Re-wilding
This week you're a water tower, the kind you see outside New York, with the city or town name across the bulbous white head, except your head is filled with snot that will not drain.
Fire and ice. You're burning up in a sweatshirt and wool socks, under a wool blanket. When you scrape off the socks, you start shivering. Outside it's in the nineties and holding.
The cat avoids you, you're a loud sneezer, a loud nose-blower. She checks on you, steps on your hip to make sure you are alive, then returns to the window where she's tracking bumblebees, the eyes of robins, chippies that may dart out from under the black cover draped over the grill. If she sees one, she might see another.
On day 3 of this, you wake up early, you get up, you cannot stay in bed any longer. You make coffee, sit down in the yellow armchair, and discover you’re RSVP’d for a webinar about re-wilding the Hudson Valley. You have no idea how you heard about this thing, or when you signed up for it. It probably had "coffee" in the title.
You join. They’re talking about connecting habitats, they say if the habitats are small like they are now, all the more urgency to connect them. They talk about culverts under highways, a bobcat teaching her kittens to use the culvert to cross safely.
And you think about Broad, the street you have to cross to get to the ShopRite, five lanes at the intersection with Bellevue, a street with curves. All the close calls with cars that turn too fast, and your rage, your understanding smaller than a bobcat, or even a house cat.
At least in Moscow they had the decency to admit they prioritized vehicular traffic flow on the wide ring roads. For pedestrians, they built underground passageways or bridges, and lit them, and put kiosks inside them.
Here, they pretend everything is fine. “The traffic engineer did a study and concluded that the intersection is fine.”
The intersection is not fine. But you will be okay.
You are sick, but that's temporary.
(By nightfall your husband will have the same virus.)
The cat notices a tiny black bug and smooshes it with her paw, her nose, licks it off her nose and swallows it, then checks all the spots in the floor to see if they too might be alive. Sometimes she eats dust.
Everywhere you look, there is dust. On the other side of the fever, you resolve to clean one thing every day, you tackle the tub, and then, on a roll, the toilet too. And you think: whoever designs a thing, should have to clean it, before they're ever allowed to bring it to market.
Blue jays are nesting in the ornamental pear tree that is not native, that the gardener advised you cut, that would have cost $800 to cut, so you didn't. The blue jays approach the nest in a roundabout way, landing on a branch removed, and hopping from branch to branch, cocking their heads to make sure no one is following. You watch them while you wash dishes, the cups you don't want to put in the dishwasher, the cups you don't want to wait for.
Outside, the ornamental pear is a whirlwind of arrivals and departures, as the sky darkens and the wind picks up. The weatherman warns of a robust storm. The phone states: "Tomorrow will be 32 degrees colder than today."
NEWSY STUFF
My story, "Junco and Wolf," has been published in A Public Space No. 33 (online now, physical copies release on May 26, 2026).
I hope you love reading it, as much as I loved writing it!
A Public Space is an independent nonprofit publisher of an eponymous award-winning literary, arts, and culture magazine, and A Public Space Books. Under the direction of founding editor Brigid Hughes since 2006, it has been their mission to seek out overlooked and unclassifiable work, and to publish writing from beyond established confines.
If you just want to get issue No. 33: a digital copy is just $9, a print copy is $15. For $21 you get both!
Divinity School • a letter every Sunday at sunset • if you’re always looking, after some time you’ll have seen
