Pollen

Spring, on a wide street, in an oak lined neighborhood, reminds me of a Saharan

dessert windstorm at night, when the air is frigid. There are large gust of wind whipping

through the branches of oak trees, and plumes of pollen that throng through the air. The

Easter night vigil is beginning at the church soon. I step on cracks in the streets, like they

are dried leaves that will crunch below my weight. Something will happen to the cracks if

I lay the rubber sole of my black shoes over them. The cracks might open wider, might

fill with the debris that line the bottom of my shoe, might crumble like the leaves. The

concrete was done last year and has not buckled from captured oak tree roots searching

for freedom. There are small cracks, like wrinkles that fill easily with the light cream of

foundation.

My mother has pale skin; I wore her foundation once, when I was ten, to my first

father daughter dance at my small parochial school. I wore a dark velvet dress that sat on

my torso like a thick wool blanket and made my body sweat when I stood around my

large crowd of grammar school friends. My face contrasted deeply with my dark dress

and dark father.

My father slept on the long green couch, until sixth grade. The couch had ripped

sides from my dog when she was first teething. Every Sunday, when we left for church

my father rolled off the green couch and cut the yellowed grass. On father’s day, he

drives to mobile and goes hunting with his father; they creep around the woods and step

on debris falling from the trees. My mother and I go to church and celebrate. My legs

stiffen, and grow numb like radio static, while I sit through the masses.

In religion class during grammar school we spoke of constants. God is a constant,

the morning and night is a constant, and the seasons are a constant cycle. There are not

many things that remain, that appear in all instances of life. I am not aware of God. I am

aware of sheets of paper with red inked letter grades claiming I know about him. I was

separated from the church like the pollen separating from branches that conceal the sky.

Pollen is my constant. Pollen collecting on the top of my grandfather’s car

throughout spring until my grandmother sold the car, pollen that made my dog’s white

skin redden and Benadryl placed within a spoon of thick peanut butter, and the pollen

smell that filled my nose at my eighth grade graduation. I am now in high school, it is a

large school estranged from the Catholicism filling my neighborhood. My father lives in

a clean neighborhood, with smooth streets and magnolia trees, I visit him often.

        The hollow bells of the church, which sits beside the school I attended, are

ringing. My head wavers like the long brown branches above it and my body stays sturdy

below. The large trunks of the oaks climb in the grass beside the sidewalk of every house.

During the summer, when the sun makes the copper front door knobs scald my palm, the

concrete in the street will buckle below the radiating heat. Cracked open, hidden specks

of pollen that weren’t washed away by the flooding of spring will be exposed and slowly

filter through the air, barely detectable.

        The small opening of houses at the curve of a street allows me to see the highest

point of the church carving through the oak trees that otherwise obstruct the view, the

bells inside it are at rest. I know my mother is sitting, waiting at the third row from the

oversized priest, whose voice lurches through the dense humidified air. I imagine my

mother sitting in church anticipating her body being cleansed, imagining her savior and

how he had risen. The body of a man lifted into the air like the pollen and floating away.

I anticipate the crisp fresh feel of summer air that leads me away from pollen that

smothers me. I am late for mass, again, she left without me. There is an expectancy of me

to appear white clothed before the congregation begins the opening hymnals.

The neighborhood is set in eights, eight different house designs, eight streets on

the left side of the neighborhood, eight on the right, the church has an eight note song that

tolls throughout it. Every window on the houses I walk by is rectangular with eight small

frames. One red-bricked house with a wood paneled addition on the side has a window

with a small crack, similar to the ones in the street, and it stretches from one frame to

another in a wide arc. The crack is filled with pollen. The house has been sold, and

rented, and owned, on and off again for the past five years.

There was a young girl found roaming the neighborhood two years ago in a long

nightshirt, her face was dirt covered. It was before the streets were fixed. Friends and I

were walking down the street throwing sticks that fell from oak trees after a large

thunderstorm the night before. We splashed water on one another from the huge puddles

that collected in large dents on the cement. A woman came to us, her fraught hands

sitting on the child’s shoulders. I knew this woman, she fed our dogs while we were on

vacations. She asked if we knew the child, none of us recognized her. The girl was sitting

on the front porch of the women’s house, the women sat besides her, smoking a long

cigarette. Her father picked her up in a small blue truck while coming home from work.

She’d lived in the house with the crack in a window. This was before the crack.

        My father’s house is wide and open, with smooth carpet and dust filters that sit in

the bedrooms and swirl around like wind. Every other weekend I stay at his house, on

Sunday’s I wake up to the fresh scent of men’s cologne, and fresh clean cut grass. My

mother brings me home before church begins. I hope to stay with him over the summer

and swim in his pool with chlorine that stings away the dirt.

The soles of my black shoes have wide ridges in them and they fill with pollen as

I walk. My nose is packed with pollen, my throat feels slathered with pollen, and my

lungs are clouded with it. The entirety of my body is infested with pollen. There is a large

stump that swells from the dead lawn of a house. Pollen, from all the trees that surround

the house, smears over the long cemented driveway. Pollen is a constant that you cannot

intercede.

We studied the notion of faith at a biblical camp I was sent to in the third grade. If

you cease to acknowledging something, does it exist? I cannot remove the pollen, it is

manifesting in every neural-pathway within the pink fatty tissue of my mind.  I have

never acknowledged a force greater than it.

When I reach the church parking lot I weave myself through tightly packed

vehicles. I hear the deep voices of the choir singing. The church has three doors, intricate

wood paneling on each, and a large awning shading them. Their handles are always cool.

Sometimes when the spring rain is thick and limitless it seeps under the church doors and

makes the tiled floors slippery, the water lugs in pollen with it and makes the church

smell like the musky mildewed floor of a dense forest.