Nonfiction by Alexandra McIntosh

My mom took Lamaze classes before she had my brother. The instructor—in neon pink 80s workout gear—told the expectant mothers to focus on something and breathe through contractions. My mom chose my dad’s gold chain. She practiced watching it in class, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, leaning against him while the instructor counted. The chain flashed in the fluorescent light of the delivery room while she brought my brother into the world. I love the pictures of them in the moments just after— feathery Farrah Faucet hair slick against her temples, her tired smile, my dad’s eyes beaming above the gold and the tiny body of my brother.

These days my mom and I do yoga together. She likes it because of the breathing, like Lamaze; she reminds me often that you can breathe through anything. In downward dog I look under my armpit to watch her body next to mine, and imagine my small life folded into hers in the months before my birth.

My friend Brad wants to visit the hospital room where he was born. I’ve never thought of this, though I live close to my own birth-hospital. When my mom’s colon ruptured spontaneously my senior year, I did loads of homework there in the plastic chair next to her bed; and before my grandpa’s death, I spent five days and nights by the big window in his room, looking out on a gravel-covered rooftop, the wooded hillsides, the church steeple on a distant ridge. Brad thinks the room number should be on the wristband his mom keeps in his baby book, along with a plastic bag and the stump of belly button that fell off a week after she brought him home. I tell him he should paint the room—he’s a painter. A self-portrait I call it. He likes this idea.

He tells me about his grandparents from Kentucky, the house they lived in by the railroad track, his grandma who held him when he was born and died a week later from cancer. He shows me a picture of her and her sisters in the 1930s in front of a mural of a swimming lady, the sisters playfully pointing at the lady’s nipples, their faces bright with laughter. He’s been busy lately, teaching classes and restoring old houses, but yesterday he painted a picture of his sister’s puppy: a Christmas present commissioned by his mom. He scrapes colors off his fingers and says it felt good; it had been days since he’d opened his box of paints, and even the smell was nice.

When I can’t write I take Grizzly for walks, let him sniff the patches of grass browned by frost, high-step through the pile of oak leaves in the church yard. I imagine the symphonic alertness of his smelling, and wonder if he pictures deer and squirrels, the neighbor’s corgi. Three birds alight from the boughs of a dead honeysuckle bush and I think of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem written decades after the Industrial Revolution—a time that Brad reminds me brought forth a renaissance of arts and crafts. In those years of soot Hopkins wrote, “but for all this, nature is never spent./ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

I’ve repeated this to myself so many times it evokes a collage of memories: the classroom where I first heard it, the university cross country trails I walked as I tried to memorize the poem. Later, the patches of chicory and black-eyed Susans tangled along the road by my first apartment. A hillside in Spain. The sun above the swimming pool in my hometown. The condensation on a bottle of water my grandpa handed me after I cut his grass. Sweat under my tee shirt sleeves, summer skin peeling. The backyard singing its bright insect song.

How humbling to know that each one of us came from the body of another. I think of this great symphony of connection, of birth and death and birth, of pain and joy, this great and marvelous history of everything, this dearest freshness. And I think of our small roles in it, of my mom preparing to welcome it in those 80s birthing classes, of her practicing her breathing, of my dad practicing with her, his smile above a gold necklace, of all the hair my brother was born with, thick dark hair, and the baby his wife will have in August.

Alexandra McIntosh lives and writes in Kentucky, her favorite place in the world. Her debut book of poetry, Bowlfuls of Blue, is available from Assure Press. You can find links to her publications and pictures of her dog on her website AlexandraMcIntosh.com.