water through my fingers
When my grandfather told me, I was sitting on the couch in his living room, watching the February sunshine spill through the windows on the hardwood floor during one of our almost-feels-like-spring Sunday afternoons when I stopped by for a visit.
“The cement walls are just crumblin,” he told me with a shrug of acceptance and his usual drawl. “It’s just one of them things. Just happens over time.”
The well has been on my grandparents’ property for over 55 years, but lately it produces muddy water when we’ve had a rain storm, and the pump doesn’t seem to be working right. This isn’t an urgent problem because his house is on the county water system, but he uses well water to nourish the plants in his gardens and greenhouses. He called a few different water pump repair services to come take a look at it before he finally found someone who would do it. But when the repairman arrived, he explained the cement walls that line the well underground are crumbling, so repair isn’t possible. Trying to stabilize the well would only worsen the problem and make it fall in all together.
My grandfather is nearing 90 years old. Healthier than many people twenty years younger and still gardening, still selling plants to other farmers every spring, still living alone without a need for help. Still the same quiet, honest, solid presence he has been in my life since the very beginning. But his legs ache now after long days in the greenhouses, he has arthritis in his hands, and his shoulders are more stooped than they used to be. He is my taproot. I don’t even like to think about what the world will feel like without him in it.
I try to get my writer brain to stop thinking in metaphor when he tells me about the crumbling well.
Instead I think about when I’d play in the woods with my cousins when we were young. We’d find forked sticks to hold and walk carefully, feeling for water beneath the surface of the soil. We’d concentrate, heighten our senses, walk slowly and deliberately, silent except the twigs snapping under our feet. Then one of us would claim we felt something and everyone else would gather and whisper and try to feel it too. I’m sure we looked ridiculous. A circle of little water witches with sun-pink shoulders and tangled summer hair, feeling the earth’s surface like a ouija board. I don’t ever remember being explicitly told about water dowsing, but I grew up knowing what it was, so it must have been explained to me at one time or another. We’d like to imagine we could do it.
When I try to write about childhood, I always end up back in the woods like this. My grandparents sectioned off the family property to make room for my mom and her brother and the five kids who came from the two of them. The sloping acres between my mom’s house and my grandparents’ place felt like a kingdom that belonged to only us, endless opportunities for play and escape, canopies of trees above us like a dome, a shallow creek bed where we’d rest our feet on slick rocks. No map and no rules, except to find our way home by the end of the day. My grandfather was the one to teach me to carefully pinch the blooms from honeysuckle vines that grew there, how to use my fingernail to slice the bottom of the bloom and pull out the string like a thread to find the one little drop of nectar you can swallow. His shoulders stood tall then. His back was straight. I thought he could do anything. He knew how everything worked, how to fix what was broken. I felt the same way about my grandmother’s hands and would watch them work and marvel at what they could do. Making biscuit dough without a recipe, leaving a little well in the center of the bowl of flour, and then adding the other ingredients and mixing by hand until they became perfect little spheres. Washing homegrown greens in a deep kitchen sink. Peeling the skin off potatoes with a paring knife in one swift motion.
The well wasn’t muddy then. Its walls were strong and solid. I didn’t even think about the well then or about his aging body or hers. Is this the reason childhood feels so magical? Because you don’t know it’s going to end?
I keep thinking about these things since he told me about the well. Muddy waters and crumbling walls. Feeling beneath the earth’s surface with my cousins, or pretending to. Water, where it comes from and how many times a day I touch it or drink it or bathe in it or watch it dripping on the window in a rainstorm.
Some people think that in dreams, water represents our emotions. Jung believed it was the archetypal metaphor for our subconscious. The church kid in me thinks about baptism, the notion that water washes us clean of something, that we come up from its surface a new person. Different somehow than we were before.
There was a house I lived in for six years, the first house my ex-husband and I chose together as a married couple. The house I brought two babies home to. It was older with dark wood trim inside and peeling wallpaper and squeaky hinges and an enormous shaded porch that wrapped all the way around it. It was a five minute drive from my family’s property, and I’d spend lazy afternoons holding the kids on the porch swing and looking at their tiny dimpled hands and feet.
That house is the one house I have lived in that still shows up in my dreams, only it's never the way it really was. It’s almost always surrounded by water instead. Sometimes I have to step across rickety bridges to reach the front door because the whole front yard is flooded. Sometimes I dream that I am in the kitchen looking out the window above the sink and instead of a backyard, I see a glistening swimming pool with multiple tiers and landscaped waterfalls. Sometimes I’m inside the house doing something mundane like making dinner or folding laundry, and the walls start seeping water from them, first in droplets, then in flowing streams, until there is water everywhere and we have to leave.
I think that house was the last time in my life when I didn’t think about the ending of the moment I was in. I forgot that it wouldn’t last forever, or I thought somehow it would.
Now I know things end. And I don’t know if that’s because everyone discovers this when you reach a certain age, or if that is because I saw so many things end in the last decade of my life. But as it always goes, once you know it, you can’t unknow it, and now I see impermanence everywhere.
How many of my core memories relate somehow to water? Eighteen years old and running up the hill in the dark to my uncle’s house with my sister and our childhood friend who had come to visit after her move to Texas, towels flung over our shoulders and laughing all the way there. My uncle’s family was out of town and we were collecting his mail and using his pool. The gate latch locked behind us, and we took off our clothes and jumped in. We’d never skinny dipped before and felt wild and rebellious. Somehow in the dark, secrets started spilling out of our mouths and into the water, and we’d never mention them again. Two years after that, I was in an English pub on the banks of the River Cam drinking pints of cider with classmates, watching handsome British boys rowing wooden rafts down the river, an ocean away from home and realizing for the first time how big the world was and how much I wanted to swallow it whole. Three years after that, I was at an outdoor concert in Atlanta on a warm June night, and it started raining so hard that we just surrendered to it and let it bathe us and sang and danced anyway. My legs stuck to the car seat on the short drive home, and I remember struggling to peel off the wet clothes in my tiny bathroom in that little threadbare apartment I loved so much. Seven years after that, I sat on a little boat floating down the Tempisque River in Costa Rica with my toddler son in my lap, and we looked to the trees beside the river bank and saw a monkey swinging by one arm from limb to limb. A year after that, my daughter was born in a bathtub, and I pulled her to my chest like a slippery little fish, and she opened her eyes for the first time to look at me as I smoothed the hair on her head with my wet fingers. And then four years after that, my grandmother was dying, and as she laid in the bed unable to swallow, I placed a sponge of water on her lips the way the hospice nurse showed me how to do it, and though she couldn’t speak clearly, her eyes met mine and we were saying something to each other that you don’t need words for, something that reached a deeper well.
All of these memories feel so far away that they hardly seem real anymore. It astonishes me when I remember something so distant and realize it was once real enough that I touched it. Moments gone like water through my fingers.
Another core memory must live somewhere deeper than the rest because I actually don’t remember it at all, but instead I know it and hold it close like a mythic tale. It’s a story my mom tells me. My father grew up on the gulf near Pensacola where his family sometimes kept a basket of fresh oysters on the porch and would eat them like peanuts. My mom tells me that he’d swim out in the emerald waters as she stayed on the shore. He’d swim farther and farther, out beyond the waves, and she’d get nervous he was caught in a riptide and gone forever. Then he’d come up from the surface of the water with a wide smile and throw his hand up to her, waving to let her know where he was. I wasn’t even there for that moment, but I still think about it sometimes. Maybe that’s where he still is for her. And for me, too. Out beyond the shore I stand on, waving to me from the deep waters. Maybe my grandmother is there, too. And everyone else I have ever lost and every moment that is long behind me that I cannot recapture. All of my old selves live in those unreachable waters, especially the one who didn’t know things would end. Who didn’t look around herself everyday all the time seeing impermanence.
An old boyfriend taught me how to paddleboard. When my kids were away for the weekend, we’d spend sunny afternoons at the lake tying a hammock to a tree and taking turns paddling around the cove. I was surprisingly good at it. I learned that you have to find your balance on the board, and then you have to hold your core completely solid and straight as you move the paddle from side to side. Holding yourself tight and stiff in the center is the only way you don’t fall in. I loved gliding on the surface of the water like that, feeling weightless and watching the clouds change shape overhead while he napped in the hammock beside the water. The next day, I’d always be a little sore from clenching my abdominal muscles while paddling. Writing is the opposite of that. I cannot clench anything tight when I’m writing. Instead, it is a letting go, a willingness to lose my balance and fall in. It is my dowsing rod. I hold it in my hands feeling for something, some vibration, some rumbling, some spot that still aches, and then I drill down and jump in, and soon enough, I’m submerged in images and memories and feelings, all of them pouring over me like water.
I googled water dowsing last week when I couldn’t stop thinking about crumbling wells and underground currents. And I found that though communities believed in it and relied on it for generations, it’s been disproven repeatedly by modern science, and actually water is everywhere beneath the earth’s surface, not only in certain special places. If you drill deep enough, you will find water anywhere. It makes me think about all of these memories living beneath the surface of my skin and that Warsan Shire poem about running your fingers across an atlas of the world asking where it hurts and hearing it answer everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
Every experience I have touched has evaporated to nothing except what I hold right now, and one day that will be gone, too. More than half of the human body is said to be made of water, but it feels like my body is made of these memories that float to the surface sometimes then sink to some place where I cannot get to them. The first few decades of my life were spent charting my map out of those childhood woods, crossing oceans and rivers, determined to build a life of worth. And now I’m just trying to find my way back to them. Back to that wildness and what it felt like to hold a forked stick in my hands and imagine I could feel something.
I want to keep feeling, keep searching for the hum beneath the surface. I want a taproot strong enough that these memories survive when the well crumbles. I want to find myself in waters wide and deep. I want to stand so firmly where I am and sink so deeply here that, just for a minute, I can forget how one day it all ends.