Origins & Fiddlehead Ferns

I walked the land I grew up on today. My aunt Alice, my dad’s oldest sister and the matriarch of the family now, lead the way with her ceaseless wonder, showing me the new heron rookery, crossing the precarious beaver dam without hesitation, glowing about how the water didn’t get into her boots.

My father built this crooked little house by a creek with his brothers and some rugged hippie friends who understood tape measures and figured out the sawmill. It’s owned now by a tall, gentle, bird-loving guy named Bruce who hung that star there, who watches the woodpeckers make tiny holes in the siding that I know he’ll fix one day, who feeds the possum that lives under the barn where my dad used to rehearse with his band; Bruce tells me possums don’t get rabies because their body temperature is so low, and they eat the ticks, so they’re nice to have around. He and his girlfriend, wearing a big smile and a flannel over a GIRLS WILL SAVE THE WORLD t-shirt, invited me to walk around inside, (which I’ll do one day, when we’re not six feet apart in the middle of a pandemic.)

I remember the story my mom told me 
about being eight months pregnant on her back under this house
stapling insulation, that big belly full of me butting up
against the underside of what would become the floors 
where I learned to walk. Bruce gets it, I think: 

A house that you build yourself is this square that lives inside you, 
the angles of which you divvy up in your dreams forever—
a nagging problem (the digging deeper of ditches 
in the pouring rain so water won’t cover the tiles),
a fantastical and ever-shrinking geometry of rooms, 
and if there was a forest around that square 
with paths your own feet wore
and a winding stream you fished with your own pole 
and watched your young children splash around in, 
learning the treacherous shape of rocks
invisible under a fast-moving current, 
then there is a part of you in the chickadees’ song every spring, 
pungent as a fresh head of skunkweed crushed underfoot, 
sweet as the fat blueberries on the bushes you planted yourself 
that will decorate someone else's summer salad. 

This land was where a life began, all idealism and sweat, 
keg beer and a kiddie pool, an upright piano tucked 
behind the stairs where your little girl learned 
to use her big voice and play chords with a one-trick-pony left hand, 
initials carved inside closets, height marks hashed into a door frame, 

a yard pocked with Barbie pond holes 
and impulsive decisions to dig to China 
or at least to the molten center of the earth 
to see if we’d melt or burn. 
Burls in ironwood where the elves bunked down, 
three-inch nails holding two-by-fours hostage 
to lightning-split stumps from forts started on a whim 
and never finished. 

Life bursts forth, 
fiddlehead to fern, 
sun-kissed to brown-tipped, 
leafless and exhausted, 
a porous feather sinking back into the earth, 
buried in months of deep snow...
Only to shoot up again!—
in hairy, fisty little swirls of Irish red 
when the robins have returned, the cycle picking up pace, 
the thumping bass of a grouse nearby, 
orgies of salamanders in shallow pools, 
pollen-thick beams of light through craggy apple branches, 
and the purple flowers of myrtle 
littered like confetti all over the floor. 
New tenants, same lease. 

Is this the invitation god meant to send 
when she licked the stamp? 
Of course it is. I am here again, 
walking the rim with Alice—
right where she was a few years back 
when she ran into my childhood friend, 
who overdosed two weeks later. 
“He was high then, I’m pretty sure,” she said. 
“He talked a mile a minute 
and told me all these stories, 
one about meeting you and Kylee at dawn, 
and she cut her arm on the barbed wire?” 
Yes.
Seven stitches, and we were grounded for a week, 
and all the other secrets of the land, 
living here still in the space between trees, 
between rocks in the creek, 
in the sticky Balm of Gilead buds, 
the mosses and mushrooms, 
the music of birds and water. 
My dad said that once, 
wrote it into a song…
One note bleeds into the next, 
a continuum through genes, 
both denim and root. 

Before I left today, under the brilliant sun, 
Alice hopped on the shoulders of her shovel and dug up some bulbs for me: 
lilies we labeled Rust, Creamsicle, Burgundy, and Yellow Ruffle. 
I don’t know where to put them out here, in my weedy green canvas 
where no one before me has tamed a thing, 
but I love thinking about some woman, 
years and years after I’m dead, 
beating an egg in her kitchen 
as she looks over explosions of midsummer lilies 
from bulbs some version of me pushed into the soil—
if she smiles, I was here. Still am. 

Bruce’s future imaginary son, not knowing, 
sets a trap for the possums under the barn, 
but they just steal the cat food and escape
into the big black night every time, 
hanging upside-down, 
living only now, 
between earth and sky, 
tails curled like new ferns, 
a history of mischief and hard times
stuck in their crooked, smiling mouths. 

 

"It's a Cold and It's a Broken Hallelujah" -Leonard Cohen // Cooper at the Honky Tonk

In her chunky high heels, fishnets, a black sequined romper, charmingly crooked teeth, and strawberry curls piled high in a proper bun, Cooper sang Dolly Parton songs and other country classics at the honky tonk with a band called The Rhinestoners—true Nashville Cats playing bullseye precise licks for tips in their big collar, pearly snap shirts. You don’t find that caliber of musicianship in just any small town across America. They land here in Nashville, backing someone like Cooper Lynn Hays, a practiced and magnetic entertainer of an indeterminate age who lavishly praised Rachel Hester, “Queen of the Honky Tonks,” before she took her turn on stage and walked the band through stops and changes in thirty seconds flat before diving into another standard.

On her break Cooper danced with a friend, and then sat on the sidelines with her long legs crossed, smiling and tapping along as she ate plain potato chips. She flitted down the bar with a jug collecting folded bills for the band between songs. We were delighted, keeping our tabs open, having already played our four-song showcase for a room full of fellow hungry dreamers, industry suits, and the indifference and subtle eyerolls of a bartender, bouncer, and sound tech, who, night after night, watch an endless stream of talent and ambition roll out onto the small stage only to be shuffled off after twenty exact minutes, each musician wrapping cables in a mad dash dumped afterwards into the back lot packed full of open trunks with amps and dreams spilling out. We had found $2 tacos and mezcal margaritas on Fat Tuesday to celebrate the last performance of the tour and landed at Robert’s Western World for Cooper and The Rhinestoners.

Right before close, she took the stage again and said abruptly, “I’d like this to be the very last song I ever sing on this stage.” She paused. There should have been some follow-up. A clarification. Something airy and sweet—a joke. But there wasn’t. She just said it again. “...This will be my last song on this stage... It’s a song by Leonard Cohen.” The rhythm section had left, so it was just the guitar player with his cowboy hat and big red beard, and the keyboard player on a Farfisa and Wurlizter behind her, and they began a familiar chord progression.

“I’ve heard there was a secret chord

that David played, and it pleased the lord

but you don’t really care for music, do ya?”

The song began to take shape, at first like an old friend over coffee with the update you expect, but then a shift: something catastrophic bubbling up. She wasn’t ready to talk about it, especially here, in this place, but it was coming anyway, an unavoidable chemical reaction, and then like an avalanche, people beginning to take notice, exchange glances, move toward the door.

“But, baby, I’ve been here before

I’ve seen this room, and I’ve walked this floor…”

Cooper gestured to the walls, to the floor, and her voice caught in her throat, and then broke altogether over the line, “All I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya.” She wiped a tear from her cheek delicately but not discretely. She messed up the lyrics, repeated an earlier verse, unraveling this time, and wiped away more tears, one at a time, nailing our backs straight into our chairs. She whispered, “Solo,” to the guitar player and swayed with her eyes closed as he hammered on the strings with aggressive tremolo through the entire progression, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“It’s not a cry that you hear at night

It’s not somebody who’s seen the light

It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah”

And then hallelujahs over and over, riding through her torn voice like a horse on fire, shouting and pleading, breaking and bending, and then twisting back down to one perfectly imperfect, soft, and very low last note, hallelujah. She hastily exited the stairs down the front of the stage and ran out into the night crying, hanging a right past the front window, and then she was gone. Vanished. We followed her out, but she was nowhere; she had evaporated into the neon lights of the strip. A drag queen in a big wig with a smile painted on walked out behind us looking both ways for her and took off searching as we stood staring at each other bewildered, wondering, Was it all part of the show? Or what had we just seen? Had we witnessed a last straw? The bruises of separate injuries finally coalesced into one undeniable, dark and complete sentence? The I-can’t-take-it-anymore; the enough-is-enough; the throwing-in-the-towel desperation after giving over your soft skin night after night for years until it is thick and hard and different, and still no one who holds the keys can see that great expense and what you’ve earned and that you should instead be gathered up in the arms of the gods and placed on a pillow among the stars... Leonard Cohen said, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” So what happens when you’ve left yourself cracked open for so long whirling around waiting for the light to find your fissure and dark is all there is? How long can we hold on before the muscles burn out and we have to let go? Was this all a part of the show?

Cooper, I hope that night you took all the bobby pins out of your hair and treated your scalp to the kindness of your fingertips. I hope you smoothed coconut oil into the aching knobs of your feet and that you found a place to prop them up and let the blood drain down. I hope you slept. I hope it was long and deep blue and dreamless. And in the morning, I hope you found your fight again. In this world of thieves and con men, we make our own light. It self-generates within the drippy caverns of our own drive and desire, and we use those power tools to build the stages themselves, to form the very glass of the bulbs that we flick on with our refusal to fall back into the night. Go ahead and disappear, but only so you’ll heal up and return, again and again, until nothing and everything is happening at once, and you are the wheel upon which motion depends.

Was it real? I’m not sure. Did it matter? Of course.

Nashville, you’re just as enchanting as I ever understood you to be, and I can’t wait to return each time I leave. There is no time for dust to gather in the corners of Music City, and the Honky Tonks on Broadway will always be alive with dreams on the cusp of coming true, like a drawn breath, held forever in that instant right before a perfect note rings out and settles the score once and for all. But it never will, and Cooper will be out the next night fighting for it still. I’m back in New York watching snow whip around the barn, silently blessing the wild and dauntless for keeping this fire burning; I bow my head in your honor, and I try again. And again.

~

*As we stood outside Robert’s Western World searching for Cooper’s ghost, we heard what sounded like gunshots very close by, seven of them I think, in two separate blasts. We all jumped, having just been transported by a devastating performance and now frightened. My friend Julia and I clutched each other as we all hustled back toward the van. The shots stirred homeless people napping in doorways and under the awnings of closed businesses, barking like dogs after a hard knock at the door. Nashville, like so many cities, seems safe is its garish American parade of commercialism. Kid’s Rock’s bar; Jason Aldean’s; Dierks Bently’s. Tourists buying $300 cowboy boots. The Pedal Tavern cycling by in a flurry of drunk cackles. Brisket and baskets of fries. But there is an underbelly and ugly truth to every place you go. We choose what not to see, but sometimes we’re forced to look, and I’d much rather see. We couldn’t find anything about the shots in the news, and, thanks to the internet, I tracked Cooper down and saw she was playing a show the very next night, not at Robert’s (so maybe it was her last performance on that stage) but at another honky tonk, and another one the next night, and I’m sure—I hope—on and on just like that, plucky and unwavering, showering compliments over her fellow entertainers, the consummate yet undiscovered professional. Through anti-lessons, we teach each other to be tough; we are never safe from each other, and there are parts of us that will always stay fragile. The gunshots are not a part of this story, but they were there, and I need the fear they incited to stay. 

~ Each tour comes to form its own character, develops its own inside jokes, and has its highlights and its pitfalls, which become its quirkier memories. I harvested oysters at low tide and ate them that same night. I fell in love with new songs and bands and hugged old friends and slept in so many different beds. 2am Waffle House stops and yoga in corners and pages and pages of handwritten nonsense, all the load-ins and load-outs, new faces, rest stops, killing time, hurry-up-and-wait… I could have kept going and going.  

I heard an old lady in New York City say once, “Every time I go outside, something wonderful happens.” I hope I’ll always feel this way about exposing myself to danger and motion. It is wonderful. For now, I’m happy to be home, writing by my wood stove, still, quiet, and recharged by the bigness of the world.