Blackberry Jam

    The day ended with a jelly sandwich; homemade blackberry jam spread across two thick slices of jewish rye bread, mixed with a sly pass of butter on one side, just like my gramma used to make. The only thing missing was the sugar cookies and milk fresh from the cooler and her. I always wonder, when I think of or eat jewish rye bread, what makes it “jewish”? If anybody out there knows, please don’t tell me. The wondering is part of my ritual. I enjoy wondering rhetorically about nonsense as I make jelly sandwiches on dark bread, it’s one of the ways I remind myself how good it feels to be me. I bet you have your ways, too, but you have to tell your own story on your own time.
    This is my time. I exist on the skin of this world-I am. I belong here with you because I am here. I am white, like the bleached-flour-wonderbread a less discriminating person might use to bookend her blackberry jam. My skin is pale and translucent, and if it snowed real hard you’d better look for the tassel on my powerpuff girls stocking hat, cause you’re going to lose me in the snow. The color of my skin pleases me. Not for being white, or how the skin so pale highlights my veins-plump fishing worms ready for the hook; not even because being white is lauded in this society as an advantage. The color of my skin pleases me because it is mine and can never be anyone else’s.
    I am feeling comfortable in my skin, jam samich resting in my tummy. What I did to lead up to the sandwich and it’s residue of peace, is what brought me here. I went for a walk in the woods. The experimental forest lies a few miles away from my abode, and I was terribly restless this morning. I couldn’t sleep, as happens to me about once a year, although I tried everything to make it happen. Giving up the attempts at sleep was essential to feeling better, and my emergence into the woods helped me to do so. The experimental forest is open to the public, tended by the dnr, visited by local schoolchildren, and treasured by me. Sometimes, when I’m celebrating a particularly important(to me!) wiccan sabbat, there is a clearing I go to by moonlight, dancing skyclad in the heart of the world. Usually, when I feel restless, I drive.
    Driving only works for me when I am awake and alone with my brooding thoughts in the middle of the night. Harsh sunlight isn’t good for introspection, and introspection helps me sleep. So driving wasn’t the answer, I knew that as soon as I hopped into my demon car. Damn thing is like a woman-she smells payday-often choosing the day before/of/after check day to break down. Oooh I need a water pump!-Why can’t I have a new pair of struts like that car over there?! Red, demon car. Disconcerting synchronicity, that- I never had any luck with redheads, either. The car takes me to water when I have a problem.
    I am an aquarius born on the upbeat of the piscean cusp, genuinely caring about the world but too self-absorbed to do anything constructive to help. As aquarian is the waterbearer pouring knowledge on the world, and pisces is a water sign in the zodiac, so too do I have cancerian moonlore guiding my emotions. Another blessed water sign clogging up the waterworks. I get E-MO-tional about absolutely everything. I cry at car commercials even when I’m in the I-hate-you-cycle of hormones. There’s a secret in the water and I promised-I SWORE-never to tell the secret to another human being or the secret would be taken from me. Let anybody who reads this know that the water re-charges my soul’s batteries, and that is all that needs to be said. When I have a problem that makes the tribe appear on the dragon’s back, I hurry myself off to the water. Lake, river, stream, give me water to make sense of myself. I really should learn to swim. The water didn't seem like the answer this morning, so I turned my demon car towards the east, where I go when I've exhausted myself on my own self-delusions.
    I found me at the mouth of the experimental forest, parking my car in the gravel parking lot. There was nothing there but me and nature, and I began to walk through the trees and into the forest, an occasional piece of sharper gravel poking through my leather moccasins. I made them myself, bought the materials on a whim. I wear them as slippers when I remember where they are and part of me isn’t sure why I put them on this morning. However, I am pleased at the idea of wearing leather mocs in the forest. It is the first pleasing thought I’ve had since last week, when I walked away from Nikki, and the gravel makes me realize that she’s what’s been bothering me for the last week. I wish I loved her. Fuck.
    My feet get wet almost immediately, and I love the feeling of my feet being wet by dewy grass. I began to notice the world outside my own mind, as I walked along the swooping path away from my car. You ever walk into a forest? Away from the sights and sounds of human life? I couldn’t hear a single car or mower or airplane or tractor. I heard the silence fall over the woods as my presence was noted. The birds and crickets sing in the woods, and their sounds are muted in a sudden wave with each step I take. Everybody watches as I enter a place forgotten from childhood. I paused in “my” clearing, reminding myself to visit sometime when the mother moves me to flaunt my magic for her entertainment. I see a spiderweb stretched between a sprig of prairie grass dew glittering like homespun diamonds in the sunlight. Being there felt good, but didn’t satisfy me, and I left the clearing for the upward path, noting early fall leaves wafting down to the dried creekbed that teased against the trail.
    I paused on the old bridge that crossed the creek. I was tempted to light the cig nestled behind my ear, but the rudeness it bespoke; lighting a burning weed in that environment was as about as rude as lighting a cigar at gramma’s breakfast table, something even my grampa never dared do-and I walked up the path. Eventually I realized I was following a distinct set of hoof prints, of the horse variety, shod with metal shoes that pointed up the hillside but not down. I stopped to examine these prints, to catalogue them in my mind, and I realized that I was in the forest at this time for a reason. I was here to find and learn what I would find here, something I already knew, and the harder I looked for it the more elusive it would prove to acquire.
    I stopped looking and started walking towards a patch of sunlight ahead, thinking absently about Thoreau. I don’t know a damn thing about the man. He wrote a book called Walden, I think that’s the title, something about his time in a forest probably not too different from this one. Maybe I should read his book and see if he knows what I know. Or vice versa. Mental rhetoric that means nothing. I walk a path through this life that is clear to me, and it is my uphill path because I have the will to keep walking where others would stumble and turn back to safety. I walk because it is in my nature to not give up out of personal weakness. When next I paused it was for birchskin that looked like someone’s trash scattered on the trail, and I laughed as my hand moved to the pen clipped to my collar. I was writing on the bark, awed at the mere thought. I would tell you what I wrote there, but I already have. I let it fall from my hand and kept walking, beckoned forward by a restless feeling.
    The feeling passed, and as the trail wound up and around I lost my need to walk it off-the pain was gone. I turned around and walked down the path, amused to think of my chances for finding my words written on bark along the trail. Astounded at the distance I had led myself, I stopped looking and concentrated on walking. The things in the forest were becoming more used to me, now, and I wondered if there is a place for modern man in the midst of nature. We have ignored her for so long, us humans, vibrating at a pace that leaves the forests and nature behind, that I wonder if we belong here at all. Just then, I glanced to my right and found the backside of my bark winking at me. I picked it up to show myself what I had learned in my journey, and then tossed it back into the brush. Two steps later I found another piece of birch waiting to be written on, and I bowed to that whim as well, leaving the wisdom on the wet trail at my feet.
    Then I came home and made myself a jam sandwich on jewish rye bread. Butter on one side, homemade blackberry jam slathered on both sides, chunks of fruit bubbling through the sides as I ate it onehanded. It’s been quite a morning. I think I can sleep,now.