Go as a River

by Shelley Read

At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. ∼Annie Dillard

The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.

love is a private matter, to be nurtured, and even mourned, between two beings alone. It belongs to them and no one else, like a secret treasure, like a private poem.

He rarely looked to the future, and to the past even less, but gathered up the current moment in both hands to admire its particulars, with no apology and no sense it should be otherwise.

Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moments of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.

Even the surrounding

mountains, even consequence, seemed insignificantly small.

was thinking about Wil, weighing my desire to see him again against the stab of clarity that the wise thing to do would be to let all notions of him go while he was still beautiful and whole.

God will take a life, God will give a life, and God will make a life unrecognizable. God won’t warn you what’s coming next.

“I’ll go as a river,” said Wil. “My grandfather always told me that it’s the only way.”

the Black Canyon had become Wil’s deep and terrible grave because he had stayed to love me.

Just as a single rainstorm can erode the banks and change the course of a river, so can a single

circumstance of a girl’s life erase who she was before.

You can be a good girl, a good horse, you can obey, you can love, but don’t expect that if you do right then right will come to you.

freedom to lie in bed with no duties and no one to answer to could have felt like a luxury but instead felt all wrong. I drifted in and out of sleep, my strange torpor beleaguered by anxiety about laziness and

choices

four thick fingers squeezing my heart like a fist around a sponge, wringing out my tears, my guttural howls. That night I slept deeply, dreamlessly, greedy for refuge.

snow. I took a deep breath of this calm, held it in the taut balloons of my lungs, and slowly let it go.

In the steady rise of morning, I recognized that I had been given another day. Tomorrow, perhaps, I would be given yet another.

My plan might not work, but, in the kind gesture of the sun’s rising, it felt equally likely that it could.

As I drifted off to sleep in my new forest home, woven in some great and mysterious tapestry, the only sound I listened for was the steady pulse of the vast collection of beating hearts, the inhale and exhale of a million lives being lived alongside mine. I realized I had never been less afraid in my life.

June made promises.

Sunflowers and purple lupines and pale-pink wild roses ornamented the hillsides. Magenta spikes sprang up from the stream bogs, each stalk a tiny circus of pink elephant heads, their trunks lifting to the sun.

It never occurred to me that I was more than housekeeper and hand, that the heart of our family and home had somehow become me. As Daddy weakened, the orchard and I were all we had left.

Even though I had grown up believing that nothing mattered so much as where you came from, I had never considered what each of those children was forced to leave behind.

the resilience required to carry on.

“Go as a river,” I whispered to her, as Wil might have done, and, I swear, I felt her spirit rise.

I started down the long driveway, trying not to look back. But I couldn’t do it. I parked the truck and got out to take one long, final look at the place that made me. Then I returned to the truck and kept on driving. I would

leave my past behind and try to build my life again, hoping not for miracles but simply for strength in new soil. I figured that if my trees could survive, uprooted and against the odds, then, damn all bad fortune, so too could I.

I was wise enough to know only one thing: the land would decide my fate.

Each day, I was building a life of my choosing, and it was a good life. I knew what was missing, but I was also appreciative of what was there.

“A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”

I, like my orchard, had been resilient in new soil, uprooted by circumstance yet able to get on with things anyway. But I had also faltered and fallen, lost my resolve, and curled into fear more times than I could count. Strength, I had learned, was like this littered forest floor, built of small triumphs and infinite blunders, sunny hours followed by sudden storms that tore it all down. We are one and all alike if for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best.

to go as a river,