Flying Island

Apprenticeship for the Walking Life For Kristen Did you learn to love to hike on those long tundra walks when I carried  you cocooned inside my parka, the one  you wear now on polar vortex nights?  We rambled over the frozen lagoon, and then past the singing Wulik.  Together, we traversed the hummocky  waves of Alaska’s permafrosted tundra.  Sometimes, I sang but mostly my Sorels  sawed through the snow, a sound similar  to tuning an old tuba. Nights came early,   at two in the afternoon, a pale, ulu-shaped  moon rose.  Riding abu, your world  was primarily sound then: ptarmigans hurdled into flight, a snowy owl mewed being chained  to an old log, one that had ridden  the sea currents all the way from Siberia.  Now I walk the Griffy Lake trails,  cross fallow fields, pace beside the endless  railroad tracks. Car lights point and shoot,  and once or twice a year, a pale aurora  hangs over our subdivision. Sometimes snow  floats down, sometimes moths bat against the light,  and in spring

I want to visit my grandparents’ house one last time, a final few hours before young new owners move in with their own styles, smells, and belongings. I’ve always thought of it as a simple house with a quiet elegance. My grandpa expanded the place over the years with the precise carpentry he used with any project. His work is seamless and solid: a comfortable family room, a single-bay garage for a car, and a solid workbench for all his tools. He is gone but lives in the beams and cabinets and brickwork. My grandmother is still with us, warm and alert at 98 but living in a nearby nursing home. She can no longer navigate steps and carpet and the demands of a family home. The house is empty, ready for its next occupants, devoid of my grandparents and their 65 years together under this roof. The vacant rooms echo. But I see the dining room table where we always gathered for Thanksgiving dinner; the special kitchen drawer that held “Grandpa’s bread,” dense brown slices that made me and my y

Walking the West Side  Bloomington, Indiana Having confirmed with each other over breakfast  what day it is, we are walking a slow mile     on the west side—the winsome mix of local artists,     their front-yard galleries. My mask dangles from one ear, my wife’s pulled down  below her chin, at the ready should someone  appear up ahead or from behind,  or suddenly step out the door full-featured. Grateful for a day’s reprieve from the hurricane’s spinoff storms, we walk  the four points of the compass, taking in  the yard signs— No Hate , Buy Local , th e amusing Helicopter Rides $20.00 — as well as the Little Free Libraries, some  achieving objets d’art . We stop to read the spines— pristine, tattered—of each librarian’s modest offering, New Age Baby Names missing its cover. Our final block, the brightly worked gardens of longtime dwellers…hostas and grasses, zinnias, phlox, purple asters…but the morning stopper is the perennial troupe of tall naked ladies  standing just below a fenc

Ellos realizarán mis sueños. ¿En cuál de los tres se verterá el caudal que les dejo flotando en el aire? Eso lo verá el mundo, y yo, yo habré sido su madre. My sons will realize my dreams. From which of the three will pour forth the stream I leave floating in the air for them? He will see the world and I; I will have been his mother.    (Amanda Junquera Un hueco en la luz )      I will never forget the first time I stared up at the names on the vaulted ceiling of the reading room of the National Spanish Library in the capital city of Madrid. Cervantes. Calderón. Quevedo. The names of dozens of illustrious Spanish writers that any knowledgeable student of Spanish literature would immediately recognize lined the high ceilings. Unsurprisingly, all of the great canonical writers whose names I could see from my vantage point were men. The legacies of these male writers, playwrights, and poets exude literary tradition and consecrate the large room of numbered desks, known as pupitres , wher