wildscape. literary journal

Fox Medicine
by Annalise Grueter

Walk beneath pewter skies and robins egg blue ones.
Breathe thick heavy air under the umbrella of towering storybook trees, and crisp bright air that tastes the way snow sounds.
Consider the vivid apricot-sized blood clots in the sink and know WebMD would say “have you considered you might be dying?”

As far as animals go, I may be more like a hound than I’d like to think.
Headstrong, excitable. Focused to exhaustion should I catch particular scents. Restless when I cannot access what I want, hungry for enrichment.

Saudade has entered my regular vocabulary. I’ll never be home again. At least not in the sense of a place. I spent four years somewhere I grudgingly tolerated. I learned there the geologies I love best (everything I’d left behind). Yet now I make pilgrimages to that grudging place every few years. Fondly. Nostalgically.

Change. change.
I heard it call me. From a distance. From years away. I hoped hunting it might lead me to more, to the elusive. Ran in the opposite direction, hoping that by looking elsewhere I’d catch the trail of what I want the most.

I see far-off lands, mossy woods and rocky shores. Soaring peaks that feel like religion. Distant people like curtained windows, withholding light from what isn’t their own.

The most frightening thing anyone has ever told me was a professor explaining that in writing, consistency and persistence are far more important than any skill when it comes to being Known.
I’ve wondered ever since if it is arrogance or delusion. Which? fed my interpretation that the battle of my life would be overcoming reticence and distraction. The notion those would suffocate my talent, that I am talented. The certainty of the shape of my words.

I remember I am a woman. One era of the world does not want my kind to be confident or tenacious. I wonder how long those teachings will take to unlearn. 

I try to love my body. To thank the pale fat that announces itself in times of uncertainty and fatigue. It is only trying to protect me. It wants to feed my appetite for affection.
I long for the hard lean shape of my thriving self. I recognize it better. But soft me has insisted on staying for a while. She’s like a phantom who looms larger to me than anyone. I need to learn the lessons she offers.
I take my happy pills. Sometimes twice a day. The plant-based ones because I hold stubbornly to a notion of medicine from nature. 

Walking a ghost through hallways that replaced the ones I walked 20 years before. The fledglings seem so foreign, nothing like my memories of that age, strange as unstudied languages. 
But that one– yes– so young, whose paintings belong in galleries already. Another, the 13-year-old who asks to stay in for lunch to research rocks and minerals and talk about the vast age of the earth and ideas and the world. A week later, the 15-year-old done with her work and bored. Wants to know what my favorite books are. Wondering if skate skiing will ever feel easy. Her whole being lights up at the recommendations on a sticky note. 

41 months ago, I saw two foxes in an aspen glade. They chattered to and chased each other, and watched me watching them, seven or twelve feet away.
It was during the plague. I’d thought I was alone in the woods at sunset, among the rustling frost-burned heart-shape leaves on pale sentinel trees. 
Consider if the encounter is a koan, the closest to a religious subscription I’ve flirted with in my adult life. Text an ex later for details about this symbol, guidance on how to read it. With gratitude but quite honestly no wistfulness at all for the person providing the answer.

We don’t get to know where we are going. There is no other version of the story. 
It is good to notice what plays on the periphery, navigating mapless, accepting that no Place is home.

In how many years, I’ll look back. Will have to laugh in the changed light. The trail will be visible, just, meandering through peaks and forests. 

about the author // Annalise Grueter