A young man I know fell off an outcropping of granite this summer, fell eight vertical feet, fell into a six-week land of cast and crutch and exotic metal pins. Shattered tibia. Surgery. June plans as broken, as painful as his swollen skin. I wanted to sign his cast, the blue sheath that hid the parallel scars, but he refused my pen.

"I don't want any signatures. I just want everyone to leave me alone."

I watched him hustle down my street, good leg out first, gimpy foot behind, dragging, dragging, rubber crutch-tip pressed into uneven brick, blue cast wrap coated with New Mexican clay, his armpits red with fury.

I told my dad about the man, the dirty cast, the way the sun refused to melt his disappointment. I couldn't read my dad's expression. He sat on my desk, in a five-pound box of unsifted crematorium dust.

"Dad."

I sighed, loud and low. My dog shifted her weight from one side to the next with a hollow thump. Her fur vibrated against the wood floor, echoed the song she expelled with one breath, another.

"Dad. C'mon. Gimme a sign. I just need one sign. One stupid sign. C'mon."

My dad didn't budge. His remains ignored me, ignored my exhaustion, my fingers stiff with forgotten words. He didn't need me, my pleas, my little-girl-lost frown. He sat on the edge of a galactic ocean, his body mingled with beach, with stardust, his mind so astral, so shattered, that any response he gave flew between the atoms of my heart, the quark and string that signaled it to continue, continue, beat, beat, continue.

The young man sat on his front porch, his bad leg extended, as my youngest son and I walked to the cemetery. The cast looked wary, heavy with dirt and anger. He didn't wave as Marty rose his hand in friendship, didn't move. I thought I heard a grunt, the shattered rail of ache against lung.

"It's too hot, Mom."

Marty lifted his baseball cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead. We'd walked two miles, almost three. The cemetery stood just out of reach.

"We're almost there, honey. I've never seen it. C'mon. Have something to drink."

I held out a full bottle of water. My dad's ashes coughed. I felt it, three miles from my desk, felt him assemble and decay. Marty lurched forward, a robot on Mars, tiny robot with bio-skin near meltdown. He sipped.

The cemetery stole my heat, my fatigue. It rolled an acre, two, fifty, fifty acres of homegrown tobacco pain, of buried man, woman, and child. Marty chased a prairie dog, his robot battery satiated, aware. He didn't notice my surprise, didn't know the cemetery didn't look like a cemetery. I lost him to the pinon, to the prairie dog, the sky of stillness and fire. I didn't worry.

The plots didn't lay in elegant rows. They jockeyed for position, each facing the East, facing the rising morning Christ. Tiny iron windmills. Hand-carved river rock. Burned and etched slabs of pine. Dolls. Rosaries. Plastic Marys with deliberately tilted heads. A handmade garden of death, only a few granite headstones in sea of a thousand, only a few memorials of Rich Person Passing.

I knelt to consider a baby's grave.

Our little angel
Maria Romero
9 Days Old
Died June 11, 1987
Rest in Peace

The baby rustled beneath an uneven circle of hand-placed rocks. She danced with my dad, with my heart, with my boy chasing rodent, with the hardened heart of the blue cast owner. I felt my neurons move to catch the wave, the sign, the ink of fury rejected from surface, my surface, my surface of fatigue and sweat. My surface of sweat, overworked sweat. Marty lept into my view, twisted in joy, in prairie dog joy. I couldn't stop the tears.

At yesterday morning's flea market I added a smiley face in Sharpie black to the exposed skin of a scarred leg. The young man's frown shattered. He smiled, the first time in six weeks I saw teeth, saw his open future. My dog smiled too, her haunches spread against dry clay, in her vibrating fur blanket. My dad didn't smile, but the dead don't grin.

You can see photos of the cemetery here.

********

There are times the writing doesn't come easy. Maybe it's one day for you, or a week, a month. Maybe it's a year. I don't believe those times constitute Writer's Block, don't believe we sit, pen in hand, unable to place words because they don't exist. They do exist, the way my dad exists, in a box, shattered, broken, or perhaps the way the young man's leg exists - in stasis, waiting for growth, for time to work her magic. It takes a crisis, a baby's grave to pull the tears together, the words from our gut.

I have come to understand that our minds follow the rule of the fields. We plant ideas through our experiences, water them with our observation, our thoughts. We harvest them when they burst with promise, each word a fully-grown kernel on our story cob. But some seasons our fields need to rest, to lie fallow. If we force ourselves to write, we may produce a harvest, but it won't be strong, be vibrant, be able to feed others with vitamins and joy.

The next time your nutrients are depleted and you can't form a story, a chain of coherent thought, just rest. Simply rest. Under the surface, your roots still pull memory, pull tiny bits of nitrogen from the soil. When your field can sustain life once more, the words will sprout with the slightest drops of water and care.

This next Tuesday, I will highlight work from several women who have been trying the exercises in this series. Have you written something based on the Words in a Row columns? Please email me and direct me to your work. Thank you.

Birdie writes at La Pajaro.