Eden

six

There was no waste produced at Eden. All our food scraps went to the animals and all our garbage was turned to compost. I'd dart back and forth between the kitchen and the chicken coop, dumping buckets of potato peels and carrot ends onto their muddy floor. I'd take a breath, a pause, there and I'd watch their little beaks peck furiously into the peelings. They'd fight each other, and feathers would fly. But in the end, they'd work out their own system where everyone got a chance to be fed. Ducks walked around the property freely, and it felt like you were always tripping over them.

There were fourteen hens inside the coop and I couldn't count the fifteenth that day. The walls were high enough that foxes couldn't get in, but I still thought it would be best if I checked she was in there for sure. I checked everywhere, and finally found her laying in the very back corner of the coop. I heard, beneath her, the starts of little cheeps rising up into the air. I knew she must be sitting on some hatching chicks, and my feet ran without me to the kitchen where Charlotte was still cooking up lunch.

"Charlotte! Come!" I was out of breath and stupid-smiley when I hit the doorway.

She followed me with just as much urgency, our bare feet clicking against the mud.

I opened the gate once we reached it and led her by the hand to the mouth of the coop, where we could see the hen sitting there in the shadows. "They're hatching!" I clutched her hand tighter.

Her mouth was agape, and her eyes were wide as they darted between me and the hen in excitement. There was no one but Charlotte that would go as crazy as me over some little hatching chicks, but Charlotte loved every single little creature as much as I did. We stayed there and watched and watched until the mom decided to step off them, letting them breathe free, and six little yellow faces opened their eyes and opened their mouths to the sky, waiting.

I didn't know what baby chicks ate or else I'd offer them some scraps. Oh well; it's always best to let nature do it's thing. It knows far, far more than I do. Moms know what to do like instinct down deep in their bones; it's a wild thing to witness.

Our kittens had begun walking at that point, and we always snuck some meat scraps away to their corner of the barn. Soon, they'd be able to prance around the whole property! Soon, we'd be seeing them waltz through the rows of veggies and tangle in the gardens between our feet.

These days were paradise.

︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵

My first opportunity to visit the city came a few days later. Everyone was too busy to go, and I was one of the only ones who knew how to drive. So I'd go run some errands on their behalf. We tried to buy nothing from the city, but there were no farmers around here who had the certain type seedlings we wanted. We also needed some practical things - rolls of toilet paper and the like. I brought a scribbled list with me and realized as I drove out the driveway, startled, this was my first time alone in months.

I wished Charlotte was with me. She'd quickly grown to be right at the other end of wherever I was. Singing with the children, telling them stories (she made up such hilarious ones), sneaking away to take care of our kittens, taking the chance to milk the cows together and bring them to pasture whenever we could... And every time we cooked, we always tried to angle our stations together. Sometimes when the other women spoke and it was something we found particularly funny, or odd, or annoying, we'd press each other's toes under the table. It meant "let's laugh about this later."

I bet I would have been incredibly lonely if it weren't for Charlotte. Especially since I didn't feel I fit in all-the-way with anyone else. Sure, we got along, but there was always something missing. Either too much or not enough of any quality.

Now, if being alone in the car for the first time was odd, being alone in the city was terrifying. There's no way to realize how much you've changed until you visit somewhere that hasn't. The city wasn't very different than any other city, even the one I'd grown up in, but it seemed a terrible stranger. I felt I was leaving the wide-open planes to the stifling and claustrophobic streets that rode my shoulders up and put shadows all around my mind and constriction up my throat. I couldn't breathe in all the way in the city. First of all, I saw myself in the reflection of a windowpane and laughed out loud. My hair was near-unwashed. My hands and feet were crested with mud. I was thinner than I could ever remember being, but I didn't really like it. It looked sickly on me.

I was rather proud of how I looked though, on the whole. I was proud of anything that spoke to the contrast between me and my old life - between me and the city. Anything that pronounced my distance. And I couldn't imagine I'd ever been like those other women walking past, high heels and proper dresses. Purses and makeup. Every time someone looked at me with curious eyes (as indeed I looked like I just stumbled out of the forest), I smiled, proud of myself.

I hated the real city even more than my recent imaginations of it. I didn't see the fun bars and cafe's anymore, like I used to. I didn't see beautiful things in the store windows I might want to buy. All I saw was consumption. Artificiality. Lies. I could hear Mara in my ear: "the city wants you to be unhappy. Because when you're unhappy you keep buying things, and the city would break down if people stopped buying things." I saw pollution everywhere - coffee cups dumped into trash cans. I saw people walking by, bent into their phones. Like they were chained to them. No one even looked up - no one even looked each other in the eyes. People walked by those begging behind cardboard signs - people with briefcases. People I knew had money. What a lonely, lonely place.

I saw a woman looking down at her phone while her baby cried in the stroller, and she shoved a pacifier in his mouth instead of holding him. I had learned a woman's whole life should be her children and it made me cry to see how wrong she was living. But those weren't my own thoughts. None of these were. Well, some of them were. It gives me a headache still to try to disentangle what was real and what was learned. Ask anyone whose left something like I did and they'll tell you trying to re-trust your perception of reality is the hardest thing. It took me years.

I hated the way this mechanical world around me was moving itself closer and closer to its own death. I hated the things the signs were screaming. "Make the morning easier" coffee (why is the morning so hard?). "Hide the blemish" concealer (why is our natural face a blemish?). "Get more done" energy drinks (do we need this, or do we just have too much to do?). I saw a sign for a new antidepressant and wondered why everyone was so depressed. It couldn't be everyone, alone. It was some sickness bred here, in the steel and the concrete and the disconnect. I saw a machine spinning itself into the ground. Everyone along for the ride. Everyone asleep. I wanted to scream; I wanted to cry. I saw a city building itself taller and taller to compensate for the depth of the hole at the centre of it - this hole where a beating heart should have been. But no one spoke about the hole, they just built new bandaids to patch it up. They just built new ways to edge around it.

Mostly, I saw a city caving. It contained the seeds of its own destruction and all anyone did inside of it was water those wrong, shallow roots that were wrapped around nothing but shifting sand. The city was built on top of a pot hole, patched up with cardboard that closed in and glimmered in steel and cement and the wrong light. Electronic, buzzing light that replaced the sun. I was so, so grateful to live in Eden where things were open and where the ground was sure and real. The ground was the Earth. It wasn't caving. It was eternal.

And I was so grateful to be leaving once I'd collected everything on my list but...

A convenience store caught my attention. Just a little one. I saw racks of chips through its windows.

I inhaled sharply. This city was horrible, evil, disgusting. But Charlotte wasn't. Charlotte was beauty and good. She was the earth and everything that was right about it. And I wanted to make her happy; I didn't know how to reconcile these two pulls in me.

This is the crucial choice of the heart. Do you live by rules or do you bend around them when the heart calls you to?

I acted from my gut, not my brain. And I bought every single type of chip, tying them up tight in a linen bag I'd brought. I'd keep them a secret. I'd keep them tied up and hidden until I could give them to Charlotte.