by Angela Townsend

My sister writes about leaves in a way that almost makes me want to go outside. In a medium that others use to confirm agendas and bark bullet points, Abby exhales. 

I open an ordinary email and fall out of my slippers. She frees awe from its amber, but she never shouts. Exclamation points fall down as though dead, like prophets in the presence of angels. Exuberance wears the wool cap of attention, rubbing the ribs of maples until she has eased some measure of the world’s pain.

Across a thousand miles of prairie, she spins my desk chair and bids me to rise. I cannot follow her through marshes into presence. I squint across my condo and glimpse cardinals within reach. But no, they are not birds, only green points gone red. It is not lost on me that the stout shrub outside my window is called a “burning bush.” Still, I stay seated.

I could write about how this suburban rectangle dresses up as a dozen roses every Halloween. I could say so much about a hedge that saves the best wine for the edge of winter. I could shake the holey trunk of my theology until all the small animals crawl out. 

But I default to metaphor before I begin. I have never touched the tiny leaves, even though they burn. They never grow exasperated with my neglect.

My sister is stitched with attention. The beige birds conspire at visitations. The scrub grasses raise themselves to their full height. Her galoshes are brown with life’s leavings and givings. She bears the mud that bathes tiny beasts and star-crumbs disguised as dust. She returns from hikes staggering under the weight of praise. 

My pink sneakers are clean. I could not describe the magnolia beside my mailbox.

I accept the duty to remain astonished. I am a woman under obligation, no less than my sister covered in eyes. I am the girl who sang “This Is My Father’s World” to the backyard tadpoles.

Yet I was always more enchanted by the word “polliwog” than the spots on the toads. They are fig-like faux eyes painted by a comic genius. They had to be pointed out to me. 

Do I fear the dirt on the treasures, afraid I will come home unable to come clean? “That’s what washing machines are for,” my mother soothed me when the grass tried to tattoo reminders of the day on my knees. 

Do I live too much inside, infatuated with the enchantress in the mirror? I have built barns behind my eyes, stacked with sneezy hay that serves my small story. 

Do I despise the body? I neither stroke the willows nor present myself in the pew. I forgive myself aerobically, petting my own head. I am weary with autoimmune mischief. I nod at meadow and church from afar. Do I hoard my bones because I have an excuse? Do I miss the geese because I am wrapped in a comforter?

I am indoorsy and exhausted, grateful, gangly.

My sister treasures maple helicopters and will not let a ladybug fall to the ground. I forget the color of my cat’s eyes. He keeps gazing back, all hazel syrup. I bury my face in his improbable mane, a ruff fit for a divinity school chancellor at commencement. I rise with hairs in my eyes.

I can’t remember when the oak turns yellow, so it slows me for an instant each year. It is long enough for the laughing leaves to send a locksmith to my cocoon. 

I do not know how many inches tall she stands, but the stuffed cat on my bookcase is poly-fil and roots. She was my mother’s gift the winter diabetes swung the axe. She has changed decades and apartments by my side since I was nine. She is many mass-produced processes from nature. She grounds me in my Father’s world.

I could not tell you where it obtained its special dispensation, but the new ice cream does not betray my blood glucose. I close my eyes unintentionally when the honey hits my tongue. It is not a blackberry fresh from August’s honesty or a loaf loved soft by fingers. It is grace that stoops.

I have no sense of their gait, their stance, the breadth of their shoulders, but I keep correspondence with souls. My first-grade teacher remembers my birthday. I beseech saints for frail uncles. I paint store-bought rocks “you are irrevocably loved” for a woman from three churches ago. I swap memes about cartoon turtles and smell incense. I finger etchings from other hands in normal emails.

I write the moon’s cycles on my calendar and forget to step out on the balcony. I curl in soft pants with coffee table books about quasars and attempt quantum psalms while I wash the dishes. I cannot see the meteors. I brush my cat’s tail and describe to him what I have read.

I leave saints and poets to debate whether it is real, but the thrift-store crystal caught my Daddy’s eye. It was only later that he noticed it was etched with a poem about a garden. It has not nudged me to plant daffodils or tulips. It is bright as a bulb in my hand.

My sister is a natural worshipper, apostle of promises in green vestments. I yearn for her eyes and ask our Daddy’s prayers when I glimpse all that I do not see and cannot write. The day may come when I zip my fleece and meet the water’s edge, looking out long enough to praise the ripples.

Today I thank the God of flesh and metaphor, who makes the hike up my condo stairs. God sees the acrylic Christmas tree I keep up all year. I swap out angels for glitter shamrocks and paper maple leaves. I wake and find branches heavy with poems and lemonades, “mountain fresh” laundry soap and fleece socks, metaphors and cat eyes. The tree lights work.