Jennifer Hole

I could have been planning a rat bracelet funeral for weeks. It felt like there were many decisions to make: something to say, a place, some clarity of purpose.

In the same manner that I knew the bracelet was the starting point of The Hearthling, it occurred to me on Wednesday that it was time – right now – for a burial. In preparation, I photographed the bracelet and its white box.

I wanted to bury something meaningful inside the box, next to the rat’s remains. An offering, a wish, a seed, a fare to cross the river Styx. But my logical mind had no answer for what that might be. Meaningful to whom? What am I hoping for? What am I doing? As thoughts do, one suddenly came to mind: a 1975 penny. Walking to find the penny brought to my mind a box upstairs in my closet that held, after recent tidying, my life’s accumulation of sentimental items. At the remembrance of this other box, my body gave a signal: yes, that is the right place to look. The signal felt almost like tears, and electrical. I spent a few minutes – five? – rummaging through and placed two pennies, an old piece of bandage, and two thin strips of paper into the small box to be buried.

I took the box and the skin outside with a small trowel. I started to dig under the fig tree that we planted when we moved here. Celeste figs – the softest, most delicious figs I have ever tasted. Close to the surface there was a tangle of roots. Thick roots. Long, elastic roots. I dug down just deep enough to bury the skin and the box, taking care not to break roots. I covered everything with soil and leaf mulch and then with a pile of small, round stones, some that had been painted by my children and labelled with words like “beets.”

Rather than burying the bracelet inside the box, I placed them side by side. I wanted the skin in direct contact with the soil. It’s been waiting 30 years in drawers, never worn, rarely seen, and it was time for that bit of life to return to motion – to be non-static, unfrozen.

And then I came inside. I wanted to read something aloud over the stones — but what? I looked through a collection of poems but nothing felt right. And then I opened Blue Horses by Mary Oliver. I marked three poems and then it was time to collect the kids from school.

Later in the afternoon I brought my book outside. A mother and her son were getting into their car across from my fig tree, I sat on the ground and waited. I opened the book and began reading softly. A neighbor walked by with her dog. Facing my house, my back to the road, I continued to read almost in a whisper. The dog paused, still and silent, as if he were listening, as if he were joining in. I sat, closer to the ground than my usual standing posture, looking towards my lemon tree and all of the new spring growth. I read quietly, but not silently. I felt uncomfortable at the thought of being observed. Who is this woman, sitting in her front yard, furtively whispering poems (to a rat bracelet)?

The dog and his walker moved on. I continued to read. I thought about when I am buried. I thought about people who talk to their plants and how it is said the plants grow better that way. The world looked green and smelled like lilac. I heard the wind move. I felt: a part of it all.