Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 9
Salamanders
If you feel the call to help people whose lives have been irrevocably altered by the devastation of Hurricane Helene, this constantly updated list of vetted sources is a great place to start. More than 50 days have passed since the storm blew through the mountains, but people are still rebuilding their lives as winter makes living harder. Please help if you can.
Ancient Symbols and Modern Ghosts
Everyone who works with humans and animals knows that the full moon is a time of weird chaos — a time when it’s hard to plan and know what to expect. Our herd becomes calm at this point in the lunar calendar. More often than not you will find the horses snoozing in the sun — and through the night — and reminding us humans to draw inward and get our internal houses in order.
Salamanders symbolize the unseen, the hidden depths, the magic contained in the ordinary. They represent our subconscious, our id, those parts of us that seldom see the light. So there is no better elusive character to introduce in this week’s installment of my love story, Ten Times I Said No To Love. We’re one chapter away from the ending and I want to draw it out forever because I get to live it.
And I haven’t had the space to really live it since the wedding. The truth is that I’ve never seen a salamander, but that doesn’t stop me from seeking them under every mossy rock and damp hiding place around the farm — much like my search for love. The salamander is the character that I will continually seek out and write about.
I followed Christopher around all week asking him questions about the life-changing moment that you’ll learn more about in Chapter 9 this week. His ability to adapt, transform, not hold grudges, and roll with the punches of everything is the trait I fell in love with first. I work every day to be the type of person that he came into this world naturally being.
I’m going to be putting together a Zoom call for all of the paid subscribers of Stable Roots this month. We’re halfway through, but I’m going to make this happen. And we’ll hopefully get back to normal in December.
If You’re New to Stable Roots
Before my wedding and the storm, I was in the middle of posting a chapter each week of my rebellious love story, Ten Times I Said No To Love. It’s easy for us to pass love off — as a concept/emotion/feeling — as trite and predictable and boring. I want to revolutionize our relationship with love stories. The world needs them now more than ever.
You can find previous chapters here:
|| Chapter One || Chapter Two || Chapter Three || Chapter Four || Chapter Five ||
|| Chapter Six || Chapter Seven || Chapter Eight ||
Chapter 9 is about ancient symbols, lingering ghosts, and the language of the natural world.
Let’s get started.
Chapter 9:
Salamanders
The salamanders,
like tiny birds, locked into formation,
fly down into the endless mysteries
of the transforming water,
and how could anyone believe
that anything in this world
is only what it appears to be —
-Mary Oliver
I’m home from Denver a whole day before I locate which bag I’ve stashed my bravery in. Like placing souvenirs in a side pocket to keep them safe, but being unable to find the shell necklace you bought for your friend. That’s how I lose things and locate them later with a jolt of excitement when I realize that something special was with me all along.
Also, it takes me a long time to unpack. I’m not the kind of person who can travel across Europe — or on a weekend trip — with only a carry-on.
The farm has not altered or shifted in my absence, despite my worries. I wake on my stiff, springy couch in the back room as the dog sighs and shifts on the bed. Her border collie genius is black and white like her coat. When I’m within sight and scent, she’d rather I not cuddle her too much. But when I’m packing to leave or returning home, I’m the sheep she must attend. She leans into my legs and whines into my skin. She loves me hard in transitional states but likes some distance between our bodies while we sleep — the better she can watch me.
I fell asleep with a goodnight from Christopher. I check my phone. He hasn’t woken yet.
Is today your birthday? I type and hit send.
Outside, the summer heat is a veil dripping from the rich-leafed trees, a dampness that sinks into me as I lean against the old, cured posts supporting the leaky tin roof of the barn. I settle into sessions with the solidness of the barn against my back and listen to people’s stories.
We prepare to welcome a new horse into the herd, a golden pony named Faith who is an answer to prayers for Michelle, whose heart glows as luminous as her new partner’s coat.
I catch up with emails and accounting. I eat lunch. I wash clothes. The feed room is stocked. The shavings shed is low on bedding. I scrape the scattered sawdust into a heap with a cracked plastic snow shovel. The sound is as familiar as breathing, a hollow vibration against the smooth, worn red clay. I navigate the farm by echolocation.
Today is not my birthday, Christopher writes.
Want to come by after work? My face flushes as I send this. I found my bravery in my pocket.
He answers back quicker than my question: Yes.
*
It feels foreign because it’s good for me, I think. I’m not aware yet that life doesn’t have to feel like starvation. This is what I tell myself. I work the rest of the day with the sense that everything has changed but there is nothing outwardly different.
I’ve cried love too many times for anyone to actually believe me. Wolves are safer.
I think something very big has happened to me.
“Have you noticed that Julian seems off in his right hind leg.”
I think I’m falling in love.
“Is your student using Choo at four?”
There’s this person that I’ve known for a long time and I think I have a bit of a crush.
Do you know when we’re getting a new load of shavings?
Christopher gives me real-time updates of his ETA as we near the hour of truth. We have successfully corresponded as if we might match well for five whole days, but we haven’t tested this energy face-to-face.
Will this scrutiny hold up to reality? I’m a nervous wreck, I’m a horse that’s been dropped off in a new herd trying to align my senses with foreign scents and sounds. As his headlights wind down the driveway, I realize that I’m deeply embarrassed by vulnerability. It feels awful and unnatural and gross.
And why this is so different from other people and situations is that Christopher is immune to any constructs I create. He senses the truth. It’s so much easier when someone doesn’t really want to deal with the real you.
I listen to him near the porch on his familiar feet.
“Hey.”
“Hello.”
“This is so weird! How was your day?” I know how his day was. I’ve messaged him since it started.
He tells me anyway.
As he talks, I feel every heavy, rusted gate that I’ve constructed to protect me from life begin to creak down on sticky hinges. I chatter-talk and we leave the porch and go hang out in my room on the squeaky couch. The dog follows and curls onto her bed so she can mind her flock from a safe distance. If border collies can roll their eyes, she is doing it.
In an attempt to rip the emotional bandage off, I lean up against Christopher on the couch and awkwardly curl into him like the dog sighing on her bed. I position myself so I can stare out a window and not have to look him in the face. It’s easier to talk this way.
He holds my hand.
Oh, God. This is both awful and nice. I can’t find a reasonable excuse to plot my escape.
(To this day, neither of us has any recollection of what we spoke about that night. He says it was bliss for him and he was soaking it in. I say it was awkward and I was looking for any opportunity to flee.)
We — and by we, I mean humans — are studied, adept, and practiced in separation. It’s the foundational principle of our world while every cell in our body is reliant on a system, a togetherness, that sustains growth. Self-reliance only works when there is access to food and fresh water. I want to be alone and not-alone simultaneously and the place where these two opposite desires meet feels unnatural. I’ve never experienced it before. I don’t know what to do with it.
Curled in the same position against Christopher too long, my leg falls asleep.
I stand up, carefully so I don’t topple over, and say, “We’re moving too fast. We need to put the brakes on and just be friends.”
I pull Christopher up and start to usher him toward the front door.
“Okay,” he says, not bothered at all, just accepting of what I say like a completely balanced, flexible human — the jerk. Monday is a holiday and we've talked about spending it together. “Can we still hang out and look for salamanders when I’m off work next week?”
I hadn’t thought ahead this far. We’d talked about exploring the woods.
“Sure,” I say. “Yes.”
*
I’ve never actually seen a salamander. I know they exist but I don’t have any personal visual or tactile confirmation. I believe in salamanders like I do the Holy Spirit, like blue fireflies, like folktales with a grain of truth.
I wait for my watch to alert me that my heartbeat is too high. I’ve been decompressing from travel as I reorient into the routine of the farm, but I feel like I have the bends.
Everything has changed but nothing is outwardly different.
If one is to gamble on anything, it might as well be love — not traffic, or a flight, or the stock market. Yet the container that we’ve chosen to publicly house our skepticism is our own hearts.
I stare at a rectangle of late morning light on the floor as my heart pounds. I’m cataloging why this whole situation is a bad idea.
The law of averages.
General relatively.
The law of diminishing returns.
A family history of delusions.
Supply and demand.
Toxic Positivity.
Co-dependency.
Rugged Individualism.
The effects of gravity.
In moments of clarity, I realize that none of the reasons come from me. These moments are short-lived.
Christopher lets himself in through the back porch door. He’s wearing a backpack and he holds of cup of crushed ice that he places reverently in my hands like an offering.
“My heart is beating super fast, and I don’t have an appetite, and I can’t sleep,” I say. “I think that something is really wrong with me.”
“Would you like me to drive you to a doctor?”
“No.”
He patiently stares at me. I stare back.
“Should we go look for salamanders then?”
(Later, I will ask when he knew for certain that I loved him — When I felt you start to run away.)
We are quiet as we enter the woods and come to the juncture where two trails meet behind the hay sheds. By silent agreement, we head like a pair of dousing rods down the steep hill to the pond.
“Remember when you handed me a bouquet of turkey feathers?”
“I do. I watched you pick them up and thought they must be important to you.”
With my feet in motion, my mind shakes loose from old tracks of thought. I inhale the rich, wet scent of the late-summer woods.
“If you’d like, I can take a rake and cover up all the paths the neighbors cut,” Christopher says.
“You’d do that for me?”
“Of course.”
There’s a mile or more of clean, chopped trail in the otherwise untouched forest. We follow it, tallying the snapped saplings and missing branches leading to the spring that feeds the pond. This area was one of the first to be settled and the healing waters of the springs were legendary.
The woods are cooler where the spring emerges from the ground to cut between old oaks hollowed at the bottom where the water flows along their roots. We cross a small shoal of polished rocks. Christopher gathers trash the neighbors have left along the banks and shoves it into his backpack.
I point to a roofline on the hill above us through the trees. “There’s the culprits.” A deflated tent crumpled into the moss is weighted down by a discarded street sign and a broken tackle box.
An ancient beech tree, bark smooth and silvery, is etched with initials and symbols like a living page of a human’s gut-driven need to leave a mark.
“I’ve never actually seen a salamander,” I say. “But I grew up in the woods at Paris Mountain and I’m guessing they were there.”
“Wait — I grew up in the woods there too, at the bottom of the mountain. My brother and I played all through those woods, and we’d play video games at the little store at the end of the road.”
“That’s where I bought my first comic book. It’s where I grew up at my grandparent’s house. We were beside each other. I wonder if we ever met? Was this where you lost your brother?”
He names the road. I know this road.
I realize that I’d heard about the accident that injured Christopher and killed his brother. Walking distance from where I spent most of my days, he had told me about his loss, but I didn’t know it happened so close to me.
“Tell me what happened again. Tell me about how you lost your brother. How old were you?” Christopher and I are the same age. He stops judging the tree graffiti and comes to sit beside me on a big, fallen oak. I count on my fingers how old we were when he and his brother were hit by a car as they walked one morning on a road at the base of Paris Mountain. Knowing the woods, knowing the road, creates a geographic imprint of the trauma that stuns me. It makes his experience more real to me, the image more immediate.
“I was twelve. Someone fell asleep at the wheel as they drove home from working third shift. I was in a coma for six weeks and when I woke, I learned that I’d missed my brother’s funeral.”
“What is your brother’s name?”
“Marcus.”
His younger brother by a year and three days, Marcus was, “quiet but assured.” Christopher talks about how the two of them were at home in the woods where they found snakes and spiders, lizards with blue tails, turtles, and bees that would “always attach to Marcus when I messed with them.”
They gathered bottles from the roads and construction sites and turned them in for twenty-five cents each, using the funds to play video games at the store at the base of the mountain or buy Transformers. “I still have all of them,” Christopher says.
Marcus had brown eyes and light brown hair. He always wanted one of those “new, wide, wooden skateboards” after riding their mother’s plastic one that she had since high school. Christopher didn’t skate before Marcus passed but “picked it up for him because it was something Marcus always wanted to do.”
The last memory Christopher has before waking from his coma is two days before the accident. When he came to he learned that his brother died and that he had missed the funeral. But he later learned from someone who witnessed the accident that Marcus had been walking in front of him, saw the oncoming car, and jumped behind Christopher to push him out of the way.
The road where this happened is wooded and still mostly undeveloped. When I was small, I traveled the stretch of it daily with my grandmother who told stories of the awful things that happened there like an oral history of misfortunes, ghost stories caught in the branches of the forest. It made her nervous to drive the road at night.
“What happened to the person who hit you?”
“My mother and I attended his trial and offered him forgiveness. He was young and it would have been horrible for him to carry the guilt of the wreck along with our blame for the rest of his life.”
“We’ve lived near each other more than we realized,” I say as we sit beside each other on this log beside a spring in another enchanted forest of stories. “I think the woods raised us.”
“I feel at home in them.”
“Me too.”
I wonder if Marcus is there with us in the towering church of trees. The thought of this makes me comfortable. It feels right.
“What happened after you woke up?”
“I learned to walk again and went back to school in the fall.”
“Do you think the reason you’re so balanced and reasonable, the way you just roll with things and stay positive, is because you had a near-death experience when you were in a coma?”
“Since birth,” he says. “I was the same before the accident.”
I want to be this flexible and outwardly focused instead of an inwardly ruminating mess.
I stare at him.
He stares back.
I think that it would be really okay if Christopher tried to kiss me right now, but I’d rather Marcus — if he’s hanging around — not be watching.
Christopher gets up and moves to the stream where he carefully peers under smooth, wet rocks in search of salamanders.
“Historically, salamanders were associated with fire,” I say. “They were thought to be immune to burning, a symbol of rebirth.”
“They’re sneaky and cute,” Christopher says.
“I hope we find one,” I say, still seated on the log.
“By we, do you mean you and the mouse in your pocket?”
It takes me a minute to grasp his meaning. “Oh.” I scramble down and meet him at the bank and help him with his search.
Behind us, the pond glows orange and blue in the early afternoon light. I hear the resident heron swoop low, skimming the surface on giant, scalloped wings. We trade words for a language of awe and delight as we explore — the conversation that we’re born into as kids, learning the alphabet of leaves and dirt and feathers.
Christopher points out spider webs and beaver teeth on trunks as I forget that I started the morning with a thousand created concerns.
He is immensely respectful of the space I asked for and we spend the day together as friends whose boots move better across uneven ground, whose thoughts come easier without walls and buildings.
*
Much later, we sit on the porch and watch the moon rise beyond the yard and the paddocks.
I glance at him and my mouth moves without thinking. I whisper, I love you. But he doesn’t, thank goodness, hear me.
We hug for a moment before he leaves and I watch his headlights retrace the farm driveway with a deep sense that my world feels quieter when he is near.
|| Read Chapter 10 ||
I’ll be back next week with Chapter 10 (Lord willing). Until then, I wish you safe journeys and unexpected surprises of the very best sort.
Love,
Kim
Ah! You write million dollar sentences that make my brain tingle and I love it! 🖤🖤🖤
Beautiful. I agree with Laci...million dollar sentences.
And this is unfortunately too true. "Self-reliance only works when there is access to food and fresh water." And when there aren't things that need to be done around the house that are too high for you to reach.