One day when I was little, I trespassed the aluminum gate that was next to our little orchard in search of a Frisbee or Nerf ball or some such thing that we had sent flying, accidentally, over the barbed…
“What I Want to Know” started as a poem, which I called “Seven Steps to Survive a Charging Cow.” I’m sure the poetic, instructional format could have worked out in its own way, at least in the right hands, but in practice I was trying to be silly and aloof and I wasn’t quite pulling it off. So I set it aside.
A few years later, when memory came loitering again, I started fresh, writing down what I recalled without any craft goal in mind. I ended up with something that sounded less like I was trying to set up a punchline that never came, and more like a phone call with a friend, or an entry in a journal. This simpler tack was an improvement, but I still didn’t know where to go from there. Like many writers, I find meaning in past events only later, accidentally.
Every time I see my mom, she asks if I’ve written or crocheted or drawn anything lately, and I tell her what I’m working on. When my writing came up, I told her, jokingly, self-deprecatingly, about entering the cow pen. As we’ve all experienced one time or another, I was telling someone what I thought was a funny story, and instead, they balked. That dissonance between what I meant to say and what was echoed back at me nudged me into asking myself what story I was telling myself, and why.
In some ways, this essay really is just about my memory of being chased in a cow pen. The cow pen next to my backyard was an anchor of my childhood, sometimes soothing and sometimes frightening, but as real as the breakfast grits I loved to eat with brown sugar and butter, or family weekend drives through the canyon with sign-posted warnings of falling rocks. But I found an added measure of insight when my mom reframed my feeling of embarrassment at a moment I least expected it, and, in writing the essay, I enjoyed the privilege of claiming every moment that makes me feel alive.
Writing the essay, I realized that I don’t know why I have refused myself the gravel of so many memories, for so long. That, often, I shy away from the fraught moment between escaping and recovering, until my ability to remember is no longer fresh. That, sometimes, I need time and distance before I can look beyond that first and most important truth: how lucky I am to have survived as I did at all.
ALIZABETH WORLEY lives in Utah with her husband, Michael, and their two children. Her essays, poetry, and illustrated works have been published in MQR Online, Post Road, Guernica, Tar River Poetry, HAD, Sweet, and elsewhere. As a visual artist, she also sometimes illustrates children’s books and draws portraits, which, alongside writing, she has enjoyed doing for as long as she can remember. You can find her on Bluesky at @alizabethworley.bsky.social.
