These Things We are Trying to Say

Wind shakes my windows at 5 a.m., thrashes the trees back and forth until the limbs give up their leaves, unleashing them in jumbled clusters that flail and skitter across the glass. There are no rhythms here. Just erratic gusts that swell and surge without cadence, whipping across the power lines and our Aspen’s broken wind chimes.

Southbound coal trains pass over the bridge, leaving behind faint tremors that roll through the fields and scatter through my spine. Sound waves disintegrate in the sweeping air. I am drifting in and out of dreams, listening to gloomy train whistles unfold like long, shattered sighs pushing through crackling static.

Day breaks slowly through this haze. I wake up and go outside where drops of early morning sunlight trickle through floating prairie dust and fade the last of the lingering stars. Black birds strung across the telephone wire, doves on a chain-link fence. Paper-thin leaves falling from the Locust trees, dropping into the gutters stained dull red from crushed crabapples. Flecks of yellow all over the black asphalt.

Behind me, an endless stream of cars and trucks pour out from the West, a river of headlights flowing over the old two-lane highway that weaves a path through the prairies.

Next door, the sound of dishes clinking in the sink drifts from my neighbor’s open window. A very large family from China moved in to the house over a year ago. Ten people under one roof, though they are rarely ever home all together. They work constantly: morning shifts, afternoon shifts, graveyard shifts. Always, someone coming and someone going, aprons slung over their shoulders or tied around their waists. Car doors opening and closing. They barely speak English, so we just wave to each other instead. They are all usually very tired, their eyes drained and fatigued. But still, they smile and wave every time we cross paths. We smile and wave. Smile and wave.

The family’s elderly grandmother takes care of the house, and I am sure that she is the one who is in the kitchen this morning, washing and clinking dishes in the sink. Out of everyone who is living next door, I interact with her the most. She doesn’t speak a word of English, but we still talk to each other during the day. I think she is incredibly lonely. We stand together at the fence that divides our yards. I hoist my fat cat up to my shoulder so she can scratch his ears while she talks and talks to me in her own language. I can’t understand anything that she says and she can’t understand me. All of these things we are trying to say become lost in the shape of our words. But I still listen. And she still listens. Sometimes when she speaks, she puts her hand on her chest and covers her heart with her fingertips. Sometimes, she will pause midsentence and tilt her neck to stare at the pale grass beneath her feet, then rest her forehead against her palm. It breaks my heart in a way that’s hard to describe.

A heavy, dull ache deep inside my chest. Maybe that is a way to describe it.

I feel the same heaviness when I think of my maternal great grandmother who left Norway and immigrated to America in the late 1920’s. I never met her, but I know her story. She had just given birth to my grandmother when she first arrived in the Eastern U.S. She was a young mother who only spoke Norwegian and could not understand English; she was the wife of a cold, aloof husband who was hardly ever around; she was alone most of the time; she was friendless; she was an alcoholic. But more than anything, she was very afraid.

I have only one photograph of my great grandmother, taken just before she left her home in Norway for the United States. She was beautiful. Pale skin and dark red hair. She is not smiling in the photograph; her jaw resolutely fixed in an expression resembling courage. But her eyes betray her. Deep blue and wide, hesitant, focused on far away worries. She was very afraid.

When my grandmother turned two years old, my great grandmother left her in a Chicago orphanage. My grandmother stood in the entrance as her mother walked away. A cold wind swept over the city streets and merged with the white noise of traffic as countless voices speaking an unfamiliar language swallowed the sound of her mother’s black high heels clicking against the gray sidewalk. Her footsteps slowly fading away. Vanishing. She was very afraid.

A heavy, dull ache deep inside my chest.

Late in the afternoon, just before the sun starts to set, I am taking the laundry off of the back porch clothesline. Next door, my neighbor steps out onto her own porch and leans against the rust-red railing. Wrapped up in her wool sweater, the hem of her beige house dress shifting against her knees, wisps of black and gray hair brushing across her forehead. She folds her arms around her stomach and stares out at the horizon cut jagged with the outline of distant mountains.

Welcome to the American Prairies. So much wind and so much dust. Steel railroad tracks carrying coal trains, telephone wires carrying voices. Long stretches of emptiness in every direction. Home is somewhere else. Somewhere far away from here.

Dry laundry draped over my arm, clothespins dangling all along the line. A flock of birds flying across the dimming slate blue sky. My neighbor walks across her porch.

She sees me and waves.

Our lingua franca.

I wave back.