June 14, 2019
Dad,
There’s a new way I see the garden now, the one you’ve been tending for decades on Garden Avenue (of all names)—the street of our family home. In haiku written by camp prisoners, days and seasons are tracked by the falling leaves of the moss-rose, petal to earth. Poets in camp numbered months and years by the memory of their home gardens left behind on the West Coast: flowering rhododendrons and peony buds imagined as vibrant, their stalks remaining firm. I think of us, traveling that week in the summer of 2019, away from California, along the train’s course, through Arizona, and on to Gila River. How far I brought you from your garden.
Did you think of the sagos, the summer tomatoes and basil, the azaleas and red maples, the night-blooming lantana, trees needing trimming, grass going brown—all the work awaiting you? Did you imagine the dog’s chirping, the silent, white bucket, and mom dragging the hose across the lawn to wake the fountain? Here, in the southwest, I find myself pining for the Great Central Valley, as I did when I lived in New York or that decade in the Bay, exhausted from cold bridges and colder waters, longing with my entire body for the landscapes of childhood’s kingdom. Smog-dust and all.
I understand now I am nothing. I am the daughter of a living father, blessed to be returning to you after these fire-and-ice travels through North American landscapes spotted by our elders’ lives, their prison desert homes, and other jails and prisons—with and without bars or barbed wire.
You were not taken. In the night and shirtless, you were not captured or broken by the sentry’s light, despite my nightmares. You took your time in the summer garden, where Leigh and I played as the light set, basil-ing our bodies against mosquitoes, baking mud-sweets in California’s sugary dusk.
Dad, your voice is wise now, beyond kindness.
I’ll see you soon.
love,
Brynn