Roof, 2020

Sommer Schafer

 

The family and I. We’re incased in green, listening to Grieg, spying on the rain. Look at it come.

Aren’t we lucky to have a roof. A place of refuge. Permanent place for bed and pillow. And all that crazy green there just past glass—tangles of soft-looking, lime-green, baby oak leaves, and buckeyes with their columns of white flowers and the bay laurels slowly absconding with the view of the valley and eruptions of sword and wood ferns and sticky spreading bedstraw, the cutest little native plant you’ll ever see that clings to your fingers like a cat’s tongue when you touch it even though you want to warn it, veer from the human! I insist on being a different kind. Must, really. And, wouldn’t you know it, plants can be happy. I see it, feel it. And there.

Spring.

Listen. The ravens, hop-skipping across the roof, and if you’ve never seen this you should at least once in your life, sounding deep-throated, contented, alien noises. Tearing up chunks of roof moss and flipping them and catching them and tossing them onto the ground.

The other day, B, N, and I watched the biggest orb spider you’ve ever seen haul herself up across outside N’s bedroom window. Slowly, so slowly, achingly, an engorged orange abdomen the size of a quarter, and, waveringly, just barely, up to the roof. To lay her eggs and die. Probably.

I’m terrified of her, but I want to love her. I want to be like B, my amazing girl. She gently picks up every single monstrous spider and lovingly carries them outside.

On the roof, how many hundreds of orb spiders laying, dying, spinning; how many hundreds, thousands, over the span of the year, high-stepping over the vegetable chaos up there to get to the other side or be picked up by a raven and promptly sucked into a crop. Plump. Delicious.

Late last fall, before all this, F and B leaned the ladder against the house, climbed up to the flat roof—1980s West Coast style, straight white lines of embedded gutters edging loopy tangles of leafless oak branches—cleared it of all the oak leaves, dead branches covered in webs of gorgeous gray-green lichen. Filled the old laundry basket half a dozen times over, dumped it in the green bin half a dozen times again.

The next day—oh. There, lifting the bin’s lid, an orb sitting fat on her web that she had so meticulously, beautifully even, spun in the dark across the opening under the lid above the crispy leaves after having been so gathered and dumped from the roof by my otherwise most loving and gentle F and B. And see, the describing of it forces me to spin too.

Life persists. Even in darkness. Even under lid.

Last night, a dream. Once again, moving, selling everything, and the panic of knowing we wouldn’t be able to get it all sold, even as cheap as it was, all of it bought from The Salvation Army. And during this time—outside, some kind of extended, dark carport full of our dank stuff through which strangers rummaged—the living room ceiling had developed a soft plaster-and-paint-encased engorgement, water accumulated from a crack in the roof. And that engorgement, despite a tiny hole through which the water dripped onto the carpeted floor, seemed as if it would pop at any moment.

F worries that the ruthless fist of the summer sun has destroyed patches of the roof, which sink a little when he steps there. Who will patch the roof for a good price, especially these days, is the question, and will it happen before it’s too late and we’re left with another bill we sink into the red to pay.

Several weeks ago, F put on his pajama bottoms that he keeps hanging on the towel rack. Out slipped a scorpion, dark brown, comically fierce (though not—never—to belittle). Two inches long, if that. Exposed and lost, terrified. The little thing immediately got herself backed up against the darkest corner by the toilet, tail raised and curled. For some reason, I love her. Not just past tense. Now. And next year too, and on. I would have transported her within the cup of my hand if I could have been sure of the severity of her sting. Instead, a cup, a piece of paper, a trip out the back door. The scared thing scurrying through a crack in the porch, falling the few feet to the ground in dark.

There is a muddy path in the woods below our house, and that’s where we go. Most days. In a few months there will be a gray fox family making their cozy home under that shack down there in the woods, and those pups will visit us at night and make all kinds of pup-like racket, playing with the bucket of water we will leave out for the animals when we’re getting record breaking heat and the air is unbearably tight with wildfire smoke. And there are bobcats and coyotes and turkey vultures and raccoon families and mountain lions; pileated woodpeckers and hummingbirds and band-tailed pigeons and little brown bats and whole gaggles of chestnut-backed chickadees and titmice and dark eyed juncos and where can I possibly end.

Once, in light of a full day in the woods, climbing the golden hills; in light of the banana slug’s slimy trail leading right to his cool, dark hiding place in the hole in the bay laurel; in light of the spotted towhee shuffling on the ground, the Steller’s jay making a racket in the oaks; in light of the hermit thrush coming round every evening after I water, and he’s usually busy looking for a mate, he stopped, for many moments.

Looked right at me.

I felt it, like a shock wave. Hit me right at the sternum, filled my whole chest. Nature’s conspiring for the non-discriminatory success of life.

Sometimes I have to remind myself. It is enough to stay alive.

The other day I had a conversation with a fox sparrow. I opened the bird app on my phone, played one of its songs. It flew from one branch to another. It pecked a leaf. It fluffed and grew slick again, the way birds can do that, constantly looking this way, that. It scraped its beak against the branch. I played the song again, then its second song, its third song (some birds have entire symphonies at their disposal). It seemed to listen, for a moment. It dipped, eyed me. I played its short staccato call. I played its second song again. And then. It fluffed, it bobbed, it slightly dropped and angled its wing feathers. It looked at me. It answered, tentatively at first, and then quite gloriously. And again. And again again.

I run on the path. Yesterday, and tomorrow, and in eight months too, and after. There’s no one.

Breathe.

Silence.

Breathe.

A rush against my ears, the crunch of running shoe against gravel and dirt. Cloudy puddles; invasive French broom. That dead tree with a hummingbird always perched at the very tip of the tallest, leafless branch, piercing the sky.

And suddenly.

A wild turkey. Caught off guard. Running down the path before me, knob-kneed jutting, scissoring head, wattles a-wattling. I will catch up!

But around the corner. And poof.

The end always comes sooner than you think.

We will be the last ones, thriving—biding—under roof and tree. Climbing, slinging through, finding purchase in this wild, miraculous tangle. It feels like love or something better than. And we will settle down, wrapped around oak, succumbing to lichen and ant and banana slug and the owl family in the redwoods. And we will sleep without dreaming and awake to valley oak branches like beautiful witch’s hair static in the air.

 

Sommer Schafer is senior editor of The Forge Literary Magazine and works at the county library. She lives in Northern California on Coast Miwok land with her family, a rescue dove, and a bearded dragon. Visit her at www.sommerschafer.com.