Strata

My husband and I had found the desert house accidentally. Each winter, we'd leave our snowy northern home for a few weeks and head to Death Valley to join other pale snowbirds on a heat-seeking mission. We checked out of our overly busy lives to wander mosaic canyons and moonlit dunes. We said hello to lizards and stretched our winter-tight bodies. We took pictures of each other waist high in leggy golden desert daisies; it was a delight to see my burly blond husband frolic in wildflowers. Because of his work, I rarely see him; these photos are proof of life.The year my mother had her “gather the family” stroke, which she partially survived—her mind did not—we ventured farther south, to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California's largest at 600,000 acres. A tiny town that would not look out of place in Mexico sits in the middle of it. The houses were cheap and the weather fine. Thinking it would be a place we went for respite during our working years, and, for me, from caregiving, we staked a claim. It was a retreat, we agreed, so far from civilization that we might never be found.For three years, I managed the care of my dying parents. My life was triangle-shaped: from our primary home to their apartment and to the desert, where my husband would sometimes join me. When my parents died, one corner of the triangle fell off; what remained pointed to the desert house. I packed their ashes into a beautifully appointed rice container that my sister in Thailand had given us for our wedding. “It's only temporary,” I told them. Then I put my parents in the van and headed south.The desert house is on a half acre and is surrounded by a stucco half wall, which the neighbors refer to as a “moat.” I like the moat. It keeps out coyotes and the trash that sometimes breaks loose in epic windstorms. The moat feels like a layer of protection I need right now. It feels like a safe place to mourn.The yard has a succulent and cactus garden filled with showcase specimens of Engelmann's prickly pear and paddle cactus. I sit with coffee and watch hummingbirds dip into the chuparosa and drink. White-winged doves coo in stereo. Ravens alight the California fan palms at high noon, tormenting our old border collie, Angus, whose job is to guard everything inside the moat. Jackrabbits have found refuge from coyotes here, and roadrunners cruise the back deck. When the roadrunners arrive, I know the snakes are on their way.The yard has five citrus trees, so I've become an accidental farmer, learning about soil and the trickiness of growing limes, but not lemons, which give and give. With so many lemons, I think there is a still a chance for a lemonade life.Anza-Borrego is wow country. No matter which way you enter, from the Salton Sea through the Borrego Badlands, dropping through the layers of rock on Montezuma Pass, or via the Texas Dip, you say “Wow.” You wonder what the hell happened to make it look like this. You feel like you're driving across another planet.I have fallen hard for this place. The blaze and tangle of rocky canyons, the palm oases, the precise elemental balance. The story of the universe laid out in stone. I want to understand this particular mayhem of granite and iron and star. The strata—the layers of how a place came to be—look like tiramisu.This desert, the Colorado Desert, a claw-shaped piece of the vast Sonoran, seems big enough to hold my grief.My mom had vascular dementia, and was in a nursing home during the pandemic when she died. We'd kept her at home as long as we could, until she started trying to escape, not understanding there was no way out of her own ragged mind. She passed at ninety-one years old without family in a sterile room and with little touch the last few months of her life. This was a woman who worked as a professional clown and wore a “Free Hugs” button on her shirt. My mom loved people and in the end she had none. I hope her inaccurate but happy memories gave her comfort.The last time I saw her, we did a window visit because of COVID. It was a perfect day in Napa. Grape vines and sunshine. The nursing staff, outfitted like astronauts, rolled her up to the window in an empty room. She was on a special mattress, big and black and puffy, so she wouldn't get bedsores. Contractures were settling in at her joints and she was folding in on herself. On that big dark mattress, she looked like a nautilus spinning in space.Over the course of a forty-minute visit, she never opened her eyes. I sat outside the window and whispered that she'd been a good mom and that I loved her and that I'd never forget spaghetti Sundays or watching old movies together. I talked to her until I ran out of things to say. I convinced myself that she looked peaceful, and then I drove away. Eventually, she stopped eating, which is common in dementia, but she kept taking her medication with a protein drink that kept her alive until finally it didn't. She died early one morning after my visit. Her hospice nurse told me the Buddhists believe it's auspicious to take flight in the morning.Six months before, I had moved in with my dad, who had congestive heart failure. He lived a half hour from the nursing home, so that drive became my groove. I had promised him that when he started hospice, I would return to my hometown and stay with him until the end. I kept COVID at bay, masking up to shop at 6 a.m. I couldn't keep him from the news, though. I tried to reassure him that I would survive the virus and the assaults of the current federal administration, and I hope he believed me when he finally let go. I'm making it sound gentle because I was there, his hand in mine as his last heartbeat circled, and he did not struggle for air. Still, I didn't know that a broken heart could break any further until mine broke again. He left in the morning, too.Back at home, I received a package in the mail. Who sent me a gift? I wondered. Inside was my dad, double-bagged. A few weeks passed and I got a second, smaller box. This time I knew what it was. I relocated their ashes to the rice container. I took them to the desert with me because I didn't want them to get cold.We arrive at the dead end at Green Links Drive, Angus and I. It's 8:08 a.m. Our daily walk in Borrego is like going to a bar. We can always count on the regulars. It's early morning and the bunnies and quails are here. The innocents, each with a comical head topping that is convenient for predators to spot. The jackrabbits with those long ears; when the sun shines through you can see the lacy circuitry of blood. And the quails, with a fancy comma on top, bustle as if they are late for the bus.If we come at 8:30, the young, lean coyotes are out on play dates. The humans follow: the overly tan, thin woman who looks like a strip of bacon and always waves; the man with the fancy dog who doesn't smile. The jogger who pitches forward as he runs, so much that I worry for him.There are ducks at the watering hole, an aesthetic at this fallowed golf course that the landowners keep filled for the animals. The Canada geese return and the vultures sun themselves and wait. Same as it ever was.I feel right-sized here. The 8 a.m. woman with dog passing through. No more important than the shapely mesquite trees that house creatures and provide food and shade. Maybe even less so. Maybe the mesquite tree is more important than me, from the species that takes and takes. I wonder if it's possible for me to be as useful and lovely as a mesquite tree. That seems like a worthy goal. I file it to consider, on the other side of grief.My husband works in education, and has arrived for Christmas break. I knew when I married him sixteen years before that I would come second to his vocation, which is fighting for teachers. Union work puts a fire in his belly, and gives him purpose. His phone is an extension of his hand, and he's usually negotiating or bargaining or talking someone down. I understand wanting to be needed. But I need him too; I'm lonely inside the moat. We will have two weeks together, which seems like a feast.Even so, he spends most of his time working. I tell myself it's fine, at least he's nearby. We have coffee together in the morning and dinner at night; every now and then I can talk him into a Jeep ride or a little hike. I don't notice that I'm still mostly alone. His busyness fills the days like clouds.He's at the computer when I tell him I'm going for a hike and I'll be back in an hour. He looks at me over the top of his glasses and waves. Thirty minutes into the trail I round the corner in one of my favorite ocotillo forests. The late afternoon light casts them in a lush blue-green. I see a herd of five large and muscular bighorn rams, grinding their way through grass and cacti. They lift their enormous horns and consider me with widely spaced eyes. They determine I am not a threat and resume grazing. Some eventually move on, leaping to new boulders with delicate grace. There are likely ewes and babies nearby, maybe an errant teenager testing the waters. I know I will not be home in an hour, whatever that is. I'm on bighorn time.A friend recently wrote in a letter, “It must be wonderful waking up in wild open land.”It feels like a return to life.In the picture, I am not yet two years old. It's sepia-toned and I'm in the pine trees. I am striding alone through the forest wearing a smile in half shadow. I'm dressed in a baby jumper and sandals. My legs are strong and I walk with purpose. Do we each have a picture like this, captured of our most essential selves—the marine layer or magma—the person the world will try to destroy? I feel her trying to emerge here from the brutality of grief. Plates are shifting.My husband tries to stay with us in our desert home, but the pandemic has unmoored him. He feels too far away from his colleagues, even though he sees them on Zoom every day. He returns to the north, a snowbird in reverse. You're going in the wrong direction, I think. Just look at the Western bluebirds, they know. I let him go because I want him to be happy.In his absence, I seek comfort in rocks and their stories. I become obsessed with the geologic time scale. Growing up, I had childhood asthma and missed a lot of school—it turns out I had missed the dinosaur lessons. I started asking friends when they first learned about dinosaurs or had dinosaur curriculum.“Second grade?” one said. “I feel like I was always learning about dinosaurs,” said another. I had some catching up to do. I bought a poster, and like a middle-school science teacher I tacked it to the wall in the guest bedroom, determined to learn the eras and periods.I grow my desert library. I pack a milk crate of reference books everywhere I go because there is so much to learn. Every hole in my yard is the entrance to someone's home. There is an entire network of subterranean life under my feet. The subway of the cold blooded, passing each other by. I think of those cross sectional images from biology class and that I've got millions and millions of years to dissect. This keeps me busy.Given that he is working exclusively online, my husband doesn't have many reasons to stay away, yet he does. “I'm waiting for my vaccine,” he says.The girl in the woods in the sepia photo keeps walking in half-shadow, doing what she is built to do: Look, listen.My mom and dad's marriage formed a layer of my personal strata when their families drifted from Europe to Appalachia to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they lived on opposite sides of a steel-span bridge. They met at a Mexican bar and restaurant, where my mom liked to dance.In a flush of hormones I was made. They were, however, ill-suited for each other, incongruent, like sandstone and marble side-by-side in a dry wash. The forces of poverty and stubbornness were the erosions that wore them down, but by some miracle, maybe California sunshine, they stayed together for over fifty years. Mom was a real razzmatazz, an entertainer who loved being in the middle of the action. She was a woman in motion, who would sometimes get out of a car before it stopped moving. Like my husband, she was rarely home, preferring being needed at work to domestic life. Dad was a man of few words who spent his spare time at a fishing hole. They had separate bedrooms, took separate vacations. Family was the glue that kept them together, like desert concrete, made when wind blows on rocks and earth so hard and long they bind together.Dad's hospice nurse showed up every day in good cheer, bringing calm and a full quiver of palliative skills. First she tended to his immediate physiological needs, and next she listened to his fears. Then she'd sit with me in the living room and listen to mine.I talked to her about my dad's imminent death, and how to keep him comfortable. About the rift my mom's dementia created between them, before her safety made us place her in a nursing home.I tell the nurse I'm missing my own husband. I want to take a weekend and go home. She asks me if I'd be okay with my dad dying while I was gone. Although the nurse never talks in absolutes, I understand this shorthand.We were sitting on the couch, our knees so close they almost touched. The nurse asked me about my marriage, how we're holding up. I told her we're fine, that my husband has his own life. “We either relive our parents’ marriage or we reinvent it,” she said, and I grabbed onto her words like a rope. I wondered if we could reinvent ours. We spent so much time apart, it was hard to imagine what a reinvention would look marriage that for a marriage to work there must be for the of over the course of a what when a a or is in a pandemic and and when The of a new person is like a We must be to the in to at this new under our desert made of rock They on a layer of and sometimes they together and one under another and is the on a hike up the it's a but up on top, it looks like a I walk on rock through I but and them up to The three of rock are from and My mind is layer of strata in Anza-Borrego is a marine layer made of which look like layers of and that formed a years is now a in the and here in the this was for so dinosaurs never took eventually up, like the a to the who lived on the the and And they out of the here on that When I see them I will not be I will give them a but I will my gives me comfort to know these creatures passed as I too am a passing the and wind and the new me. The me on the other side of the Anza-Borrego State I see more bighorn than My husband is so my and I that his has my I watch the at the hard to believe what I am to have at the world through a geologic I have come to that there is no here. The desert is not in but there is enough in the trees will The wind will come from the it's and go into or put hand in someone lives And We will one day be or or five my husband days he It's I don't know this at the but I will never me a of He it across the he you got He you mind if I been waiting for him for so I what he is of the house to away and I'm into doesn't tell me this, but he is of grief. The desert, for is the wrong him into the The on the casts an It feels like I'm watching a in a His is out on the and he's his I understand that he has been this for some time and knew what he to believe you didn't see this he I have been to the the home we bought to get away from and work and to citrus and our bodies. I am alone making my way in a pandemic without at years without my of layers of me are A new it and or or will it hold my husband for good in the morning, I open the to let him must be the fallowed golf course at a.m. I see through from a and lift from a tree. a it looks like a baby a did it this little of in the made it and is it there My mind with a and I know I will have a hard time at work with of this going on outside my I will forget for a few that I have been and I will learn everything I can about the of and and my little but maybe a little My for their I have yet to see but I have become a now the A large the through every year on their way from to A flight of Western the of my California palm with for a few then move how in the world did they my The yard is with the of who to work in I I'm on the back in the morning, from the sun by lacy and mesquite in the in the afternoon under the I will as to the of and too many is a Death is a I have is a outside at and There is it is every or not we It's there, with my parents were in their they their I asked them where they their ashes My mom a the where they lived together for years, even though she was of My dad a place in the high desert I'd never as they Mom to be with the family at you put me out at the she Dad to be I was. They are now my inside and outside the rice container. You don't know until after that they don't first day without my husband, the wind blows and A The of wind that rocks and of gone. This is a that keeps going through my like a by or a or a or a desert It's and he I was almost happy again. I as far this because I am with the subterranean and This I be from the I have friends here. star.

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