When I look back at the nature drawings I did in college I feel like a hungry dog gnawing on its own tail, or like how I did in High School, when I used to eat the skin off my cuticles and think to myself, this is lunch. This nostalgia will inspire a fresh wave of creativity and I will draw again, I think to myself, but all it does is pass the time. I’m just not hungry enough yet, I guess.

I used to tell my dad I was hungry, and he would say, eat a banana.

I would say I didn’t want a banana, and he would say, well, you must not be hungry enough yet.

Mom was more lax. She’d take me to Nico's Taco Shop for a carne asada quesadilla, then maybe to the mall. We’d run up the crowded down escalators, past a slideshow of surprised faces. We’re giving them a much need thrill, mom said_, a reminder that backwards can still be forwards. Mostly though, we were having fun.

Mom tugged on fun like a bowstring, and Dad usually got shot in the ass. I dreamt of Dad last night. Him and I were in the kitchen together, cleaning the sap-caked teeth of Mom’s chainsaw with toothbrushes.

I woke up with a jolt, into a day with a 4-8-4–8 beat — hours slotted — play-work-play-sleep cadence. The play isn’t all that playful. It’s just a word to follow work, like jelly follows peanut butter, or how Mom followed Dad until death followed his life. I grab my phone from the nightstand. I always turn it off two hours before I go to bed, so I can scroll in the morning with a sense of earned gusto. Today though, I lay in bed and stared at my reflection in its black glass. I’ll wait an extra hour, I think. I'll start Finnegans Wake, or finish Infinite Jest. I’ll idle my pre-work play in a ball-pit of words, enriching and useless. The day will be mine, it will fit me like my skin.

I started cleaning my kitchen instead, it's not enriching, but it is useful. In a few hours I’ll clean the kitchen at Chaitanic for $21/hr + tips. My kitchen cleaning is corrupting my 4-8-4-8, leaking into my dreams. I’m harmonizing into a state of undifferentiated kitchen cleaning. There are only mugs, to scrub — mugs and blenders and chainsaws. It feels like the answer to a Zen kaon. What was the question though?

It’s another hazy day, I know it will be red lining the AQI. It’ll be slow at Chaitanic. Working a slow day feels like digging a ditch and filling it back up. Hours of prep-n-close on either side of a dozen orders from people who should be at home between two HEPA-filters set to ‘HIGH’.

Mom and I used to dig huge ditches at the beach. Dad made us fill them back up before we left. A jogger would fall in and break his dam leg, he said

Mom said that too, once, a little after he died. It threw her into a laughing fit, like she felt it all and chose to laugh. I didn’t understand, but laughed too. She brought out an old yellow cigar box, our low-budge urn, and we poured the ashes into the hole. She cried, and I didn’t understand but cried too.

We dug our holes lower on the beach after that, below the tide line, where the sea would do the filling work for us. This is the first time I worked smarter-not-harder, but they never say that about play do they.

My phone buzzes over the edge of my kitchen counter. I catch it with a wet hand mid-fall. I hadn’t turned it off after all. I never hold the button down long enough, three seconds is so much commitment. Mom has texted me a picture of an old newspaper clipping. The headline reads, ‘Area Girl Breaks the Record for Most Aerial Baton Twirls’. In the photo, Mom stands in the beach sand, young and tone. Her body takes space like a man's body takes space. Her skin is gold and her leotard is gold. It’s a black and white photo, but I know she is gold, the baton held aloft — a golden capital T.

Look what I found tucked away somewhere. What have you done with your life (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)ᕤ? She texts.

I’ve never heard about this record, but that’s not a surprise. Mom’s made a kaleidoscope of her life. It rotates as undisciplined vignettes of an exploding, enthralling whole. When I see Mom, I pretend I’m looking in the mirror.

I text back, the current record stands at twelve, two more than your ten twirls.

Yeah yeah, inside some LA climate dome. I threw my wand at Malibu Beach, toes dug in our lost future, Courtney Love blasting out your Dad’s JBL Partybox. No one can beat me now. Hey, hey, I knew what to do. I drove away from Malibu.

She’s right. Her record stands forever. Malibu is long gone.

My head jerks towards a motion out my window. A man in gym shorts is standing at my gate. He holds a phone in his hand, a Chick-fil-A bag hangs from his other. I crack the window. He sees me and shouts, “You 2271?”

I shout, “That’s next door.”

He coughs and shouts, “thank you.”

I shout, “you’re welcome.”

His shorts are tan and his shirt is red, but it’s too small and his belly pokes out the bottom, like Pooh Bear. I’ll never see him again. It feels much sadder than it should.

I think of that pill — I see ads for it before episodes of Cowboy Bebop — the one that treats pollution induced depression. It covers harmful endocrine disrupting particulates in lipid coats of many colors. An hour or so after swallowing, you hack up a funfetti wad. It lands on the earth and melts like Dippin’ Dots. The stains on the sidewalk are everywhere. They look like old bruises.

Mom sends me a video of a toddler toddling around her living room. The child bumps the coffee table and plops down, giggling.

Friendly visit from my kindred-soul Jill, brought her granddaughter.

I text back, Cute.

When toddlers fall they fall straight down on their bums, collapsing in like the Twin Towers, cept it doesn’t change everything forever after, or maybe it does and the changes are just too small to know. She keeps look over at me to see if falling is an ok thing to do. Is for you, sweetheart, but old ladies fall like dead trees.

These days Mom works in wildfire management. She chops down the charred stalks of Poderosa and Sugar Pines that roll over miles of Nevada County like an endless veteran’s cemetery, tall and dead. Like them, Mom refuses to retire.

I went to work with her on my last visit. She got me my own hard hat. It’s checkered pink & teal, and has a sticker on it that says, Malibu Barbwire. It came with a matching pair of small leather work gloves.

“You are petite, just like your father,” she said. But Dad was 6 feet tall?

On the ride home I nibbled the sap off my knuckles. I liked the astringent taste. Mom slows down and points out my window at a spot of roadside nothing. Her arm smells salty, like the beach.

“Last August Jill caught a rescue ride right there. She broke her hip, well, shattered it more like. The tree she’d just cut clipped a loose bough on its neighbor goin' down. Sent the thing flyin’ at her like a tomahawk. Busted her phone too, so she had to drag herself through a mile of muck to the road. Got a ride with a weed trimmer, laid in his back seat smoking the first joint she’d smoked since Trump’s third term. I got to the hospital as fast as I could. Turned on her phone and called her son. She asked me, ‘How’d you get my phone to work?’ Thought the branch had busted it. I said, ‘Jesus Jill, you just have to hold the button for three seconds.’”

“Why did the hospital call you?” I asked

“Jill and I been datin’ for a year.”

She has never told me this, but that’s not a surprise. My hard hat was a gift from Jill that Mom forgot to tell me was a gift from Jill.

“Jill’s son is cute, you know, batcha it’d be hot to date a step-brother.” Mom says.

Mom’s neighbor killed a chicken the day before. He gave Mom the bones in exchange for a bit of the broth she’ll brew up with them. They’ve been simmering all day in an amber crock pot with hunks of ginger, turmeric, and galangal she buys from her, Local Root Boy.

We remove the bones, skim the shmaltz, and chop in onions, carrot, celery & sweet potato, while George Harrison sings Hari-Hari out of her old JBL.

I asked what else it needs.

“Something profane,” she said.

We walk to Speedy's Corner Quik and buy two packs of Top Ramen. Back home, I throw the flavor packets in the trash, but Mom picks them out.

“Don’t throw those away,” she said.

She opens an old yellow cigar box and puts the packets inside. A flapper girl in a straw hat lounges across the lid. Mom kisses her on the bum and sets it back down on the shelf next to a picture of Dad wading in the ocean.

“That’s your inheritance.”

Thank you all for reading.

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ʕ – ᴥ – ʔ

Till next time, be well.

— Sean Jewell