Oak Hill

But here I’ve found myself, every day for a few weeks. Sweating under the sun and dripping from April storms in the DMV. I am not from here. Maybe if I were I could be buried in this spot, this large oak stump my gravestone; I could etch my name and let it fade with the tides of summer as they turn to autumn and fall into brisk winter. Not as brisk as Boston winter of course, nor the shivering cold of my own mind’s madness, but brisk nonetheless, cracking the skull of the large stump and filling its cavernous body with dried leaves, acorn caps and insect colonies.

And here I am, a girl among the violets and the marble slabs, among the whirring of the cars on the parkway down below and the leaf blower directed by the only other man on the property. I can’t say I’m not impressed by the upkeep, a home of the dead much more manicured than a home for the living. But the earth still breathes here, nonetheless. It is earth day and I’ve come to sit in the sun, so here I am sat. On the stump - oak I presume. I’ve realized that my green leggings and olive waxed jacket have outfitted me to fit in with the land here. Today I am beginning to feel more at home. I decided to come to Oak Hill every day until this has all passed, a promise I would like to keep to myself. But finders can’t be keepers, at least I believe that’s how it goes.

That sole brush with death was the passing of my dog, Jo. The vets found and invasive tumor in her side only when it had already begun to rupture her organs. I was visiting Boston for the week. My mother had called me the night before while I was at a bar, I told her to sleep next to Jo, leave the water bowl out and call me when they went to the vet in the morning. When she called the next morning we hurriedly spoke over each other in static until I asked how Jo was doing. The moment I heard silence I could feel her voice about to break. It was peaceful. We were with her. Daddy stayed in the surgery room while they gave her the injection. We’re getting her ashes in about a week. Of all things, I was only sorry. Sorry for my sweet mother and her empathic soul. My troubled father, antisocial in the world of humanoid interaction. I was so, so sorry. And I was in the car headed to a polo match with my best friend Becky and a 15-year-old whom I had never met before, sobbing, mumbling to myself, crying for my mother. Crying for my father and for Jo in her old age and her sweetness and unfathomable love. I wept in the car for an hour and trudged out into the Western Massachusetts mud to see the polo match. Becky’s parents greeted me with grief heavy on their faces, drooping down towards the puddles and the slop. They gave me a hug and before they could make an utterance, Becky interrupted— “They always manage to say the wrong thing. Stop, please, before you make her feel any worse.” We trudged in silence through the mud and shuffled across the concrete of the barn aisles towards the polo ring. I found a step ladder and made it my lonesome perch, trying to hold back the tears which my saline-coated cheeks could no longer bear. A reddish pit bull wandered over and sat by my side. As always, the dogs never failed to understand.

I’ve walked along the pathways and the grass— I tried not to walk on the grass, it felt heathenish to trample over graves, but I gave in eventually— and found myself a bench. Poking up from a drying bouquet of plum-colored tulips I spotted the ears of a sweetly fashioned canine, formed of wrought-iron. He stares head-on to a brass bench, the space between about ten or so feet of verdant earth. I have sat here to write, again. It is chilly in the shade and as I watch the clock I know I should meander to the gate. But here I am sat, letting myself breathe in the glimmer of death, the dog-eared pages of my mental notebook, remembering grief and imagining if I could ever feel it so strongly for the loss of a mere human.

As I leave Oak Hill I am smiling. The sun’s embrace is soft and I think of my mother and how she might love this place. I think of my father, he too will love it here. I re-enter the brutality of the city streets and wander the way home, cracking twigs and crisp leaves and dried bird poop on the brick-lain sidewalk. This was my today.