“The November Essay”
Eight days a week is not enough to show I care! I love you every day, girl, always on my mind. One thing I can say —
It is 6:00 in the morning, on the sixth of November.
Spread in front of the fireplace is my great-great-grandmother’s spring yarn. My mother comes out quietly to the room and kneels down on the blanket beside me. She holds my face close to her. My father, who will do the same when he’s awake, is still asleep in their bedroom. She sweeps my hair away from my neck, and presses her mouth to the top of my head. I feel the cool medals, Catholic jewelry, of the holy ones rest against her chest. A tiny Mother Mary against my brow. In a soft voice she says the blow: “Oh, my sweet girl. What a mess.”
I listen to the sounds of the neighborhood dogs echo down the chimney, into the fire in front of us. Mom has me in her arms for a long time, and it is wordless. I hold her waist, I watch the heat, I hear the barks. When a different light slowly begins to fill the house, we walk to the screened-in back porch to see the morning. The sun turns the wood around us gold; the desert chirps and stirs in the cold, suspicious wind. Later that morning I get dressed and rest my phone on a desk, and I go for a walk around my parents’ neighborhood. The mule deer have come down from the mountains, as they always do when the weather drops, and study me as I pass by. A…
