It's possible

I walk the trail behind the hospital everyday on my lunch break. It snakes along a steep ravine, thick with mud and leaf litter and rusted bottle tops. There’s one giant cottonwood that’s been shedding since the first October wind storm, branches like witch fingers all buckled and angry at the joints. Today it was raining, not a hard rain, but dependable. I picked up a bud and squeezed the bright orange resin onto my finger; it smelled like the time we found a tuft of elk hair stuck to willow at the river, right before I sprained my ankle and hobbled funny for months. An easy time compared to this morning. This morning in the room before sunrise with Ev holding baby in her arms, lifting baby to her lips, blessing baby’s cool face with never-enough wet kisses. With every step in the mud I tried to stomp out a tear, as if contact with our sloshing earth might again unleash something wild within me. But it wasn’t until later, eating supermarket sushi in my windowless office, that  a few were shed. Just three or four. How fucking mundane. Last night Brooks and I were talking about how our lives keep going even in the working presence of so much absence. We agreed it’s not a distraction but the point. So between bites of salmon avocado roll I texted Em, solidified plans for Saturday, flirted a little, drank lukewarm tea. By the end of the day it was dark out again and Ev was making jokes about kidnapping her dead child, her dead child who rested then like a porcelain doll wrapped tight in a red quilt while we laughed at the back of the room behind the drawn curtain. We went on like that for a while, talking and laughing and crying. It’s possible. Even laughter on the worst day. It’s possible.