The Ephemerals

Plants known as ephemerals respond readily to spring's early warmth and fade back into the earth during the heat of summer. So I've read anyway. I bought my house in December. The yard, as far as I could tell, was grass bordered by curving beds of gravel. How Zen, I thought. Maybe I'll make hypertufa garden orbs, grow some herbs and vegetables in some big pots and call it a day. It's been a cold spring in here Minnesota, but in the last couple of weeks green things are rocketing out of the ground. There will be no room for garden orbs. I'm trying to make sense of it all, using an app on my phone to ID things and marveling at the fortitude of the plants pushing their way through a thick layer of black garden cloth and gravel. I'm also trying to make sense of the death of my friend Shanna, who left this Earth by her own hand not quite two weeks ago. As another friend put it, depression is a murderer and a liar. Shanna pushed her way through a layer of darkness, and I was in a writing group with her as she blossomed. I never shared a meal with her--or even a drink or a cup of coffee--our common ground was writing and struggle. Her own rough life gave her a nose for the sadness and pain of others.Shanna emailed me more than once when I was at the bottom to tell me to see her therapist. As I remember it she followed up with a phonecall. I went to the therapist. I made it out of the bottomless hole I was in. Shanna made it out too. She wrote a novel,Oh!You Pretty Things a few years ago that got all around fine reviews. She moved. I moved. We weren't ever see each other/talk regularly friends--and time and distance, well,you know how that goes. Things happened that I don't know about. Then Shanna got Covid in November and shared her struggle on Facebook. She was super sick. I posted on her wall like a zillion other friends. I PM-ed her now and then to not clutter up her wall of well-wishes, so numererous were the messages from friends and fellow writers. But she didn't get well and became a long-hauler. And overwhelmed by Covid and god knows what all, she took her life. Muffin and cupcake, she'd call me and the other writers in our group. Sweet cakes and sparkle pie. Shanna was a secret sauce of heart-aching empathy cut with wicked wit and profanity. Honestly, there was no one fucking like her. Not even close. I haven't felt like doing much this past ten days. I pull weeds and put comments from my fellow writers into the appropriate folders for the essays I'm trying to finish. I cut out images for collages, but don't make anything. I look at the Virgina bluebells in my gardern and think the word ephemeral. They'll be gone soon, I guess. But you wouldn't know it to look at them right now. Ephemeral.

Derailed.Figuratively speaking, thank god.

Yesterday the train I was on hit a car.

Or the car t-boned the train. This was how the incident was described by Amtrak.

I am a fearful flyer. I'm often anxious while riding in/driving a car. I like trains. They don't worry me. Even so, I always choose the middle car. Yesterday I was riding in the snack bar car in the dead middle of the train. The car struck just a few feet from where I was sitting. The train lurched and wobbled, the sound of something not meant to be there grinding beneath its wheels. I yelled. The guy standing near the door, waiting to get off yelled even louder. "I think we just hit a car," he said. The snack bar attendant opined that it was something smaller. He was wrong.

The sirens were screaming when we stopped. Just outside the door to the train car a piece of smashed metal sprouted from the train like a deformed wing.

No one on the train was hurt. No one informed us about the person or persons in the car. The sheriff came to investigate. Amtrak employees in the blue trousers and white shirts sledgehammered and crowbarred, trying to remove the piece of car that had welded itself to the train. As time passed it became obvious that I'd miss the event at the bookstore where I was supposed to read my piece recently published in a special post-election anthology put out by the Rattling Wall and Pen Center USA. I considered showing up an hour late and maybe catching a few of the fabulous readers, but the whacking of the undercarriage of the train by the determined man with the sledgehammer was not exactly a confidence builder, so I caught the train back home.

I searched the news all day, wondering about the car. There was nothing but this tweet from Amtrak:

Pacific Surfliner ‏16 hours ago

ALERT: Train 784 now released by police following investigation of vehicle incident. Now 1hr 43 mins late.

That seems like good news. No one died.

Here's the link if you'd like buy the anthology. It looks pretty fabulous.

Only Light Can Do That