What We Bury

I buried my heart in Macon, behind a tiny brick ranch on an oxbow of the Ocmulgee. I was young and single, and I wanted a place. I wanted my place in the world. Not my parents’, not a boyfriend’s, not a rental, but mine. I loved that little red house, with her yellow pine floors and her big kitchen, with the large backyard and the chain link fence. I did the only thing I knew how to do. I carved my heart out of clay, cut grooves and patterns in it like it was some tiny, ornate seed. I fired it in a kiln, and I painted it. Waiting on the seller to take my offer, I snuck into the backyard. It was late at night. I buried my heart under an oak tree. I dug under the moonlight with a spade in the soil. I might have said a prayer. This was my first place. I marked it. It was mine.

Ten years later, I buried my embryo 70 miles south, where the beaverdam swamp met a cattle farm, not a mile from the Oconee River. It was dry land, and I was soaked in tears. The only thing I loved more than those 80 acres of hardwoods and clear spring water were my two blonde boys. They played outside by the pond while I passed the pregnancy in the bathroom. I was shocked at the labor of it, shocked by the pain. I did the only thing I knew how to do. I buried the fetus in the yard, near a Catulpa tree. The skinny limbs looked like bare bones in the winter. I laid beneath it and cried. I know I said a prayer as I patted down the dark dirt. I buried it as a way of remembering, as a way of saying this too had been mine.

I moved again and again. My womb healed, and my heart grew back. Another blonde boy came. But no place that I loved. Living in an old Victorian in the center of town, I longed for the litany of seasons once more. For the way, each year, nature announces the next season’s arrival, how one by one the birds leave and then return, the flowers fall, then bud and open again. 

This is where I was, full of longing and ache, when she found me. A large stretch of unspoiled acres another hundred miles toward the coast, right on the edge of the sea islands. The land is bordered by the rolling bends of the Ogeechee to the north and golden marsh grass to the east and west. It's cut in half by two straight rows of 300 year old oaks, old enough to have watched the world change under their limbs. 

Just this month two eagles mated mid air over the marsh.  The green heron has returned to the pond. The Forester terns have doubled, and soon, I think, the red maples will bud. I will be here, with a pen in my hand and a new prayer on my lips. 

This year, in this place, I plan to plant and not bury, to witness and not lay claim.