Digging Out Bells: A Summer by Afton Montgomery
A day of summer
My right foot is a right foot in the garden in a black Croc no socks in a great deal of pain.
A day of summer
Neuropathy, the confusion of nerves, comes in a slew of colors. Indigo. Lemon. A cold lavender and a hot marmalade. I don’t walk to the public pool on F and Blake or up Howard to see the peach poppies blooming the size of dinner plates. I don’t lounge in the stalls of peppers at the farmer’s market or wander the arboretum or take myself running or hiking on Moscow Mountain, the place that returns my friends in this town to sanity multiple times a week.
I’ve lived in Northern Idaho for two years, but given what the disease has done to my connective tissue, I’ve never had reason to go up the mountain, and I probably never will,which is not a thing I’m supposed to say because I ought to narrate my body into healing. Language has the capacity to capture a state a person has never experienced, of course, but it’s my imagination in this case that’s unable to stretch to meet the words.
I’ve never been well; I don’t know what it feels like to have a body that’s not in pain.
I have a handicapped badge for my car that I renew every six months at first, and then later only every three years, as permanence sets into my body. I’m still afraid each time I hook it to my rearview, afraid of who might scowl at me in the parking lot as I rise to my feet, my twenty-eight-year-old but unsteady feet, my feet that have lost the ability to regulate what impulses move from them to my brain.
My desire with sentences is to translate something true.
Nerve pain, in all its colors, is ultimately a failure of communication—the sending of a warning message from the foot or elbow or neck to the brain when nothing external warrants that message. Pain is a somatic experience that the brain sends back; pain grows from the brain, shooting outward as prescribed by mixed signals—a faulty call and response.
Trying to justify my body will always make my sentences too long.
At home, I try to write better sentences, if try means: run the sink, make a cup of tea, stare from the couch at the pine out the large front window over a closed laptop or no laptop at all. Better sentences would be staccato with certainty. Instead: languishing trails of narrative that run in slow loops.
I take my body to the yard, where the limey green that’s crept over our raised bed, which stretches from one fence to the other, is not something I planted. A weed, with shields for leaves.
Pain, in my body, does not come in the color green.
A day of summer
I’ve never been well; I don’t know what it feels like to have a body that’s not in pain.
Where I grew up in Colorado, we had no creeping bellflower yet, but we did have roses, which Mom did not plant and did not love. For parts of every year, the bushes got so spindly that they’d wrap the mailbox, and the postal service would refuse to deliver mail—cutting us off from the outside world until we dealt with the “dangerous conditions” of our home. Mom does not have the right kind of hands for roses; her fingers are twice the width of mine, masculine and covered in scars from hot glue guns and kitchen burns. She’d use the French knife Uncle sharpened every Christmas to hack the bushes down to their stumps, both aware she was only encouraging their growth and temperamentally unable to take a daintier approach. When, every few years, she tried to dig them up, she never got much more than thorn gouges in her neck and the backs of her hands.
Mom and I have a disparate relationship to pain. She never notices when she’s sliced into herself or charred her wrist red on a saucepan’s edge, every nick a source of disembodied entertainment—Well! Look at that. —and then ambivalence. Meanwhile, my body curls around its center, collapsing floorward when I use its joints too much in a day for standing upright or twirling a wooden spoon. Even wordless, my shape hosts the femininity of complaint.
Another long sentence: Our pains are different, of course, but I can’t keep from comparing us—Mom has the strength of her family’s men, while I arrived waiflike, like the wisps of my patriline’s girls. I practiced her approach first, taking a kitchen knife to the tops of the bellflower plants colonizing the garden. It wasn’t sharp. The weeds keeled over but hung on at their hinges by threads.
A day of summer
Just as any body that can do harm, creeping bellflower is deceptively pretty, with light purple buds slumping like a wind chime along one side of its stems. Its near-lime green leaves ruffle in any breeze. The weed thrives in heat and cold, drought and monsoon. Last year this time, I’d pulled the bellflowers a handful of times already, and I had a deep tan from the 6 or 7am garden waterings that often took two hours or more. The tomatoes and the cucumbers and the broccoli and the thyme were always so thirsty.
This year, it’s rained near every day in June, and the Weather app’s flood warning decal has settled in for the season at the top of my phone screen. It’s 47 degrees. The back of the yard has leapt skyward in bellflower and nipplewort, which hadn’t made the fall from the raised beds to the lawn yet this time last year.
The internet says the bellflowers will eventually choke out every thread of grass from the fence to the house and that it’s all but impossible to eradicate. Bellflowers are electric, nervous and strange. Most gardeners write that the only effective method is to dig up every single thread of the plant. It has thick, carrot-like roots, though, which live a foot or more underground, and thousands of white hair-thin ones that tangle in every millimeter of soil above and below. Even a half centimeter of root or leaf left behind will regrow the plant, and if they’re allowed to flower, each individual can release 15,000 seeds to the wind.
I get out a trowel and the rusted kitchen mixing bowl my partner Adrien has dubbed our yard bowl. I set them on the stone wall that wraps the raised bed of bellflowers by the fence and, because Adrien is working, slowly walk the push mower in rows around the lawn. I think: I’ll clear the scene of grass before I get to the real work with the weeds. I’ll prepare the stage for my experiment.
If my body were manual, the sentence would be: I mow the lawn.
Instead, electrified and glitching, the sentences go: It is, by far, the most walking I can do in a day—more than the most—but I can’t stop myself. I can walk more than I can walk in a day. I reread the sentence. That’s correct. I can walk more than I can walk in a day, just like a credit card. Tomorrow: debt. Horizontal. My ligaments and joints. Before I’ve done anything at all with the weeds, I return the trowel to the garage, collapse in the shower, and cry my body to sleep.
A day of summer
The employee at the hardware store’s garden department has a body like Venus of Willendorf, a thing I like about them. A pre-mullet they run their hands through and run their hands through. What do you know about creeping bellflower? is what I ask them because there are these blue and yellow delphiniums in the greenhouse that look like giant sweet corn, and they’re all I want. There are these feminine, soft pink larkspurs I’d like to plant without condemning them to a slow choking death by the weed.
That’s rapunculoides, Venus starts. I don’t know if I have the creeping kind, but… They start to walk away.
Oh, no. I don’t want them is what I say, as quickly as I can. I have them. Everywhere.
I wonder if anyone before has come looking for my weed, has paid money for impossibility.
Later, outside the store, my knees and feet shoot through with pain as the lip of the horizon starts sucking the sun back toward the wheat fields. Into my trunk, I load up a pot for my ancho pepper and no delphiniums.
I ought to narrate my body into healing is something I said some other day just like this day. It’s an echo of what I’ve been told. Maybe, though, I’d find more relief in just handing over the yard to the weed, learning to love the matte dangle of its bells. Sometimes I do talk to my foot, ask what it needs. What I’m not saying is I ought to make peace with my pain. But I’m not not saying it either.
Just as any body that can do harm, creeping bellflower is deceptively pretty.
Alone in the car on the short ride home, I throw up my hands.
A day of summer
Now I get up at 3:45 or 4:45 in the morning because I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how to write a sentence in my dissolution. Clauses pile up around me. I’ve been getting sicker this summer, palpably so, and spending hours sitting on the tiled bathroom floor—which I crawl to from the bed—with my jawbone resting on the tub’s edge. Sometimes the cold ceramic can pull me back from puking. The light before the sun comes is blue, paler than the blue of Didion’s grievous blue nights, her gloaming, but more so in what it promises than truly in its shade.
Shade is not really what I mean. Shade, which has to do with a color’s proximity to light, to white, is too neat for this; the morning’s blue is more cyan than the night’s—ultimately a disagreement of hue.
Mostly, I’ve quit em dashes.
Mostly, my sentence structures still are painfully the same.
Commas. Qualifications. The word which, whose appearances I go back through and delete and delete until they are few enough to bear.
My body is only my body until I have to describe it.
This time of morning, my stomach picks a point in my esophagus where it would like to turn itself inside out. It sticks a pin there to remember the crease, irons it with heat.
I put on the kettle and collect my trowel from the garage. The yard bowl sits. Over hours, then days, I fill it with roots of the creeping weed. I dig in the blade and shake soil clods loose. With a fingernail, I part the floss of the bellflower’s root from the black clay.
In the bowl, the pile of leaf and white dries and collects dew and rain and dries again. I burn a slew of sports bra and tank top straps into my shoulders, turning my top half into a Sherwin Williams strip of sunshine.
The sentence, getting clearer, is I know something of compulsion.
A day of summer
A man who managed to get the weed out completely after four years of daily effort from spring till fall is labeled a wild success story by one blog’s comments section. A woman who’s given the same effort for ten still has stalks unfurl from the soil. Sisyphean is the sort of task I like to assign myself. Pain, anyway, can easily be a seed of purpose if only you do anything at all in response to it. Anything at all and response are definitively and importantly not the same as remedy and defense.
Adrien and I go to the fish truck that crosses the whole state of Washington from the coast to reach Moscow every Friday, and we pick out salmon and tuna and eel from the coolers of crushed ice. We roll sushi rice and fish in seaweed all day; we tuck the yard bowl in the collapsing garage, and when our friends fill our yard with their warm noise and cans of beer to eat, the soil of the raised bed behind them looks rich and dark. Open. The two sage bushes I’ve planted with hope are soft in their furry green, and for a night, we are unmarred by the lightning of my feet and my weeds.
A day of summer
On Wednesdays and Saturdays, I drive to a barn seventeen miles southwest, into wheat and lentil fields, where artists make and sell our work. I switch from throwing with a stiff chocolate clay that makes my fingers and neck and ribcage lock up, mechanical, to a white porcelain that’s thin and butter-like. My body can no longer manage the weight of something hard to move.
Now, I make bowls at the barn that look like the bodies of poppies; I pull their petals up and split them by hand. I stain them red-orange with oxides and frits. If thin enough, porcelain lets light come through once it’s fired, like real petals, but not like the clunky petals of the bellflower. A doctor once suggested that using a kick wheel and getting my hands in clay each day would be integral to my body accepting treatment for its disease. He said my cells needed the regulation earth can give. The few other potters who work in the barn mostly hate my finicky porcelain, but the softness of a new bag—twenty-five pounds I still can’t pick up on my own—turns my hands back to hands around it.
I crave these things that give my body back the malleability of a body.
Water does the same, presenting me with lightness, so I lie in the bathtub twice a day for two hours each, grading students’ papers and giving my bones a chance to float. Some days, when I am not taking doctors’ suggestions about grounding then wading—when I instead have something to prove to myself about both my pain and my tolerance of it—I remain in the tub after I’ve pulled the plug, feeling every ounce of my weight return to my frame, leaden, while the water takes itself from me.
Today, I drive myself to the public pool to watch the teenagers flip and belly flop with pride from the diving board, and I stand in the water, interlacing my hands in the warm field of my hair. Today, I let the pain take itself from me instead.
A day of summer
Pain punctuates.
In strange places.
Refracts.
A day of summer
I watch myself punish the body in small ways or play out games like this months-long fight with the bellflower. I call the body the body and refuse it the communion of my.
Something about compulsive acts rings not of goodness but of penance, and perhaps that’s the closest, just now, I can reach to the correct sound.
After an early morning pulling roots, I go inside and tweeze my bikini line one single hair at a time on the tile floor. The thinnest of them hurt the most, clinging to the tiny pores from whence they come. I do not wish to inflict injury on my body. I do not wish to inflict injury on my body, only to engage with any power at all in the conversation it and I have every day about what is tolerable and what is possible.
It’s not that I don’t know I’m practicing harm. But the body is loud.
I go back to the yard; I talk to the knotted, thread roots of the bellflower. At the far end of the lawn, its leaves—those I haven’t touched yet—flicker and glow. A fragment of the sentence is trying to change our narrative, the narrative we’re building, but I don’t know if the sentence’s subject and verb are “I am” or “we are” or “the weed is.”
Together, perhaps we might come up with something more kind.
I do not curse the weed. I compliment its tenacity and adaptability, the way it can make flowers from soil that’s almost entirely clay. I do this aloud. I ask if it might be willing to lend the space it occupies to some flower more delicate, less independent. I start every sentence in the paragraph with I and have to remind myself to listen for the response, even if I is important here, returning a voice to my voice.
Still, accord or amity with pain cannot depend upon ignoring the pain’s sound.
Might the weed be willing to trust that the seeds it’s made will still come up in more rugged places, will be freer, if it lets this one alone?
With the same tweezers I use for pubic hair and eyebrows in the house, I sort through the soil, plucking tiny root pieces my hands have left behind. I pile them into the steel bowl where they can commune.
The one time I mistakenly toss a worm into the bowl with the rest, I follow through on the terrible impulse to dump the whole thing soil-ward—saving the one at the cost of the whole. The ground, if it is to be healthy, needs the slick creatures’ aerating movement. If I am ever to be able to harvest some of the clay in this soil to turn into bowls for soup and mugs for tea in the artists’ barn out in the middle of the wheat field, the worms’ castings must first aggregate its particles.
How much work I’ve undone.
But the sentence presses in. Unless this, too, is part of the work.
A day of summer
The yard bowl sits through every day in the sun. When I walk it, finally, around the side of the house to the street, stalks shoot from its sides. Even with the heat. Even though it looks bone dry on top, a cow patty, the bellflowers have made something of their shards and grown from steel.
What I’m not saying is I ought to make peace with my pain. But I’m not not saying it either.
Together, the roots and I collect the trash bin from the curb and roll it slowly, my feet shuffling and swollen, back to its place. I dump what I can into the bin, soggy and molding detritus from the bowl’s bottom sliming my hands. Over the next week before the truck comes again, it’ll grow more in this dark plastic heat hole. Sprouts will clamber against the plastic sacks and coffee grounds we’ll toss on top.
Back at my post by the bellflowers, I wait on hold with the City of Moscow power department to ask after the map of pipes and electric wiring buried in our yard. A foot or more underground, I’d struck plastic-coated power lines, thick and knotted together. My trowel prodded at them, slipping its blade between and among the tangle, perhaps seeking a shock or a silent, relieved celebration. The hold music is silent; there is no hold music.
My anger rolls in red, a rainstorm, and the green of leaves I haven’t reached yet grows greener in contrast.
The phone slips from the place I pinned it between shoulder and ear and falls into the yard bowl with all of its slime. I give up, tooth off a garden glove to press end on the non-music. . Here is the place where I re-tuck the electrical cords into the clay with the carrot-like taproots that I can see below them but can’t get to. Where I talk to the bellflowers through a cramped stomach. From underneath the cords, they will lightning out, casting glimmers of root toward the ground’s surface.
I wonder if present palpable harm—the risk of exposed electricity—is always worse than future harm, which is guaranteed but has yet to occur. Everything, anyway, is electrified.
I hurt my body to do this work.
The sentence is ambiguous.
Is the hurt present or preordained?
In the bowl, I hope my weed will swallow the phone, swallow the City of Moscow and its silent hold music and the utility company and my pain and causation and clauses and charged waves of light.
In the bowl, for a moment, I love my weed entirely.
A day of summer
In the bath again, evidence of my work in the weeds twirls around me. A twig, a shard of grass. This is why, I know, people who don’t like baths don’t like baths: their own detritus ensconcing them. It’s one reason I do. I don’t mind the snails of my own blood that slide around the bowl for one week a month. As a child, I watched Mom pull her own out of her with a finger, quickening the process of dropping one’s lining. I think to take a handful of my dad’s ashes from the mason jar on my desk into the water with me but don’t want to risk what I’d lose down the drain. A body so finite, dwindled to so little that remains here.
A day of summer
This time of the morning, the light comes in the window blue, and I understand Seurat and pointillism for the first time. Adrien’s back is bare, made of pinpricks of pale grey-blue and muted indigo and a surprising deep red that I squint and rub my eyes at. And black too.
Black? is what I ask myself. Mom taught me to ask what the colors really are.
The wall beyond Adrien is everything the same as she is, just a shade lighter.
Last week I spent almost four hours mowing the grass, which was two feet tall when we came back from a trip to Colorado, according to the red dash I drew on my leg with my fingernail to measure its height. Took tens of small breaks, sitting on the bricks by the back door.
A day like that one turns me horizontal for several after.
Because of my immune system, I can draw anything I like on my skin, and it will stay for twenty minutes or an hour, depending on how upset my body is. When nettles from the yard sting the bottoms of my feet, my soles turn pillow-like and purple; I can walk the venom up my legs with a nail. The color of my marks is a white-orange first, then pink, cool red. I try not to touch myself with anything pointed, except on the days I draw a map of the weed on my thigh and the side of my hip with a bobby pin, coloring the thick taproots under the thin root strings with my finger or the plastic edge of our box of floss.
A day of summer
The dog’s new favorite treat is patties of wet, mulched grass, and waiting for her to puke emerald bile is a particularly interstitial way to inhabit time. Nipplewort almost choked out our Russian sage bushes while I wasn’t looking. The creeping bellflower feels like insanity, or I am insanity with my hands tangled in it. I don’t have my glasses on, and its green is the first color to break away from fuzzy blue in the morning. The leaf spears come up from the earth easy, but their snaking remains seem giddy, laughing.
I dig up roots. I throw the orange ball and then throw the orange ball for the dog. We are all just doing something to do something with ourselves. At night, I listen to sentences piling up one after another until my memory yells that it’s one too many to hold up. I stumble from the bed to the desk to get them out of my head.
I fear that my sentences will add up to nothing, monotony in which the whole is no sum, just a repetition of its parts. I fear this of my summer, of my weed, of my body’s pain. But the simplicity of monotony is also, I suppose, what I want. Else why would I be here, in the yard. When there is no solace to be found in extricating meaning, perhaps there is solace in meaning’s lack.
Sunrise has been creeping toward 7am. Fire season looms, and earth’s spinning refuses my artificial standing still.
Something, everything, has to change. Sentences link end to end instead of lying flat atop each other and still. I take my body out to my weeds.
A day of summer
I left my nice trowel out to get rained on. The creeping bellflower creeps. Disregard for my objects is the sort of thing my dad taught me I should hate myself for. It’s also the sort of lesson he said, when he was shrinking from cancer, that he regretted passing on. Stories are harder to dig out than never to plant.
When there is no solace to be found in extricating meaning, perhaps there is solace in meaning’s lack.
Last night, the lightning chased lightning until she caught herself. The two danced. Somehow, Adrien slept. The dog shook and shook. I tried to hold her still enough to come back to her soft body. The thunder sounds like a garbage can pushed endlessly down an echoing alley, but our alleys here are only black-brown gravel, no concrete, no noises but leashes jingling, boots going crunch.
Without wanting to, I’ll hear the way these sounds dissolve into fractions of themselves when the snow comes. The snow will come, so soon, after the season of smoke. I clutch the dog into my belly and ribs and wonder if this might be what pregnancy feels like—pregnant people, always clutching their abdomens—permitted for a period to caress their own bodies. I wonder if my bellflowers’ leaves will be able to breathe when the sky is red-orange and we clamp the windows shut with tape. I pray for them, my bellflowers. My pain.
A day of summer
6:20 in the morning. I was up till 2, reading. I start the day now in the act of the same, fuzzy eyed with Doris Grumbach’s memoir of one day, as I’ve started so many days this year. I take her from the library and take her from the library. I leave my little shred of paper in page 93 because no one else takes her out. I’ve not yet passed 93. I keep beginning again. She’s caught the chipmunk she caught in one of those no-kill traps tens of times now. I don’t know how her twenty-four hours of ordinariness ends, on Billings Cove where she’s lived for years. Time in these pages is both long and short. Eventually, Doris passes the time where I’ve left her.
A day of summer
I should be packing for Adrien’s birthday in Portland; for the writing conference on the Olympic Peninsula, packing my shower shoes; packing the tent and the sleeping bag and the tarp, the swimsuit for the sea. All of my camping things are in a pile by the fence, getting dirty, getting nettle hairs tucked into them.
Naturopathic doctors sometimes use nettle stings to treat nerve pain—a shock of light in the body, a rush of blood to the area. My body is far beyond tolerating such therapy but applies its ethos: pain for pain. My feet have gathered nettle stings in their soles all summer, where my body can’t rid itself of the poison, and so the stings last for weeks instead of just one day. My white cells rail against heat and pressure, exhausted in the face of poison; my heels and the big part of the sole below the toes swell indigo purple and deep and wide. I have bruises on my knees because when I wake up in the night, I crawl across the tile to the toilet instead of walking on my bloated feet.
Still, I make the cross of the yard to the bellflowers. The bed is the clearest it’ll ever be, as we’re leaving town. When we return, fall will be riding smoke season into the valley just south of here. The sun will come down earlier and rise at a different angle to the tomato plants. The tangled hairs of root will regrow the square yards I’ve spent weeks pinching them from while I’m away.
In a moment, the sky is too big here, the neighbor’s pine holding too much time.
I grab at the patch of remaining bellflower leaves above ground, ruthless. I’ve moved methodically inch by inch, flattening chunks of cakey soil into pancakes that split to release every torn tube of root for the plucking, but now I’m lightheaded and thick in the jaw; I nearly dump the metal bowl of roots into the grass instead of taking it to the bin. Who cares. My body spins or I spin in it, a side effect of a new medication that the doctor says is too effective to stop taking, a side effect of pain.
There are leaf shards in the crumby clay, torn in my rush. My nails are short and unhelpful. Adrien blessedly calls the dog in from barking, tells her Mom is busy with her bellflowers, doesn’t rush me to the things I ought to be doing instead. This is a moment when I love my partner more than ever before; I feel time stop around us, just for a second, as her voice becomes the thing protecting my body and reality from the one that presses in on it. Though we’ll only live here nine or ten more months—though we’ll pack up our boxes before it’s hot again next summer season—she reminds our dog of the rules of this yard’s world, in which the acts of my insanity are allowed and even held sacred, even if she has no reason to agree to their value. I am studying masochism if nothing else, and we both know it, even if we hope I’ll get to study what’s on its other side. Everyone always gets the definition for positive feedback loop wrong, like it’s a good thing instead of a spiral into oblivion. I must be allowed to conduct my experiment—we both know this—an experiment that demands the presence of my body in space, feet on the ground removed from and required for the puzzle that moves me in any direction.