Mourningtown
History
My family has lived here for as long as settlers have lived here. My parents purchased the deed to this particular square of land the year I was born, and lived in the house located here until wildfires burnt it to the ground in 2016.
The lot sat empty for a year, then we rebuilt a small house in the footprint of the previous one. My brother lived in this house until his sudden death in February of 2020.
In January of 2022, I moved back with my spouse and our 3-month-old baby. The land has been totally transformed by fire and time and trauma. I move through a remembered dream landscape, my current life happening one step up and to the left of my past life.
2. Process
I’ve been a farm worker for the last ten years, and know how to relate to a place through cultivation, planting and harvesting and eating,. Here, I’m afraid to plant anything because an entire house and 25 years of its contents melted into the ground where the yard is now.
I think of myself as a botanist, and it’s been hard for me to turn toward alternate modes of knowing. As a lifelong seasonal worker, it’s also hard for me to think about a timescale where nothing will visibly happen for years. It’s all hard. Every time I step in or out of the door I think about my brother here alone and lose my breath. At least sawing down mimosa trunks and cutting blackberry brambles is hard in an obvious way. This is the work I do when I can’t figure out a path to get to any of the other work.
3. Transects
I think of the specific interventions I’m producing here as transects - choosing an arbitrary line, or points on a line, and looking at them as representative cross-sections in time. At this point, my grief is diffuse and intangible. At this point, it persists if you know how to read it. At this point, it is impossible to ignore.
I’m experimenting with ways to depict an image that changes over time, through encounter, in the same way a memory changes through repeated recall. I want to preserve my brother’s memory here, his impact, without leaving his ghost trapped or exposed. How can I fix and depict his image while holding a pocket of privacy and fluidity, his life’s work of refusal and undefinition?
How do I do the same thing for myself? I have a towering mountain of grief that is also a regular mountain no matter how I feel about it. How do we live on the mountain?