Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "Erased Edges" by Barbara Hurd (©2001 by Barbara Hurd).

Once, I enrolled in a weeklong seminar to learn how the government delineates wetlands. The government's guide to finding the edge of a swamp is fifty pages long, complete with graphs and soil maps you need a magnifying glass to decipher. But a liquid landscape cannot be nailed down with maps and charts any more than love can be understood as a biochemical reaction of pheromones.

Trying to define the edge of a swamp is like trying to put a neatly folded shadow into a dresser drawer. Our efforts to outline these places arise from a desire for tidiness, a wish that nothing undefined lurk around our own edges. But the truth is, even human boundaries shift. Some mornings, I wake up feeling small and compact. I barrel through those days, teaching, opening mail, and grading papers like a self-propelled lawn mower. Other days, I feel huge, airy, globular. Someone blows through the bubble wand, and I billow out my front door, roll into the garden, into class. I can't grade a thing, but I can see the shadow a poem makes, where it wants to go. On those days, I can live with how the edges of a swamp shift, how its underbelly can sometimes surge in the center and open up into a pond, how the pond can disappear and the woods around the perimeter go soggy overnight.

Once, as children, my twin sister and I fashioned our own seedpod by threading an old rope through the four corner grommets of a tarpaulin and flinging the rope's frayed end over a large limb of a maple in front of the house. We sat cross-legged in the middle of the tarp and pulled on the rope until the four corners rose around us, enclosing us, and the sack began to rise off the ground, we were actually able to hoist ourselves a few feet into the air this way and dangle there, a khaki-green sack of twins, a pod hanging heavy on the vine, its seeds hidden inside, suspended and swaying over the front lawn of a suburban neighborhood.

At that time, my family lived just a half mile or so from a small pond. One spring I spend weeks there imaging my stick was a giant pencil with a pink rubber eraser on the end. I imagined crouching on the bank of the pond and systematically erasing the edge. There was something quite magical about the notion that you could change the ground you stood on by erasing some line.

The gift of ambiguity is that it stretches us. Makes us less rigid. Nudges us out of either/or thinking. One morning when I was forty-two, I stood in my bedroom, changing from a sweat shirt to a T-shirt, and suddenly I couldn't remember whether my twin or I was older. Was I Baby Girl A or Baby Girl B? From the moment of our birth, in spite of our parents' best efforts to differentiate us, we were "the twins," a unit who shared bedrooms and friends and chores and clothes and good-night rituals, a unit others momentarily dissected by asking which of us was older, as if those thirteen minutes were the only distinction between us. So, on the midlife morning when I stood in my bedroom and felt those thirteen minutes utterly dissolve, the realization swept over me that if I didn't know which one of us was older, if that distinction disappeared, then I might very well be my sister, not me. Looking in the mirror didn't help. I recognized the face, knew this body was the writer's and that other one the designer's. But I felt somehow it was quite possible that I had momentarily sloshed into her body and she into mine, that this might not be me now sitting on the bathroom floor, the way if you take a stick and dig a channel between puddles in the dirt, the water from each puddles heads toward the other, and there's nothing to stop the exchange of liquid so that, in just an instant, there's some new, double bulged body of water, but no recognizable puddle A or puddle B.

Here's what I love about the in-between: its inherent ambiguity, how it invites a swaying of imagination, a languid hammock swing between two definitions, two identities. The mind, like the body, swings sideways, rises over one bed of possibilities, pauses at the peak, considers, sweeps down and over to the other side. I am one twin, then the other. This swamp is land first, and then water, this turtle in my hand a waddler, and now a swimmer. We are shape-shifters, all of us, liquid mosaics of mutable and transient urges, and we give ourselves headaches when we pretend otherwise, when we stiffen into permanent and separate identities unsullied by the drifting slop, the very real ambiguities of ourselves and the world.