I decided on March 31, when I was sick to death of the news and calling my state representative and everyone asking for money for worthy causes and feeling like shit because I couldn’t possibly donate to every worthy cause, when the weather outside was gray and promised to stay that way for another week, when I knew why all the good things I did were worth doing and I was still tired of them anyway.
I decided when I read an email from the university office about Days of Service, the sort of thing which is most certainly planned in good faith, but nevertheless makes most staff members roll their eyes, before clicking delete. We would all like to do good, but we’re far too busy right now. Rain check?
In the middle of the email, there is a calendar link to a group trash pickup along the Charles River. I am not available on that date, but I am here now, at 7:30am, and an old Market Basket shopping bag is sitting quietly folded up in the corner.
I will go outside and find at least ten pieces of trash. I will put them in my plastic bag and bring them back inside, and recycle the bottles and cans, and dump the rest into the big trash bin, and then wash my hands and go back to my email inbox. I will walk a bit and breathe some fresh air and remove a few small thorns from the open palms of the universe. I will not fix the world. I am tired of trying. I will simply take a couple of things that are out of place, and move them to somewhere they rest more easily.
And I do. And although I will continue to call my state representative and send my donations and sign petitions, for those are all good things to do, this feels more real and true to me than any of the things I have sent out into the void for the sake of civic-mindedness.
And so, the next day, I do it again.
March 31
one manta ray gibbet
The manta ray is made of plastic, or perhaps rubber. One of those gibbets that you can buy for Crocs, a thing I have done exactly once. I was in Italy and my great-aunt, whom I had never met before, got it into her head that we really needed gibbets as a souvenir from the land of pasta and the Renaissance. I have not thought about gibbets in years, but now this manta ray huddles in the corner of the walkway ramp.
The manta ray is scuffed but shiny. I imagine someone walking through a souvenir shop, maybe at the aquarium, a finger pointing, that one! that one!, the excitement of holding the smooth, new rubber, and then the realization that actually, it’s uncomfortable to walk with a bunch of plastic pins digging into your toes. Days later, they take a trip down to the water’s edge. On the way home, noticing the absence of discomfort, they glance down at the suddenly-bare Croc with a guilty sort of relief. Sometimes, we go places where we know things will get lost, because it saves us the trouble of getting rid of them.
I throw the rest of the trash in the garbage bin, but I put the manta ray next to my coffee cup.
April 8
a moon snail seashell
I told myself I would only pick up unnatural things, and yet –
“You’re not where you’re supposed to be,” I say to the shell, which I recognize turned-over and mostly-sunk in the mud because I know snail shells, I know the curve of a snail shell opening in a heartbeat, I know the name of the door that snails make to fit into that opening – the operculum, from the Latin operire, meaning to cover – because I did not one, but two major elementary school projects on snail shells, and somehow the public education system let me get away with that.
“You’re not where you’re supposed to be,” I say, as if I have some sort of jurisdiction over what belongs in the river versus the ocean, as if I have any sort of authority, and if the snail shell could talk, it would probably be saying, and who the hell are you, lady? Do you know where you’re supposed to be?
April 14
one clear claw clip
I added the word “clear” because I like alliteration, and the crisp slide of the “cl” sound, like the rounded but steady edges of this hair clip. I imagine that it has been used. Perhaps last Thursday, when the weather was nice, someone sat down with their friends to chat by the river and set this clip down briefly among the tree roots, then got chased away by a territorial goose.
The geese, by the way, have not hissed at me this week. Perhaps they’re getting used to me, or perhaps their fear fades as the earth tilts sunward, as the yet-to-be goslings in their little eggs push themselves a bit further towards existence. I imagine them floating in a clear jelly, warmed by the unknown daylight, billions of atoms moving towards each other because life loves to be alive.
April 15
one Yogi tea bag, with a tag that says the one who listens understands
Last year on the Appalachian Trail, I read a book called Everything Is Beautiful and I’m Not Afraid. My favorite page of the book was a two-image spread with a person in front of a teal and purple sky, which said, when you were looking at all the answers, did the universe ever talk back?
I rub the paper between my fingers as I stand under the cherry blossoms, which must have bloomed furiously overnight, because I’ve been checking their progress daily. Just a dozen open flowers last Thursday, then a few on each branch fluttering open yesterday, and now a reckless, beautiful abundance of tissue-paper pink that glows underneath from the light of the gray dawn sky. Because even on gray days, the world is full of beautiful things.
Did the universe ever talk back?
Yes, it did. It does.
April 15
one beautiful shape
That description is not particularly helpful, but then, I’m not entirely sure what this is. It might be a necklace charm, or part of an earring. It might have been a clasp on a handbag. A flattened, asymmetrical donut, dark silver tinged with fingerprint rainbows. Circles within circles. I have always been a lover of circles, of their contained endlessness, of their easy impossibility. It is essentially impossible to draw a perfect circle with a free hand, and yet it looks so organic, like the shape just slipped and fell and rolled out of bed that way.
The circle-within-a-circle is beautiful and smooth and shiny in my palm, and I cannot stop rubbing it, sliding it onto my finger, sliding it off again. I cannot believe I might have missed it, if I had not gone on a walk at that particular time and looked down at that particular moment.
I had been gathering fallen cherry blossoms, planning to press them, except I realized that the beauty of cherry blossoms is that they are alive and fluttering and soft, and pressed flowers are not the same, and so instead I fed the cherry blossoms to the geese, thinking about how I would like a more concrete souvenir of this beautiful day, and here it is.
The universe listens, too.
April 22
one gold earring
I’ve been waiting for my first earring. They’re such a common loss – somehow, it’s so easy to lose something that’s pierced through the human body. This one is particularly lovely – three strands curving into half a loop, each square piece of golden wire twisted so that they form a ribbed crescent moon.
I hope that the person who lost this earring didn’t have an overwhelming sentimental attachment to it. Or perhaps I hope they did. I like the idea of people getting attached to their possessions, even if they’ll lose them. Especially if they’ll lose them. I prefer the pain of loss to the idea that we can drop possessions without notice, purchasing new memories at Target for 19.99. Loss, even accidental loss, ought to sting.
April 22
one iPhone
This is indeed a momentous day. An iPhone and an earring, all at once. I assume it’s because of the marathon, and the nice weather over the weekend. I’ll try, later this evening, to recharge the battery and find the owner. I imagine it was an enormous frustration – a terror, even – to realize it was gone. Thirty years ago, people walked around phoneless all the time, and now even my walks along the Charles feel somehow unthinkable without a phone.
Perhaps on Thursday, I’ll walk without my phone, just to see how it feels.
But since I’m a woman, I’ll keep my pepper spray. The world is full of beautiful things, but it does not promise safety. Or rather, the world is full of beautiful things, and it does not promise safety. The two statements do not negate each other. Indeed, I’m starting to believe they might depend on each other, for a world that is entirely safe is a world that is entirely controlled, and I am not convinced that beauty would survive a world like that.
April 28
one regret
As I was walking towards the street where I planned to pick up trash today, I saw a tiny human out with their mother on a walk. They were moving fast, all one and a half feet of them, legs pistoning out, clearly on a mission to get somewhere. The somewhere didn’t matter. They didn’t want to get anywhere, they wanted to walk.
As I was passing by them, we all passed the rhododendron bushes in a neighbor’s front yard. Over the years, several of their bushes have withered, but one of them hangs on, dripping purple-pink flowers and, on this warm twilight, humming with bumblebees. As I walk on, I can hear the mother say quickly, “oh, no, dear, that bush is full of bees, so let’s keep walking, okay?”
Which is, I suppose, a sensible thing to say to a small child that might try to grab a fuzzy thing and stick it into their mouth. Still, I feel a sharp and lingering sadness that children are taught, so early, to fear the bees. They do not sting nearly as badly as some rosebushes, and no one ever taught me to fear roses.
Some day, perhaps, I will be watching the small child of a friend, and I will tell them, “dear, that bush is full of bees, so we’re not going to touch it, but let’s say hello to the bees, shall we? Let’s say hello to the ants, too, and the wolf spiders, and the small mice that creep into our attics. Let us at least learn to see the world, before we decide to run away from it.”
May 6
one small death
I am halfway through picking up an empty potato chip bag when I see it. And it feels both disrespectful and entirely right, because a body is no longer a being, once the life has left. Death is the transition from subject to object, for I do not believe that a corpse contains all that matters of a being. Still, this small bundle of yellow and gray feathers is all that remains, now, of what was once a gosling. A body that made itself a house, not knowing it would just be a rest stop.
I know there will be many small deaths in the coming months, and I do not argue with the inevitable and gentle turning of death, but I still take a moment, on this cloudy day, to stand by this small body and think, as so many have before me, but even so.
May 12
a white, plastic Nike whistle
It has that familiar swoop. I consider blowing into it, to hear the hooting sound of a tiny whistle, before reconsidering the wisdom of putting my mouth on something that’s just been on the ground. It was probably a freebie. Something easily discarded, as so many things seem to be these days.
I walk along under the falling cherry blossoms and think about the rivers of merch that are churned out for advertising purposes, all of the pens and the bouncy balls and mug cozies and keychains and water bottles and notepads that are acquired because we cannot resist a free thing, only to get shoved under the bed and thrown out on moving day. I do not think items need to last forever to matter. But I am profoundly saddened by the thought that so many things are created and discarded without having been loved.
June 9
one enthusiastic dog
I think the dog’s name is Hershey, judging from the increasingly emphatic shouts of “Hershey! Touch! Hershey! Now!” coming from the woman about 50 feet behind me. Hershey is ecstatically and enthusiastically oblivious to these commands as they rocket through the undergrowth along the river, whirling in circles, occasionally darting out to sniff at a particularly compelling patch of grass, and then vanishing again. When they finally walk towards their owner, panting, there is not an ounce of penitence in their furry black body. And although I think dogs should be kept on leashes, for everyone’s safety, in this moment I adore Hershey. This is not even rebellion. There is no awareness of disobedience; there is simply too much life to take in. I wonder if this is what revolution could look like, someday: not even having room for anger, because there is too much world to love.
July 1
nothing
I considered a plastic ring shaped like Sonic the Hedgehog for a little while, but in the end decided that my lack of any personal connection to the Sonic franchise, combined with the fact that to me, the ring felt less like a wink from the universe than a future piece of clutter, meant that I would be better off holding nothing. I don’t want to turn this into a treasure hunt, where I hang onto a meaningless trophy for the sake of a memorial. I consider it a great fallacy that we have been taught that something is always better than nothing, that to get “something for nothing” is a grand achievement, like a badass heist from the universe.
The truth is that my hands felt very light, and very free, as I walked back across the bridge. As much as I dislike the pretentiousness of certain academic art circles, they did have a point. Empty space leaves room for the world to dance.
July 8
one thin piece of metal for some undisclosed engineering purpose
I am unable to pull this metal out of the ground without disturbing five or six anthills, and I am unwilling to do this. It would be wrong, I think, to destroy so many little lives in the pursuit of my own idea of saving the world. I am feeling sort of ambivalent about trash-collecting today, to be honest, watching the dump truck slowly inch its way down the back alley behind a row of apartments. I will pick up this trash and put it into a bag, which will then be dumped into a can, then into a dumpster, and then into a landfill somewhere, assuming it doesn’t get lost along the way. But this is not the same as removing the trash from the world entirely. Unless I keep it and use it, all of this trash will continue to wait in its de-compostable, eternal way, burrowing into the earth’s skin somewhere else. A thorn by any other name can still draw blood. I am not a bacterium that can chew through plastic and turn it back into biodegradable material, and I wonder sometimes if there is any point to this at all.
July 8
one graffitied reassurance
And then, on the cement block beneath one of the benches that looks out at the river, there is new graffiti. Curling red letters read it’s okay 2 trust. I look down at the letters and take a deep breath. The point was never to fix everything. Not everything will be saved, but everything that can be saved is worth saving. I walk with my plastic bag back up the river and trust that I am leaving a slightly less wounded world behind me.
Some people may accuse me of looking for signs from the universe, and of confirmation bias. To which I say, yes. If you are looking for signs that the universe is speaking to you, then you tend to find more of them. Funnily enough, that is how conversations work.
