Go As A River by Shelley Read

Highlights from "Go as a River" by Shelley Read

But I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.

We actually were a riddle, this boy and I. The riddle went like this: What, once tied together, have bound destinies? The answer: Puppets on the same string.

mostly my abhorrence for Seth was raw and ragged as a thistle, having grown a little sharper each day of our lives

Suddenly the Magellan of my own interior, I knew not what I had discovered. I lay my head on Wil’s broad shoulder and wondered where and who he’d come from, and how long a drifter ever stayed in one place.

One rule my mother taught me by example was that a woman does herself a favor by saying very little. I often thought her aloof in conversation, especially with the workhands who ate at our table. But I came to understand that she, like I, like women throughout the ages, knew the value of employing silence as a guard dog to her truth. By showing on the surface only a small fraction of her interior, a woman gave men less to plunder

after a while, as my memories of Cal faded, I came to understand what it meant to be a girl in this world with no mother. Surrounded by males, I was patternless.

Seth was born with mischief as sure as bones and blood.

I ‘spect most folks aren’t ‘fraid of her so much as just naturally wary of peculiar. They’ve forgotten she wasn’t always such ‘n odd duck

Miracle peaches from the start,” he’d say reassuringly. Then he’d frown, like a scientist who didn’t actually believe in miracles at all

just for an instant, I was again the little girl who loved her brother and wanted to untangle that love from fear and confusion, wanted to save him from himself and balance out all the bad in him, all the bad in the whole world, by being good. I wanted to tell him there had been more inside me than I’d ever thought possible, and, maybe, there was more inside him too

in the known world, each step surely unfurls the next, and we must walk into that open space, mapless and without invitation

Then I returned to the truck and kept on driving. I would leave my past behind and try to build my life again, hoping not for miracles but simply for strength in new soil. I figured that if my trees could survive, uprooted and against the odds, then, damn all bad fortune, so too could I.

But carrying your sorrows all alone isn’t strength, V. It’s punishment, plain and simple. Whatever happened to you, you’ve got to stop blaming yourself

Eventually, I gave up the notebooks and novels I pointlessly carried in the diaper bag and stopped longing for the life I might have had. Instead, I surrendered to motherhood. The choice was motherhood or madness

It was not my imagination that Lukas had a charmed touch, an electricity or a heat or just a tenderness of heart. He rescued spiders from sink drains and freed bees from window screens, and if an animal or plant was ill, a caress from Lukas seemed to set it right. Most importantly, he could calm Maxwell when nothing else came close. Even in mid-tirade, Lukas’s hands upon his brother could wind Max down to limpness or tears. Then Lukas would return to his play as if it hadn’t been interrupted at all.

Late that night, I sat alone on the sofa, drinking red wine and already mourning my sons. Vietnam was a death sentence, if not to their lives at least to their innocence

Have a good time,” I said into his shoulder. I wanted to tell him he was a small-town Colorado boy who could easily be eaten alive by New York City. Instead, I said, “I love you.”

Sometimes a woman splits in two. Sometimes a woman is a public self who sits rigid on a bench with proper dignity and acceptance as someone she deeply loves walks away, while simultaneously her private self is shrieking and chasing and grasping and tackling and begging that love to stay

And what about what you need, V? This is about you just as much as him.” I shook my head. “It’s not. Women endure. That’s what we do.” “That’s nonsense,” she replied more harshly than I expected. “A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”

I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil in my palms and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself.

So much had changed, but history still clung to me like stabbing, stubborn burs.

had chosen to meet on these shores because my rising wisdom understood that I must carry my whole past alongside the new space I had created in myself for hope.