HOMECOMING
life death and the eclipse

The other morning at 2 AM my daughter came home carrying two of her brother’s old duffle bags, one in each hand, like the scales of justice with her backpack causing her to bend slightly under its weight. So more like a burdened scales of justice which feels appropriate in too many ways to bother to innumerate. She walked over the threshold both physically and metaphorically; 19, returning home full of life, flesh intact, lungs expanding and contracting, smiling and calling to the dogs, Matthew curling his lips into a grimace, his understanding of a smile, and his tail keeping rhythm with his happiness. My powerful girl went to Wyoming to follow her dreams, much like her brother, but she unlike him managed to actually inhabit the state and find her way home, without coroners and permits and a heaviness more dense than bones.
We lay together in her bed that morning with the confused bleary eyed dogs breathing between us, and I wondered how much longer I have of such sweetness. She was buzzing with hours of travel and the desire to tell us she was okay and to see that we were as well. Just 24 hours earlier she was standing in a canyon riverbed, a fly rod balanced across her broad shoulders, the waters of Wyoming rushing past her knees and taking with it a small essence of her and she stood smiling into the camera holding a glistening and surprised rainbow trout. Its lungs unfurling and contracting like an umbrella opening and closing against her palms, this was the image her boyfriend captured. The canyon surrounding them while the river rushed through with diamonds and rainbows and rocks and soil. I know that moments later she opened her hands and released the fish into the coursing waters and she likely wiped the shiny residue the fish left behind down the sides of her shirt. They hiked to the top of the canyon out to a precipice where the rocks dared moss to grow and stood in the path of totality alone, with each other and the birds and the fish and the rabbits, but alone with the sun and the moon. But as I lay beside her looking at her photos I thought of the fish and wondered if it believed life was over in the moment caught on film?
The day before the picture was taken of the fish and my daughter and the rocks and water, my husband and I were running purposefully toward the rocky shore of our own local river. Our eyes trying to focus on three flailing bodies, heads disappearing and resurfacing, each time a little less and for shorter and shorter moments. An entire family was drowning before our eyes and it was oddly quiet except for the frantic slapping of claw like hands trying to find solidity in a liquid landscape. When I swam close enough to try and grab ahold of someone I felt the panic and urgency of life trying to persist and was pulled under momentarily by what felt like an octopus of hands and desperation. We managed to get all three back to shore where panicked friends rushed around watching them heave up river water and blanch at the thought of how close they were to the end of their lives only moments earlier. I stood listening to their lungs with a stethoscope and marveled again at how quickly life becomes death.
I wonder if the fish pumped its muscles furtively after being released and pondered drowning out of water, and was there anyone there to rub its back and say, “take a deep breath now, you are going to be ok.”
And as I lay next to my girl I thought about her continued return to our home and that someday that will change and I am not sure how I will catch my breath when it happens.
