Is there any brighter blood than what dances across my knuckles as I bend to the earth in my own backyard? Planting things and tossing woodchips about, I’m a child and an elder and I’m a creature at play. Caitlin Earth-mover, I call myself. I’ve got a microcosm of it all under my nails and staining my nail beds, but it’s not my world. I’m just in it, pushing dirt around and scraping my knuckles.

The bats will be out soon, but I stay out in the slanting sunshine as long as I can, until I stink of fresh air and have acquired a fine patina.

Back inside, by lamplight, I coat my nails in a clear lacquer even though they’re not clean. Maybe I can trap the late afternoon on my hands, like a fly in amber, frozen, to be considered a while longer.

Still hungry for something, I go back outside after full dark. I’m in the Adirondack chair on the back patio moonbathing. Listening to other people’s dogs, and air conditioners, but the bat swooping overhead is no one’s and everyone’s and I’m cheering it on, for eating the bugs and doing its part. No one’s opinion changes what the bat wants to do right now, a black shape against the blue of the clear night.

Weeks later, I wonder about this day. I worry I’m a suburban troll for tending only my own backyard, literally, but I love it because it puts me back in the dirt and under the swooping bat. Nobody yelled at me when I played in the cemetery as a child, though they might have, could have. It had the trees for climbing and the shade I wanted and I was happy to scrape my knuckles on the bark and wipe the blood on my t-shirt. My bike tires compressed the grass when I lost control going down the big hill, and I wondered who would see my tracks and what they might think.

But I love especially anything that gets me to stay outside a little longer and I think maybe I need more vitamins than what fit in the alphabet.

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