Poem of the Week, by Catherine Pierce
We were classmates. He was a country kid, like me, and like me, he was condemned to ride the bus for miles and miles. I dreaded that bus every day of my life –it was a place of fear and intimidation and endless cruelty.
On this particular day, he sat down next to me and everyone began teasing us. They were loud and relentless. I was desperate to make them stop, make it stop, make it all stop just stop just stop, and at some point I picked up my empty lunch box and bashed it over his head.
Did the teasing end? I don’t remember. What I do remember is how he held his hands up to protect himself. The poem below brought me back to those years of fear and that day on the bus. Kindness is in part an act of self-preservation. Had I just sat still and endured the ride I could have spared myself the lifelong memory of having hurt a kid like me, another kid who was only trying to get home.
Poem for the Woods, by Catherine Pierce
Not as I would dream them now, not with growls
and twig snaps, not with dark birds and thorned vines
I’ve invented (keening blackwing, violencia). Not late-dayblood-
sun-dappled, not refuge of men equipped
with knives and lust, not a mouth into which you might
venture and not return, no, nothing like that.
This is a poem for the woods as I knew them,
shaded and cool behind the Novaks’ house.
They seemed endless, but there was a shortcut
to Fairblue Swim Club. They held no growls,
no spikes. Only squirrels skittering, plunking acorns
down the canopy. We’d been warned of poison ivy,
but never found it. We’d been warned of rotten limbs,
but none fell. One muddy, sun-laced afternoon, we took salt
from the pantry and ventured out to where the rocks
teemed with slugs. I’d like to say our cruelty
had to do with power—human girls versus torpidity—
but really it was our curiosity, pure and unnuanced.
We wanted to see mineral against membrane.
We wanted to see something living melt. If I could,
I’d find my younger self in those woods and stop her.
I’d say, Someday you’ll carry your cruelties with you
and you’ll never be able to set them down. Keep walking now.
Keep pretending you know of nothing but kindness.
For more information on Catherine Pierce, please check out her website.
My daughter at eight: What would happen if you die? I tell her she would be very sad but everyone would take such good care of her, and she says No, they wouldn’t. Because I would be dead too, of sadness. My son at four shuffles out of the bedroom in his first pair of flip-flops, having put them on himself with the strap between his second and third toes. It’s fine, mama, don’t worry, they don’t hurt, I can walk. My grandmother, flustered and red-faced in the small kitchen where she’s trying to make dinner for me: Oh Alison, I’m just no use at all anymore. Me outwardly protesting but inwardly stricken by the knowledge that in that single instant, everything is now changed. 
My five year old nephew is currently huddled behind closed doors inside his family’s new freestanding pantry, where he fits neatly into the bottom cupboard. I know this because my brother texts me ongoing updates as to this fixation with the pantry, along with the fact that my nephew just declared he’s no longer a ninja genius but a secret agent. (Didn’t surprise me at all. I never bought the ninja genius line.) My nephew cracks me up and breaks my heart the way all little kids, over and over, break my heart. 
In the lobby of the Minnesota Public Radio headquarters are three white egg-shaped chairs. Whenever I’m there I crawl into one of them, sit cross-legged, and close my eyes. Sitting in one is like wearing a warm sweatshirt with the hood pulled entirely over your head. My love for those chairs is inordinate. When I picture a safe place to comfort myself when sad or troubled, those egg-shaped chairs come to mind. 
A few years ago a lifelong minor heart glitch spiraled out of control. I didn’t tell anyone until a couple hours before the surgery to fix it, so as not to worry them, and I took a Lyft to the hospital. But just before the procedure, as the surgical team was pushing the gurney into the OR, I put my hand on the arm of the nearest blue-masked nurse. Please take good care of me, I said. I don’t want to die. 
The day after I moved to Minneapolis, I bought a sewing machine. This was in the days of newspaper ads, and I found a used one for $60 and insisted my then-boyfriend and I track it down that very day. That ancient, impossibly heavy machine is what I’ve used to make all the quilts I’ve ever made, sewing together blocks I hand-stitch piecemeal. Story quilts, every one of them, made not according to a pattern but out of my head and heart. 
Someone close to me sent me a booklet a while ago, photos and written memories of her life. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a childhood spent solo with older parents in upper Manhattan, a gentle childhood filled not with money, of which there was very little, but with family card games, shared meals, trips to museums and playgrounds, school days and summer camp upstate. Black and white photos show a small, smiling girl in the embrace of a mother and father who clearly adored her. Here they are leaning against a railing by Rockaway Beach. Here they are on the stoop of an apartment building. Here’s the little girl on the first day of school. 
In my life as a road tripper I’ve been to every one of the forty-eight lower states multiple times. Road trips have been part of my life since I was a little girl and my family went on a two-week driving vacation every summer. Now I go solo, for the most part, and mostly westward because I love the west. The endless rangeland, mesas and buttes and mountains rising in the distance. Sweeping across the country on wide-open highways. This is when I think best. This is when ideas for books come to me. This is when knotty problems unknot themselves. This is when I see parts of my country that I don’t live in and don’t often know much about. My road trip rules: A la 
Days One and Two: 807 miles, five states –Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado– and two time zone changes. A thousand twirling wind turbines across endless Iowa fields in all the colors of brown. The near-empty highways of Nebraska and Kansas, swooping across plains so vas
Drove south and on a whim decided to head into Santa Fe, where I had never been. Within five minutes of arriving had decided to sell all my possessions and move there. Kidding. Maybe. I’m smitten. It was one of those magical afternoons where everyone I walked past smiled at me, everyone I talked to was interesting and kind, and the whole place is down home, lived-in, human-scale beauty. Tore myself away because miles to go before I sleep. Drove south 300 more miles to El Paso. Arrived long after dark, winding my way around a mountain below which sprawls the twinkling lights of this border city of border cities.
Day Five: El Paso. Snippets from my long conversation with Carlos, the trolley driver.
* 
Day Six. Breakfast in El Paso, where all the servers and half the customers switch fluidly from Spanish to English. Happy to recognize many words from my first three Coffee Break Spanish lessons. What’s the problem with multiple languages and cultures anyway? Isn’t multiplicity only a good thing? Doesn’t it make the world bigger and also smaller, for everyone? Yes, these questions are rhetorical. But they are on my mind, because this road trip was originally going to be a hike our national parks road trip, and the reasons it’s not are so, so troubling to me. 
Drove to Saguaro National Park anyway, to behold the giant sentinels standing guard over the red hills that belong to all of us, unearthly beautiful hills that I couldn’t hike because of human stupidity and ego. Aldo Leopold: “When we see land as a community to which we all belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Same thing with people.
Last two days: 547 miles total, from Tucson to southern California. Do you know what to do in a dust storm? Based on the hundred or so signs on the highways yesterday, I do: Pull off the road, turn off your ignition, turn off your lights, stay buckled, wait until it passes. Yesterday: one of the great museums of the world, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, to see raptors, wolves, coyotes, javelinas, all manner of cacti and interesting bugs. Afterward hiked the King’s Canyon trail nearby because even though there are no rangers, there were lots of cars at the trailhead. Drove on through the nearly humanless Arizona desert to Yuma, where everyone in the breakfast room this morning was mysteriously dressed in Victorian period costume. 
Drove through the nearly deserted Mexicali desert and mountains, encountering distinct and extreme landscapes. Enormous sand dunes that looked as if sand-colored heavy cream had been whipped to soft peak status. Huge fields between mountain ranges that, from a distance, looked to be growing a kind of black shrub I’d never seen before, which turned out to be solar panels up close. “Danger: rock slides next 15 miles” territory in which I felt as if I were driving a hotwheels car around huge piles of boulders flung down by a gia
This body of mine. These bodies of ours. As a girl I often witnessed both my friends and older women close to me disparage their bodies. One of my grandmothers had been a model in her youth, and she despised photos of her aged self so much that I couldn’t let them near her – she would snatch them and tear them up. My other grandmother openly hated her heavy legs, had hated them her whole life long. In response to this self-hatred, which was so painful to see, I early on vowed never to say one bad word about my body to anyone, especially my daughters. This is a vow I kept. But still. This body of mine. This body that will do everything in its power to keep me alive until my last breath. Oh my body, I have not always loved you the way you deserve to be loved. Fearfully and wonderfully made body, I have not always been good to you. When I heard this poem, I wept.
My three children and I were in upstate New York. This was a long time ago, and we were making our annual summer trek around New England to visit family and friends. We had just finished touring the Utica Club Brewery, one of my favorite childhood destinations, a tour that ends with a complimentary beer or root beer in a Victorian saloon. We were all tired. I was chatting with my parents while my children wandered around, trying out various red velvet chairs.
Alison McGhee 