Hummingbird Before Dinner

After two months of good weather, the rain has finally arrived. It is sifted and fine, like a gentle snow, and out in front of the house, the creek has turned to an ice cold barrelling-down. The sound of the pounding creek reminds me of last summer--like everything up here does, and maybe always will--and it reminds me of how much easier this season is, with Anna's diagnosis no longer a diagnosis, just a piece of us, like a small tag inside a shirt with fine print I don't usually lean in to read. Anna is crawling fast now. She gets her knees right under her and asserts herself onto stool rungs and Zaley's back while she's doing a puzzle. Anna likes to play with piles of clothing (no shortage of those), and she's fascinated by her shirt sleeves, pulling her arms inside them and staring into the wrist opening with amazement. She had a "language burst," as AVTs call them, erupting one day, during church, into yadadadadaDADADADA, and Zaley and I almost had to excuse ourselves we were giggling so hard.

There is one week still left in July, but my mind is already on Colorado. What our kale might look like, where we will eat, how late we will sit on the porch while the girls play in the driveway, when my family and Luke's will come over to see how the girls have changed. I am counting my eggs before they hatch, I know. But when the rain started coming, my heart started leaving here. I forget, during the stretches of summer when Zaley can ride her bike at 4PM or we can load up and walk down to Eagle Beach in the long hours before dinner, that this place changes drastically when the skies turn white and covered and we pass hours figuring out how many items can be made into tools that vets or dentists would use.

While Zaley tinkers around my body, fixing any malady she can think of (casting a broken foot, extracting a newborn baby, sucking out an infection), I watch the pace of the rain change outside the window. I think of rain tomorrow, rain last summer, rain next summer. I imagine landslides, seek the slightest swaying of trees when I look up into the fog-frosted forest you can see through the high windows of our front door. I picture tsunamis, if we'd have time to drive higher, if our house is high enough up that the water would stop before it reached us. Luke says there's not going to be another landslide and that tsunamis come every thousand years, but the anxiety of last summer's disaster never left me.

"Is three inches in a day, like, a lot-a lot?" I ask Luke, after hearing this weekend's forecast.

"Not like last summer, if that's what you mean. That was six or seven inches in one day."

"Is the rain here to stay, do you think?" because the weather in Alaska makes a child out of me.

"No," Luke says, dismissive about the rain but patient about my obsession. "We have LOTS of time here still. There will be more sun."

This gives me both dread and hope about the rest of fishing season.

Sometimes I wonder if I would be happier if we didn't come here. But then I think of how bored I might be at home, how the heat might make for malaise, and how young children make the romantic side of malaise (lying around, reading and drinking, which I was really good at in New Orleans) inaccessible. Also, I think of the dangers of Denver, and while there aren't earthquakes or landslides or tsunamis, now there is the imminent threat that it's a big city inhabited by human beings.

This summer, with a horrific act of violence, it seems, every time I turn on the radio, I can see why people would come to Alaska and never leave. We don't lock doors, we leave the keys in the ignitions of our cars. We don't even have working locks in the cars. If you try to push down the orange switch that would lock a typical car door, ours firmly resists, as though it knows its uselessness. There's crime here, but it's quiet, and mostly confined to drug users and drunks. I never really think about our safety here, just our survival.

I've been working on a long piece about cmv that took a month out of me. I sent the girls with friends or babysitters and sat in the library for a few hours a few times a week, looking up from my computer to the stretch of sea where the boats come back in past the lighthouse and the sailboats and the old white two-story which used to house the newspaper and now sits sea-salted and peeled down at the tip of a rocky spit. I sent the piece out. It has already been rejected. I sent it out again. I am not sure it is the story anyone will want to tell. It is amazing what I found out or had more strongly confirmed: that most med students don't know about cmv, that congenital cmv is the most common infection at birth in the U.S., that if I had known to avoid Zaley's saliva while pregnant, it is almost certain Anna would not be deaf.

But lately, with the article behind me and Anna reaching milestones I wasn't sure she'd ever reach, I find myself putting cmv temporarily to rest. Like a virus does in actuality, my focus on cmv flares then recedes. Anna's changes make the latter happen readily, at least right now. She sprouted a tooth! She's saying BA-BA-BA. She is able, sometimes, to pull herself up in such a way that she stands, even if it's just for a second and even if it's just because she locked her legs out in the way her OT's say she's not supposed to do.

Our AVT says we are doing everything right even though I don't tell our AVT that some mornings, I'm too lazy to make all the Ling sounds (AH, EE, OO, MM, SS, SHH) over and over again, and I don't tell her about the other half-hour some days when I take Anna's cochlear implants off and she scoots around like a silent little caterpillar eating grapes off the floor and I don't have to worry about her chewing her devices, she can just be the now-mobile, deaf baby that she is. When she has her implants off, I still look at her and marvel that she cannot hear a thing. How different her existence will always be.

When the girls wake up from their naps today, we will go to the grocery store because what else do you do on a rainy Sunday evening in Sitka? I'll make the barbecue-basil burgers my mom makes at home. I'll think of my mom tonight, like I do every night, when I'm making dinner and I think of how women have done this forever: the hardest job--the home, the kids, the meals, the kids, the home--a cycle that has repeated since the beginning of time and that repeats every day in our little house here, some days more smoothly than others, some days with more precipitation, but always in the same ongoing and invisible communion of all mothers getting through all days.

Thinking of my mom--and all the moms--is a salve similar to knowing that the same prayers we say are being said at the same time of day the world over. These thoughts keep me from feeling so fully that we live on an island. The meat is thawed, I can hear the baby bubbling towards being awake. Just now, a hummingbird hovered at the window, the unthinkable speed of her wings undeterred, I guess, by all this rain.