sleet melts

He looked for others. The shoe box was full of letters with his handwriting. He picked one from the middle of the stack. It didn’t have “Turkie” as its return address and dated a few years earlier.

Hello from my little mountain perch looking down over Lake Missoula. Hopefully, you will come to our weekend retreat at the end of the month and of course, a shuttle can be arranged — so basically you don’t have any excuses. Get your bare butt on the deck and even out those tan lines with the alpine sun. Stare at the curve as the night turns on. Where are the stars brighter? Where else can you see the intricacies of the Cat’s Eye Nebula? If you don’t know what this means, Google “Hubble Cat’s Eye Galaxy,” you can see it with our gear.

And, now for the painful news. What happened to K? Ms. Andressen was our beloved AP English teacher. She’d spent a decade on Broadway though her only time on stage was pushing a broom. She found some extra work off off Broadway, and she had a job dressing as a lion and walking around Times Square to solicit ticket sales. It was an unbearable job in the humidity of August as the outfit didn’t ventilate and she lost gallons of sweat each day. Then one Sunday, 95 degrees, 92% humidity, she took off her lion’s head and looked up just as a pigeon dropped a load on her lips. She spat. She gagged. She was dizzy and tasted vomit in her throat. She took the lion’s head and found shade in a Chase Bank kiosk. A mime came to her with a bottle of water and helped revive her with some energy medicine. They started a relationship and he taught her the trade. She quit the lion costume and started miming for tips in a box. Her miming abilities became a teaching tool in our classroom. I still shudder at her impression of a hen protesting the abduction of her eggs (ch. 7 Animal Farm) and retain a tenuous relationship with poultry.

She dressed like a mime with vivid running shoes, usually orange New Balance, but sometimes green or purple. The black pants and black t-shirt rarely changed. She put uncapped makers in her back pocket so they were ready for yet another parenthetical note on the board, where the margins became the main story.

Then one day in November, her high heels clacked across the tile floor. Her beige pantsuit made her cautious of rubbing up against the whiteboard. She delicately took a red maker and wrote her name: Ms. Andressen-Chow.
We all looked around and asked questions—Who is Mr. Chow? She held up her wedding finger clad in a diamond that sparkled even to my chair in the back of the class. We were silent as she rocked back and forth on her 3-inch heels. I’ll keep it brief, she said, bringing up a picture of a handsome man and her walking on a beach. They held hands and seemed to be looking over the ocean. It had a professional quality. She kept the introduction brief—Please call him Mr. Chow. That’s all. A boy in the back sang out, “it’s a glamour profession.” She kicked him out of class. Nobody asked for more details, but we were curious. Each day, she arrived with new clothes. Tailored suits. Expensive pumps. Handbags worth her used Toyota. And then she came to school dressed like a mime again. Call me K, she said, writing a big K on the whiteboard. That’s all. Just K. The deal is done. She cried when asked about Mr. Chow. She just shook her head to say—no.

What happened to Mr. Chow? I think she wanted him to remain in the shadows by not exposing his absence. The handsome man on the beach. She wasn’t alone. Sometimes we just want things to linger, even if they don’t exist, a kind of denial of death.

For us, she will remain in many modes. She was many things to many people.

K was part troll, part mother, teacher, mime, yogi, longboard surfer, hula dancer, vegan (on weekdays), Derridian, and mentor—she encouraged every talented girl to forgo a future in poetry for a career in medicine or bio-medical research, as women in marginalized communities may need obscure similes less than insulin.

K has inspired hundreds of women to find places in Harvard and Stanford’s medical schools, to name but a few, as well as countless research and clinical positions with various orgs like DARPA and The National Association of Dental Hygienists. We are diverse.

But then she began to change. External forces turned on her, and she took on some new habits. Eating chicken is one example. Her last email to me included a warning about what chicken production entails. Here is one of her last posts:

THE TALE OF TWO CHICKENS

There is a chicken on the [REDACTED] and there is a chicken on a free range.

The free range is easy to imagine. Natural grass blows in the wind. Clouds pass over. Raindrops patter the lake. And, the smell of dung is quickly absorbed by the smell of the pampas grass, or cedar, or tumbleweed. The chickens' epigenome responds in kind, triggering genes that make it more vital, and natural juices flow. If you eat chickens from such an environment, you know the difference between their tales. Factory-farmed chickens live in toxic cages. You may not have really gagged until you’ve inhaled the combination of urine, feces, chlorines, ammonia, [REDACTED], fester, and bubble.

The factory chicken is also full of (redacted). It’s an arsenic compound that stimulates growth and it’s banned in some countries because it causes cancer. Yet, it persists. If you’re curious about why it causes cancer and its prevalence, contact me for some high-quality studies. Here are some of the quick takeaways:

1. [REDACTED] has been highly correlated with cancer
2. Though banned, [REDACTED] is still commonly used
3. Deceptive labeling practices often trick people into thinking they are eating chicken from a local farm when in fact it has been raised in a foreign country with little to no regulation and then shipped to a US processing factory. The label reads, for example, Texas chicken, but it was raised on [REDACTED] and soaked in a chlorine/ammonia bath somewhere (west of the sun) before its juices soak in your gums.

How would you know? That’s tricky. False positives are easy and without significant training, you can’t really be blamed for not properly navigating the available tools and testing procedures. Plus, even if you are correct in your diagnosis of foul play (couldn’t resist), have fun being taken seriously by government officials and other quasi-medical professionals. Saying that, you can test your chicken, and some testing kits will help you do that (contact me for details), but for most busy people on a budget, this just isn’t practical. One solution, vague and distant as it may seem, is to incentivize free-range chickens through our buying habits and community standards. Do a thought experiment with me and imagine every yard in DC with a chicken coop. It is our capital so the wire should be neat. There is plenty of natural fertilizer for rich soil, and we have many new arrivals who could use a job, so the production of meat could pile up. A chicken diet without the chemicals could improve many lives and reduce our health care burden.
I think she needed to work with the idea a little more. But what about her mime of the hen losing her eggs? Wasn’t that moving? Didn’t she believe in that? Yes. But at the same time, her life as a plant eater took an unfortunate turn.

Reason 1: Pesticides, which gave her breast cancer, she believed. Bitter that after denying herself meat for so many years so that she could spend her elderly years in good health, maybe past one hundred in a lawn chair, watching the waves come in, the sand between her toes, romance novels, someone to hold her hand.

The other reason was that she changed her mind about meat and felt that if it was dead already, then wouldn’t it be wrong not to eat it? If the animal had already suffered, then wouldn’t its poor soul be forever jaded by the memory of its body decaying in a pile of trash? Imagine, she said to me, imagine trash bags stacked three-stories high, and somewhere in the middle your flesh is decomposing under the weight of thousands of plastic bags, some are white and some are black, and rats have tunnels.

She told this to me as we sat together on a beach of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she invited me to join her last vacation. I found her blue tent on a white sand beach with driftwood scattered and high limestone walls forming a little canyon—quite pretty, actually, and apparently featured in the National Geographic for a best beaches award. The trade-off was that the temperature was barely above freezing. Wettish. Late March. Cold gusts of wind. Slate gray clouds rolled low and sprinkled us with snow then sleet.

She lamented the fact that she had no money and couldn’t afford to be on a tropical beach and instead was lounging in low-end mountain climbing gear to stay warm. We sat in fold- out chairs with a makeshift table between us. On the table, there was the one-burner stove. She took off her gloves and held out a silver spoon with blackish edges. She cooked up a little recipe of black tar with a grain of something—I didn’t ask what and didn’t really want to know.

She tied her arm off and found a spot between the bruises and scars. Her eyes fluttered. She nodded off. Her skin was sagging and reminded me of dirty snow. She came to with white shit caked around her mouth. She smoked a glass pipe.

“If plants have feelings, then is harvesting a field of soy a form of mass murder? Imagine a harvester with those industrial blades—millions of stalks severed each second— and, the field mice, snakes, and bugs. Lots of bugs depended on those soy plants for their homes. And why is it that we prioritize certain animals over others? Why is a cow more valuable than a gopher? Why is the life of a plant less worthy than that of a cricket? Just as in our patriarchal, onto- theological society, we have worthy and unworthy victims.”

She lit a cigarette.

We sat there. Total silence. She forgot about her cigarette. It burned into long flaccid ash and then disintegrated into the wind.

She nodded off. I wrapped her in a white sheet and went to my car, which meant a climbing up a traverse a few hundred yards away—I needed to go get warmer gear. There was an outlet store about twenty miles away. I drove there to get some sleeping bags.

When I returned and looked down on the beach, she stood naked in the water. Little whitecaps decorated the horizon. Gray on gray with ripples in between. She dove down and an undercurrent swept her away.

The text blurred as he stared at the letter. Rob seemed to be leaving out a few details. He didn’t want to think about this poor soul. Poor life choices. Teaching English. Death in the cold.
He read it again and checked for the date. A few years ago. He wanted something more recent and looked for dates from the last year. He had her black box in the middle of their bedroom floor with letters stacked next to the box. There were many.

He shuffled through the stack from Rob, trying to make sure not to disorder or wrinkle. He chose one postmarked from a month prior. Footsteps in the hallway. The floor creaked. Spine erected. Sound of his veins pulsing and expanding. He turned to see her in the doorway. The ceiling light turned on. Her eyes were round and quivering.
“Finding something you like?”
“I thought,” he wanted to explain but she turned and walked out. He got up and chased after her.
She got into her black Volvo while he pleaded. She slowly pulled away while he lightly tapped on the window, “I was just worried. I wasn’t snooping. Your place is sacred. It’s sacred. Trust is there. I just,” he gently pounded on the window.
She avoided eye contact and drove away.

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