"In the yard, she adds water from the bucket to dirt, creates mud, generates new climates and landscapes with fluid hand movements, coordinates a shift in the poles, alters life forever in the span of seconds. Her small hands direct an orchestra of transformation." |
Jan van Kessel, Insects and a Sprig of Rosemary, 1653
My eight-year-old niece visits and we spend the afternoon in the backyard, digging. She plunders with her hands, fingertips stabbing summer-dry dirt. I’ve forgotten, again, to buy her a shovel but she has a brittle plastic bucket I unearthed from the garage. She asks for things, one after the other. Do I have a glass jar? With a lid? Rocks? I fetch a jar from the kitchen, fast so that I don’t lose her within the square of the window.
We kneel over grass, patchy in late August, and pick out pebbles. We find a lichen fallen from a branch which looks like a little tree once she places it in the jar. She yanks a maple leaf down and shreds it in one hand. She’s creating a scene behind glass. She’s making it for me so I thank her.
She comes up from the dirt, a gray bug the size of a pill in her palm. She thrusts it toward me. “Look,” she says. “An isopod!”
I recoil. She drops the isopod into the jar.
“What will it eat?” I ask as she twists the lid.
She sighs, sets the assembled scene aside. She’s given me an assignment I have already failed by being old and not her mother, for telling her no when she practices swinging a plastic baseball bat into the center of the rhododendron. “They eat leaves and the material inside the jar.”
I’m worried about air, how the bug will breathe. If I’m complicit in its approaching death. Her father, my brother, has told me about the collection of isopods she ordered online and keeps in storage bins under her bed at home. They multiply and wiggle, getting loose in her bedroom where they find them on the rug. They shake out from sweatshirts, roll under discarded socks. It’s the same with the crickets she buys for her lizards. Proliferating from her bedroom.
In the yard, she adds water from the bucket to dirt, creates mud, generates new climates and landscapes with fluid hand movements, coordinates a shift in the poles, alters life forever in the span of seconds. Her small hands direct an orchestra of transformation.
“Ooh, another one!” A bug ascends her arm. She’s teasing me now.
I sit on the wooden bench under the lilac tree until ants bite my bare feet. She wants to stay in the yard until sunset. Sweat dries to a chill under my sundress. Soon, the sun will set before I make it home from the office in the evening and not rise until after I’m climbing the stairs to my desk the following morning. Glimpses of sky through glass, or in the coming and the going. The grass will die. Each year, less rain, shifting seasons, but regardless, a beginning and an end.
She grabs the jar. I wait for the second bug to be added to the death jar, or for the jar to be discarded to the earth, her sights set instead on pulling grass by the handful, green confetti.
“We should go inside,” I warn. A flash of movement along the fence, a rat or something larger. It has long nails, and I hear the tap-tap of strong toes grasping decayed wood. The darkness and the wildness.
She unscrews the lid on the jar, her contained world. She leaves it loose, crooked, creating a gap through which the isopod can escape.
“Good, now it can go free,” I say. “It didn’t have any water.”
“Bugs can live in there a while.” She rolls her eyes, flashes of white in the darkened yard. “They get water from the leaves and stuff. The jar is a little ecosystem.”
There’s a snap from the tree which nods over the yard. The maple leans with time and a separated trunk. One day, it will fall, the two sides finally pulled apart enough to snap. I can’t know when this will happen. The horticulturist told me, you’ll know when it’s time, the tree will tell you. Daily, I stare at it from the bedroom window, searching for a message. The two sides of the trunk move away from each other by degrees imperceptible to my eyes, but one day it will fall despite my inability to see its progress. In old photos of the yard, the tree is still almost fully together, a solid unit.
In the yard with my niece, when I look up, the branch of the maple looks like an arm. It reaches out, a shadow, leaved ends like fingers reaching to close the space between us and the sky.
“Probably safer in the jar than out here,” I say to my niece, but she places the jar on the ground and heads for her bucket. I watch as the bug summits the lip of the jar, then jumps free.
We kneel over grass, patchy in late August, and pick out pebbles. We find a lichen fallen from a branch which looks like a little tree once she places it in the jar. She yanks a maple leaf down and shreds it in one hand. She’s creating a scene behind glass. She’s making it for me so I thank her.
She comes up from the dirt, a gray bug the size of a pill in her palm. She thrusts it toward me. “Look,” she says. “An isopod!”
I recoil. She drops the isopod into the jar.
“What will it eat?” I ask as she twists the lid.
She sighs, sets the assembled scene aside. She’s given me an assignment I have already failed by being old and not her mother, for telling her no when she practices swinging a plastic baseball bat into the center of the rhododendron. “They eat leaves and the material inside the jar.”
I’m worried about air, how the bug will breathe. If I’m complicit in its approaching death. Her father, my brother, has told me about the collection of isopods she ordered online and keeps in storage bins under her bed at home. They multiply and wiggle, getting loose in her bedroom where they find them on the rug. They shake out from sweatshirts, roll under discarded socks. It’s the same with the crickets she buys for her lizards. Proliferating from her bedroom.
In the yard, she adds water from the bucket to dirt, creates mud, generates new climates and landscapes with fluid hand movements, coordinates a shift in the poles, alters life forever in the span of seconds. Her small hands direct an orchestra of transformation.
“Ooh, another one!” A bug ascends her arm. She’s teasing me now.
I sit on the wooden bench under the lilac tree until ants bite my bare feet. She wants to stay in the yard until sunset. Sweat dries to a chill under my sundress. Soon, the sun will set before I make it home from the office in the evening and not rise until after I’m climbing the stairs to my desk the following morning. Glimpses of sky through glass, or in the coming and the going. The grass will die. Each year, less rain, shifting seasons, but regardless, a beginning and an end.
She grabs the jar. I wait for the second bug to be added to the death jar, or for the jar to be discarded to the earth, her sights set instead on pulling grass by the handful, green confetti.
“We should go inside,” I warn. A flash of movement along the fence, a rat or something larger. It has long nails, and I hear the tap-tap of strong toes grasping decayed wood. The darkness and the wildness.
She unscrews the lid on the jar, her contained world. She leaves it loose, crooked, creating a gap through which the isopod can escape.
“Good, now it can go free,” I say. “It didn’t have any water.”
“Bugs can live in there a while.” She rolls her eyes, flashes of white in the darkened yard. “They get water from the leaves and stuff. The jar is a little ecosystem.”
There’s a snap from the tree which nods over the yard. The maple leans with time and a separated trunk. One day, it will fall, the two sides finally pulled apart enough to snap. I can’t know when this will happen. The horticulturist told me, you’ll know when it’s time, the tree will tell you. Daily, I stare at it from the bedroom window, searching for a message. The two sides of the trunk move away from each other by degrees imperceptible to my eyes, but one day it will fall despite my inability to see its progress. In old photos of the yard, the tree is still almost fully together, a solid unit.
In the yard with my niece, when I look up, the branch of the maple looks like an arm. It reaches out, a shadow, leaved ends like fingers reaching to close the space between us and the sky.
“Probably safer in the jar than out here,” I say to my niece, but she places the jar on the ground and heads for her bucket. I watch as the bug summits the lip of the jar, then jumps free.
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Suzy Eynon's work has been published in Roanoke Review, Passages North, Autofocus, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Commuting, was published by Ghost City Press. Originally from Arizona, she lives in Seattle.
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