edge of the road

thoughts on naming this newsletter

I have seen a fox in the wild only once. It was late spring on an unpaved road covered by thick canopy, greens almost bruised in their vividness, bracken fern, a forest of maritime oak holly. I’d set out to find a small cemetery I’d heard someone mention in town, one without a single engraved headstone. I needed to see it. Why? I was pregnant, looking for something, and thought I might find it there. 

The density of the leaves above gave the road the impression of dusk, though it was midday. There was thick mud below, my boots sinking into the earth after days of heavy rain. An eclipse feeling—how else to describe what it was like that day? Everything was cool and shadowed, an urgent stillness. I was startled before anything happened at all. 

I peered off the road, looking for a footpath, the kind that might lead to an overgrown graveyard. Where are you? 

In the earliest days of that pregnancy, I wondered if we used to have ways of knowing what to call our children, something like reading bones, waiting for the gods to leave a note on the sill, looking for a sign in the river’s night conditions.

Just earlier that week down in Florida, a fawn was born on the edge of a hurricane. She was seen picking her way through the remains of a coastal town in her first hours of life, and the local news station held a poll, wondering if they should name her after an archangel or call her Promise. I dreamed they should name her Triumph, Felicity, Perpetua.

I touched the outline of the baby’s foot through my cotton dress, and there it was—fox! 

It was slight, bright rust, flash of white at the neck and chin, with black at the feet and tips of the ears. We stared at each other in the middle of the road, eyes locked, and I felt my daughter move. I knew it then—the early impulse I’d been quiet about had been correct: I would name my daughter after my grandmother’s grandmother, a woman called Rose Fox. 

The fox appeared, and a door opened. Stock-still, she told me something about the nature of time, how we manage to signal our presence. Surely, once at least, I flashed across a field in Rose Fox’s girlhood in St. Clair County. It was as Eavan Boland says: “what else / can a mother give her daughter but such / beautiful rifts in time?” And then the fox was gone, leaving only the open door. 

I never did find the cemetery. I stopped looking. I’d found what I’d come for and discovered something more besides. Have you ever seen a fox? The encounter was like receiving a missive from my future. The fox appeared and offered me a knowledge I didn’t know I already had, telling me something true about how I needed to live. 

Early last year, I attended one of

David Whyte

’s Three Sundays series. He spoke about the paths one can take in a life, that a part of you already knows what you’ve chosen, what you’ve said yes to. A part of you already knows and has gone ahead and is beckoning you onward. A part of you already knows what has been promised to you since before you were born. He spoke about how deep attention and care are the foundation upon which we must love the world and our place in it, and I thought of the fox, its presence, the way it was urging me forward, a conversation with my future, an invitation to befriend my uncertainty and longing. 

Mary Oliver describes a similar encounter like this: 

A fox goes by in the headlights like an electric shock.

Then he pauses at the edge of the road

and the heart, if it is still alive,

feels something—a yearning for which we have no name

but which we may remember, years later, in the darkness,

upon some other empty road.

This is what I’m after, moments that startle me into brilliant aliveness, that ask me to remember some truth I’ve forgotten, that make me ache for what part of me already knows is waiting. 

Each writer has her subject. When I say I write mostly about birth, death, and love, what I mean to say is that I’m concerned with wonder. I heard

Joy Sullivan

share just this week a practice she uses as a poet, carrying a notebook, collecting what she calls “tiny tenders.” That’s it, I thought. I keep the bird burrowing into the fruit husk on Carroll Street, and my son’s notebook sketches. I keep the gentle notes from a friend, the ones she sends so casually that yet sustain me: “Just keep walking north,” she texts. “I’ll find you.” 

I keep these things, collecting them like one might for a cabinet of curiosities, a wonder room, though less locked cabinet and more vivarium, mind like a field station. Less specimens in jars and insects pinned to cork board, more rooms filled with frogs and winged things, snakes and the door forever ajar, flora spilling through open windows.