A Routine Blow-Up

Following nature's diminishing renaissances

Mar 23, 2025

Walking Leonard, I heard the lapwing late this afternoon. Calling from somewhere nearby, but not from the nesting grounds they’ve used the last three years.

Wooaa. Wooaa. Like a siren. I’m hoping this means the bird I heard will find a mate and settle to nest in the protected patch of moorland surrounded by apartments and industrial buildings—butting up against the skateboard park. Every year a bit more of the edges of the fields disappear, but still the peregrine flies overhead. The noisy seagulls gather and circle. The wild hare still live in the stone hedges.

Every year I’m relieved the chicks become fledgelings and leave to return. I know they’re endangered. But they are here. Right now, this year, they are here again. It feels like some kind of victory.

I was listening to Shriek of the Week this morning, which reminded me of the thrill I had last year, looking up to see a woodpecker in a birch tree at the entrance of the park. Close enough to see unobstructed and marvel at the colors and patterns of her wings. It was the first time in eight years I’d seen a woodpecker here. I was running alone for some reason that morning. It was bittersweet to have something feel this special and have no one there to share it with.

I’ve been unable to walk for nearly two months, and am frustrated to have missed the beginning of spring (again). I’ve missed the way we have to swerve on our runs in early spring, around the duck-couples who plant themselves in the center of the trail to court. I have no idea what the purpose of their exhibitionism is, but there it is. By now, though, they’ll have wandered back down the bank to nest in the reeds.

My foot is still on pins and needles, but I’m learning to walk again. Going back to work tomorrow, I’m going to have to pull myself out of this haze. I thought I would get so much writing done. The wasp poems. The Baroness play. But instead it’s as though emotions filled my head like tightly packed cotton—not the soft kind, but the kind still rough with bits of hulls—making my whole body itch and my mind ragged. For three weeks I had trouble breathing (which meant a phone call to the oncologist). Is it possible to say “mild panic”? I’m beginning to wonder if sick leave itself was enough to trigger a kind of trauma response.

There’s a part of me wanting to get back to the old normal, and another part that wants to blow up (parts of) my life. I keep telling myself that once I can run on the trail again, everything will fall into place. This isn’t a time to make decisions of any kind really.

Right now it is about pushing through.

I’ve been thinking about woodpeckers today. And because they eat wasps—wasps. This means I’ve been thinking about the women in my family and their deaths. The deaths they’ve carried in their minds and the deaths of their bodies.

My grandmother was nine when her father died. I know so little about her life, but this I remember: I remember her telling me more than once about the fourth wave of the Spanish flu epidemic. Her father died at the very end, in 1921. I subtract nine to get to the year of her birth. Her life took a hard turn that year. From her soft memories, to her prepubescent years in service: a ten-year-old working for room and board.

I don’t know what year her mother died. Much, much later. She was the cuckoo wasp who dropped a egg in a stranger’s hive and never returned.

My grandmother’s body was strong, though not without its pain. She soothed her slipped disc with Vodka. But just one. She lived long enough to have floaters take the joy of reading from her, and once her blood pressure dropped suddenly and she fainted in the washroom of her assisted living apartment complex. She was 88 then. It was her mind that ailed her. She would have never said ailed, she was no Southern Belle. It began to bother her at 91. I lost her then. This woman whose love had always been like parallel play, was a child again.

When I was a teenager, my mother “adopted” a second mother who’d had breast cancer. I remember that once she hugged me and the asymmetric embrace made me self-conscious and uneasy. A few years after her death, my mother’s body began to ail her with stage four breast cancer. By this time, my mother had taken on the Southern identity. It took four years for her to die.

If her mind or heart were bruised, I wouldn’t know. What they say about end of life epiphanies isn’t true.

My aunt who took antidepressants, forgot them on a business trip, and had a seizure while driving and killed a stranger. She began drinking. My aunt, who is dead now.

My aunt who married a man who murdered her child. She lives. And I don’t know how she has the strength. And I will never know, because we are solitary wasps, all of us. If there are no threats between us, there are threats surrounding us. Internalized.

We each chew the stationary that desperate letters were written on. Spit out the mass to seal the entrance to each little cell.

Yes, there are prison stories I haven’t told you.

I had an uncle who married a witch. Then he disappeared. Like his father who disappeared. But that is another story.

What I am circling here is that there are all kinds of deaths. And renewals. Sometimes I believe we are fated to repeat history because that is what humans do. It doesn’t matter who raises you or how closely your DNA is related, your story will be eerily similar to someone else’s hidden story. Because that is a fact of nature: the recirculation, the renaissance of what came before. And whether that is the glory or the shame, is a matter of perspective. Whether the lapwings come two and two again, or whether they’ll find a safer place this year, it is a form of the imperfect repetition.

I believe in blowing up our lives now and then. I believe in writing more than one story.

Thank you for taking the time to read.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack, or go to the Dramatic Roots chat, where note sharing becomes an act of literary citizenship. Post a link to your work, and share another. You can find more about my work, including my mentoring and accountability services, at renpowell.com.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

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