plum lady larva
I dream I’m flying, and flooded with memories of scratching through leaves, huddling in the understory, and most of all this fascination with winged migration. I barely tolerate comparisons of men with animals anymore, the exceptions being metamorphoses and fostered goslings. This month, seven years ago, we packed our things and took to the Oregon trail, my 20th move in 27 years, and my last.
1984
Write a story with trees and a lake and throw in some birds. We only live in the cottage on Lake Ontario for a summer, but it gives me my first taste of longing for home, my first rejection of the moult. The waves clap against the foundation, and it becomes easy to imagine that this would be the kind of house that children would find on the other side of the bed sheets if they lingered underneath the kitchen table for too terribly long. A house with miniature people and miniature windows and wood floors that smell of stone and water. On our last night, I crawl past the tape marking the renovation of the second story, climbing trumpet vines to secure one final vista of the moon on Sackett’s Harbor, but I fall. I throw my arm out and catch a railing, and let myself dangle for awhile, unable to see how far it is below. I could stay forever in this place, along the lake, hidden in the trees. But I survive, no easy death ex machina ending.
1994
The second time I wanted to stay, also on a lake, also after a fall, but very far away. Gatul Berbecului, a cabin on Lake Negoveanu. We walked for hours and crossed logging roads and got lost and saw the water through the trees. I could fly from here, I think, and let myself fall, and reach out with the same arms that saved me 10 years earlier, but there were no railings, no linden branches, just words, already spilled, and like radiation blown along wind currents, too hard to contain, to break down, with half lives longer than love lives. She came tumbling after, and turned up, lucky penny, in my lap. We throw what currency we have left at the man inside, and he serves up hot tea and warm slivovitz, and bread. What is this place? The Ram’s Neck, she says, and we cannot stay. I miss her terribly, but only in that place. The next week, I go for a bike ride with her boyfriend past the church at Cisnadie and all I see are goats, necks impossibly long, satyrs.
***
We live near a lake, and it has begun its summer call, the waters stirring like stones tumbling down a hill. I’ve never lived in a house this long, this awareness striking me only today, that I somehow missed my own transformation. I set out tiny houses and feeders and flowers, and greet the vagrants on their layovers in this familiar backyard.