Southverve

The blackberry stalks pressed to the window in Oregon have shadowed the moon all week, and back in Georgia where thick wisteria has overtaken the sills of an abandoned shack, afternoon light cuts through plates of dust where glass had once fit.  Two miles from there, green ivy spirals from a skylight in my father’s home, a slow unfurling of gravity across his years.  The tendrils tangle halfway to the guest bed, and when I return to Georgia, a guest now, I pull up from sleep, try to find pieces of the morning sun.

Like that story about the stalk and Jack, you and I could take any vine, rung by leafy rung, to a heaven-land of honey and one milking cow heavier than all the cumulus fluff in the world we just passed through.  Except, instead of god, a hungry giant awaits, singing for tired climbers who’ve managed the trip so far.

But these blackberry stalks aren’t strong enough to climb onto, which isn’t to say they are not mighty.  They are the memory of blackberries at the field’s edge of a farmhouse in New England where I once lived; they mark the deep thorn creases in the moon’s splotched face when it shows.

Inside my father’s home, the ivy has spread above the ceiling joists, become a wire mesh marking the beginning when my father put the roof in place.  And holding up the floor joists of the shack on my uncle’s land, who years ago departed, whose son wants the building pushed down, the wisteria is now the root bed, the foundation.

My son, my daughter, and I took old boards from that ceiling in December.  In the rooms, wet rye seed and fertilizer bags, a ripped up sofa, what was left by people now gone.  The lightered wood will be the floor in a cabin we are building.  And when the boards swung down, hundred year dust filled the empty windows where the wisteria had twisted knuckles into the frame.  Then the wind shook the beams where squirrels from a different winter had left pecans and a nest of straw for us to find.

I stood on the ladder, rocking, wondering what would happen if the vines were cut: would the house fall away?  the yard?  the field beyond it? would the soil float up to meet the clouds until the quiet bee houses at the edge of the woods disappeared?  Everything going somewhere, except for us transfixed by shapes still breathing in the frame.

When the clouds finally clear away, there are so many stars in the black sky, I cannot hold onto my breath.  I just stand before how full the night is on my father’s road.  Every twenty minutes, chicken trucks diesel through from a farm out toward Rebecca, but otherwise just black, and the sharp light of stars, the littlest dipper at the center spilling a universe.  The shooting stars, the falling ones, appear and burn away before I can wish upon.  I tell myself, next time, I’ll have a wish ready.  And will place it where my breath slips along the cold.

Where we start digging, the ground is dry powder.  It had taken all day to walk the perimeter and mark where the fence would go, buy the six corner and twelve line and fifty T posts, the spools of barbed wire.  Now it’s getting on toward night.  In Rochelle a summer storm flares up like the storms have for weeks.  Coming on.  My father says, Coming on, but never arriving.

Maybe the twenty percent chance the weatherman has been preaching will be our luck this time, the drought here will finally give way.  The lightning and wind try to convince us, and I tell him and my son Dylan we need to get the first corner post in the ground before the rain. 

My son lifts the post hole digger handles, punches the ground—he’s the young back—while my father and I hobble to the truck for gloves like barbed wire is coiled around our legs.  We joke about being old men.  When he first bought this land, my father dug all the holes, put up all the fences himself.  Fifty some years since he did that, before I was even born.

The ground is a dry powder that keeps slipping through the jaws of the post hole diggers.  My father heads to the house for gallon jugs of water, his alchemy for turning dust to mud so it’ll stick in-between the blades and we can dig this hole.  The sky grumbles.  The rain hasn’t arrived, and if this digging is going to happen, we need alchemy.

Then Dylan hits a root of the closest pine.  He can’t cut through it, not strong enough yet, and I spear the earth over and over until chunks of root tear free and the smell of rosin lifts with the dust and he can go on working. 

I tell him to throw the post hole diggers into the ground like a javelin, not that I’ve ever thrown one.  Let go of the handles at the last moment.  Then my father returns and adds half-jug of the water.  Now try it, he says.  The dirt sticks like it should when my son brings up the closed blades.  So many things to tell him.  When he’s tired, I take over, and my chest hurts down the center where the force of throwing the post hole diggers has shaken up the bone and muscle. 

Don’t have a stroke, my father says. 

I’m too young, I tell him and don’t tell him about the pain.

When I’m tired, Dylan takes over again and we are down to the handles now, three feet deep.  We need to go one foot more.  My father takes over for awhile, but neither my son nor I want him working for long.  He’s put in his time across these years.  And the storm did miss us like he said—we got a few drops—and the lightning is striking west over Seville now. 

Here, the darkness seems to creep up from the grass, and I throw the post hole diggers into the ground like a javelin.  Sparks flash where the metal blades scrape against the iron in the clay, the sides of rocks.  It’s as if we’ve dug up the universe, where stars are made and die quickly.  Or maybe we’ve uncovered where falling stars are buried, having sliced into the earth and cooled.  If the sparks and dust catch, a fire will spread through the pine roots, feeding off the rosin, until the whole earth becomes the sun burning again. 

Deep enough, my father says and we lift the corner post, set it, pack the mud and dust with the handles.  We can pull the first wire tomorrow.

Soon we’ll be driving to Cordele for supper, and later I’ll come back out, walk the road by the field, after midnight, the stars underneath me, the ones above marking the space between us.

Somewhere on another balcony, a kid says Ah man wow each time the long streaks of lightning come down over Tampa.  We are on Clearwater Beach not too far, it is midday, and the strikes are so complete, they spread the visual field from the top of gray clouds to the earth.  I keep thinking of Zeus.  I keep thinking they are white fingers split off a hot sun.

I should go inside, but across the bay I see where rain has covered one hill of homes and high-rises stacked and squeezed together.  Every space is glassed concrete and pavement, nature manicured down to sand and ocean, what is valued here.

I’m waiting for the sheet of rain to cross the bay to us, for the first drops to pop on the water.  I’m waiting for that sound to reach me, what I’ve always known, rain coming across fields or through pine needles, bringing wet sky, suddenly the cool taste of the earth settling in your throat.

Whenever I’m riding the Amboy-Ashburn Road or the Vienna-Pitts, I always come upon expanses of sky so full, the earth feels squeezed to nothing.  So I breathe in and breathe in, exhale until I have filled the whole space of row crops, pines, blue. 

But on a day like this with whole sheets of gray clouds torn away from white clouds, sinking down with rain, with heaven this close, it feels as if the horizon has moved, as if the road is ascending, as if every breath elevates, gravity no longer tangible and easy to let go of.

There’s a blue tarp along one side of The Holy Temple of Jesus on 1^st Place.  Still the sign for worship bent and curved.  And out over the broken trees in the west, the sun has spun down into orange and red.  All June we’ve been trapped in a heat and haze river the nights can’t cool.  But when the sun gets this close to gone and the wind kicks, we go out walking. 

At the corner, a pear tree rooted into the sidewalk forks at the sky.  Tiny shoots have sprouted green with green leaves along the trunk and what remains of the branches just like the swamp pines in South Georgia whose needles poke out wherever lightning flashes into the bark.  And across the street, more forked pears.  At the base of them, bricks, glass, a flattened school-crossing sign and strips of plywood.  But along the trunks, green branches regenerating.

A train howls—I can’t see it; it’s down in South Pratt—and cars, so many cars coming and going on this highway, hurrying through.  They no longer slow to look at the torn up earth and buildings.  After awhile even devastation becomes familiar. 

It’s hard to explain why you can breathe easier here with so much rebuilding still to be done, but just like the shock we all felt in April when the tornadoes cut through these neighborhoods in Alabama, a calmness has unexpectedly set in.  You feel it without realizing it.  But even in the calmness, there’s a disconnect. 

An old spotted dog walks up the street, looks at me, turns away. A huge steel plate sits over a hole in the road and the cars keep hitting it.  Across the street, young kids walking, singing, four girls going to meet four boys.

The power lines are up.  They were one of the first things.  And stoplights working.  On Dugan the Qwik mart has reopened.  “Just last week,” I’m told inside.  It’s the only store open in North Pratt.  Outside, men sit at the door, ask for money, and car after car stops here. 

Wire, glass, wood—all of it has been removed from the roads as if nothing happened, pushed into empty lots or carried off on dump trucks.  White signs for land clearings and demolition are everywhere. One lot on Hibernian has been leveled, the fresh turned dirt ready for a new house, the north corner marked with a pair of pine stumps.  But all around this empty space, fallen homes and apartments waiting, the smell of the sewer and rotting wood and mattresses.

If you keep walking to Sheridan Road, you’ll find a small ravine of pines and bays sheared off, full of the machinery and paper of nearby homes.  Someone’s sweater swings on a branch and inside that grove, birds calling back and forth to one another, cicadas cranking up like back-firing mufflers.  In the dead branches, red birds, swallows.  They flit across the sky, the shape of their flight harder and harder to make out. 

One bureau mirror in a second floor apartment keeps caching the last light of the sun, reflecting it as a blue-silver past the missing wall.  And I wonder who was at that mirror before the tornado came, what they found in their reflection.  Did they believe things would be all right?  Did they tell themselves, just go to sleep?  Where are they now?

All the car lights have come on, darkness blurring the corner wood of the houses, free hot showers available at the fire station, and blue tarps pocking the roofs.  And on one curb, white bags of trash like the ones we’ve taken out on summer evenings before pickup.  Only no house behind it, just the foundation, the stairs where you could walk up and enter the blue-black night.

It is not yet noon in Birmingham.  Already long gray sheets tear apart below the white clouds.  There will be a moment of rain or just missed rain—our summer no longer in drought, dictated in just the last week by storms, what we can get done before they arrive and not.

I cannot find the lightning, but thunder is in the churning where clouds have overtaken the mountain.  The wind throws itself at us, lifts the heat.  My father has no rain in Georgia.  The crops are a disaster, he tells me.  The grass for his cattle, all brown.  He hasn’t cut hay for winter.  Send me rain, he says.  In the Dakotas there is so much, the rivers cannot hold anymore.

I’m keeping two dogs for a friend and they want nothing to do with this weather.  They lick at the drops on the porch like my father’s cattle lick at salt.  Then the dogs hurry inside. There’s no one at the pool, just these different waves of cloud holding, turning water, the wind strong enough to reach him.  But then the rain breaks loose here, comes down steady, and soon will be gone.

It’s afternoon and the humidity left from yesterday’s rain has coalesced above us.  From the north, a gray-blue rumble-slides, sweeping out the heat and the sun.  One of the kids at the pool tells the rain to go away.  She covers her head in a beach towel.  The boy with her just stares through his sunglasses, too cool to move.

We have enough light still that lightning can’t be seen except in wide-sky flashes.  Then the rain comes over.  In the courtyard two kids with sheets of cardboard overhead jump at the rain, then back under the overhang of a porch.  There is one kid swimming in the deep water.  She won’t come out no matter what the thunder tells her.

Then the rain really comes and dark enough that white jags of lightning split the world, one side of the courtyard to the other.  The girl at the edge of the pool hides under an umbrella.  The boy screams and races away.  The swimmer comes out and puts her things under the umbrella before they get too wet.  And then, with the lightning splitting the world more and more, the rain on the tomatoes and every porch, everything, the swimmer jumps back in.

Blackbirds swing out over the roofs in front of the storm, kite strings attached to their backs for bringing the clouds on.  Already the tomatoes have blown over on the porch, and below, umbrella tables spin into the pool.  The clouds sink low and come over the mountain.  From the east.  Out of the gray and black, rain.

But before it reaches us, light slips in like it does through an open band of sky.  The tree branches bend, make a sweeping bow at the earth, then up.  In this moment, the pine needles turn a brilliant green.

Then the rain shifts south.  It has missed us, and left us with air so cool, all of the heat of the day drawn up in thunder, returned in far off lightning.  Where the birds have disappeared, the reverse of everything we’ve known.

Part One: On Thursday, April 28 I drove to Pratt City, the day after a tornado churned through its neighborhoods and destroyed so much.  When Saturday morning came around, all I could still think of were the broken apart homes I had seen, the twisted off oaks and pines, the debris in the roads you had to walk around.  My mind tried to sort through the clutter, but couldn’t.

As a kid, I would make things out of blocks and sticks, tear them down and put them back together.  But how would Pratt City be put back together?  If I could refigure those neighborhoods in my imagination, then those homes, this small piece of the world would be okay eventually.  But I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

So I thought of all the maps we carry.  Road atlases because we’re always driving to somewhere.  Or the directions people give us jotted down.  There’s the map of the body, its arteries and veins and organs and surgeries.  The boxed rooms we inhabit.  In the kitchen, a refrigerator divided into shelves of cold food and milk. Our offices, the routes we walk, the elevators and stairs we take.  The mapping of each day that starts with coffee and doesn’t end even as the yellow moon comes out of the trees.

Then there’s the mapping of the past, how memories fall and resurface like lost aquifers.  Dreams that connect and disconnect.  People always ask me how tall I am, and I think back to the pencil marks dug into the dark-wood timber of my father’s home.  Those marks are still there from when I was eleven, twelve.  But mapping is two-dimensional and when you pull away far enough, and stay at that distance, and look back closer, what you find are geographies—the shape of live oaks and hills, the curving path of blood, cars, people, time.

I told a friend that how well I remember something depends on layers of geography.  When I go to the Smokies, I take the same paved road along the Little River from Townsend to Gatlinburg.  Each time the way the current bends at the rocks impresses its layer on top of the layers I’ve created of this place.  In the summers the river is down and the water slows along.  In spring, faster.  In fall the leaves are carried and carried.  At some point, a rock slide will change the landscape or a fallen tulip poplar or rocks breaking and carried off.  And just as the river shifts to heal so does my memory until the new geography is the one I’ve always known.

I do not know what Pratt City looked like before the tornado. I only know the broken hills and roofs.  So on Saturday I returned to see how this geography, these people were healing.

I followed the same route I did Thursday—I-20/59 southwest to 78-Jasper.  From there just a little ways to Pratt Highway.  And off of Pratt Highway to 1^st Place, where I parked at the Holy Temple of Jesus, its metal sign bent into waves, yet still there.  It tells you the pastor and presiding elder and when to meet on Sunday.

First night I came to Pratt City, I talked to a friend of the pastor who had locked his keys in his car.  Around us so many cars on the road, one after another barely moving.  And on the grass and sidewalks, people walking around stunned, all heading to the broken neighborhoods.  But on Saturday, there was no one at the Holy Temple of Jesus and no one walking.  Every now and then a car hurried by.

From 1^st place I walked to Avenue W past the library to the highest point on Hibernian Street down Meehan Avenue and back, the same route I had taken before.

The walk on 1^st took me back by Tony Maxwell’s antique store. The front of his store had been ripped off by the storm and he and his friends had been busy removing bricks from inside.  He said he wasn’t going to use the old bricks and there they were in a pile on the sidewalk and in the parking places on the street with plaster and wire.  The bottom floor was covered up with plywood now and a sign of no trespassing.  But the second floor was still open, and I could see the rows of lamps and rocking chairs Tony had gotten from estate sales and fairs.  And that cool, damp smell of old buildings, their wood and dirt.  Across the street a block wall at the corner gas station was almost completely up.  They had started it on Thursday.  And still the trees down, many cut into chunks, still holding down power lines.

Avenue W remained closed to traffic and the police and aid workers occupied an abandoned gas station, the makeshift headquarters for relief.  On Hibernian, people in red volunteer shirts were out helping home owners in the heat along with a few army trucks, a helicopter.  Wires marked the edges of the roads and debris had been pushed into piles, so the trucks could get through a little better.

And in many places everything was so quiet.  That’s what happened on Meehan.  A gray car sat with the front smashed and the trunk open, the trunk light on.  And the wind kept stirring up house dust, burning my eyes.  I talked to Anne Hampton who said her neighborhood in Pratt had escaped, that the tornado had bounced over her and hit parts of Avenue U.  It got dark, and the tornado bounced, she said, and then the sun came out for a second.  The tornado came back and turned through here.  She pointed at everything around us.  House after house torn or leveled, the smell of chainsaw gas and oil, the chainsaws being worked in the distance.  One man and his son were taking things out of their home and putting them in a truck. The helicopter circled, then was gone.

And when Anne left, I looked and looked, stuck as I had been in my dreams, impossible to put any of this back together.  And it was that feeling, the quiet emptiness, the overwhelming sense of loss I could not shake.

This past week, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about the tornadoes that struck Alabama, What the Wind Carried Away.  On Saturday, I visited Pratt City again. Many people were out helping to rebuild, to supply food and water, whatever assistance necessary – all of this, so good. And yet I’m struck by the irretrievable loss of people, homes, and place. I will write more about it, the hold of this memory, and the efforts to recover this community.

Tonight the moon is full and yellow.  Where the wind picks up, no mosquitoes and slowly, the moon turns white, brighter.  We stare at it as long as we can.  Afraid to look away, as if looking away might cause us to disappear, as if the moon is not really there and its breath and skin, none of it real.

* * *

I wake up sweating, having dreamed in traffic lights, stop turning to go turning to stop and me caught in-between.  Then on-cue, the neighbors start fighting.  Well, she starts screaming.  Loud knocks against the wall – her fists, his fists, furniture, a shoulder being pushed against – but they’re not those kinds of screams, not about that kind of pain. He’s a bastard for doing something, and why did he do that? And calm down, Baby, calm down, the police – I know. I don’t care is all I understand and cannot go back to sleep.  Until the traffic lights start switching in my head, the road after rain, that wet sound coming off the backs of wheels, windows down and cooling, and I hear him say, I’m leaving.  Go, she says, just go.

* * *

There was a field we’d go to in high school on Saturday nights, we’d go out there and build huge fires against winter, sparks dying off before they caught in the grass.  And someone in the group took whole sheets of paper – he had graduated the year before, and still had these notebooks in his truck, and ripped out the spines and took whole sheets and slung them on top of the flames, and off they would go as soon as they were lit into the air and I remember, what I remember, was lying there and watching them float overhead, these huge sheets of burnt paper like bats, blotting out the moon, one eclipse after another of our own invention.

* * *

All day I’ve tried to, but I can’t angle the light out of the sky.  It washes over the dull clouds until the clouds sweat away holes for the sun to wiggle through for a moment.  I run towards the flashes as if they’re kite string or fishing line I’ve just lost.  If I get there fast enough and grab hold, I can peel the clouds away before they close again out of my reach.

* * *

Chasing the sun all day leaves one thirsty as a general rule.  And long summers, and working until you no longer taste salt in your sweat, and some peppers like jalapeño, cayenne, and what she had said about kisses, Don’t you want my kisses? through the wall during the fight I could barely hear.  These kisses, not hers? As if each were a drop of water.  Never enough to just draw sweat from the neck and fingers.  Salt just makes you more thirsty, and trying to draw kisses through the back of a spoon, a silver ring, paper and wood smoke, even the ground, drawing up all the dirt, hoping to be cured of thirst.

* * *

And what if everything was one color?  Everything you felt and touched and dreamed and thirsted for.  What if it was all in one shade – even in the light, the absence of light – all one color?  Would it be blue, like sky like some water deep enough and clear enough? or green, the leaves everywhere, or would it be red, yellow, always ready to spark?

* * *

Tonight the moon is full and yellow.  Where the wind picks up, no mosquitoes and slowly, the moon turns white, brighter.  We stare at it as long as we can, afraid if we look away it will catch fire and draw the stars closer to each other until the whole universe crashes.  And if the stars change, reverse and scatter away from us, the earth will leave us, too, and spin right through the moon’s empty center.

Where the green has returned, at first in April, it was a light thin green, shadows when you looked through the woods by the creek, but now the leaves are fuller, darker.  On the road, two copperheads run over by cars, the shape of their bodies still trying to get away.  The intensity of the sun has come back, and the pattern of storms – purple and blue lightning, tornadoes touching down, then gone. Next day, clear sun.  There’s this one place under the bridge, all shadow and cool, but when you look out, the water catches light, rolls it under, cools it. The rolling water is where I want to place my hands, allow the afternoon to sink into my skin wet and bright.

What I love about Lyle is his sly take on love where a man sets himself up as tough, but when it comes down to it, whatever she says, whatever his sweetheart wants, he says okay.  The man turns to butter.  Lyle could change the roles in the songs or make them about two men or two women.  Who’s in love with whom doesn’t matter.  It’s the humor and the vulnerability in the relationships I believe in.  And for the length of one song, Lyle puts up a fight.  He’s been through a lot of bad love himself.  Remember the Julia Roberts’ fling?  Maybe it’s all his fault, but he’s had a lot of love gone wrong on him.

Outside, another thunderstorm is playing its usual rumble: a little hail, a little hint of tornado with lightning forking to the ground in mad blue streaks through the rain.  It’s the middle of spring semester.  I need a reprieve, something to lighten up the weekend grading of story critiques, so tonight I’m listening to Lyle and watching Twister with the volume off.

I know, you don’t have to tell me, it’s a great movie.  Epic.  Helen Hunt trying to run away from a tornado with some guy in a Midwestern cornfield and that tornado fat as a low-flush toilet acting like the devil.  I’m amazed to see all those fences uproot and come apart so easily, cause I’ve put in fences like that, and, man, it’s a lot of work putting fences like that into the dirt.

Outside, a huge arc of blue-sun lightning is followed by a growl that shakes through the apartment.  I wait for the lights to go out, but they don’t.  Inside, Helen and her man get trapped in a barn and the tornado throws swords or something like swords at them, scythe-like.  A lot of dangerous implements hang above their heads about to get whirled into a frenzy.  This is a movie with manmade objects of ill-intent.

I laugh through it all.  Maybe you’ve laughed, too.  Or maybe you’ve screamed and worried.  About the chasers in the movie, about the storms.  I always wonder where that fury carries off to after it passes me.  My father left a cow and bull in front of a tulip poplar at the edge of a field once with the rain just starting and came back later to find them dead, the poplar trunk branded and splintered.  When he was younger, my father was hit from behind by a strike.  “Felt like a baseball bat,” he said.  “It knocked me out.”  My wife’s great-grandmother was hit by lightning just walking onto her porch.  She lived through it, though everyone thought she was dead for hours.  Her dress, with burn-holes down the center, is stowed away in a drawer somewhere as testament.

It’s good practice for writers to watch movies with the volume off.  Actors and actresses always over-accentuate their gestures.  After awhile you’ll pick up the rhythm of one character’s action triggering a reaction in someone else which triggers a reaction from the first character and back and forth they go until someone’s killed or there’s a kiss.  That’s how these things end.

So the volume’s off and Lyle is singing, Yeah, I used to be able to handle rejection while Helen and her man hang on to the plumbing.  Every board of a shack (yes, they’ve moved from the barn to a shack) disappears and the couple flies up in the air like clothes on a sideways clothesline but still, somehow miraculously hanging on as the storm passes over them, and I lose it for good.  The peas I’d been eating shoot across the coffee table.

I know that’s gross, but I can’t take anything serious in this movie—not the it’s-a-tornado-let’s-start-a-romance story line, not the I’m-going-to-eat-your-planet tornado, not the we-are-the-Flash way Helen and her man outrun the greenish-black winds for a half hour before grabbing hold of the plumbing.  Maybe I’m being too cynical, but seriously, has a human on foot ever outrun a tornado?  Much less two humans joined hand in hand?  Lyle, the voice of reason, sings I used to be so much more open-minded, they tell me I was so much sweeter and kinder, but once is enough.

And I know Lyle is right: wordless or with words, I can’t watch this movie again.  Outside, the rain slows; the lightning fires long sheets across the sky northeast of here. Inside, Helen places her hand on her man’s face.  With the tornado gone, she can now promise him true, real love. That’s what I think she’s doing; at least, that’s what I want her to do.  She mouths something.  He nods.  They kiss.

Before the regional finals against Calhoun County, I locked myself in my brother’s truck and focused on that one motion, how the basketball came off the wood when dribbling, then up through my hands like a fountain of water arcing toward the rim. All week I dreamed of the ball spinning into the black cold air over my father’s fields and woke up breathless having run through every dark corner of my mind trying to find it. I had convinced myself that the secret to the whole thing, if I was going to transcend my lowly six point shooting average and become a phenomenon on the court, I had to get inside the spin and understand how it worked.

Music was the conduit for understanding because in high school, music was the conduit for everything over-serious, how you related to the world and moved through it. So I made a cassette of fierce jams and turned up the volume on my brother’s stereo we called the magmatic mama: Billie Jean, Don’t Turn Around Uh-Oh, Say It isn’t So, We Are Ourselves, and the whole Risky Business soundtrack—bad 80s music I still cannot separate from my DNA.

I listened and focused on the turn of the ball, how the leather would smooth down my fingertips. Then I let the ball go as the speakers womped. Then another bounce followed and another shot, the smell of winter rye and mud-shit percolating through the cab, until the spiritual meshed with the real and the windows steamed against the cold. I’m surprised no one knocked on the door and asked if I was okay. I was in the truck a long time.

There is high and low spirituality in this world and my mixture of pop music with an imaginary basketball was definitively subterranean. Back then, I thought I had invented the alternative to my cousin’s faith in a god that would damn all non-believers such as myself to hell. I didn’t want to go to hell, so having a counter-religion was a good option.

I’d like to tell you that the movie-trailer I created in my mind played out on the court—me stealing the ball, then dribbling the distance to the paint, giving a fake and going up strong, scoring and scoring against my exasperated opponents—and I became a basketball legend in South Georgia that night of my senior year. But that’s not what happened. I made my six points and we lost the regionals for the second year in a row.

What I can tell you is this, I discovered what was inside the spin—the making and unmaking of time. This is how it worked: as the ball spun to the floor like an orange-brown tornado, a moment of time unraveled, then it bounced, and the tornado un-spiraled, its destruction reversing until stopping in my hands as if nothing had occurred, the unmaking of time. If the ball came back just right and my hands were positioned just right, then I’d lift the ball and arc it toward the goal and pray for a whoosh of nets. That’s how I envisioned it, and with this secret I was ready to dominate.

I turned off the blaster stereo, buttoned up my gold W jacket with purpose, walked into the gym, and slipped past the girls finishing up their game—they had the crowd yelling, Go, Go, Go—to the locker room where everybody was in the middle of their own rituals of getting ready.

Carlton, our shooting guard, worked through pretend shots, holding the ball in the air, freeze-framing that moment, aiming at a locker. He was deadly from the left corner. Amp dribbled the ball furiously, getting his hands as close to the concrete as possible without making the ball stop. When he dribbled like that, it threw my heart off-rhythm, like quail that flutter by you in a field. I wanted to keep up with each bounce and couldn’t. He was the point guard. Anthony had started his push-ups off the long bench. Next would be sit-ups, then stretches, then he’d do it all again. He was a forward and our leader and had the most set routine. Dwayne, the strong forward, moved from one person to the next making jokes and laughing, trying to get loose. At some point he’d come up and ask me if I was ready. I’m ready, I’d tell him and ask, You ready? Yeah, he’d say. We got it tonight. We’d slap hands and he’d go to someone else and I’d focus on that single motion—the ball off the wood, the ball through my hands to the goal. I was the center, no. 54.

There were other players moving around us—the B-teamers, the second-stringers—but the game would be mostly us five, and everyone gave us our space. Then Coach brought in the game ball and we put our right hands in like the Hokey Pokey song said to do and stacked them and said the Lord’s Prayer. First silence, then on cue, Our father, who art in heaven. No matter what you believed you had to respect that prayer. It had a power with our hands down and joined, speaking those words at the same time like we had every basketball game, forever and ever, as if our playing together would never stop. Then our hands raised up, and someone clapped which started everyone clapping, and the world restarted. We got it, we said and lined up at the door in our blue and gold jerseys. Behind us, the long bench littered with our dress shoes, the metal lockers mostly closed, and the smell of mold from the showers and the tub of icy-hot still open.

Now, it always hits me without any reason to. I’ll be reading a book or walking around thinking about my next class, or grocery shopping to a store’s dull tunes, and the basketball comes spinning back into my hands from the dark of my father’s fields. With it, the heat of time lost, as if that moment had been spinning around the universe for years and years, a rogue tornado with nothing to bounce against. Then it bounced. As soon as I hold the ball, the whole thing comes back to me: who I was, what happened that night, the past no longer undone until I set it in motion again.

Just a week ago, I walked down to the creek trail and snow falling. Gorgeous that night in Alabama, the snow coming through the limbs, a light sizzle. You could only catch that snow in shadow, and sometimes in the headlamps of cars coming the opposite way, depending on how they turned and depending on how long you could stand to look into the lights. Things had to match up. But when they did, you could see the snow drift. The total opposite of those cars zooming. And whenever you looked straight up, the snow floated into your eyes, melted cool. You’d blink it away, strain your eyes open even more to see the flakes before they hit until you did see. Shadows. Or maybe it was just the anticipation or what your mind had held onto about snow—what it should be look like, what you’ve seen before.

But that was a week ago. That snow lasted one night. As it should be in the South. You get the pretty of it and it’s gone and then one week later, which is now, the sun has gotten a lot stronger, and the tree outside your porch is about to bloom red. Or maybe that red’s going to open pink. But whatever the color, it’s going to happen—the long spring that begins in February. If you grow up here, your body-clock is set to it. When I lived up north, every February my body would say to me, “What the hell’s going on?” Outside would be fields of snow, just stacked up for months, packed in with dirty ice. It can be beautiful, that top layer of snow, don’t get me wrong. And there are places in the north I could wake up and be content. But my body knows in February it should be spring taking over those fields. And now it is.

So much so, that every morning when I get up, I have to put on a little music. Something to help my groggy headed son get ready for school. One of the fun things about being a parent is the opportunity you have to annoy your children when they’re somewhat defenseless. The best moments of defenselessness come when they just wake up like a snake waking up in a wood pile in cold winter, not wanting to move at all. They walk out of their rooms, shuffling against the walls a little, trying to figure out how those feet work. They see the lights turned on and they see you moving and bobbing and singing around them, but it’s too much to take in at seven am. But you, the parent, keep it up: “Have you had your breakfast? Have you got your homework? Did you brush those teeth? Wake up, man. Wake up.”

My son, who is a senior in high school, doesn’t answer any of these questions. He just looks at me dumbfounded like, “Who are you? Why are you asking me this?” But I keep up the pressure, getting in close to him like I did in my basketball days. My wife always tells me I have no sense of personal space because I cross right next to people on the sidewalks and I’m six-five and she’s afraid they’ll be afraid of me. I’m not trying to intimidate anyone; it’s just reflex. Because in basketball the definition of personal space is very narrow—how else are you going to guard your man and keep him from scoring if you give him a lot of personal space? Not going to happen. So I don’t give my son personal space, and I know, I know, he just wants to push me back, give me one good hit, maybe, but he doesn’t want to move a limb, doesn’t want to exert that much force.

Sometimes, when I get him truly riled up, he says, “Leave me alone, Old Man,” and stomps off to brush his teeth. But this morning, he just grabs hold of my beard at the chin, doesn’t pull or anything (though the threat of pulling is there), and I move my head back just a little, ready to snatch out of the hold if needed. He says, “Cool your jets, Old Man. Cool your jets.” Calm, judicious, wise, sleepy.

“All right,” I tell him, smiling. I put my hands on his shoulders, just to let him know that if he pulls that beard, there might be some shoving. Then he walks off to brush his teeth, and when he comes back, I do a little Lyle Lovett singing, I used to be so long, lean, and tough, are how the lyrics go. My son grabs his books. He’s on the phone with his girlfriend, she’s here to pick him up, and he’s out the door, gone.

And I know, like you know, or you will know, when you’re a parent, I’ve only got so many days left to annoy this kid. But it’s spring now in the South. All good things happening.

We drive up Highway Two past the dark trees in white snow, the red rocks of the Berkshires, curving down inside a ring of hills to Shelburne. Then we park and walk across the main bridge. Underneath, the Deerfield River a glaze of snow-ice. And adjacent, the Bridge of Flowers with its white barreled arches, its walkway packed in too many feet of snow to cross until spring.

It’s late in the afternoon and the wind, it won’t stop cutting at us from the north. Ten degrees. Tonight down to minus twenty. So we keep moving past the glass blowers shop, the furnaces cooling, to the glacial potholes, the falls. There’s really nothing to keep you warm.

Mole Hollow Candle is empty. I remember going inside, brushing against people, the store full of people coming, going in summer. Through the wide sheets of glass, the falls, the pounding water you could not hear. Inside, wax melted and refigured with cinnamon, berry, too many scents to take in at once. Now, a sign is taped on the glass, a number to call if you want to buy the space, if you want to rent.

But it isn’t just Mole Hollow. The Art Co-Op up the street has closed. The candy store in town where my children filled bags with sugar worms and sour worms. The Copper Angel restaurant where my family had a hard time choosing dessert pies from a glass case. There are moments in life you would freeze if you could. You would slip inside and keep inside and hold your family to you, protect them from growing old. There. More than nostalgia, certain points of history, seeds on a sunflower before they scatter. It is those seeds, embedded, I find picking at my skin when I am here.

The other restaurants and cafes in Shelburne have new names or the buildings are empty, only wooden fixtures of what was or what is coming next. All in flux.

Used to in summer, you could bring your kids and run down the slope of rock to the potholes, sit underneath the falls coming from the #3 Dam. Used to I came here with my kids. Once, they raced to the edge of an outcropping, and I grabbed their hands and pulled them back to me, looked out over the rock’s slope, and in my mind their feet kept racing as if they were running through the sky, had become birds flying and weightless to me. I held their hands tighter.

These falls are of the coldest water even in the dead of summer as if the water is always churning from some place at the coldest part of the earth. Now I am here with my wife. For tradition, we first ate almond brownies at McCluskers Market and drank apple cider; its sugar-heat worked for awhile against the cold.

My dream is to live here, to wake up and walk across the bridges, across the Deerfield, watch the sun go dark in the circle of mountains. My wife takes pictures of the ice and snow. Underneath, pools of black water pulse against the ice, and the brown-red rocks jutting out with snow, blacker now in the dark, and from the dam, the falls tumbling out.

Once, my oldest daughter swam across the Deerfield at the bottom. I was worried about her, but she was a good swimmer. And I stayed back with the younger kids as she swam through the current. I told her when she returned that one day we would swim across together. But they have closed the potholes because someone jumped from the outcroppings and missed the pools of water, could not fly, fell onto the rocks. And if I had not grabbed my children’s hands what would have happened?

We are here for only a short time, soon driving back to where my middle daughter is starting college. The cold air presses down. My fingers turn numb and my toes numb. It is darker now, and the light left on the ice and snow has turned blue—a long blue light curling across everything—so it’s not quite real anymore, this place that every time I come here breaks my sense of time apart until it is the old dreams, the ones hard to let go of that will not let go of you, the ones you believe in for so long they become your breathing at the deepest pools of sleep waiting to pull you under. The old dreams surface. A pact you made with yourself, what life would be one day. And how I ask you, do you stop them?

Tomorrow I return to Birmingham and my wife to Cincinnati miles and miles from here. She will send me the grainy pictures of blue air. Blue air over an ice river, blue air over ice and snow, the Berkshires circling this town. Some of the photos will be of the two of us smiling, our warm hats not keeping us warm. Beyond us and beyond the pictures, the blue fills everything— the empty buildings, the river, and up the rock, climbing, climbing until it spills over the other side until it vanishes.

Sleet hits the porch, a sound like snow being crunched underfoot, like popping, a long glass cloud broken by the tops of pines. The ice falls, bounces, falls. We are told stay indoors, go nowhere. Sleet to be followed by snow to be followed by freezing rain. I wonder if our power will hold, if the limbs will break, pull the wires down. In the South, as my father says, you have to wait for things to thaw naturally. Somewhere in the courtyard people are laughing. All of this is nothing to worry about. But I cannot think beyond the sound of ice, how the evergreens try to shake it off and how it gathers on the ground, fine pieces melting under the press of your hand.

At first the moon was flat white, a pan fish unable to swim away. Then the earth slipped in between the sun and moon, working its shadow to the white center, allowing the cold to spill thick over the ground. The stars had scattered, and gray clouds kept sliding up like smoke from the earth. My son hadn’t dressed warmly enough because he just puts things on no matter what time I get him up. But I was ready, layered, had slept in the bed that way until the alarm went off at two, sweating, and then out the door where the black and cold heavied the earth to a stop here in Chula, Georgia.

We watched as the white of the moon shrunk down and a gray-pink underbelly bled into the shadow-back curve. I made wishes: a good life for my children, novel completions, lottery drawings, a good life for the world. That’s the power of the moon changing: it makes you feel small.

The sweat began to freeze, and my body shivered, trying to warm up. It’s cold, my son said. I’m going in. He said it straight out with no room to argue and placed his thick hat over mine. I might have gone, too, but there was a sliver of white left. I wanted to see the moon go dark and me still standing in the roadway on solid earth. Lunar eclipses come to end the world, and I wanted the superstitions to be untrue.

The sun’s reflection slipped off the rim, and what was left, not deep black, but a red fish. The gray clouds slipped over the red, brooding. When the clouds lifted, the red came up brighter, thinner like the juice of wild plums mashed and strained, ready to boil into jam.

Earlier, I had sent a picture of the white moon getting eaten by the earth’s shadow to my wife and children, and she said I had woken her, that she couldn’t go back to sleep, those hundreds of miles away in Ohio. I couldn’t sleep either but sorry I had woken her, and I wondered if my father, only thirty miles north, was on his farm seeing the same thing I was seeing, taking a night walk into town, though it was late, even for him.

My son was back inside warm and asleep. I stared up until my neck grew tired, and the cold had worked through all my carefully planned layers, frozen me more. All the distance to there, and further to the scattered stars, all the distances between me and my son, my wife, my father, my daughters, filled up with sky and cold and turned through me. Nothing to be made tangible in that distance no matter how long I stayed, no matter the wishes, or when the earth passed far enough out of the sun’s path, the moon turning back into what it had been, a white pan fish sinking against the earth moving away, the sun still hours to rise, time creating, moving.

Remember the summer light, round as the earth, sitting on top of everywhere you looked, heavy and close, no way to turn from it.  In fall, the light began to lift its heat and turned away from the sky like the sun was really a comet and not a sun and slowly heading out of the universe.  No matter how high you raised your hands, you couldn’t get the sun to turn.  Now it’s December, and whatever you thought might last of summer is gone, the light so pale, holding the first atoms of pink clouds becoming snow, and you know for sure, it will be a long time before the sun comes back to soak into your skin.