It is quiet save for the nearby trains that pass through the next block and along the nearby waterways. They announce their arrival enthusiastically and with haste. Each time they pass I look up to see them in their goings and note their direction of either east or west.

Each time they pass I think quickly of my great-grandfather whom I did not know and who came to an abrupt end after having dined at a restaurant in San Jose and, upon attempting to cross the railroad tracks in his pickup truck, was struck down by the oncoming train.

He was a man with another family. I was told that my great-grandmother Ernestina went to the court in San Francisco to ascertain what was due to her upon his death and found out that his wife and children were his next of kin. And as he and Ernestina were never married, that was that.

I’ve seen one picture of this man whose stakes in my origins were forever unbeknownst to him and whose memory involuntarily comes to the mind of a great-grandchild each time a train passes by.

The Union Pacific railroad near my garden passes by waterways and one side of the tracks, beached in the water, is a four-masted Schooner that is now a popular spot for bird watchers.

Nearby is the home where Joe DiMaggio was born, which burned down but was rebuilt with his historical marker. He was buried in Colma and one time my uncle Bob, the son of my train-stricken great-grandfather, took me there and showed me all of the bats and baseballs that continue to honor his resting place.

It’s not far from Ernestina’s grave which is also not far from Rick and Linda’s graves; my father and mother.

I do not know where my great-grandfather was buried.

My neighbor to the left is Beauchamp Oil, a small oil & construction company and is itself quiet and has only a few trucks rolling in the morning and that is where the road ends.

Above us to the left is a hill which sits the old “Pioneer Cemetery” with the first inhabitants of westward expansion forever resting in the mound up there. One of the grave markers says, ‘My Papa,’ and that is all.

I think of my own father when I eat the apples from the tree in the garden. I think he would have liked that. But instead, I share them with neighbors to the right of me, an Indian-American couple with a toddler that I actually wish I heard more of.

When I was exercising the woman across the street spotted me and came right on over and started chatting. Said her name was Anna and she had a boot on her foot from an accident trying to climb into her tall bed one night in which her husband paid little mind because it happens often. She does not live in either of the buildings that are the bases of construction companies but she spends so much time there that she seems like a neighbor.

It’s hard to get my dog to leave the garden nowadays. Her whole life she liked going places and going for her walks we call “little adventures” but apart from her walk during the day, she wants to stay home. And she doesn’t want to go inside, she doesn’t want to go outside the gate, she just wants to lie in the grass or if it’s hot she likes to dig herself a little hole in the soil underneath the upstairs deck where its cool and her belly stays cool. She grows old, she grows old, but that is not why she doesn’t want to leave the garden. It’s her first real yard and it is quite peaceful. And it is new.

And Maggie, that lived here before me, and planted the roses that come in through the night. When the plumes of dust rose with the evening breeze from the deserted street in front of the white picket fence, what stirred from her life then? I won’t try to guess.

But I will water her rose bushes and write from her chair in this quiet, together, with all of the stirrings and all of them that come to visit.

I grew in gold mining country.

I also explored the wetlands, the marshes, and the John Muir house—the nature boy himself.

I reflect on this as the students I teach explore Gettysburg battlefields, civil war medicine museums, the White House, and Philpot Street where Frederick Douglass learned to read.

They don’t experience the delta; the turbulent sapphire water that buoyed me in all directions my young life. The abrupt shade and splitting noise of the Bay Bridge. The smell of piss and carnitas when walking up San Carlos Street in the mission district. They won’t experience these things.

I experience sticky summers that drench me while suffocating me all the same. By suffocate I mean drown; the air is so dense it nearly drowns me in hot mist.

The trees are wide and crooked and still. There are no waving palm trees or redwoods. There are white pines and willows. I like the corkscrew willow. There’s a street called Elm Street that is lined with beech trees and not one elm.

I am surrounded by green and sometimes open fields of it. Cherry blossoms really are beautiful, a field trip worth taking.

There are no smells. Nothing overwhelming like China Town or my childhood friends houses. Or even the smell of my mom’s kitchen when she made big pots of menudo—if you’re wondering, the smell is devastatingly repulsive. No one’s cooking here smells repulsive. Which I offer you is, in turn, repulsive.

I experience sunsets that are deep cavernous orange, that plunge into the sharp black line of horizon, and are seemingly old.

The dawns are old, too, as they rise with the same hot mist that drowns me.

I thought about my dad and the man that handled him now. And how did they handle him? His hair which was thin but not balding and still full of color and easily slicked back, but if left uncombed would stick to the sides of his forehead. They had to comb it back. Someone would have to comb it back or else it would be as it was when he just woke up and was sleeping on one side for a while. When we camped, he would jump in the lake and come out and slick his hair back himself. But he can’t do that now.

I thought about his feet, which ached him and of which had no more toe nails left because of the diabetes or perhaps that’s just how his toes were. Even his fingernails were cut so close down they were barely there anymore. His feet were white and they had hair on the toes. I wondered about the man that put a toe tag on my father’s toe not really knowing anything about him. And he would be alone there. My father was never alone in his life.

I noticed the sudden quiet in the car as a rainbow appeared in the sky. There was sniffling and I probably was too or else I was all cried out by then. We pulled into an empty parking lot and the sun was more out than before. It was the weekend and we were picking up my father’s belongings but there weren’t many people in the building so we had made arrangements for someone to be there and we waited for him. The sidewalk was wet and there were still autumn leaves on the ground and most of them were yellow and there were some lighter dry spots of concrete where the sun spent more time. We waited a while and a man came and said things and then he left.

When we got home to my parents’ home with my dad’s things, my mom opened his wallet, and the contents were still soaked in the water that drowned him. She lay it all out on their bed and it took a long time to dry. There were five twenty dollar bills, his license, his fishing license among other things. He had a lot of tickets for unlawful parking or speeding or anything else he could have gotten in trouble for. I have one of those twenty dollar bills he died with in my own wallet some fourteen years later. I did not view my father’s body, my mother did. She dressed him in his nicest Pendleton flannel and she rolled him his last joint and gave him his last bit of whiskey and then he was cremated and put into an urn the color of his ’56 ford pickup: Burgundy.

My father’s memory stops here and leaves me now, it stops at him fishing and water and that’s his tomb, that is my tomb for him.

Our first date was wrapped in text messages and catch-me-if-you-can flirting that predetermined the pace of the night. He picked me up outside of the firehouse in a small sports car from the 90s that was the color of midnight. I learned later that it was not his, that he borrowed it from his friend for the evening. He showed off the speed, driving me around the town, up and down old country roads that I was not accustomed to. The joy he was having made me joyous and while he didn’t tell jokes, I was laughed right onto his front porch. It was not his front porch, he lived with his father and stepmother in a small shack-like home barely noticeable for the darkness of trees and woods. The house was seemingly made of the same wood as the fence line and there were buckets filled to the brim with dried cement holding various broken things up that in turn held the integrity of the home. It was not clean nor tidy and it was well-lived in rather than cared for.

That summer would have me and keep me to herself like Calypso. I was swallowed into it, into the heart of a Maryland summer set with carnivals, fire departments, old surnames, hush puppies, Camden Yards, Appalachian moonshine, silly nicknames, and I fell in love for the first time in a smothering hot pizza stand. I was sweating throughout the carnival and the sun had not shown itself that day through the thick of the clouds, threatening rain. In the back fields of the fire house were stands that have always been and will always be, serving their purpose with each new year and each new layer of white paint. What came with the carnival was a Ferris Wheel and lines of new stands in blue tarp that had various games and prizes. My job was in the pizza stand along with two other girls that cashiered with me. Making the pizza was a job for the boys. As the day became evening and the permeance of the heat on the old wooden shack slowed down a bit, I was making a sale with a customer and I felt him watching me. My face flushed, I smiled more, I got louder and more enthusiastic, and I turned back and looked at him watching me as he leaned against the window sill, puffing a cigarette with his sunglasses on. He was tall with broad shoulders and brown eyes that did not look away. We already had our first date by then and whatever spells that hung in the ether needn’t be cast any further. Somewhere in that stare and my shy glances was a deal made, a shaking of hands, and the following year would be like filling a jar of happiness, wanting to preserve it forever.

Bright-eyed Athena said to Telemachus just before his journey to find his father and move forward with his life, “You must not stick to childhood, for you are no longer just a child.” When a parent is lost, childhood reverie permeates with the temptation to stay there. It was as if, when my dad died, I just became aware of this raft that was supporting me and started losing air and the vulnerability of it all pushed me to get lost in what felt good. But what did any of them know what was really in my heart? Those broken spaces that would not be healed and transformed for a decade or more. What did he know about my heart when he came to me eight years after he left me there in our home to not glue together the pieces but to sweep them up and give them away to strangers? He was careless, he showed me tokens of love, pictures he found and kept over the years when he refused to relent. It was then that Calypso released me from her long spell and I had awaken to a new dawn.

She stood in a black dress and slightly heeled shoes in a sunny parking lot. She was fourteen. The sun was high, the air was crisp and cold like a refrigerator was left open and it swirled around her drifting through her dress, bobbing against her legs. An airplane was breaking through the chilled air, continuously roaring above them and somewhere far away there was streetcar screeching to a stop. And there were bells and seagulls. That pungent smell was piss that dried on the street the night prior but had been coated on top of more piss from someone else prior to that. Or perhaps it was on the sidewalk or the green building itself that stood in front of her. The two-story building was mint green with forest-green awnings and flags. Unlike a funeral home it looked much like a hotel that never changed color nor style. There were cars and people that she knew and people she didn’t. She waited for her mother to gather herself and get out of the car. Her mother’s hair was dark and pulled back half up and half down and the high sun gleamed off it. Her eyes were dark and shiny like vaseline. She smelled clean with warm musk and a hint of marijuana. Against the far-away streetcar screeches, bells, seagulls and car engines of passerby cars, her heels scraped slowly against the piss-ridden blacktop. Her mother flashed a smile, a fake one, to show she was ready and perhaps if her eyes weren’t sad she would have believed her. Perhaps if the night of her great grandmother’s passing her mother didn’t soak in the tub for hours with candles lit until they were miraculously all blown out. And when she got out she told them all that great grandma is safely home, for it was she who blew out the candles and sat with her mother, broken-hearted, in the bathroom that night. Her mother’s first night of loneliness in this world.

She followed her mother around to the front of the mint-green building. Once inside the chilled air broke and the sounds of the street were quickly muffled and the sound of women’s heels were silenced through thick red carpet and there were people talking and some whispering. Some people were drying their eyes with tissue and some were not. People were seated in their chosen rows along the red carpet that spanned the room and the aisle that led to her great grandmother’s casket. She could see her hair, it was as it had always been: wavy and red, though it was lighter than usual and perhaps a little more white than she would have liked. That was a dead person, a person she knew but was now dead and she looked around the room and distracted herself with people and followed her mother closer and closer to the casket. They said hello to people who stood and whispered “hello” and to her mother they smacked their lips open and they hugged her tightly. They wiped their tears with tissue absentmindedly hugging her and sucking in their snot. When she approached the casket she was quiet. She had nothing to say, nothing formed in her mind. But the person that lay in the casket looked like her great grandmother Ernestina just sleeping and a bit waxy. She was bony and cold with lipstick on and if she weren’t dead she would have looked lovely. She thought of green olives and coffee nips and her old white kitchen in her apartment but she couldn’t force the connection to this dead person. She was suddenly aware of her mother standing to the right of her, fixing and dusting off her great grandmother’s dress that didn’t need fixing and smiling close-mouthed, tearful, and she told her that she can talk to her and go ahead and talk to her. Her hand robotically moved forward and rested on Ernestina’s hands which were resting atop one another under her chest. She was not expecting her hands to be cold because they were never cold and she thought of Ernestina’s old orange and brown blankets that were itchy and thick and covered her bed that was also the place to sit next to her small television on a tray with lots of old TV Guides stacked one atop the other. Her hands were soft bone, cold and waxy almost like a candle. She never did forget that part.

When it was time to sit down and let others have their go, it was easier to walk away from the casket than it was to walk toward it. And the day went a lot like that, lots of sitting in that room with the red carpet and sniffling and whispers and in the talking somewhere was relief and real smiles and hushed laughs. Before they left for the burial a loud woman, a cousin, plopped noisily beside her almost frantic and angry. She did not know this woman. She watched her quietly as she bent forward to the row in front of them where her mother sat and they talked loudly. She told her mother of her drive there to the funeral home on Valencia Street. She was driving in traffic, she said, and curling her eyelashes and the “motherfucker” behind her honked at her and so she threw her eyelash curler at them and she couldn’t finish telling her own story because she was laughing so hard through closed eyes and she couldn’t breathe well. At some point her mother started reciting a lyric from a Snoop Dogg song and she laughed more and more until the woman’s own mother a row away stood and called her name and sternly told her to “shut up” and she said she couldn’t because Linda was rapping Snoop Dogg at our great grandmother’s funeral.

My cousin V told me to be careful of witches in the desert. Of shapeshifters. Skinwalkers. Of course this was after the witch stood to meet me in an isolated watering hall. Another cousin told me more of these stories. Told me I needed to go to the place on 24th in San Francisco to be cleansed. You can’t touch anything in there but they will tell you what must be done. Blood cousins on my mom’s side, of my great grandmother Ernestina's. I feel them always. She must have seen me returning home, the witch of the desert, in some fever dream. What was she or where did she come from?

Passing through Nevada on 80 heading is where I began drifting from the sun that shone forever in a never-ending blue sky so vast my eyes began creating edges to keep markers of time. The gray-black road droned on alongside tumbleweeds and desert floor. The mountains stood still and the landscape was quiet, the way quiet gets in a tunnel or an airplane once it’s taken off. For hundreds of miles I drove checking the gas and hoped for a rest stop when one finally appeared outside of an old desert mining town called Beowawe. There were about six cars and families taking breaks from the long stretch of road behind us all.

It looked like a typical restroom area of a national park: an open brick building with women on one side and men on the other. With water fountains inside the shaded passing area and a white roof to top the cement bricks. There was a short wall around it that made it look like a fort and had historical markers stuck in the dirt with titles that read “Hot, Dusty and Tattered” and paintings of pioneers trailing wagons through the desert landscape that seemingly had not changed in all the years that have gone between myself and them. My dog wined to get out of the car. “Hang on just one more sec,” I said to her. Double checking that I had my keys and grabbing my florescent green water bottle that needed filling. Once outside, the air was hot but dry, a difference from the stifling wet air in Maryland that we were coming from, and it felt good on my skin. The ground was hot so I put a leash on my dog and headed straight for the dirt. As she squatted I looked around. There was nothing but dirt and mountains, no town or gas station, or any sign that life had progressed since the railroad or ever.

Once out of the restroom I hunched over the water fountain just on the inside of the building, fighting with my dog’s leash and holding the water bottle in the same hand. “Why are you moving so much?” I said as my dog began pulling the leash behind me and was hiding herself. I looked at her confused as she was backing away and turning her head away like something were threatening her. It took a moment to realize that something was threatening her somewhere in the small area I thought was empty just a moment before. As the hair on my body stood up, I turned my head fast and the woman stood in a dark corner behind me watching me. She was small and dark and had long gray hair and she smiled at me and nodded at me slowly as if she were mute but would try to say something anyway. I said hello. She said nothing. I watched her. She smiled and looked at my dog and looked at me. I replaced the cap on my water bottle as my dog tugged on her leash. The woman moved slowly out of the corner but stayed in the shadows alongside the wall still and she did not lift her gaze from me. Her smile was innocent looking and I could see her aged face and nothing else. Not her clothes or the colors she wore. I backed away with my dog and turned my back only when I was far enough away from her and couldn’t hold composure. As I exited I went towards the most populated area with picnic tables that sat in the sun. My dog sniffed around and greeted a family of travelers and I saw no sign of her. There was an old payphone and a bulletin board with missing persons and outdated newsletters behind thick plastic. There was no graffiti, not because it was cleaned but because life didn’t exist.

At the entrance, while my dog smelled around the dirt one more time before we left the woman emerged again and walked by me with a small boy down the walkway that I stood besides. She walked slow and her face was straight. The boy was dark like her and had dark hair that had been recently cut. My dog hid behind my legs as she got closer, she smiled her smile at me and she and the small boy walked on. I turned to my dog and she looked away from the woman, as if her very visage alone would touch some part of her soul that she would not have touched. As if to look at the woman would be to invoke something she would not have invoked in this lifetime.