Emily Brisse

Because sometimes you need to think not cold but warmth. Because sometimes you need to think not dark but light. Because sometimes you need to think not fall back but spring forward . Here's an old essay, friends, that I first tapped out right here in this space that has, in the meantime, become a newish thing, a reminder that we can find a balance between two unsteady places. Visit the most recent online issue of The Fourth River , and once you open the PDF, read the other wonderful stories, essays, and poems, and then find my essay "Spring Forward," on page 96, at the very back. Thanks for reading. And believing in the transformative power of art. It is what will save us. It is what always has.

  Took a walk yesterday eve just as the sun was sinking. Baby was asleep. Husband had his feet up. The birds were winging as if it were their last hour on earth. I walked out and joined them, spirit right up there beside their bodies in the air, the air warm, the breeze blue, the clouds perfect, the light the same light that I've loved as I've loved all I've loved my whole life. The world is kind.

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When I think back to these final days before your birth, I will remember several things: the cayenne pepper I mixed generously into every soup and onto every entree I made; the yoga ball I bounced on while your father put the groceries or laundry or Chunky Monkey away; the quiet powdery snow that came several cold nights in a row, perfect and smooth, leaving one or two new inches for us to discover at dawn; how I stopped dreaming of you, and instead talked with you during the day, the hours coated with my pep-talks, my explanations, all my hopes I knew you were hearing. In the dark hours I would lay on my left side, a pillow between my knees and under your weight, your father wrapped around us both, and he and I would close our eyes, so warm, as the world outside went on and on and on and we waited to enter it with you in our arms, too. There were also daily walks where I tried my best to coax you, rock you into trusting the air. On a 12’ afternoon I bundled us up and trekked across th...

We went out west to southern Washington and northwestern Oregon recently to visit the first child that has made us Aunt and Uncle . A lovely trip. Inspired lots of writing that I can't quite find the time (or energy) to finish. But these. Thank God for photographs that don't require words. Except I can't quite keep quiet about the fact that, yes, this pregnant lady hiked through the drip, stepped back and forth over switch backs, and stopped (repeatedly) to suck down great gulps of delicious mossy thick green-coated air until I reached the top of Multnomah Falls, sweating, heart pounding, baby dancing inside of me, thankful once again for high places and tall trees and rushing water and the flat-out wonder I feel when I walk upon the world.   

 

  What do you think: Would Henry have said the same thing about running (or biking )? That an early morning run  was a blessing over the whole day, too? For some reason, I have a hard time picturing HDT up-and-downing and huffing-and-puffing next to Walden Pond, a fine sheen coating his brow and collecting on that fine, fine beard. Still, I imagine were he with us this morning, taking in a September dawn such as this, he would have laced up his worn-in boots and greeted the day, heart pounding.

So it's spring, and I'm out walking again, today in the middle of the big city, trains rattling west, airplanes overhead, highway noise rumbling on two sides, glimpses of 35W through the ten-foot high still-standing grasses, but: the still-standing grasses swaying ten feet high, the robins with their scraggly nests and cautiousness, the deer paths, the boggy soil, dirt black as night, a new word ( fen ),  the Mississippi past the sedge line , the (I think) common sootywing butterfly that looks neither sooty nor common to these color-starved eyes, which is to say nothing for the green the green the green the green the green.