to go sailing above town.  The sound I heard was the pilot opening the flame to keep the balloon aloft.  He did three short bursts and one long one.  I waved and waved, and they waved back.  My dogs didn't care, but it was magical to me. You have to understand just how crystalline a high-desert sky is. How clear it is and how very vibrant those colors—primary red and yellow, blue and orange—were against that startlingly deep blue. 

I walked on, thinking I'd heard that breathing pattern before, the way the pilot opened the flame to keep the balloon aloft.  It's the way whales breathe when they're preparing to dive. They take three short breaths signified by three short, fast exhales, then one big breath in, and then they dive. I was struck by the possibility that these two creations on Earth—one a construction of human whimsy and the other miraculous beyond human imagination—might share a life process in common. Both rely on buoyancy to survive. And they breathe the same way.

That is what I will teach my princess about.  Buoyancy.  How to navigate the depths of her life and trust herself to know when she needs to come up for air.  How to rise above to find a new perspective and see that things that seem insurmountable to us at ground level maybe aren't so significant from a different point of view.

I will teach her that levity, mirth, humor, call it what you want, will get her through even when she's tired and feeling deflated, and that boosting someone else up--helping someone stay afloat through a storm--is just about the best gift a person can give and receive.

Buoyancy of heart and spirit. How to float and how to fly. What could be more magical?  Better than boots any day.  Always beautiful and always, always in fashion.  

Blackberry Hell

There are people sleeping in the greenbelt behind my house. About 20 feet beyond the fence, under the blackberry brambles.  They try to hide that they've been there and try even harder to hide that they'll be back, but this afternoon as I was cutting the brambles away from the cedarwood privacy fence, I saw the crushed undergrowth and moss where they'd bedded down, the flattened cardboard beer cases pulled from neighborhood recycling bins, used as ground cover to sleep on and sometimes as blankets, the plastic grocery bags of food bank bread and Spam, clothing and soap partially hidden in the Scot's broom.

I've seen this coming for a while, actually. Each morning, my dog and I walk up the street, turn down a narrow, overgrown track and hike up a short, steep rise to come out on the Interurban Trail, an asphalt path that runs along the old railroad right of way.  It's designated as “public multiple use” land, but I think the city planners had mostly bicyclists and dog walkers in mind when they okayed the trail, because there aren't any structures like three-sided sheep sheds where people can bed down and wait out a rainy night relatively dry and safe.  But people are sleeping under the Douglas firs and hemlocks,  in the rhododendron hells and blackberry thickets up there, too. There are more permanent dwelling sites along the trail. I've seen sleeping bags and food weighted down with rocks, clothes left drying on low branches.  There are T-shirts and blue jeans too small to be adult clothing. There are used and unused diapers.  I've also seen people whiz by on $2000 bicycles, wearing another $2000 worth of fancy gear, carried away in their Tour de France fantasies,  never noticing the battered old pup tent partially hidden under fallen alder branches.

I'm not talking about little green elven people. No, they're mostly a brownish color, weather-beaten, haggard and the color of the forest floor they've been sleeping on. The color we would all be if we'd been sleeping outside and hadn't bathed in reliable memory.

One morning, my dog and I happened upon two happy families harvesting blackberries on a slope that rises from a section of the trail.  The clean, well-fed, well-clothed children ate berries as fast as they could, their hands and mouths stained a deep, blackish red. Their parents chatted and swapped pictures on cell phones as the children gorged themselves. Their REI strollers were full of buckets and bags of sweet, ripe berries.  This was a social gathering of my suburban neighbors.  One little boy offered to share his harvest with me, but I said no, thanks, they were all for him.  The thing is, I don't know what pesticides and herbicides the city sprays along this public use land to keep the weeds back.  Besides, the prior afternoon in the very same spot at the top of the hill, between the brambles and more privacy fence separating the adjacent homeowners from those making the most of public multiple use, I saw a girl—I'm doing my best not to speculate about her age—tricking with first one guy as my dog and I walked down the trail, and a different guy as we came back.  Her knees below her miniskirt were stained a deep, blackish red.

Early in the morning, I've seen the earth-colored people rise from the brambles like cautious deer, keeping low and still, wary, watching carefully until they know whether or not you mean them harm.  Not all of them traffic, but there are too many vacant stares, too many needle tracks on arms, too many syringes, broken glass vials, used condoms and spent amyl nitrate cartridges scattered amongst the piles of moldy dog poop at the edges of the trail for it to be strictly innocent public multiple use.  There's a ring of downed logs in a space under the trees by the power station where teenagers like to sit and smoke. I passed by once, and there were three bodies lying face up on the grass just outside the ring, two of them with arms and legs splayed onto the trail.  They were breathing and their eyes moved, but they didn't flinch as my dog sniffed and nuzzled at them. As I checked for pulses and breathing, their arms floated up from the ground trying to brush me away, but without minds conscious and coordinated enough to direct purposeful motion.  This went beyond a simple marijuana high.  Not one of them was over 14 years of age.  An adult voice spoke from just beyond the circle of log seats under the trees.  “They're all right,” he said. “I'm watching them.” 

I'm ashamed to say, I was so angry and frightened that I just grabbed them by their skinny little floating arms, hauled them clear of the trail onto the grass and left them there at the mercy of their pusher. I walked away and did nothing.

In the book Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival, co-author Edwin Marty likens Himalayan blackberries in the Seattle area to kudzu in the south. Both introduced, invasive, aggressive species, they are resistant to most forms of herbicides and thrive in the poorest of soil and climate conditions.  They spread fast, resist disease and, therefore, harbor diseases that decimate the native species.  They grow in the tiniest crack in the pavement and can engulf a house in less than a year if equally aggressive measures aren't taken to combat them.  You have to poison the plant, then chop away the dead foliage, then poison the stump, then poison the ground so it won't come back. That's what it takes to kill these plants  Both have carved out a niche for themselves by dominating the native species. Poverty's like that too, taking root in distressed areas, vanquishing one household at a time, bringing disease with it, easily resisting known methods of defense, aided and abetted by public multiple use.

There are other species living in the brambles.  Coyotes live in the greenbelt that runs behind my house and adjoins the trail.  Raccoons, possum, squirrels, innumerable Norwegian rats and mice. And, of course, the birds.  There are lots of tiny, colorful migrating birds, a few hummingbirds, but mostly we have Stellar jays, starlings, crows, pigeons, gulls—the usual scavengers. We had a family of California quail before somebody bought the lot at the top of the hill, spent a raucous summer building a house on it and the quail moved away. We've had the occasional bear coming looking for grubs and berries, though they're usually destroyed by 18-wheelers as they try to cross Interstate 5 in the dim predawn light.  

It's been a particularly dry summer, and the fire department has come three times to put out fires gobbling up dry weeds in the greenbelt.  Each time, it was blamed on kids and firecrackers, but while that's possible, I don't believe it. The coyotes didn't set the fires either.

As I worked chopping brambles, I realized our privacy fence badly needs to be replaced.  The posts are rotten and wobbly, the rails are soft and won't hold a nail, and the slats have decayed to pointlessness.  We're making ends meet, but the economy is tough, and we don't have money to spend rebuilding the fence.  As I cut back the brambles, I realized the only thing holding the fence up was the blackberries and that there were dead leaves and cobwebs in my hair. Flies swarmed around my legs where bramble thorns had torn my skin and made it bleed. And my arms were brown from fighting the brambles in the dirt.