MUSINGS | Another month gone and I’m still buried in it.

I have been trying to write more like I talk, or rather, more like the way I talked before parenthood and perpetual exhaustion softened my brain and stole all my friendships. I used to take pride in going off on tangents, in my ability to have those long, meandering conversations that you can have, perhaps only when you’re young.

This is a secret, but I was so pleased with myself, because if you could keep up, or so I thought, I’d always bring it back full circle. People seemed to marvel at this — at my spider-like ability to weave a connection out of thin air. Stay with me, I’d say, making absolutely no sense, and my excitement would buoy us along and then … they’d step back to see the whole, and be dazzled. Ta-da. How winning I was. Or at least, that’s how I felt.

Someone I used to love once called me a “whip-smart teenager”. Then again, someone else once called me a “boring, complaining bitch”. I have been called a lot of things. Lately, only “Mama.” Who I used to be is somewhere under the weight of that word.

It is possible no one was dazzled.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because if I ever had it, it’s gone now, that ability to shine.

There are so many things we bury — secrets, evidence, bad memories, our anger, the dead.

We make mounds to hold it all down, then put heavy stones on top, so nothing can escape, just in case.

At the southeastern corner of the cemetery we found the Hebrew section, each marble or granite monument crowded with smaller stones and pebbles. Little offerings of extra weight. Just in case, just in case.

Animals bury their scat. We bury things that embarrass us, things that smell, and things that we’re done with. We bury what might otherwise poison us with bacterial, infectious shame.

Burial at a crossroads used to be the method for disposing of executed criminals and suicides.

I’ve heard that if you bury your wish in the centre of a crossroads, the Devil will come to grant it. In my yard, moles have made the earth spongy and soft. When I walk over a tunnel, feel myself sink, I am both disgusted and sorry. I don’t want to touch whatever is down there. I hate the moles, with their long, blind faces, and repulsive curving claws, but at the same time, I don’t want to ruin a home. Don’t want to be a homewrecker.

They never emerge. They’re only trying to survive.

There is so little news about the pandemic anymore. I mean, it’s out there, but I rarely see it shared. I think it’s been buried too.

At the old Occult Shop on Vaughn Rd. in Toronto, I once read a spell that said to bury three stones under the light of a full moon at the base of a willow tree. I can’t remember the rest, or the why.

Willow bark is an analgesic with a 3500 year pedigree. It’s known, even today, as “nature’s aspirin”.

My head hurts all the time.

When I was a youthful Tolkien fanatic, one of my favourite things about The Fellowship of the Ring was the escapade among Barrow-downs. It was so deliciously frightening, and senseless.

A barrow is a burial mound, which I understood, but I couldn’t pin down the wight. There was no internet at the time. And anyway, it’s fantasy and Tolkien was already long-dead and entirely unable to retcon.

Now, I ask and immediately find an answer: “A wight, from Old English: wiht, is a person or other sentient being.” Still, it’s confusing. Tolkien’s wight seems both ethereal and material. Frodo cuts off its hand, and though the creature is wraith-like and dispelled by light, the young Hobbit sees that the severed appendage remains, and is wriggling.

Look, if you were white man, particularly an older one, born to a lost century, you could write whatever you wanted to, and it didn’t have to make sense. It would dazzle, regardless.

In the cemetery, my daughter was fascinated by the graves of children.

There were so many babies who lived just a year, or two, or four, or sometimes, according to the weathered stones, for a single, solitary day. Why? she asked, and we talked, yet again, about medicine, vaccines, and survival, as we do nearly every day. She seems to take comfort in repetition. And this story hasn’t changed.

The tops of the littlest markers are often adorned with stone lambs that have become nearly unrecognizable with age, gone soft at the edges, furred with moss, missing ears, and noses, and sometimes entire heads. So often, these small effigies lie next to the graves of mothers dead at nineteen, or twenty, or twenty five. The fathers always seemed to live longer.

If popular fantasy culture has taught me anything it is that subterranean worlds are especially dangerous for children.

A child taken by or lost to the upside down (because the mother wasn’t watching, or was already dead — regardless, it’s her fault), or to Underland, the mines, the caves, or simply the earth, is not going to survive the story, or not unscathed, at any rate.

When you grow up, your heart dies, but what if you grow down?

My daughter used to say that she would never grow up. She would simply reach a comfortable stopping place, turn, and “grow down” — no Neverland required. This was when she was three and afraid of age. At five, her anxieties have mutated.

“How do I know if I’m dreaming?” she asks, and “How do I know this is real?” Every single night, she worries, “Will I have bad dreams? What if I have bad dreams?” Sometimes she’ll ask over and over and over again. I think she’s had only one “bad dream” that she actually remembers in her entire lifetime, but this is of no comfort. And comfort is her goal. She is not afraid, yet, of death.

Often she’ll ask, “What if I get sick?” It is discomfort that concerns her. And doctors. She’s even afraid of band-aids right now, because they “hurt when they tear off.” The size of the hurt doesn’t matter. Even the most minor pains are an anathema.

In the stories, it’s simple. The living don’t belong in the earth, where there are crooked men, and lovely bones, and sinkholes, and caverns, secrets and shame. All the dangerous beings that appear to live within those spaces, within the earth, are not, in the traditional sense at least, alive at all. They are something else entirely. (I must note here the exception of Dwarves and Gnomes, usually of the mining variety — that disappointingly resilient anti-semitic trope.)

I promise, I tell her. I promise you. It’s all I can say. I have tried every other conceivable answer, including the truth, which is that I don’t know. I am her mother, and I don’t know. That made it worse.

What awaits any average living being taken into any fictional underworld is nearly always the same — infection or death. Then again, when you place a seed within the earth — and what is a child if not a seed? — does it not sprout and grow? Like anything, I suppose all of this depends on how you look at it.

We must look on the bright side. That’s what I’m told.

I had to pause as I was writing this to “do bedtime” which is to say, to lie beside my child and answer all of her questions and ease her into sleep.

Tired from her day among the dead, she went down with relative ease. And now I’m back, and I’ve lost the thread a bit. I told you this would happen. Still, an essay makes it easier for me to pretend at the way I used to be. There is time and space for me to go back and remind myself of what I was saying earlier. It’s not quite the same, not dazzling by any means, but it’s the closest I’ve come so far, and it feels more true than the writing I used to do for work.

I’m free to follow any path I’d like among the graves, and if the path peters out, well so what? You knew what you were getting into.

I have a recurrent dream about some sort of tidal-wave-earthquake-storm that exposes the secrets of the mud flats at my family’s imaginary beach house. Sometimes, a great flood swamps the building and leaves behind ankle-deep mud on the floor of the living room, swarming with lost things. At other times, the things are outside, half-buried in the shallows and soft-sand. They are things that feel either valuable, or terrifying, and the tension in the dream comes from their abundance and variety — there are so many things — and from the fact that I know it is up to me to either run around in a panic, trying to gather them up before they are buried again, or to attempt to cover them, lest they be seen.

Sometimes I am frozen, unsure of what to save and what to push back down, and always, always, time is short and the clock is ticking.

I wake up thinking about all the things I’ve buried, and of when we’ll be exposed.