While Attempting to Write about My Sister
I think of how our dad enlisted us in yard work—nonoptional—and the weight of moving rocks from one end of the property to the other while he trenched the rock-infested clay to lay sprinklers in the vermillion earth.
When wet, the russet-running clay molded to me, clogging my tennis shoes and mucking up each step. I started noticing small things while slogging through the mud and dirt and time and credit those countless hours pushing a wheelbarrow up and down that hill to the eventual breaking open of my mind to beautiful mundanities.
One of the beauties that struck me first: the diving of black and yellow mud dauber wasps who gathered liquid clay from my shins while my sister ran inside. Looking back, the pattern is clear: her fear taught her to flee while mine taught me to freeze, to watch and wait.
Perhaps I should have seen my sister’s abandonment coming. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising when her perinatal psychosis, and the hallucinations it conjured, overwhelmed her with fear and she fled. She didn’t feel safe and her mind convinced her that the people who loved her most were to blame. She had to protect her babies. She had to create a safe environment for them. One by one she cut us off and left us behind.
As an adult I learned that the slip collected from my shins was most likely being gathered by solitary mud dauber mothers trying to build shelters, one room at a time, to fill with her larvae. That after the completion of each room, she would paralyze a couple dozen spiders to be consumed by her offspring when they hatched, sealing them up in the larval chambers. I think of each chamber as a birthing tomb, fully enclosed, each larva completely cut off from its family and the realities of the world around it—it knows only closed walls, preserved spiders, and the feeling of being alone.
I struggle to find grace in my sister’s leaving. I feel myself crumpling to the ground. I weep and watch my phone and wait, not knowing if she’ll ever return. And when I feel inclined to write about her—about us—I remember dad hosing down the mud dauber nests from the eaves and the way they flaked to the ground in layered clods. I didn’t know about the chambers then, or the spiders hidden inside, but when I think of them now, I wonder where my sister was when they hit the ground. I wonder where she is today and why she never calls.
I wonder if she wishes we could go back there, to that rocky clay yard before all the sod was lain and we grew up. I wonder if she remembers the weight of the wheelbarrow on our path through the flowering wildrye and valley sedge. Perhaps more than anything, I wonder if she remembers passing dad as he glued pipe junctions with plastic solvent cement—can she conjure the combined smell of red clay and all-purpose purple PVC primer in summer heat? Does she long for that trench? Does she long for me?
