For years I have watched the image of body morph without my body changing, image changed by the current takes on flesh by society. Too thin, not thin enough, odd olive arms with ashen legs, sagging flesh, tight forehead.
Out of work, not unhoused, for a I have a shed, I have lost the last flickering image of my body. It has vanished, no longer seen by passersby, not anonymous, but bodiless.
I take my white metal basin over to the hose before I can see the sun, and fill two inches of water. I brush my teeth and spit. I remove my shirt and wash my arms and chest, back and neck, face and scalp, remove my shorts and stand next to the shed out of sight of God and all people and under the watchful attention of two robins wash my lower half, then dress quickly and dump the water in the garden.
I refresh the water, take the small mirror donated with the soap and make suds, take the razor also donated with the soap and shave. Today I do not cut myself. For fifteen minutes during the bathing and the shaving and the standing with clean skin and clean teeth I feel joined. I do not know what I am joined to, but I feel joined.
I slip into the shed and must dress in the dirty clothes I have worn for two weeks, and put on a pair of socks I have worn for three days that reek of dirt and sweat and quickly destroy the smell of cleansing. I feel as if I have been sent back centuries in time, like a coal miner who bathes and comes clean in the tub and rises close to God and steps out and slips into his coal miner’s clothes and returns to a soot that no one can scrub clean.
Since I have lived in this shed, I have washed up every day, even if I have found no paying work, yet I have worked a little grove of drooping plums behind the shed where I can enter in and no one sees except creatures and birds. I reduce the thicket, clear the fallen branches, slope the soil by hand-scoops and tromping down with my feet, replanting plum pits with a deliberate stomp and wiggling press of my toe.
And what a riotous joy this brings, what strength. I am no longer alone. I am joined by this presence who does not ignore me but celebrates in my meager life, my immense joy, who heals. Together we nurture.
The grove is more of a haven than the shed. This morning, I look at my skin, blotted with bites, scratches, bruises, scars and spots I cannot name, my legs have become spindles, my arms braised, my fingers and palms weathered and leathery and the nails like jagged shards of broken glass. But today, here, my body is not hidden from myself. My body is fractured and damaged and tattooed with harm but in the bending plum trees it is somehow whole.
I have no need for others to see my body any longer. In this grove, through this work, it is seen.