catapult magazine

Cycles

by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma

carry a camera with you
keep a notebook close
inspiration must be captured
like fireflies in a jar
to light up your room while you sleep

beauty is slippery like a fish
and knows when your objective
is to devour it

Destruction

Rumors were all that existed when my husband Rob and I opened a fair trade shop three years ago in Three Rivers, Michigan.  A mere month after our grand opening, we were witnesses from our back deck to the destruction of an old building, and then the loads and loads of sand.  And then the grand project to build a new parking lot for downtown shopping—stalled.  Three Rivers Sand Dunes.  Mount St. Three Rivers.  Someone posted a wooden cactus in the side of the hill.  I saw people trudging up to have their photos taken next to it.  It was an embarrassing start that threatened to destroy the fragile confidence of local citizens.

Creation

About one month ago, shortly after Rob and I had moved our home address an hour and fifteen minutes to the north, the construction crews reappeared.  The city signed a new contract!  However, the promise was hidden too long and our faith now requires proof.  Heaps of asphalt appear, sand is pushed around by grown up boys living into their heavy machinery dreams.  However, this was only after they took down the cactus.

Destruction

On a Saturday afternoon, our friend Jeff comes over with a shovel and, while Rob tends the store, Jeff and I dig out remnants of an old river rock wall, built to retain, but now hidden beneath a landslide of dirt and wildflowers.  The parking lot will bury this wall beneath even greater depths of soil soon.  Later that evening, Rob and I head back to our new home in Grand Rapids, our small car loaded down with approximately 500 pounds of stone. 

Creation

"These smaller losses are just practice."

I think of the weeping cherry
that grieved its front yard home
by refusing to put on leaves
in the back the next spring
and I wonder how
we will ever leave this place
altogether.

Destruction

The next morning, armed with merely a garden trowel, I pried the bricks in our front yard loose from a tangle of sand and mulch and tree roots and sod.  The crooked border was not pleasing to my eye and the time had come for its removal.  I think about who might have put it here and wonder if she'd be sad to see me dissembling her work or if she'd understand my longing for home.  Perhaps, she'd know both things at once.

Creation

Draw a new line, more shapely than the old.  Shift the mulch and patch the sod.  Line up rocks, like a receiving line, to welcome me to this new home with history and memory.  Remember the Sunday we "did nothing," savoring the first hints of autumn by putting in a new garden border in the front of the house?  Hundreds of tasks beckoned us that day—the office is still stacked with boxes—but creation called us out.  We biked for the first time since moving and then turned the earth, tending the garden and recalling the beginnings of the human family.  Adam reorganized the garage while Eve considered which shrubs would give height and color to the front of their new dwelling.

Destruction

The house we rent is old and smells like an urban cottage.  Old wood floors slope toward the northwest corner and a gap under the back door invites small critters to seek warmth and food under the kitchen sink.  We're still learning which doors we have to slam to shut and which we can just close politely.  I know already that someday I will be tempted to take my rocks with me.  We'll be pulling out of the driveway for the last time, and the neatly disheveled row will catch my eye.  I will know that it's not the last time we'll say good bye and I will hope that maybe, just maybe, a new tenant will find solace in the impermanence of annuals vining over a rock that was born a thousand years ago.