The Condition

Julia Bouwsma

The condition of my hillside is that every winter it hardens, folds hunched shoulders into itself, crusts into a strata of snow, then ice, then snow. The condition of my hillside is that as winter slides into early spring it weeps. It bleeds water. It runnels itself raw. The springs overflow and snowmelt gurgles through stone walls laid a century and a half ago. The road buckles, heavy with moisture, ground unstable beneath our feet. We drill the maple trees and watch them leak out their mouths. 

The condition of my hillside is that after the hardening and after the letting down comes the green. This green is like no green I have ever known. It fills me so deeply I think, throb. Think wound. Picture the green blood of insects broken under a fat palm. Picture gutting a chicken, my hand blood-skimmed to the wrist as I try to twist the fragile, stalwart gallbladder loose. Picture the green bile that spills across my fingers, staining them, when the organ bursts beneath my clumsiness.

The first definition of condition is disorder (n). The second definition is state (n). The third definition is stipulation (n). The fourth definition is acclimatize (v). 

The state of my love for this hillside is that I have become acclimatized to disorder. I have become accustomed to the tumult and tangle of it, to the madness of its cycles. I don’t try any more to extricate beauty from horror. Sunlight glints off the blood on my hands, drying maps into my skin. In the garden, the green sings to me, even as I rip its weeds from the earth in loose clumps and fling them to wither.

The condition of my mind, I have been told, is that I try to carry the burden of the whole world on my shoulders.  I doubt this is true, but the condition of my shoulders is that they are meant for carrying. I haul grain. I haul firewood. I haul buckets and buckets and more buckets. When my hillside weeps in spring I weep with it, and my body makes some space for the more hardness that will follow.

Because the condition of my contract with this land is that everything will be difficult. Before we built the road, we used to walk a gully of collapsed granite with pack baskets, and, in winter, a sled to haul the grain. My feet have worn ruts into this hillside, and the labor of this land has worn ruts into me. I mark the land, the land marks me. Once these choked and bony woods were cleared to sprawling fields. Now grown back, we work to clear them again, tree by slow tree.

The condition of work is that you do it, regardless of season. You work through pain and through joy. When everything is falling around us, there are still seeds to be planted. There are still barn beams to raise, to join, to peg.

The condition of my mind is that I am willful, stubborn, refuse to let anything go. When I grab a pig by the hock for a shot of wormer or antibiotics, it feels like holding a jackhammer. I lock my fists. A single line floats through my head, from a song I can’t place: The only thing that matters is not giving up. The pig shits and screams. I hold on.

The condition of my hillside is that it has seen many people come and go. It has been there as they arrived full of ambition and anticipation, as they dug and tilled, as they wrestled rocks, felled trees, built structures that have long since collapsed. It has been there as they celebrated their ability to shape it. It has been there as they broke under the harshness of its demands. It has watched them fall, watched them leave. It has cradled their bodies into the arms of its earth in the small cemetery beneath the pines. 

The condition of this land is that it is built on a strata of stories. Many of these stories I do not know. Here is one I do: a farmer was haying as the sky darkened with rain. He and his crew strained muscle over bale over minute to fill the barn with hay. They got the last bale in just as clouds began to burst. The farmer shook his fist at the sky in triumph. Then a flashing fork of lighting burned his barn to the ground.

The condition of this hill’s acoustics is that sound warps wildly here. The music playing at the base of the driveway is actually a mile down the road. The rifle retorts from the wrong direction. The coyote wails morph into dog barks and back. This land is a clamor of voices. I stand in the dip beside the stone wall and listen to my own words bounce back at me. 

The condition of my hillside is that it is an archive of bodies—of the determination and futility of bodies, of the hope of bodies, but also of their violence and their destruction. This hillside carries bones and ghosts. This hillside is littered with detritus: bottles, rusted remains of metal tools, a shirtsleeve, a cast iron skillet, a silver spoon, a baby diaper that won’t rot, shotgun shells, peeling photographs. Everyone who has lived here has cast their remnants. They sink back into the earth. They become the stones beneath my feet. They feed the forest floor.

The condition of my work is the same whether I am stooped low in the garden or bent to a blank page at my desk—that I must plunge my hands into spring earth and that, when I do, I am touching the same earth touched by those who came before me. I claw the archive, dense clay and gravel of it, delving a small hole in which to plant a seedling. Tiny fragments of the archive come loose and grit beneath my fingernails or teeth. Fragments of words swim the dusk air, thick with flies, as I walk the trail. I swallow them. I let them become a part of me.