Epilogue

     Outside the car, redwoods lined the asphalt. Vaulted branches filtered out stars and the moon. I shivered and wrapped my arms across my waist, but I felt brave driving down the coast highway at night with all that air pouring in.

     A week ago, my dad and I had hugged at the gate as my plane began to board. My stomach lurched as I walked down the jetway, not from nerves, but from a sense of possibility. I had first flown across country, to the waiting arms of my aunt, three years earlier, in celebration of my eleventh birthday. Now fourteen, I felt only excitement. I could go anywhere, do anything, be anybody.

     We had spent the day at Fort Ross, my aunt and I; we photographed the weathered chapel and stockade fence, photographed the yellow grasses that spilled down to the ocean framed by an astonishing sky. At home, touring an old fort would have been low on my list. But Gail's attention was infectious.

     "Oh, look!" she had exclaimed so often it became a joke. "Oh, look!" she said until I began to see. That is how she was, my aunt, the woman whose name I had shared from birth. That's how she was, alive in each minute as if she had no skin, no boundary between her and the world around her.

     On previous forays to the West Coast, Gail had taken me out for sushi, ordering tuna and octopus. I had not been sure I could eat octopus, each tentacle ogling up at me. Besides who ate fish raw? At home we ate fish, always cooked.

     She took me to dim sum and chose chicken feet and red bean buns from the silver carts that passed. I remember Gail's eyes, fanned by crows feet. I remember those blue challenges teased me into nibbling chicken toes, deep fried and crunchy.

     We searched for faces in the wind-etched rocks at Cañon de Frejoles, and meandered through a literary pilgrimage of John Steinbeck's Monterey. She introduced me to the Buddhas in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. And always, always, we walked on the beach, marveled at the sculptures of bull kelp and driftwood, at the waves of the Pacific thundering on the sand.

      Back in Willa, Gail's mini-van turned camper, named for her favorite author, we had headed south on Route One. Gail drove; I craned my neck for the last glimpse of sea, as the road turned inland. In the twilight, Gail's hair glowed pearl and moonbeam. She slid a cassette into the stereo, and I rolled my eyes as Merle Haggard's voice poured from the speakers.

     "I'm rolllin' down heel like a snowball hay-ded for hay-ill" I howled exaggerating his cowboy rasp, and making my aunt giggle through her protests. In her mid-fifties, Gail had already attended a Merle Haggard performance for each year of her life.

     "Mmmm" Gail had said, "Skunk. Do you smell it?" I did, and nodded. She glanced over offering a smile. "I love that smell."

     "I do too," I admitted, feeling like a conspirator. So she had rolled down her window inviting in the scent. It washed over us, sharp and pungent and wild, wrapped around us with a cloak of cold air and the sound of the living, breathing, buzzing forest that slid by outside. The smell held a sweetness, a musk that slipped through the offense of warning.

     I thought of my parents at home, they would have been in bed already, back on the East Coast, the summer scent of honeysuckle wafting in an open window. I could see the whole sleeping house, like a dream without sound. I fast-forwarded their night into morning, watched their routine unfold: showers, breakfast, preparing for work. Their dawning day felt steady, solid, like a kite flyer, two feet on the ground. And this life, out at night in the redwoods, was the kite, subject to sudden gusts of wind. Under my aunts wing, I flew.

     I breathed in, filling my lungs until the oxygen made me giddy. And I shivered. The night air laced with fog bit thorough my shirt sleeves. I held my teeth closed to steady the chatter that threatened to begin. But I couldn't bear to close the windows. I couldn't bear to close out the tumult of the night, to seal us again inside our ordinary box of air.

    She is gone now, my Ampie Gail, but she instilled in me a lust for adventure, a desire to throw the windows wide and saturate myself with the world around. She taught me to see beauty in unlikely places, in the weathered grain of a stockade fence, the curl of kelp, and in the perfume of skunk on the night air. 

This piece arose out of a Writing Workshop Institute at Columbia Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project, June 2013