So Much Depends

July 1997. The saturated air slaps my face like a smack of wet fish as I walk out the front door toward Glenview Road. Four miles to the east Lake Michigan must have evaporated into the atmosphere overnight, spirited away by an easterly wind as an offering to the clouds, the sailboats of summer washed up like silvery alewives along a dry lakebed. At least the boats won’t stink like the alewives did in June thirty years ago when they lay dead and dying in a layer three feet deep by twenty feet wide along the shoreline, their stench blown inland, our neighborhood reeking of decay.

Down the hill and north into Harms Woods. Honeybees whirl like dervishes around a thicket of wild roses. Except for a lone worker bee whose task it is to keep me at bay, the swarm pays no mind to a voyeur’s fascination with their exuberance over pink blossoms and yellow stamens. Could my observation of these nectar-drunken bees possibly alter their behavior? It doesn’t appear so, but then honeybees don’t live in Schröedinger’s sealed box in a state of superposition; they don’t live in all possible states at once until the moment I chance to observe them; they dance and drink in a macroscopic world of sunlight right here and now in front of my eyes.

I walk on. The frenzied bees may not be indeterminate, but a few calcified cells residing in my left breast are, ever since a needle biopsy three days ago. Inside the sealed box that is my body, my cells have been thrust into a state of superposition until someone, some medical establishment voyeur, observes through a microscope the six little plugs taken from my breast at gunpoint. Only then will uncertainty be resolved. So much depends upon the observer.

Lighter than air, my steps follow a gravel path to a patch of milkweed for which I’ve developed an exuberance: broad, alternating green leaves with hairy undersides; milky white latex sap; cloyingly sweet pink flowers; yellow, white, and black poker-chip caterpillars; red-orange beetles; black and orange monarch butterflies; brown seed pods with silken white filaments. The saturated morning beads on my forehead and runs in rivulets down the back of my neck. Condensation on a cooler object. Drop by drop I alone am pulling the Great Lake known as Michigan back from the clouds; it helps to have a purpose.

Initially attracted by the iris along my walk this morning,I can't stop thinking about Michelangelo Antonioni's first English language film Blowup from 1966. I have no interest in being accidentally or incidentally involved in a murder, as was the photographer played by David Hemmings, but the shadows are what attract me now.

Walking in the rain this afternoon, I hear through my rain gear the swishing of each step I take, the water swirling down the streets and into sewer drains, the soft pelt of raindrops on fresh green spring leaves not yet ravaged by insects and the summer heat to come. The rain is capricious, but there is no wind. Down at 34th and Atlanta, a gangly duckling is running back and forth across a bridge over the sewer drain, up and down a sloping lawn, in and out of the euonymus under an oak tree, back to the drain. His little peeps are as poignant as those of any lost child. I stop to watch him. He stops to watch me, then continues his frantic search. My heart aches. At 34th and Lewis, I turn around to thunder and lightning. My pace quickens. I don't relish the idea of being struck down by lightning. I remember reading THE ICE QUEEN by Alice Hoffman, learning about Gretel Ehrlich being struck by lightning out on the range in Wyoming, hearing many versions of the afternoon my cowboy brother-in-law was out checking his irrigation ditches in Colorado during a summer storm until he was felled by a secondary ground strike. My nephews found him crawling back to the ranch house, his clothes torn and singed.