Judith Harris

We walked five blocks to the elementary school, my mother’s high heels crunching through playground gravel. We entered through a side door. Down the long corridor, decorated with Halloween masks, health department safety posters— we followed the arrows to the third grade classroom. My mother stepped alone into the booth, pulling the curtain behind her. I could see only the backs of her calves in crinkled nylons. A partial vanishing, then reappearing pocketbook crooked on her elbow, our mayor’s button pinned to her lapel. Even then I could see—to choose is to follow what has already been decided. We marched back out finding a new way back down streets named for flowers and accomplished men. I said their names out loud, as we found our way home, to the cramped house, the devoted porch light left on, the customary meatloaf. I remember, in the classroom converted into a voting place— there were two mothers, conversing, squeezed into the children’s desk chairs.

I can hear him, now, even in darkness, a trickster under the moon, bristling his feathers, sounding as merry as a man whistling in a straw hat, or a squeaky gate to the playground, left ajar or the jingling of a star, having wandered too far from the pasture.

Not yet summer, but unseasonable heat pries open the cherry tree. It stands there stupefied, in its sham, pink frills, dense with early blooming. Then, as afternoon cools into more furtive winds, I look up to see a blizzard of petals rushing the sky. It is only April. I can’t stop my own life from hurrying by. The moon, already pacing.

How quiet is the spruce, the wind twills through the uppermost tier of splayed leaves. Now the song of a bird like the squeaky lock over a canoe's oar, followed by startling chirps, the sky pushing its clouds like sailboats, and I think, what kind of God keeps himself secret so that to find him out we have to seek, as children do for something like the beetle scuttling between grass, hidden in plain sight.

They were smooth ovals, and some the shade of potatoes— some had been moth-eaten or spotted, the maples were starched, and crackled like campfire. We put them under tracing paper and rubbed our crayons over them, X-raying the spread of their bones and black, veined catacombs. We colored them green and brown and orange, and cut them out along the edges, labeling them deciduous or evergreen. All day, in the stuffy air of the classroom, with its cockeyed globe, and nautical maps of ocean floors, I watched those leaves lost in their own worlds flap on the pins of the bulletin boards: without branches or roots, or even a sky to hold on to.

At five, the market is closing. Burdock roots, parsley, and rutabagas are poured back into the trucks. The antique dealer breaks down his tables. Light dappled, in winter parkas shoppers hunt for bargains: a teapot, or costume jewelry, a grab bag of rubbishy vegetables for stew. Now twilight, the farmer’s wife bundled in her tweed coat and pocket apron counts out her cash from a metal box, and nods to her grown-up son back from a tour in Iraq, as he waits in the station wagon with the country music turned way up, his prosthetic leg gunning the engine.