This Place Has Secrets

This place has secrets. I could feel it the moment I saw it.
“Attention: Chien Bizarre,” the sign warned, or bizarre only to those who don’t know deep, unyielding love when they see it. The new upholstery on the chair doesn’t hide the years of love stained into it, the chair hat Brandi is sitting in as she talks to Tim about belonging and the second chakra—energy.
That first night we stood on the dock, in the dark quiet of the New England night, staring at the ocean of starts expecting North, looking South. The house was lit up like a Jack-O-Lantern, each window glowed with an offering of warmth. Jenn and Brandi, mothers both, drew a bath, and put a sick Craig in it. We waved to him in the 2nd story window. “You’ve got to stick your foot out the window.” We turned off the flashlights and walked into the inviting darkness. Just then the coyotes began to wail and plead like lunatics locked up in the wide, dark asylum of night.
On the way back to the house, the one with one side yellow and three others cedar shake, our shoes crunched and rolled over fallen apples, sweetly fermenting under our feet.

I’d never been in a graveyard after dark. Wescott. Kate, a baby I think. Isaiah Wescott, Lost At Sea. October 1, 1867. 25 Years, five months old. Monty. Good Boy, Good Boy, 2008, buried close to the hallowed mausoleum which house those ancients that Alex loves the most: Lincoln 1956, and Dodge 1929.
In the brightness of the morning, I followed the sun outside. I moved and prayed as the sun hit me in the face. I wondered across fields, cleared centuries ago. Stones creep out of the ground, they can’t hold their secrets forever, another stone to place on the fence, probably for the third or fourth time, each 100 years or so it dissolves back into the ground only to crawl back out, be discovered by rough hands which place it upon yet another fence.

Alex and Jeryl live in the smaller house at the top of the drive, the once across from the pink house, and not the new big one with one side yellow and three others cedar shake, the one that looks over the landscape. Gratitude. No, they live in the small one because it has secrets, history and ghosts. Because it belongs. It is where Nancy used to live and some part of her still does. It’s the one across from the pink house, the pink house that is the same color of the underside-pink leaves of the crab-apple tree in the field, the leaves that lay on the October grass, bright and playful in their dying.

Bah’s for lunch. They don’t have to tell you that their main ingredient is love. You can practically smell it when you walk into the door. The Reverend with her holy jeans, her righteous ass, held me with those smoky-blue eyes and talked to me about work, spirit, embodiment and people. She’s someone who is so solidly herself that it gives me amazing confidence to be very real with her. I could tell her anything and not expect even a smile. It wouldn’t matter. She could hold anything.
We visited Craig in Bluebell where we checked up on him and watched some bad TV. It was bad, I guess, simply because it was TV. Bad because it’s canned and planned and boring but completely consuming, like a dungeon with moving pictures on the walls, furry hand-cuffs with fuzzy dice hanging from them.
Craig whose heart almost hurts worse than his inflamed scrotum because he doesn’t want to let us down for being sick. I can see amazing tenderness and understanding and kindness and other mysteries in his eyes. I can see some hurt too but there is also resolve.

This place has secrets. Who cleared these fields? Who erected these stone walls that have fallen and have grown over with thickets and lichen and moss? Wescotts? Names: Wescott. Pentagoët, Penobscot. Huppé. Necrotizing Fascia Cellulitus. Alex says that we’re living in Wescott houses. We are walking in their fields. We are looking at their ocean, the one that reclaimed Isaiah. Did I tell you that he was lost at sea, 141 years and 24 days ago?
Alders. Those damned alders who wrap their arms around the road and lovingly claim their own, just like Betsy’s ghost, Captain Guile, just like Alex’s family of ghosts, just like the embrace of this new family. The embrace of Brandi that lifts me off the ground with her laugh, a backward embrace for Tim, a backbend into the sun, and an embrace to and from Jenn, who shared Gratitude, chased away tears and when she realized she couldn’t, they chased her into the other room. Then she hugged me again but without the beads this time—just people.
Just people.