my mother thinks that longing
for a landscape is genetic. she herself
is made of sea and wind. brought up
in the woods with a single mother
an outdoor toilet and a ghost
who could open sliding doors, her yearning
for saltwater comes from her father’s side.
a long line of maritime pilots and fishermen
have made her want to be near the coast.
so when I tell her about the forest
I don’t expect her to understand
the comfort of morning sun washing
the moss in orange. but I forget
is that she’s a mother, and that all mothers
know about loss.
my grandmother’s father, my mother says
never wanted to cut down the trees.
after his death, the family sold
the land, the buyers
cleared it all.
my grandmother, unaccustomed to the wild
her broad knuckles in the garden dirt, her firm
grip around the toughest weeds, around
the whisk in her kitchen.
we rarely walked the woods, my grandmother and I, we preferred
the open fields
the pastures
the cowslip
dirt roads lined
with lupins and tansy
where you could stop
to talk to neighbours
or horses. she had a dislike for cats
based on them being predators.
but some days my grandmother
would put on an old fur coat
she would sneak around the back
in the half-dark of a summer’s night.
she would rap on the patio door, laugh
and stare at us through the window
with watery wild eyes, she would scare
us half to death.
she was the skogsrå, the mistress
of the forest, she morphed
into a mythical creature, luring
men and children into the deep dark woods.
it was a joke. but she was a queen
and according to my mother she cried
when they felled her father’s trees.
