“Are you okay?”
I was not, as it turns out, attacked by a bear. And neither was Bob, my husband. We were not kidnapped from our camper. We were happily off the grid in Chaco Culture National Park in New Mexico for three days, part of a month-long camper trip we took in May 2022.
The first day, we took a hot hike on top of the mesa, then spent the afternoon enjoying naps and hours of reading. My mind and body settled, adjusting to the heat, to moving more slowly, to drinking water in the shade, reading, but mostly doing nothing. Worry slid off of me like sweat, like the fine red dust. Deadlines faded. I lay back against the webbing of our yard sale recliners and stared at the blue sky, so much bluer it seems to me than back East, a blue to get lost in.
Before heading out the next morning, we wandered among the immense ruins of the great houses and kivas that sprawl across the canyon and on top of the mesa behind it, what is left of the people who once gathered here. I took photo after photo of the sky through the stone-framed windows, some with spider webs looping across corners.
As we passed the dark brown wooden sign for Chaco Culture National Park when we were leaving, I turned to look at it growing smaller as the truck picked up speed. I wondered if we would be back. The pandemic was a thief, stealing not only lives but that blithe assurance that more life, more travel, more time was around every curve on every road, promised by the white contrails that crisscrossed the blue above us.
Twenty miles and an hour and a half later, we left behind the jouncing of the washboard dirt road for a paved highway. A cell tower found our phones. Mine came alive, pinging and vibrating frantically with texts from my two sisters.
Where are you?
Please get in touch right now!
We don’t know where you are. Are you okay?
My sisters and I have an every morning Wordle habit, like thousands of others. First one to get it or lose shares by text, followed by the other two. I had forgotten to tell them I would be off the grid and the only person who had our itinerary was my mother. They would not have wanted to worry her by telling her Bob and I were missing.
Sorry! We were out of range. We’re fine, I texted back.
I was looking up park police stations in New Mexico, texted Julie.
Send your itinerary now, immediately after from Stephanie.
Getting their texts makes me laugh and comforts me at the same time. Emotion is a power line buried deep in our family. One of its outlets is worry. We are worrywarts, every one of us. This is my memory of the first time I saw the Grand Canyon at age eight: “Get back. Right now,” says my dad many feet back from the edge my brother and I had run toward. This is my mom before every trip I take by car or plane: “Call when you are on the road/at the airport, and let me know when you touch down/get close.” We all do it. We check in, obsessively, probably, but it has become shorthand for “I love you.”
For the next couple of days, I send Jule and Stephanie photos captioned by “Still not eaten by a bear.” And “Nope, not kidnapped. Yet.”
YEARN
It’s a daily habit I have come to count on, Wordle with my sisters. During the worst of COVID, I kept hearing Elizabeth Bishop’s poem in my head, “…It’s evident/the art of losing’s not too hard to master/though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” One by one our connections severed, long weeks then months at home. Like so many others and the far too many who lost forever someone they loved.
Our mom was isolated in her house, my sisters who live nearby and their families coming by to wave. We tried to Zoom—all of us, mom, sisters, brother, spouses, nieces—and it was stiff and awkward. We are a family who likes the hubbub of talking all at once, interrupting each other, laughing. I’m always having to help my quiet husband jump into this conversation pool. “Now, tell them now.” Oops, missed. “Bob was saying something. Hey, Bob is saying something!” We missed our August reunion, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then another visit, and another, another holiday, and then another vacation.
ALBUM
The first time I saw my sisters, I didn’t really see them. Julie came first, born in Redwood City, California, when I was eight and our brother, Greg, was six. Dad took us to the hospital, but in those long ago days, kids could not go into patients’ rooms. So we stood in the parking lot in the cloudy chill of a San Francisco November and looked up as my dad pointed to a window on the third floor. “Wave,” he said. “That’s where your mom is and your new sister.” We waved and then went home and had scrambled eggs and toast for dinner because my dad’s only culinary ability was making eggs, scrambled, fried, poached.
A year and a half later, it happened again, this time in March, and my dad was holding Julie the tiny toddler. “Wave to your new sister and your mom,” he said. We did and then went home for fried eggs and toast. His range had not expanded.
I didn’t love my sisters for a long time. Years. They were more like dolls I was tired of than actual members of my family. There is a picture of me and my friends when we were 13 in a tent at our church’s summer camp. Two of my friends are sitting behind Julie and Steph who are grinning like little kids do when big kids like them. I am a smiling a thin line. Tolerating.
AGAPE
I remember exactly what I was doing on August 13, 2021. It was a Friday, close to five, and I was frantically finishing up emails to my freelance writing clients. The doorbell rang. My retired husband looked at me. I looked back at him. “Are you going to get it?” I asked. He did and came back. “It’s a package for you. You have to sign for it.” I sighed and headed for the door. Through its glass pane, I saw my sisters, smiling and holding a small round chocolate cake.
All I could think to say was “What are you doing here?” “Happy birthday,” they replied. I started crying. I sat down heavily on the step of the half stairway going up to the second level, laugh crying, hands over my eyes. Meanwhile, my sisters, who had driven seven hours to get to our house, were still outside looking in, laughing themselves. They lit the sparklers and sang Happy Birthday. Badly, I might add. We are not singers. I loved it anyway.
We spent 20 hours together, sitting out on the back patio drinking cocktails, ordering pizza for dinner, eating birthday cake, and talking before they headed home.
It was a perfect way to celebrate my 60th birthday. I have come a long way since that thin smile in a tent, all the way to threatening to build a tiny house in Stephanie’s back yard when I get (really) old so we can all be together in the same city. She smiles, her lips a thin line, but I know she is secretly pleased.
TACIT
Every morning since sometime in January 2022, after feeding the ancient cat and bringing my first cup of coffee to the living room with its big windows, I fill out the Wordle grid and text it to my sisters.
I once got mad at my husband, who is not a word person and doesn’t wordle (is this allowed yet? Wordle as a verb?), for trying a game and getting the answer in three tries while I struggled (April 24, 2022: INERT). It was his chortle that did it. If he plays these days, he does not tell me. I’m only a little sorry I got mad. Wordle is my game with my sisters.
In a fiercely competitive family, we are not competitive about this game. We commiserate, cheer the winner, boo the algorithm. We complain about the injustice of words like NYMPH (April 4, 2022) or APHID (July 21, 2022). I still hate aphid. We don’t talk about much other than Wordle. We may send a photo, Stephanie of her daughters, Julie and I of our pets or vacations. Maybe something about Mom, but otherwise, it’s Wordle.
PHASE
While Bob and I were at Chaco, there was an eclipse of the moon. The ranger told us about the Chacoans’ knowledge of astronomy, about the petroglyphs high on Fajada Butte, two spirals carved into the rock face. On the winter solstice, a pair of vertical light daggers move down on either side of the larger main spiral and on summer solstice one dagger of light moves through the center of the spiral. On the equinoxes, the light daggers move between lines located between the center and the outer edge of the spiral. The great houses on the desert floor, he said, are also aligned for astronomical observation throughout the year. He turned off all the lights and we fell silent, watching the moon slowly eclipsed by the earth.
I think about how often at Chaco I thought of absence, the Chacoans long dead, the immense blue sky through their windows, empty of clouds. The red, pink, and tan rock forming mesas and buttes, the miles of desert with no houses, not even cows. Life at Chaco is small, at our feet, the silver gray, green, and yellow of desert plants, the quick movements of lizards among the ruins of a civilization and the slower curls of snakes.
The pandemic was its own eclipse, emptied of life as we knew it before. Emerging, I look around for rituals to remind me of what matters. I find one of them in Wordle, just a few seconds every day checking in with my sisters to make sure they are still there, still okay.
- Are You Ok? - June 15, 2023