We wear the chains we forge in life

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An earth tone drive through Ohio rain. Direction: southeast, into old hills. I thought about the Native Plant Rescue as we sped through the Nelsonville bypass. I peered into high oak hollows. In each or some of those crinkles of earth is maidenhair fern and other plant treasures, things that evoke mystery and speak of age. The maidenhair. It evokes another memory. I remember an old visit to Cantwell Cliffs: the maidenhair in the valley, scrambling over timber and ferns, revelations of a lost sister, really getting to know someone, barbecue for dinner. 

We were bound for - I think I am bound to - Athens, sleeping in the wide, alluvial plain of the Hocking, and bustling up above that fertile ground on brick paved, pock marked streets. Up the hills it creeps. Children in rotting houses slummed out over the hills that are close enough to the past that they still remember woods. I am one of those children. This time, I come with my own child.

Earlier in the trip, safe and comfortable in the flat, diminished grey forest, which I grew up watching fly by from the passenger seat of a rusted out Pinto, my daughter and I walked among cottonwood giants and picked up shale in the Rocky River. We had impromptu lunch in Lakewood (Root Cellar) with Jessica, traveling between hospitals. It was a hectic and wonderful lunch, which is like all of parenthood. Prickly joy, coldness becoming ecstasy. And, then I was melting under cliffs and cottonwoods (Rock Cliff Springs Preserve) into the Rocky River - fly fishers wading in the background - and crooning about dried out flowers and Solidago leaves to my wife-eyes infant, bright eyed, curious that Dad was getting so excited over trees, albeit a real giants of a cottonwood.


The next day, we felt the bite of Lake Erie’s cold breath when we met my family at a restaurant on Broadway, downtown Lorain. Union Town Provisions. Grandpa came by and cradled the babe and she looked happy. 

The open calendar expanse was blissful, except for a midnight run to emergency room for intense stomach pain (which turned out to be just "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato," or the like). And, when we returned, after a Happy New Year, we found water and water and sopping insulation. I've seen more of the crawlspace than I care to remember.

The chains we forge are with us, maybe, not to drown, but to pull us back to dry land when we are overcome by rising tides. 

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