Nearly Winter

She reads Homi Bhabha and Bayo Akomolafe. She reads Olivia Lang’s book about loneliness. She thinks about third spaces, and intersections that can't exist in loneliness. She turns to Pascal and Camus. She rereads A Zoo Story. She thinks about houses and home and belonging, about what objects need to be inside to make a home, what it feels like to be outside of houses looking in, searching for cracks in shut blinds as tiny invitations into anyone's life. She thinks about handling vases in the Goodwill store, - cracked crystal, simple glass, coloured and bejewelled, tubular, pear shaped, baubled. Inside the vases, she envisions bouquets of black flowers, flowers with stories of grief and loss, of migration and displacement. She seeks out Aristotle and finds no comfort, nor from the Bodhisattva.
 
She goes outside. It's late fall, trees nearly fully naked in preparation for their white winter coats. The sky is startling Robin breast blue. The river is still, also in anticipation of winter, resting before the freeze and winds. A shopping cart leans sideways near the riverbank, another is inside the river, water flowing through its cage-like structure They have been cast off by tired houseless people, too much of a burden to drag from one part of the forest to another. ‘Be damned,’ they say, plunging their homes down the riverbank.

‘Cops don't keep us safe’ is scrawled in black paint on the concrete wall under the overpass. On the other side of the tunnel, a field contains thousands of soldiers of dried grass. The small yellow flowers died weeks ago. She notices a pod, a brown shell with white poking through its cracked sides. Cotton, she wonders. Does cotton grow wild? Black and white images of plantation slaves, the detritus pricks of racism, flash across the scene.

She steps into the dried grass. Brittle leaves crunch beneath her sneakers. Strong sunlight makes her squint. The shell is tough, textured with fine hairs, a satisfying pure earth brown. She pushes her fingers into the crack. Strands of white silken covered seeds are stuffed inside, invisibly layered with such density that as she pulls them out, they slinky and fan, first to the ground and then into the air, covering the tops of grass, dancing in the sun, drifting lightly heavenward. White on blue like the colors of Greece, and she smiles and realizes, this is the best of her, the child who can still delight in simple and extraordinary things.