Blog Post #8: Away (almost) in the Garden

My grandma is dead. Her house still stands, decaying and darkened like her/like her insides/the plush inside her coffin as comforting as the remaining decorations in her house. I walk in, first time since January - the time my mom enlisted only me to help clean out the house. 

It looks like she was robbed: an empty orange rug, stained yellow with age, the walls a color I can’t even begin to understand. The love seat remaining is sunken in and stuffed with bags of her things to give away. We won’t tell them they wear the belongings of a dead woman. 

Somehow the umbrella bin still hugs the backside of the front door. The musk is as unreal as the darkness/as unreal as the haunted-housing-creaking staircase/unreal as it all is. I never look the same in the hallway mirror. I, too, look unreal. I was so happy growing up, walking up and down the stairs, modeling for the hallway, dressing with my brothers in our grandparents’ clothes. I look like a ghost in the landscape spread mirror. 

This isn’t grief. This is life/where I water the flowers/where the aloe plant that’s been in our family for two generations will die/where no one can save this place/save this.

Only one more light in the house works. Thank goodness for the Easter warmth. Even in the rain and wind it is almost fifty degrees. It was winter when she died. It has been freezing in this house since then.

She didn’t die here. She died next door. In my aunt’s house/in her hospital bed/in the pink covers we got her/in the clothes we dressed her in/in her body: some hell. 

It was always so fucking hot in there. My frail grandmother so cold/thin/bone/chilled, we blasted three feet tall space heaters in all free spaces of the living room, for her. The walls overflowed with medications, bandages, morphine/dripping from the bags.

I imagined it dripping from the walls one night, then catching on fire with the old-fashioned space heater. I imagined dying with her, taking the row house/her row house/my aunt’s, with us. 

I dreamed of the garden outside, somehow alive again. I came back. She didn’t. I stand at her kitchen door, now. There is a large piece of wet wood underneath the handle of the door to make sure no one gets in. Everybody knows us, here. No one will come in. No one will go out. I put my hand on the wood. I could kill someone with this. I could break these glass cabinets, this menagerie, these good dishes, the whiskey glasses, the windows. I could break out. 

I keep thinking I’ll open the door. I stand there. My mom calls, interrupts from the other end of the phone, from next door, “What’s wrong?” I breathe, say, “Nothing. Just finished watering the plants.” Her voice wavers. She knows. My hand is still on the door. I think of the garden beyond the backdoor, barred with our backyard tree’s wood. The garden that is death/the everything that is dead, here. 

Nature Post #7: A Historical Nature

What degree of separation are we from the sources we are made from? 

Birmingham, I am nothing more than flesh and bone, than old pollution-breathing asthma. I am nothing more than a city girl wondering of my place here. 

I live in one of the most confusing parts of town. It is currently called Uptown. There is a sign at the edge of your body that sparkles Welcome to Uptown. On my street, Seneca, there is a mural. In the mural is embedded Soho, a previous name of the neighborhood. Tustin runs perpendicular to here. James Tustin: the reason why my neighborhood exists. 

It seems that Brits could never stop colonizing. James Tustin settled and began to build homes of English architecture and fruit orchards. He named us Soho. He gave me the mulberry tree that still stands and scatters fruit all through our grass and concrete that lives in the fences of our walls. This used to be the most beautiful place in the city. 1915.   The Post Gazette. 

Not a mere ten years later we stopped being beautiful. We were old and unattractive, we were populated now by the poor migrant mill workers, we were no longer a beautifully built nature.

How strong, how weak, are we?

My house is decaying. Still, we live. Our landlords are amicable enough: housemate/friend Thomas, and his parents. Good-natured Virginians. They’ve got this house and the one on Tustin. They fix us up the best they can. The roof leaks into my room, specifically on my bed. The ceiling in the bathroom is cracked all the way through from Hurricane Sandy rain. The woods and walls do not match, but they hold. They are not beautiful but we know where they came from, how they were built, rebuilt, painted, repainted, nailed, hammered, and solidified. We know where we came from.

The rooms that have closets are brick wall inside. There is nowhere to hide.

 No one knows us beyond Duquesne University and Mercy Hospital. Five blocks past. Ten blocks past. Here you are: Seneca. Tustin. People know Jumonville, where the buses turn up the hill to Fifth Avenue. It is the last stop light before Brady Street. 

We are a ghost town here, they say, since 1977 when it was official that the wealth moved out and urban renewal setbacks kicked in. It used to be hip here, used to be made of something solid like steel. But now, it is abandoned buildings, closed shops, dead/gray, brown, dark reds, and tans. This side of Uptown is riddled with parking lots used for the Consol Energy Center visitors, Downtown workers, and Oakland residents. 

But, here we are. Here we are Birmingham. We still climb the billboards, straddle the concrete of the Parkway Blvd of the Allies. We still party. We still act as if we’ve got a wild soul. We are not dead of nature. 

But what is nature, if not wild?

Just because we don’t look as welded together as the bridge, as concrete, iron, and steel, doesn’t mean we aren’t still standing. You see our gardens? You hear our records? Here we are. Brick. Concrete. Mulberries. Grass. Limestone. Here we are. Park and ride. 

I’m wondering Birmingham, what it is about you that makes me stand on you, feeling so at ease, feeling so alone, feeling like I’m about to escape, and still wanting to go back home?

Thoughts from a Plane: Nature Post #6

Here we are again, Birmingham. But this time I’m so far away. Up on a plane I look for you. It’s a beautiful world from here. Nothing seems to be broken up on United. I just wanted to spend some time thinking about you and the city in ariel view today, thinking about the city as a whole. While on my second flight of the day from Boston back to Pittsburgh I wrote you something:

I am in an innocent place. On a plane. I begin to see waters split the grayish brown land into oval paths. This is when I know I’m home. Pittsburgh. There is desert-colored dust, like limestones in the Mediterranean. It feels like I’m minutes away from vacation, on my way to the ground. I didn’t know I’d miss it. Dark brown hills of dirt pool out of the earth coming further into town, adjacent to dust piles. The houses between the lands neatly planted by God, evenly spaced lawns and hedges. It’s a beautiful world from up here. The highways and waters laid out in the same swivel of threes. I wonder if God plucked and prodded his hands into the thirsty dirt himself, or sent someone on a plane to see what it would look like laid before them. My face is on the plane window. United. Far off to the northwest there are thick white puffs. Too opaque to be clouds. I guess: snow nestled into crevices of mountains. I guess: Laurel Highlands. Apalachia. Everything is peaceful past the rush of wind on the wings. There are no rapids breaking at rocks, from here. No brittle branches breaking off dying trees. Even the sandy-colored bark, dry in between fields of corn rows, doesn’t look helpless. Somehow I am standing in the middle of the sky blowing wind through the bald trees, feeding oxygen into their lungs. Remembering them. Remembering themselves. Evergreens stacked just behind the sinking, bare trees; they are a forest next to a barn next to a highway next to a wheat field next to a terminal, a sign, a bridge, a light, a cone and a flag welcoming us. United. My hands sweep the city. Make love to the open. Make love to the closed. Make love of home, so beautiful from everywhere. 

A Preposition: Nature Post #5

Before the earth was tilled into the urban hills of a city this place had three names. Like the city with three rivers running us through this borough, these hills have a past. This Hill District opens up from one central point on Kirkpatrick street. It splits, and those streets split, and we’re sent into the directions of every end of the city. You can see where you’re going up here. 

Birmingham, you and I, we weren’t here then. But I’ll tell you, the Hill District used to be three parts: Sugartop, Haiti, and Minersville. You see my friend, this Hill District used to be a country, a field, and a cave. The highest part was the tip, like a sweet, severe sugarcane, sticking out of the center of the city. Haiti was a lower, more vulnerable land: its own country in the midst of a city. Minersville, where it all began with the generic name of Farm Number Three, before it became more than dirt patches of earth, sold off acres of land. The city was once many towns. But that was then. 

Now The Hill is of one nation its own, a neighborhood undivided in itself, but so singular it’s own. It’s the heart of itself, the enemy, and the decay. It’s the outside factors imbedded in its soil, and the inside locking hands under the buildings as well. It’s the struggle so deep no one remembers where it came from. Maybe it’s even that no one knows. I’d like to know what happened between Minersville and The Hill District that made it so afraid of itself, that made us so afraid of it. We’re all falling short here, watching our backs. 

Birmingham, do you ever wake up with the gun shots and running teenagers down the Kirkpatrick hill and want to dismantle yourself from the concrete overseeing the Monongahela to steel-walk to the neighborhood and protect the youth from themselves? I do. 

So what do we do now? Is anyone in a position to save another? Why don’t you (please) detach yourself from your middle of the waters, no name part of the city reigns and go? Be a shield. Be a mark in the land. Be a wall high that separates The Hill from itself. I’ll stand with you.