Connie May Fowler - A Million Fragile Bones

Twisted Road Publications LLC

Copyright 2017 by Connie May Fowler

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-940189-18-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-940189-21-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959744

www.twistedroadpublications.com

For the eleven who perished, and millions more, natures children all.

When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize you cannot eat money.Cree Prophecy

C onsider A Million Fragile Bones my Book of Psalms, my Song of Solomon, my sacramental moment of bearing witness, my altar box of memories.

My life has been marked by moments of profound loss, but in the midst of pain and bewilderment, eventually I insist on hope.

The first great loss was the death of my father when I was six, and in the writing of this book I realize that over a half-century into my life, I am still searching for him. My method? Immerse myself in nature because my fondest childhood memories, those untainted by violence, arise from his love of the natural world. Its as if Im trying to provide what eluded him in life: a happy home filled with found objects that, by their very existence, signal we are part of something larger than ourselves. We are seashells. We are feathers. We are bones. We are what cannot be named.

My quest led to a rare life. For twenty years my days were filled with bears and bobcats, dolphins and snakes, turtles and birds, sea and sky. It was an ecstatic journey, a hermitage well chosen. And then that too was blown asunder by human greed and ineptitude.

But I refuse to see this as a fatal blow. I am still standing, still searching.

A Million Fragile Bones is built of memories that out of the volition of cause and effect paint the canvas of my life. Each memory leads me to the next crucial moment. And every moment is my attempt to find my place in the world as a daughter, a wife, a friend, a keeper of dogs, a writer.

The story begins in the middle, when I am at peace. But we all know the middle is simply the beginning of stepping backward and flowing forward. After all, every creature on this good earth lives out her days in the ebb and flow of lifes mysterious currents.

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.

Gabriel Garca Mrquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

I live on the edge of the world, alone except for the occasional boyfriend or husband, always in the company of pets, books, art, friends, sundry wildlife. Only part-time neighbors inhabit the houses closest to me. There are no stores, unless you count the ships store, which is rarely open and where a carton of milk will cost you five times what it costs in town. The only real commerce that occurs is illegal, and no one speaks of it, so it might as well not happen. Though I have less money than anyone I know, I rarely wake up depressed and often feel inappropriately rich. I suppose its all this beauty: dunes, water, sky, and wildflowers whose lives are so temporary even the gentlest of rains fall in the silence between life and death.

Here on the sandbar animal talismans abound. Creatures soar and scuttle, slither and lope, swim and sleep, their existence seen and unseen, their lives forever unfurling, individual threads woven and rewoven into natures ancient sutra.

Amid the bustling rhythms of the natural world, time is not an abstraction. Rather it is visible, amorphous, revealed in tumbling swaths of sunlight, stardust, cloud shadow, and fog.

At dawn, amid the chime of first birdsong, I throw back my bed covers, walk across worn pine planks, and step into a waking world. The skys canvas is full. A rising sun. A sinking moon. An insistent, bright planet. Hungry seabirds cutting dark and fast against blooming white clouds.

On earth, sand gathers around the edges of my bare feet, warming them. I close my eyes, knowing below, hidden from view, silent to my ear, limestone mazes shift and crack. Subterranean tangles of tender roots attached to salt impervious plants curl through these mazes with a natural ease I will probably never possess, tethering the dunes to this ever-changing world. Perhaps they tether me, too.

T o linger here, a woman must get her bearings.

The wide sweep of the northern Gulf of Mexico and Apalachee Bay is in perpetual motion, reshaping, and at times, reclaiming my front yard. Alligator Harbor, with its clear shallows and deceptive currentspulled by the moon, the sun, the trickster we call weatherdefines and sculpts my backyard, revising boundaries and property lines, confounding appraisers and owners alike. Sometimes, when under the influence of hurricane or winter gales, I watch, awed, as this usually placid bay boils forthwhite caps and allpushing unmoored boats, wayward crab traps, and lost life jackets to within a few feet of my shack.

Butterflies, neo-tropical birds, songbirds, snow birds, sea turtles, sea horses, seashells: everything in flux, everything in a state of rebirth, which means death is ever present. Ants swarm a nest of black-capped chickadees, stinging to death the baby birds and then devouring their warm, swollen bodies. In turn, a blue jay eats the ants, ingesting the chickadee-rich nutrition. Whoever coined the phrase cycle of life was clearly an optimist.

At its zenith, this peninsular sandbar rises only thirteen feet above sea level. Thats where my old wooden bird of a sea shack is perchedas if it is its own weather vanewind-blown, crooked, stubborn, and sweetly tattered at the diminutive apogee of a comma-shaped barrier island known as Alligator Point, a semi-wilderness scarred with too many vacation homes and attached by an umbilical cord of piney woods to the far larger island of St. James.

The configuration of its sugar sand shores and wind-ribbed dunes are, like the living human body, never static. And also like the human body, complexity is its strength; fragility in the face of sudden change, its greatest weakness.

A mid this burgeoning sunlight, I am pelted by shadows. To be exact: shadows cast by great wings. I look to the sky and count. Twenty-seven brown pelicans race in a straight line from the west, moving southeastward, out into the open blue eye of the Gulf.

Like me, these birds are survivors. Like me, their survival depends on the kindness of strangers.

O n December 31, 1972, the EPA made the pesticide DDT illegal in the United States. Without that legislationand without Rachel Carsons environmental masterwork Silent Spring changing the mood of the countrythese twenty-seven birds would not exist.

On December 31, 1972, my father was long dead, my sister was out of the house, making her own way in the world, and my mother and I were living a tremulous existence in a roach-infested cottage in Tampa. Blooming into a teenager, I was afforded small but significant freedoms. On New Years Eve morning, Mother dropped me off at my friends housea trailer at the edge of townso I could spend the day with him and his family. Four hours later, she phoned, her voice wavering as she said, Dont come home tonight. The house is crawling with goddamned demons.

The next day, wemy mother and Iabandoned everything we owned. Every shoe, every blouse, every skirt, every dress, every scarf, every pair of underwear, every earring, every pillow, every book, every juice glass, every dish, every music album, every scrap of paper, every Christmas card, every towel, every spoon, every knife, every photo, every mirror great or small. Everything.