Processed Meats by Nicole Walker

Author:Nicole Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

OUT OF PLACE

BIRDS OF PREY WEREN’T NEW to me. I’d seen them from the car, driving through southern Utah, sitting on posts of fences put up to keep the cattle from wandering onto I-15, now providing perches for red-tailed hawks. On the way home from Torrey that one pretend-apocalypse winter, I saw five bald eagles, standing as tall as fence posts by the side of the road. On the ground, they were undignified, tearing at a deer roadkill. But when, in my rearview mirror, the head of one eagle turned nearly all the way around to make sure the car moved on its way, the eagle’s white head eclipsing the thin, exhaust-dirty snow, the eagle made it clear that I had interrupted them. On the side of the road, tugging meat, was where the eagles were supposed to be. I, in my car, driving with salmon through the desert, was the one out of place.

Compared to southern Utah, western Michigan seemed like the last place you’d see birds of prey. Once, Erik and Zoë and I tried to go camping. We drove and drove until we found a campground far from the city. As we unpacked the car and began to set up the tent, I spied a basketball hoop hanging over a concrete driveway. The campground was in the neighborhood. Or the neighborhood was in the middle of the campground. Basketball hoops do not make the outdoors feel wild.

And, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make Grand Rapids feel like home. Grand Rapids was not Salt Lake, where I had lived for most of my life. I’d left for college, stayed in Portland for a few years, went back to Salt Lake for grad school. Now, in Grand Rapids, having moved for a job, I wanted to go home. In time, I would get used to this place, I hoped, in the same way one gets used to oneself: you learn to like the way your hair parts on the left, the way your left eye is smaller than your right, the way you bite your pinky fingernail just like your mother. You learn to adapt to the place you live. But as the climate changes, as even your native land changes—butterflies in November!—I wonder how anyone is supposed to get used to that. Maybe Michigan would always feel like butterflies in November.

But I also felt like I should stay away from Salt Lake. That place has a way of domesticating even the most wild child and Zoë, three years old, though stubborn with her love of square food and rabbit-like dialect, wasn’t particularly wild. She liked her face and her hands clean, her hair brushed. She folded cloth napkins straight from the dryer. She suggested that we get out the iron before company comes, like my mom does. I wanted her, even if it was a pain in my ass, to be more stubborn, less acquiescent. Fierce. If we went back to Salt Lake, I was

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