Still. Life. by Nicole Walker
In her flash-length essay “Still. Life.,” Nicole Walker braids an ecological crisis, the dramatic die-off of pinyon pines in Arizona, with a personal crisis, call-backs for ultrasounds after mammograms when she was forty and again when she was fifty-two. “Because I’m always braiding essays,” she writes in her author’s note, “it seemed straightforward to me to bring together a recent personal health scare with another kind of scare—the one where a plant endemic to Northern Arizona may disappear as the climate changes and the drought persists.”
Often in braided essays, one braid is personal, the other scientific. Here both braids combine memoir and science. In the braid on cancer, we’re made aware of the science of breast cancer detection and treatment as well as the emotional devastation of a potential diagnosis. In the braid on pinyon trees, we learn that pinyon pines are gymnosperms infected by scale insects at higher temperatures, and also experience the narrator’s personal memory of pine cones she collected on walks with her mother-in-law: “I bite them in half and suck out the meat, although it’s hard on your teeth and the husk slices your lip.”
The wind that blows through the skeletal pinyon trees on her more recent walks sweeps through the flash, sometimes literal, sometimes figurative, uniting its separate parts. Walker compares her fear of death when she was forty to a breeze below her consciousness that grows “into the kind of wind that can pull down trees, upend houses.” When she’s called back for another ultrasound at age fifty-two, she engages in casual chat with the technician, asking whether she thinks the wind will stop blowing. Her response to the breeze below her consciousness has changed. “I do not have the same inflamed response to which way the wind blows. If I’m holding onto a rail and the wind needs me, perhaps succumbing to a needy wind isn’t a bad way to go.” And yet, her fear of death may once again metastasize, “dividing and multiplying like cancer.”
Walker’s title “Still. Life.” suggests the possibility of death or extinction (still life as “nature morte”), but also survival—life that still persists. In an essay in Creative Nonfiction, “The Braided Essay as Social Justice Action,” Walker observes that braided essays are “reparative.” “As you stitch an essay together, you stitch yourself into the world. The world, stitched by you, is made more whole.” A world made more whole becomes the future she imagines, for herself and the environment. —CRAFT
Max was two. Zoe, seven. I was forty, when the nurse called and told me I needed to come in for a follow-up mammogram and ultrasound. My manners couldn’t catch up with my physical reaction. I started yelling why why why into the phone. I fell on the floor. The nurse was still on the line. “Ma’am. Are you okay??” How could I be okay? My worst fear, a perpetual breeze that blows just below my consciousness, blossomed into the kind of wind that can pull down trees, upend houses, loosen your grip on what is real.
Pine nuts aren’t real nuts. That doesn’t mean they’re imaginary. It just means that they are gymnosperms, which means naked ovules, in contrast to say walnuts, which are angiosperms. The hard outer shell of the walnut means you must use a tool to crack it. Pine nuts, you can open with your teeth.
Many of my friends have had breast cancer. Rachel. Mary Anne. Sylvia. When my friends tell me how they were cured—surgery, radiation, chemo—I want to hold them tighter than the machine that squeezed their breasts between its plastic plates and extruded bad news. I try hard not to let it be about me, but I am selfish and afraid. I have a lump. It’s not cancerous, supposedly. But, I am still scared. It sits unmoving inside my left breast, against my rib cage. I press on it as a totem to the breast cancer gods: Please keep this fatty deposit, this calcium entanglement, this ganglion inert, imaginary.
The pinyon pines in Arizona are under attack. Drought, exacerbated by climate change, has weakened the pinyon pines. In the warming air, the scale insects are happy to stay put and suck the sweet juice from the needle until it grows large enough to reproduce. As the scale metastasizes, pinyon pines don’t produce seeds.
This year’s mammogram elicited another ultrasound follow-up. This time, I didn’t wail on the phone. I didn’t think of all the ways my body would be poisoned by chemicals or cut into portions or emblazoned with toxic light. I made my appointment. I took my top off. I asked the ultrasound technician what she’d eaten for breakfast, if she thought the wind would finally stop blowing, what time she picks her kids up from school. Part of this nonchalance is age—at the time of my first follow-up, my kids were tiny and needed me, hourly. Minutely. Now, Zoe is at college. Max, high school. My illness and possible death will not be as big a pain in the ass for them. I have even thought that fifty-two is plenty of years old. I do not have the same inflamed response to which way the wind blows. If I’m holding onto a rail and the wind needs me, perhaps succumbing to a needy wind isn’t a bad way to go.
But such language is, in fact, a lie. I have a very inauthentic relationship to death. I think I know what it is—obliteration, absence, emptiness, stopping. But my imagination and reality don’t always see eye-to-eye. I believe I can think something, experience it through mental acrobatics, but still when the phone call comes, I will not be prepared. I will find myself on the ground, crying into the telephone, thoughts of my impending death dividing and multiplying like cancer.
In the past, when walking with my mother-in-law by the Sand Creek where pinyons cling to unfaithful sand, I’ve collected pine nuts from their cones. I bite them in half and suck out the meat, although it’s hard on your teeth and the husk slices your lip. But now, most of the pinyon trees are brittle brown skeletons. The wind blows through them like maybe I imagined them all along.
It’s one thing to imagine a human future. That’s how we’re supposed to heal ourselves. Mind over matter. Imagine a healthy you. But can we imagine a future for other species? If we can invent drugs through our wily innovations, like Herceptin to treat breast cancer, why can’t we imagine how to save these trees? Perhaps if I press hard enough on the sharp edges of these empty husks, I can conjure a treatment—a chemotherapy, a scale shell removal system, cooler night temps that keep the insects at bay. Perhaps I can sit with these pinyons, my lump, benign for now, inside my chest, and transfer my good luck into the heartwood of the tree.
NICOLE WALKER is the author of Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose and How to Plant a Billion Trees: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature, both forthcoming from Bloomsbury, as well as Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster; The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet Sustainability: A Love Story; Where the Tiny Things Are: Feathered Essays; Egg; Micrograms; and Quench Your Thirst with Salt. She edited the essay collections The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction with Sean Prentiss and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction with Margot Singer. She edits the Crux series at University of Georgia Press and nonfiction at Diagram. She teaches creative writing and serves as the Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University. Find her on Facebook @nicole.walker.18041.
Featured image by the National Cancer Institute, courtesy of Unsplash.
