We Did Not See A Fox
On the allure of absence & how we enliven and give it shape with our imaginings + bikes & dogs & obstacles + an unexpected mystery involving Mary Shelley & her mother and a 649 page book
Our writing prompt this week will be a rich one. I promise. It’s going to take us deep into the intersection of place and story. If you want to get right to it, scroll down to the bolded subhead that says Writing Prompt: We Did Not See A Fox.
And by the way, the flash sale on annual subscriptions, in celebration of my new essay “The Cost” in the Ilanot Review, ends this Friday, after which the special link will expire, so if you wanted to take advantage of that, you still can for the next few days. Just click here for the discount.
Otherwise, before the writing prompt, I have a few thoughts (which add up to something related to the prompt, in the end, I promise) on the whole Mother’s Day thing. Yes, Mother’s Day. You might have noticed my silence on it over the weekend. That’s not because I wasn’t thinking about it, or, for that matter, celebrating in my own weird way. In truth, I thought about it an awful lot, because, well, my mother does not speak to me. So, it’s complicated. As it is for so many others. But my mom isn’t the only reason I have lots of feelings about the whole Mother’s Day thing. It’s also because of the many people whom I’ve mothered (and loved dearly) over the years, people who come in and out of my adult children’s lives in intense ways, people who become woven tightly into the fabric of our family, people who then sometimes, when circumstances change (breakups, mainly), pull their threads back out, leaving open seams and unraveled bits around our edges. Around my edges.
So imagine my surprise this year when I got the most beautiful flowers from one such cherished person who, at the very least, has assured me that although the future may be different than we expected a year or two ago, he will always be part of our family. I cried when these flowers arrived. These flowers say: people can change and relationships can change and, yes, people’s hearts can break, but we can still find ways to keep on loving each other anyway.
I also got a text from another similarly cherished young person no longer in my daily life who said, “Happy Mother’s Day. I love you and will always love you.”
And I spent the entire day with my kids and also with my foster grandson so it was both sweet and wholly exhausting, which feels about right when speaking of mothering. We took a long bike ride to the waterfall at Minnehaha Falls, and Z did great in the bike trailer but had a harder time at the park, which was very busy and likely a bit overstimulating. He started running as fast as he could at every opportunity, which is dangerous when there are bikes and dogs and other obstacles around.
After all that, we came back to our house and hung out in our backyard as Jon dug a giant hole to plant a maple tree. Z “helped.” And by the time that was over, he had accumulated enough mud on his body to need two or three baths rather than the usual one. But the mess was worth it because watching him with that shovel, mimicking Jon’s every move, nearly did us in with cuteness. As we watched, Z’s foster mom, also my youngest, Billie Oh—who some of you know from Dumpster Yoga—confided in me that this, their first so-called Mother’s Day, was pretty confusing and a bit of a letdown, given that fostering is so invisible in so many ways, and so sadly controversial in so many other ways. Also because they are single, so there’s no partner in the wings to make the “grand Insta-worthy gestures” that these commercial holidays seem to now require. Billie and I leaned into each other on the back railing then, watching the deep hole grow deeper, watching the large mud pile grow larger, watching the thin evening light grow thinner.
What I felt? Profound love.
So, as I nodded off Sunday night, I told myself that it was a perfect day. A beautiful, ridiculously tiring, unusually grubby day, punctuated by worries and regrets, sadnesses and intractable conflicts, but perfect nonetheless. Because I felt at peace, despite that there was a mother-sized hole in my day, along with several other holes of various well memorized sizes.
Then, today, I opened the mail and in it was a thick envelope addressed to me in my mother’s handwriting. Yes, there was her return address. And inside the envelope I found a book. Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley.
No note, no explanation. Just this book. So, you could say it is a mystery. One I can solve only by reading the book. Which is 649 pages long. But I do love solving mysteries.
Maybe that’s why I love to engage with writing as a sort of mystery, too—as a process of continual discovery and unending surprise. I love that about Brian Doyle’s work. Have you read his essay “Imagining Foxes” yet?
It begins with a childhood memory of place and experience:
One time, many years ago, when the world and I were young, I spent a day in a tiny cedar forest with my sister and brother. This was in the marshlands of an island the first people there called Paumanok. This little cedar forest was twelve city blocks long by two blocks wide, for a total of eighty-four acres, and there was a roaring highway at the northern end, and a seriously busy artery road at the southern end, but when you were in Tackapausha Preserve you were, no kidding, deep in the woods, and you couldn’t hear cars and sirens and radios no matter how hard you tried. We tried hard, my kid brother and I; we sat silently for probably the longest time we ever had, up to that point, but our sister was right, and we were deep in the wild.
Doyle goes on to detail the many things he and his siblings saw that day in the “tiny cedar forest,” describing with equal parts precision and imagination. Suddenly, though, he pivots, saying to the reader: “ … but my point here is not what we saw… it’s about what we did not see.”
Consider the full passage:
We saw many other amazing small things that are not small, and we wandered so thoroughly and so energetically all afternoon, that my kid brother and I slept all the way home in the back seat of the car with our mouths hanging open like trout or puppies, sleeping so soundly that we both drooled on the Naugahyde seat, and our sister had to mop up after us with the beach towel she always carried in the trunk for just such droolery, but my point here is not what we saw, or even the excellence of gentle patient generous older sisters; it’s about what we did not see. We did not see a fox.
See what Doyle does there? How he gets our attention with the emphasis on what they did not see? How it becomes important? When you read the whole essay (which is short, it’s flash!), you’ll feel this even more profoundly.
What is it about the allure of negative space, the intrigue of what is not, or what once was but is no longer, that draws us?
We’ll do our best to tap into this allure in this week’s structured writing prompt. Please let me know if you give it a try!
Writing Prompt: We Did Not See A Fox
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