Kaylee bends over the giant green leaf and peels off an edge, then chews it like a brontosaurus—unashamed and flagrantly. Never have I ever seen such a thing, having grown up in the suburbs, where the color green represents a lawn so smothered in poison that each blade appears shellacked, therefore mirroring. If you eat that shit, you spasm.
“Delicious,” Kaylee says, grinning her grassy teeth.
She looks so damn beautiful right now—her freckled cheeks dusted by pigtails of pinecone hair, a smear of soil across her nose—that I find myself reckoning, however fleetingly, why a human being might choose to spend the rest of their evaporating life next to another warm mammal just to wait for these loamy moments, so eternal.
Here’s what happened…
Fresh off my year thrice touring psychiatric wards (I don’t recommend it: you can’t cancel and there are no refunds), I found myself in Vermont, but really, I had no idea where I was (still don’t), having haphazardly arranged a job in the green mountain state before even knowing where to locate it on a map.
I’d been working the evening cash register at a New Age bookstore in Sandy Springs, Georgia. There was no sand nor spring. But in between welcoming space cadets who shop for wax fairies and glitzy crystals and Nepalese loot and bright violet books all with “SHAMAN” squeezed somewhere into their titles; in between showing post-Jesus celestial light-surfing warriors the buy-one-get-one-free table of hazy quantum physics and astral projection DVDs; in between escorting droopy-eyed angels to the backroom $100-an-hour psychics who will tell them their sacred number and channel their run-over cat; in between all that, plus my casual meditations at the register that’d eventually get me fired (though, it must be argued, my dismissal may also have had something to do with the witchy employees’ assessment of my aura, which emanated from the only male body around), I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to rent that dilapidated trailer somewhere in the New Mexican desert and meditate for a year straight as my dreams had indicated. Not on eight bucks an hour, nor on the slightly better pay from my day job working mental health peer support at the city hospital.
If I really wanted to escape the vise of city life—a top priority now that I understood my madness as machine-made—I’d have to score a full-time job in the countryside. That’s how I ended up googling “mental health peer specialist” and returning three hits nationwide, one of which was for low-pay work at a county mental health agency in some place called Springfield, Vermont, population 9,373. “No one could possibly want this job,” I reasoned, then revved up my engine and drove twenty-two hours North for an interview.
Never knowing where I am, I picked the route up the Eastern coast, which, fuck me, meant city after city, punctuated by grey cement smogstacks and red rusty warehouses so repetitiously long they took five minutes to clear my rearview mirror. Though armored inside five brands of psychiatric drug, I could feel that ol’ vacuum reaching inside my guts once again, sucking out whatever little bits of meaning I’d stored since the suicide attempt.
…hollowing out fast, the city is inescapable, I belong in the ward, after all, where at least the hollows echo…
Then I crossed the border from Massachusetts into Vermont.
It was September, when the blue sky crisps away from its Summer haze, when the shadows slant a little longer to make the ground feel a little fuller. At the state line, the forest alongside the highway had been continuous, but something in the ether flipped. On the Vermont side, the trees looked, how do I say it…revealed…by the afternoon light, amber sprites brightening each vein on each leaf, until the whole splash of it became something viscous, a pregnant syrup I must waddle through and suckle from forever. I’d felt that connected before, long ago, but not since I’d learned not to. It wouldn’t matter a damn what the job was gonna be, I was packing my bags.
One year and one failed relationship later, I found myself living above a garage on an owl-hootin’ gravel road in a town (population 3,483) with exactly one restaurant, one church, and one other young person (yet to be discovered). I was by then sober, and my interest in social life had evaporated with the spirits, but still, the extent of my solitude at age twenty-six—when you ought to be incessantly chattering—was pretty extreme. Now I’ll be damned if I’d have gone all by myself to the one restaurant and sat there awkwardly sipping diet soda—I don’t give a shit what AA recommends—so I drove by the one church instead, even though I’d hoped to leave Jesus safely behind in his home terrain.
Churches down South all have these lawn bulletins that shame you into coming inside, like, “Entrance to Heaven ain’t free but Church is!” or “God don’t accept plea bargains so reppentt!” and they’re often misspelled, or one of the plastic letters is crooked because some crow got pissed and kicked it over. And usually a billboard across the road peers down at you with fireballs and something about abortion. You can guess what kind of straggler those fireballs take aim at, so just guess how stunned I was to discover in the (unmowed) lawn of my new church, a barebones sign asking in all caps: ARE YOU A TRANSCENDENTALIST?
Are you fucking serious…at Church? Like, the Henry David Thoreau TRANSCENDENTALIST, the Walden Pond windbag who I skimmed in high school but whose saying, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation” was my life’s haunt (also, the only valid explanation I’d ever found in my teens of adults)?
That Sunday, I was there, and I didn’t hear a word about Jesus. Instead, beneath a huge cotton banner reading “Our religion is LOVE,” regular folk talked breezy philosophy, and at the end, rather than a hot basket being passed around in which I’d have to kick twenty hard-earned bucks to the fireproofing Pope—God counts your every hair in the South—the pulpit was opened for anyone in the congregation to come on up and say a little something about what’s happening in their small town lives and what they’d like the rest of us good neighbors to be praying for. This was mind-blowing shit, but I never went back. All that language about love and community and family and potlucks…not there yet (still don’t know where I am).
I’d about given up on friendship, gotten used to hootin’ at owls by myself (they hoot back), until one late afternoon, driving home from work through the amber syrup, I spied another young person climbing my gravel road. I must’ve looked awfully creepy slowly rolling by with my head cocked sideways like a wide-eyed rooster, but then we exchanged the anonymous country wave and I swear a diamond refracted off the puddle in her blue riverine eyes.
Once parked, I had half a minute before her brisk feet would pass my garage, so I hustled down to the bottom of the driveway and stood in the mud smoking a cigarette…you know…just minding my own business here. We got to talking, as you must on gravel roads. Her name was Kaylee, and she said, “You should come hang out,” meaning at the one restaurant on the one musical night, and that’s what I did, and I hated every second of it, for this was before I’d given up on all attempts at social life, but a week later, at her suggestion, we took a walk together, just the two of us, and I loved every hour of it, though I assumed by “walk” she meant a casual stroll past our town’s rotting barns and artisanal farms, but Kaylee, having hiked the Appalachian Trail solo with her hard maple legs, led me on an eight mile tour de force, during which she lifted her skirt and peed on the side of the road like a wild hyena, and during which I tried every possible configuration of my face to hide the grimace at just how bad my damn city-boy calves stung.
A year later she’d invite me on my first overnight bike trip, which again I’d innocently accept at face value, until the day of departure, when, with fully-loaded mountain haulers, in the hilliest region of the nation, she made us peddle fifty-one miles straight. Finally, it sunk in just who I was dealing with.
I left Vermont shortly after our first encounter—couldn’t take the Winter—but couldn’t stay away from the smalls too long either, and on my return, Kaylee and I, just friends so far, rendezvoused again, this time with a little more headroom from our past relationships.
We took to walking up the gravel road regularly, always to the top, where a vast marsh with dottings of ponds disappeared into a horizon of successively fading hills. One evening, sitting at one of those ponds, the full moon rising, the full moon’s yellow whiskers swirling across the water’s scummy face, I clutched her thick sweaty hand inside my skinny palm, and we reclined onto our elbows to soak in the soaring rhetoric of the peepers and frogs, such a Spring treat, chirpers and gut-thrallers and hemmers and hawers, and I told her about the old man’s laugh, the one you hear inside the choir if you listen long and hard enough with the right dose of patience and attention, AHHH-HA-HA-HA-HA, AHHH-HA-HA-HA-HA, and as we waited for it, the big bellied been-there-done-that laugh, as we waited for the surface layer to peel back, I leaned over and whispered into her perking ear, for the first time, “I love you Kaylee.”
Soon I’ll discover: she keeps her calloused New England hands in the soil, starts a community garden from scratch, makes friends through plants, chairs the food co-op, edits books about green life, sleeps on her porch, bike-rides twenty miles to work each day, circles the lake by foot on every lunch break, recites Auden’s poems from memory, breaks into tears at itsy bitsy Spring plants breaking soil, breaks into tears at hardwood arms opening their vanilla May flowers, wears the same rags about every time I see her, laughs and laughs and sometimes cries, tries to do the right thing and teaches me what it means to live a life outdoors. Not that she ever lectures on the matter: she just retains a loamy wildness each moment, which I love, and I learn from what I love.
We visit my family in Georgia, and on the first night, once in bed, she gently guides my chin over to her face and looks deep into my scared eyes and tells me, “Now I understand.” We both cry hard at that, and I wonder whether my tours of psychiatric hospitals would’ve been necessary had I been understood like this, and she says this even before wino Aunt Sophie responds to our announcement that we are getting married with a disgusted, “Why?”
The next day we go to the baseball game, the Braves, and Kaylee bounces up and down grinning her teeth like a sugary child. We cruise several times around the stadium in the blazing hot sun looking for seats, finally choosing a pair based on their tanning potential rather than the ability to see what’s happening.
We were the kind of lovers who promised never to discuss serious relationship matters without our bodies being entwined and facing each other’s eyes. We fought exactly twice, once for each of us in that one church, one restaurant town.
(Americans live in a narrative that romantic relationships are hard work, and that to make them work long-term, you have to do your own work. Conflating work with love is market logic, not the logic of bodies.)
I fought hard for Kaylee and I in the beginning, two fire-born sun signs tending each other’s flames, but in the end I let us burn out without much consideration, for by that time I was exhausted with trying at all, exhausted at trying to enjoy community gardening and potlucks and town meetings and family time and good company when all I ever feel in company greater than two is zero, exhausted at hiding that, not knowing that I’m hiding that, still trying too hard to be what I’m not, not knowing what I’m not, therefore trying to be what I’d like to be which exhausted me, and moreso, I was exhausted by my unremitting daily fears, the pop-up torture chamber I have to endure following intimacy, every time, damn your medications and psychological interventions. I just wanted to sleep again.
Plus, Kaylee has an understanding family, and people from understanding families want to create more understanding for the next world. And so we broke off the engagement, and I headed for alone life and she’s raising a child, alone.
After the brontosaurus finishes chewing the giant green leaf long enough to pronounce words, I accept her invitation to eat from the wild plants myself, closeting my citified fear of microbes, and so it is at twenty-seven years old that I taste, for the first time, food unmediated by a grocery store. Friends, I eat a plant straight from the soil!
“Bitter,” I conclude.
Bitter as licked batteries. I guess I’m used to sweetness, which calls forth indulgence, but here is the flavor of mystery, something that must be patiently explored. So, despite noticing a little black bug climbing tryingly over the leaf’s hairs, I hastily throw back another round, and another, and another…
A year later I’ll eat, for the first time, an apple picked straight from the orchard behind the cabin I’ll rent, and I’ll let those thick saccharine juices drip from the sides of my lips down my chin through my bare toes back into the moist soil where Kaylee’s hands will be, as always, and as she looks up from her knees, asking “How you doing, baby?”—such a hard question to make sincere, but she does—I’ll find myself thinking about biblical Eve and her apple, about how despite knowing the consequences, she said fuck it.
Shortly after Kaylee and I broke up, I moved into a tent, renting a slice of grassy heaven on a homestead where other nomadic cats prowled. Kaylee’s confidence had unearthed—like that old man’s laugh rising from the choir—a dormant wild in me, a creature who wanted to wake up with as thin a veil between his skin and home as tenable.
Each evening I walked a makeshift path to the homestead’s pond, where in May the moon’s yellow whiskers cued the peepers and frogs to start singing over scum again, so reassuring, especially when alone. Though the fields of grasses grew as tall as the sun would lend, my frequent footsteps eventually carved an alleyway, and I grew worried that I’d hurt the land. But the next Summer when I came back to visit, I found fresh baby clovers reclaiming the cut, making anew what had become barren beneath my skittish, determined feet. There was a gal there too, Sierra from California, who was living exactly where I’d camped in exactly the same kind of tent, trying to figure out, I suppose, where the hell Vermont is, too. So you could say I’d started some kind of trend—because Kaylee had started some kind of trend—because if you dig your hands deep enough in, the soil will have her way with you.