July 17th: Jennifer Lunden
My to-do list is always impossibly long. I make each day’s list on a page in a 5.5” x 3.5” notebook. Lately, the fifteen college-ruled lines aren’t enough, and I squeeze more items between the lines and in the rare small spaces after short entries like “laundry” and “balance checkbook.” In a few months I am moving far away from this country, and so the list also includes items like “photograph and post instruments for sale” and “Duolingo.” Every day I should be practicing my French, but some days I run out of steam before that particular item can be crossed out.
My dog’s name is Maisie, and my list commands me to “walk Maisie x2.” My husband takes her for her longest walk first thing every morning. He and Maisie and our two cats are staying behind. He doesn’t want to leave, and I can no longer stay.
I think of the people being pulled off the streets and out of their homes by men in masks who won’t show ID or warrants, and then shipped without due process to detention centers—i.e. prisons, i.e. concentration camps—in other countries or to the newly constructed Alligator Alcatraz in the Florida swamps.
I think of the Supreme Court justices who ruled that a United States president, unlike the rest of us, can sometimes be immune from the law. Our president wants to be king. He ordered a military parade for his birthday.
His party stands with him. The legislative majority just signed a sweetheart deal that hands tax cuts to the wealthy while ripping health insurance away from almost 8 million people.
I have stood by the side of the road with my sign. I have called my legislators.
***
I arrive at the river just in time for the thunderstorm. I forgot to check the weather report. I have just thirty minutes to swim. It’s almost three o’clock. The sky is dark, the parking lot empty. I have therapy at four.
I hurry to my spot at the tip of the promontory. Thunder booms and raindrops plunk into the water, each strike rippling outward. There’s no lightning. Where is the lightning? Where there’s thunder, isn’t there always lightning?
The air is thick and smells of rain and soil. I strip down to my bathing suit and lower my body into the water.
I used to be afraid of sharks in this river, a physical impossibility thanks to the dam, not to mention the freshwater. Now I look up at the sky and worry about lightning bolts.
But why would the lightning choose me, low here in the water, when there are so many tall trees nearby? Alternatively, could its electricity shoot through roots and down into the water to electrocute me?
There are so many things I don’t know.
***
I don’t even know what to eat anymore. I pick up foil tins of shepherd’s pie or stuffed cabbage at the neighborhood market. I eat too many pastries, spoon too much ice cream into my mouth.
***
I swim the front crawl and the breaststroke, count the dragonflies (three) zooming through the rain, listen to the water pummeling itself below the dam, watch the sky turn darker and then light again. In the river my body remembers its animal self.
***
Later the dog, Maisie, our Great Dane, comes to my den to ask for her nighttime walk. Passing a neighboring porch, I think I overhear an African woman comment to her friend about the “gros chien,” and think, “not large, not gross… grande.”
Maisie stops in her tracks to sniff the weeds. I wonder, if I were the chatty type, how I might explain her to the woman. In English: “She likes to smell all the dogs who’ve passed this way.” From my small vessel of French, I puzzle together words I know: “Elle aime le parfum de chien,” which I think may translate to “She loves perfume of dog.”
Maybe in France, by dint of my dearth of words, I will be funnier than I am here.
***
I did not go through my shoes and clothes. I did not sort through files of papers. Other than “Elle aime le parfum de chien,” I didn’t practice my French. I ate a chocolate mousse bomb I bought on the way to the river and stored in my cooler while I swam. I ate it in bed, surrounded by piles of papers and towers of books, most of which will not come with me when I leave. The chocolate coating cracked under my teeth, and my teeth sliced through the mousse inside, and the mousse was soft on my tongue, and the chocolate—sweet, so sweet—went down so easily.
Jennifer Lunden (she/her) is the award-winning author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. She is currently working on her next book, which is about the people and animals she meets when she swims in Maine’s Presumpscot River.
