Mother as Manifest Destiny

(memoir and poem)

When I was ten, we moved to nine empty acres that we bought from a dairy farmer from our church. I lived with my five sisters, baby brother, and parents in an RV on a plowed portion of our new land. That summer and the next, we did our dishes and took our showers in our barely-built home’s single appliance—a bathtub—and shoveled cow manure by the wheelbarrow into a deep hole, which at the time, seemed like a demonic, chasmic abyss. But I’m not the best with facts. Maybe it was only the size of a regular grave.

The property’s eastern border is Crab Creek, so named for the presence of crayfish, which we called crawdads and caught for fun, those mean-pinching water-aliens that don’t look like animals so much as a thing on its way to being another thing. Outnumbering the crawdads were bullfrogs and carp. Bullfrogs are bad for a local ecosystem because they eat everything. Common Carp, big-bellied, camo-colored “trash fish,” are bad for a local ecosystem because they feed by burrowing into the vegetation, which releases chemicals that foster algae blooms. It also means they’re boring as hell to fish. We’d hunt them with pitchforks in the spring when they spawned. Dozens swam up the relatively tender rapids at our ankles as we lunged and lunged again. We were wild girls. We had that particular combination of silliness and suffering you can only have in childhood.