RACHEL M. HANSON

Winner of the 2022 Walter Nathan Essay Award

WEIGHTED

It was early enough yet that the morning still felt like night when my dog cornered a doe. The crashing sound of it all was terrible. She must have been picking at the best new grass at the corner of our eight-foot wooden fence, and when my dog came upon her so suddenly she’d little recourse, no momentum to speed her jump. She clamored over the wooden planks, my dog at her hind legs. I was angry for a split second, but this is my dog’s instinct and there’s no getting it out of her, or if there is, I wouldn’t know how to do it. I look beyond the fence for the deer, now standing in my neighbor’s yard looking right back at me. I feel ashamed for not thinking to inspect the yard before letting Blue out. My shame grows when I see the doe limp away. My partner comes outside, awakened by the racket, and I walk past him on our porch steps, through the kitchen, and to the living room window. The doe limps across the street and disappears into the woods not yet cleared to make way for another new, huge, and ghastly house, crammed between the older homes like mine—small and sturdy bungalows of the fifties. For now the magnolias and oaks, rhododendron, and the invasive kudzu with its long roping vines gone rampant here in Western North Carolina, live undisturbed. 

“She probably landed wrong. Like we do sometimes,” my partner says gently. “You know, like when we jump and come down just a little off and it hurts so bad you limp, but then it goes away. I bet it’s like that. She’ll walk it off.”

I acknowledge my partner with an agreement, though I don’t quite buy this comforting notion. Maybe it’s the pandemic and all the death, maybe it’s this southern land, maybe I’m still numb and unable to get optimism back after four years of Trump. 

When I talk to my friend, Lena, who is completing her clinicals in nursing school, there is a weariness in her voice I’ve never heard before. Not even during the worst river trips she and I guided, the longest and hottest summers spent dealing with difficult clients, have I heard her sound like this—and she’s only been in clinicals for a few weeks now. She tells me some people who lie in the emergency room dying wish they could go back and get vaccinated. 

“We all make bad choices sometimes,” she says, “It’s sad. People die knowing they made a really stupid choice.”

I get off the phone with Lena and walk to class where I teach behind a mask and look at my students in masks, and I know how much easier my job is compared to the medical workers trying to save the dying, the many dying, day after day. I try not to recall pre-pandemic times when I could read my students’ faces because it seems wrong to wish for something like that when I know my friend is watching people die on the regular. And still, I find myself unnerved at work. Like many universities, mine has not given me the choice of teaching in-person or not, and I find myself unable to muster much push-back to the administration. If I’ve learned anything about the value of human beings from higher education administration, it’s that while faculty may have traditionally been a prioritized amenity of the college experience, we have certainly become a low-end one, now more than ever. College stopped being about education a long time ago.  

 

*           *           *

 

My partner and I married out West because I couldn’t bring myself to do anything so important in the south where we live. I’d never wanted to come back to the south, having been a teen runaway from this region two decades ago. But I’ve learned a job is a job, and academics can’t be choosy. If I hadn’t come back here, I wouldn’t have met Jonathan. We were both first generation college students, both grew up poor—he in a nice family, me not so much. We both moved to Asheville for our first teaching jobs—both contingent when we began, though that is no longer the case. Part of me, the romantic part I suppose, is convinced that I came here to meet Jonathan. Though Asheville has become one of those dreamy places for tourists and destination weddings, I just couldn’t do it. I needed thin air. I needed the safety of the desert 

Before our courthouse ceremony in Santa Barbara, Jonathan saved up money so we could spend two days hiking on Santa Cruz Island. A place that feels more deserted than like a national park. Old farm equipment, fencing, oil pumps, and pipes are spread about the island, rusted and wrong. We hiked from one end of the island to the other, about thirteen miles, and met only two other hikers venturing out on the same route. Two lovely girls, celebrating one’s twenty-seventh birthday. We toasted her with whiskey before sneaking away to catch the sunset alone, almost newlyweds looking out on the Pacific Ocean until the pink and orange of the sunset gave way to night and the twinkling lights of sailboats and cargo ships. What a strange feeling it all gave me, sipping on poorly mixed hot chocolate and whiskey, leaning up against a man who loves me so much he’s taken to reading about desert lands and water rights in the southwest so he can understand more about the spaces I love. 

Both nights in camp, pygmy foxes roam around looking for food scraps. They aren’t just confident, but saucy, their fluffy tails bigger than their tiny gray bodies, their snouts delicate but ready to go sharp at any moment. We fall asleep watching them bounce about on the first night. Such quiet creatures, flitting through the night, coming alive with the cool of night, like Sacred Datura opening for the moon.

We spend our last morning on the more-populated side of the island where there are over thirty large campsites, unlike the four small ones in the backcountry, a fox waits his turn at the water pump. He wasn’t spritely as the other foxes had been, and it was strange to see an animal wait in line alongside us. One man started to cut the line and I asked him to wait, pointing to the fox who was clearly hurting, panting sickly, or maybe just old and ready to pass on. The man stopped short, seemingly annoyed, but let the fox have his turn all the same. I couldn’t look away from the fox’s little body as he drank from the puddle at the pump—his movements delicate without the sharpness of his fellow species. Jonathan took my hand in his and moved us to the dirt road. As we walked toward the ocean, toward the ferry that would take us back to Ventura, I said, more to myself than to him—

“Everyone dies.” 

I’d been saying that to myself for the last few weeks after having to put my cat, Fairbanks, down. It happened quick. One moment he was playing in the sunshine, rolling back and forth, and the next he was seizing. Having grown up in rust and violence, hungry for food and love, I know pain intimately, and I can still honestly say that nothing has ever hurt me so bad as having to put my animals down. During those last moments, Jonathan thanked Fairbanks for all the love he’d given to us. When the vet injected Fairbanks with the mercy drugs, I was on my knees so I could be face level with his as he lay on the exam table. I want to think he knew I was there with him, but I have my doubts.

 

*           *           *

 

I’ve been getting up in the quiet waiting for the light and the limp doe the last few days since Blue chased her over the fence. In the darkness, I’m pulled back in time to another morning waking at dawn in the back seat of my car. It was cold—the desert cold of early spring. I reached past the front seats and turn the key in the ignition, set the heat on full blast, nestled back under my sleeping bag. I waited until I was nearly too hot, then squirmed out of my covers, slipped into my flip-flops, opened the door and hastened to the trees just off the side of the road for the bathroom. As I was unfastening my pants, my fingertips going cold fast, I noticed a dead deer just to my right. I screamed—she’d taken me by surprise. Her pelt looked as though it had melted over her broken bones. I ran back to my car, hopped in the driver seat and drove towards town. 

I’d driven to Boulder, UT from Salt Lake City to re-certify my Wilderness First Responder, a requirement of the summer job I had as a river guide in the Grand Canyon. The timing of the course was bad. The timing for all things has always been too tight in my life—it’s my own doing. If I move fast enough, let myself be consumed in labor, then the past won’t be able to catch up and make me recall my Tennessee girlhood stuck in one drafty house or another, the bones of them aching from the wet air, my body feeling heavy with the density of it all. Lately though, I’ve grown tired, and find it difficult to jump from one thing to another. Lately, my memory isn’t letting me move forward, but pulls me backwards. I wake up from nightmares that I live in the south, and then I remember, pushing through all the confusion of sleep, that I do live in the south. The first time I had the nightmare I was unnerved, took a shower to shake it off, and then drove myself to work early. I saw the hills, the orange sunrise light peaking over the tips of the Blue Ridge just after I drove over the French Broad River. I took in a deep breath—it is beautiful, this place. And then I’m back sitting in one of the many yards of my childhood. I’m hiding behind an oak tree, leaning heavy and breathing deep, looking at the hills to know something good. And with that memory, I’ve burst into tears while driving down I-40, no longer telling myself I’m okay, instead asking aloud to no one, “How will I get out of here? How will I get out of here?”

On the first night in Boulder, Utah I slept in my tent near the community center, but there was something about the place that freaked me out. I woke up early and packed up my car. I drove to the outskirts of town where I could get a cell signal and called my friend, Danielle, for no reason other than to remind myself I wasn’t as isolated as I felt. I tell her about the vibe of the place, how I hadn’t expected to feel so weird here—I’ve always loved Southern Utah. 

“Something feels bad here.” 

“Come home. Just keep driving out of that town and come home.”

“I can’t. I have to recert the WFR or I won’t have a job this season.”

“Fuck the river. You can find other work.”

I’ve thought of quitting the river so many times, even back then I’d been contemplating what it would mean to give up the Canyon. I probably should have quit then, stopped pushing through things that made me feel bad—harassing men who withheld training, withheld decency. Even the good guys just made it that much worse to get stuck with the bad ones. I could go an entire trip and feel safe, happy even. But the bad trips seem even worse, every moment weighted down with the knowledge that I was stuck in the Canyon for seven to twelve days with unsafe men. Though I stopped guiding full-time years ago, only working a handful of trips each summer, it took me nineteen years to realize that no matter how much experience I had, no matter how many trips I led down the river, no matter how good I ran a rapid, I would never be safe from the misogyny plaguing the industry. Worse, I wouldn’t be able to protect the next generation of girls coming up. 

On my last trip of what would become my last season, the swamper, a young woman, not much older than I’d been when I started, approached me. She’d waited until the night’s work calmed and the other boatman had gone to bed, then she sat across from me on the back of my boat where I was sipping on a cocktail and listening to the current run fast. She took a few sips of beer and then looked at me directly, her eyes meeting and holding mine.  

“Do you know how you were talking about some of the stuff JP did when you started here. Being nice and everything and then going bad. The trying to touch you and bothering you, staring at you all the time, making you feel weird. Not letting you learn to drive because you wouldn’t let him touch you?”

I did remember saying that, even though I’d consumed far too much vodka that night before we launched as a way of calming myself after going off on all the bullshit I’d seen over the years—the way men got away with making the women feel small. 

“Yes. It was a hard time for me when I worked with him back then.”

“And he eventually apologized to you, said he was sorry and that he had learned how bad it was to be that way with you, that he would never do that kind of thing again—not to you or anyone else.”

I nodded, feeling sick to my stomach as it dawned on me just how stupid I’d been to believe him, to offer forgiveness. 

“Well, he’s been doing that stuff to me now, too.”

As this very smart, very impressive young person sat in front of me drinking a Bud Light and squirming as she recalled the moments where she’d been made to feel unsafe, I felt the incredible urge to scream. 

            “Fuck,” I rubbed my hand over my face, feeling the sweat and grime of the day, feeling the grime of the last nineteen years, “I can go with you, we can report this together, if you want?”

            “Not yet. Maybe soon, if I have to work with him again. I bet I can handle it, but if I can’t, if it’s bad maybe then...,” her voice trailed off. 

The reality is, reporting probably wouldn’t do much anyway. It’s not like the company is every really going to do anything about him. JP’s been here forever—practically grew up with the owners. They let him get away with all the drunk stuff he pulls all the time. What’s sexual harassment compared drunk driving a bunch of tourists down river? As I listened to my young friend, the river dancing along underneath us, I understood that I was finally finished with this job that had always given me a reason, given me the means, to spend the time I craved in the desert. I just couldn’t justify it anymore. 

I wasn’t even ten years into my river-career when I called Danielle that day on the side of the road outside Boulder, Utah. I wasn’t ready to let it all go, scared not to have work, scared to let go of a place I loved even though it came with so much bad. I wish I hadn’t been so scared. I wish I had driven away and let the WFR go, let the guiding go. But I didn’t. I drove back to town, to the community center, ready to spend the next three days learning wilderness medicine that was highly unlikely I’d ever put into practice in real life. 

It was an odd group of folks taking the class. I was the only woman there and I felt nervous about it. They were not the group of river runners and guides I’d been expecting. Mostly they were folks who seemed like they just wanted something to do. One man brought his daughter to the class. She looked to be about thirteen but dressed as if she were a pioneer, minus shoes. Her bare feet bothered me. It was too cold. Her father wore hiking boots and was bundled in thick flannels. She wore a light cotton jacket over her dress and clung to a cloth doll. She stuck near her father and barely spoke, smiled at the older woman who was cooking for the class. I assumed, given the area, that her father was a fundamentalist. The instructor of the class, who seemed to be a kind man, a safe man, was friendly to the child and made sure she knew there was enough breakfast to go around. I didn’t have to ask the girl what the instructor did—

“Is school on spring break?” 

I knew it wasn’t. Most likely her schooling would never be traditional, would never amount to much beyond keeping house and tending babies. Her role was to serve the men around her. As I glanced at the girl shyly spooning oatmeal into her mouth, it occurred to me that she might be rebelling against all the bullshit. Maybe she was causing trouble at home and that’s why her father had brought her along. It made me sad. Keeping women uneducated is just another way of setting them up for oppression. That I also knew without asking. My parents had had their own version of religious fundamentalism, and I’d also been kept from school and was told domesticity and childbearing was why God made me. There was no point in educating me, because my purpose in life didn’t call for it. 

I could have talked to the girl, though I imagine her father would not have approved, but I didn’t want to. It was too much, too close to a reality I’d left behind me in Tennessee nearly a decade ago. I didn’t want to know another girl whose life was likely to be one lived in oppression. I hadn’t been able to save my own sister, and this girl, well, there was nothing I could do about it. I left breakfast early, went out to my car and opened up my laptop. My thesis was coming due and we had another twenty minutes before the class started. I looked at the lines I needed to edit. The sun was coming down hot—that beautiful desert sun. I closed the computer and leaned back to feel the heat on my face, whispering to myself again and again—There’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing you can do.

 

*           *           *

 

We can live anywhere and we can die anywhere, but different places speak to different people. I think of what that means for my history, my memory, and my desire to be as far from this Southern region as possible—this is not my place, but it is the only place for others. And I think about what it means for the women I have known or at least known of, women connected to my life or my community in one capacity or another. Some of the women I find myself thinking about are those who have crossed my path peripherally. Like the girl back in Boulder, Utah. My thoughts have been preoccupied with these women lately. Maybe it’s all the bullshit in Texas—the republicans waging their never-ending battle against women and what they do with their bodies. How many women will be forced to bear children they never wanted? How many young girls, still children, will be forced to give birth because this country is full of men who are determined to write laws that break their bodies? Men and all their breaking, all their controlling, all their violence. Fathers, brothers, priests and preachers. And too the righteous woman sitting with righteous men on the highest court in the land. It does not bode well for most of us. 

That special kind of morality that allows one person to decide that their belief about what another person does or does not do with their body, is more important than the person making up that body, well—that shit is everywhere. It’s in Texas, the state of my birth and where I first learned of violence, in Tennessee where I grew up, and in Utah, the state that gave me home. And still, I’ve come to believe that place is everything. If I was pushed own some kind of belief, I’d say I believed in rivers and in dirt, in the desert. 

Kristen, who had been my freshman roommate, drove over a curb and popped her tire on the way to a party the year before I graduated. While we struggled with the flat, a complete stranger watched from his apartment window across the street. We must have looked silly trying to break the lug-nuts, taking turns steadying one another as one of us bounced on the x-shaped wrench jutting from one lug-nut than another. We managed to break two, but sat down on the curb to take a break before going after the others. Kristen, who rarely came out with me, was not pleased. She lit a cigarette and muttered something about fucking Salt City and its massive curbs, and something about me being bad luck. This was the second time we managed to have car issue that month. Comparatively, a flat was better than the tow we barely avoided the last time—the last of my paycheck covered half, but I still don’t know how Kristen came up with the rest of the money. She refused to call her parents, and I didn’t have any worth calling, but in the end, she had her car and her parents never knew how close she’d been to getting it impounded for parking it in the wrong zone. 

Mark Hacking was quiet when he came across the street to help with the flat tire. He said very little and seemed nice enough. He was a bit round, bald, maybe in his thirties. Later, when the story of his missing wife broke, he gave the performance of a loving husband, concerned for his pregnant wife, Lori, wanting her to come home. But he knew she would never come home. He’d shot her in the head with a rifle, wrapped her in the mattress, and threw her in the dumpster. She was found at the landfill days later. Why? Because she’d discovered him in a lie, in many lies. He’d told her he’d been accepted to medical school in North Carolina, though he’d never finished his undergraduate degree. He told her a lot of untrue things. She probably cried herself to sleep that night after telling him she was leaving him. And then he killed her. 

I called Kristen at her parents’ house to talk about the murder and that day the murderer changed her tire. We were both smoking, both sipping on sodas on either end of the phone call. Something about that sameness gave me some comfort. 

“Well, people are fucking assholes, even the nice ones, sometimes especially the nice ones. You just never fucking know.”

Kristen said fuck a lot, and I found that comforting too. 

“Um,” I started hesitantly, “do you think I could come to your parents tonight?”

“Yeah, you can stay the night. We can skim my romance novels for all the dirty parts.”

I sighed, grateful. “That sounds perfect.”

 

*           *           *

 

I’ve had many manual labor jobs, including the river, where the management let me know that most sexual harassment was just teasing and shouldn’t be taken seriously, but if I was being sexually harassed I needed to learn how to stand up for myself and make it stop. As I sit here writing these words the thought I’ve had so many times, said many times, stays with me—another refrain. Men hate women. Men hate women. 

I know that women hate women too. Perhaps it’s a learned disdain for how they are treated—if you don’t align yourself with other women, if you aren’t a feminist, then maybe men won’t hand you the same treatment they give all the other kinds of women. If you can convince men, and yourself in the process, that you are one of the boys, then maybe you’ll be as good as one. Maybe. 

When I was quite young, not so long after running away from home, a woman I looked up to told me that it was mean to make a man stop at a certain point when it came to sexual intimacy. 

“There comes a point where men can’t help themselves and trying to make them stop is just mean.” 

The man who raped me was eight or nine years older than me. I liked him. We hiked and drank beer, cuddled in his hammock. When we went to his room and started making out, I said I couldn’t. I said no. He stopped. Said okay, but didn’t stop. For everything in my body that knew what was happening to me was wrong, that led me to madly run down the street the second it was all over, I could hear that woman’s voice—

“Men can’t help themselves.” 

 

*           *           *

 

When I was little and living in Texas I had a neighbor. Her name was Annie, and when she died it was slow—years in the making. She’d damaged her brain when she tried to take her own life. Carbon Monoxide poisoning. The details of her attempted suicide are fuzzy. I wrote about Annie some years ago, an essay in which I considered her kindness, and the oppression she lived under day in and day out. I’ve been thinking about her again because I’ve been thinking about all the women I have known who have been stifled—a life without agency or life lost at the hands of violent men. 

When did it begin, my awareness of this violence? I think it was Annie. I was four when I knew her, a year or two older when she suffered carbon monoxide poisoning. I think I was ten or eleven when she finally died. Her husband, a preacher, was a brutal red-faced man. 

When I was fifteen living in Tennessee I worked on a small tobacco farm with my older brother, the farmer, and his nineteen-year-old son, and a nineteen-year-old man who dated the farmer’s daughter, Dana. They had a child together—she was seventeen. I’ve written about Dana in the past, too. Her boyfriend murdered her with a shotgun the first and only winter I worked shucking tobacco plants. At first the boyfriend ran, but quickly turned himself in. I saw a brief news clip. She was trying to leave him, wanted to move away for school and didn’t want him following her. He killed her while she sat in the driver seat of her car. He shot her from the outside, pressing the gun against the glass. She must have been trying to get away. At her funeral, I had the hopeful thought that maybe there had been mercy. Maybe she hadn’t seen it coming. Now I wonder what it was that made him feel so untouchable that he didn’t feel the need for restraint, that he helped himself to the life of a young woman who simply wanted to live away from him. 

 

*           *           *

 

When the whole country, the whole world, is being ransacked by sickness and death, it’s hard to avoid the thought of death and dying and loss and grief and the overwhelming sadness of it all. It brings things up for us—those of us waiting for the end of the pandemic. I take inventory of all the ways in which I’ve known violence, death, and grief when I’m walking my dog on the trail by my house, when I’m looking out the window before dawn has appeared. I wonder if thinking this way is also a condition of living back in the region I swore I’d never return to. This space, despite so much beauty, presses me down even though I work daily at not giving over to the heaviness I feel in here. I remind myself my early encounters with all this darkness started in the south, but it didn’t stop there. Everyone dies, and anyone can die anywhere.

After Annie died, after Dana was killed, after I fled home as a teenager, determined to escape the violence of my own family, I met a man who shot his wife to death on a calm street in Salt Lake, and two years before that, Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped and held in the foothills behind my apartment. 

 

*           *           *

 

The other night I saw a dead black bear on the side of the road. The second one I’d seen since living here. Deer, elk, antelope, racoons, opossums, coyotes, armadillos—those I’m used to seeing dead on the roadside. And each one bothers me—every time. The black bear though—I have no words. All this encroachment, the fast-paced movement on our dying planet. 

I hit an opossum once in the dark driving across Kansas. I cried. People think them ugly and horrible, but they are docile and gentle creatures, baring their teeth with a hiss when threatened, when afraid. Last year, I read about a man who took a golf club to a baby opossum and beat it for no reason. Just because he could. I’m writing about a wolf who was shot by a hunter for no reason, other than he could. I wonder how much violence would dissipate if men didn’t feel confident and assured in what they can do in the world.

 

*           *           *

 

This past summer, a young woman from Florida went missing. Her body was found weeks later. Her fiancé killed her. He could, you see, she was small and he wasn’t. Now people are talking about her death, and now, once again, everyone is talking about “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” When a white woman goes missing she becomes a national obsession. When murdered Indigenous women, Black women, Brown women, Asian women go missing, we rarely hear their names, the circumstance of their cases, on the news for even a short period of time. At least the conversation is happening, yes, but I worry it won’t last. When more women of color go missing will their disappearances get coverage, or will they be set aside until another white woman goes missing, again forcing the conversation about the obsessive coverage of those who are deemed to matter and those who matter less? It’s not an unfounded worry or an unfounded question—it’s a one people ask about their loved ones who garner no nation-wide coverage every day.

Of the hundreds of Indigenous women who have gone missing in the Utah adjacent Wyoming in the last few years, none of their names have garnered the attention and recognition that Smart’s had then and even now. When I think of who makes up the police force, who makes up the justice system, who sits on the courts, who matters and who doesn’t, who the media cares about and who they don’t, I find myself walking from one room to the other. I pace knowing that it’s not enough to feel bad, to go outside and close my eyes, feel the heat of the sun and tell myself there is nothing I can do. 

In a country built on a foundation of racism and the genocide of Indigenous peoples, it’s hard to be surprised that missing women of color, their stories, are represented less in the media. Violence against women is commonplace because women are just not the kind of people who matter enough. For all the learning and teaching and believing that somehow change is possible, we have not learned how to change fast enough. We move slow and pride ourselves on our snail-paced-progress that has always left and continues to leave so many people waiting for justice that never comes.

Ours has never been a country of kindness. 

 

*           *           *

 

I write about wildlife, rivers and desert lands, mountains and mud because that’s how I try to make sense of the world, and maybe that’s because the land has been gendered too, like the constant legislation of women’s bodies, our lands bridled again and again. There is a connection between the destruction of the planet and the bridling of women’s bodies. Our lands are dying, our water polluted, rivers dammed and broken—like the Colorado, every gallon claimed and taken before it can reach the ocean—leaving it a pathetic trickle in Mexico. Is it easy dismissal our dying planet because we are so used to seeing it exploited and strangled? And where is the root of such things? 

When the colonizers came to this country they already saw women in nature, had already gendered the land, but they certainly leaned into that way of seeing and being and thinking more so than ever. It’s not really such a surprise then that the land and the wildlife living upon it are so easily dismissed—and that, to me, is particularly weighted. What it tells me about women is that we’ve never mattered enough, and if women have been historically connected to the land through metaphorical language, then we may all just be doomed. Or maybe not. Polluted water, dammed rivers, wildlife and plants decimated by climate change could potentially force a reckoning because it’s not just women’s lives that will be affected, but everyone lives. Still, in these pandemic days riddled with illness and a significant portion of the population refusing life-saving vaccines, and with the near useless Senate, I’m having a hard time letting myself hope for much.   

Still, tomorrow I’ll sit down and plan another lesson. I’ll look at my students in their masks, and we will talk about literature and its various ways of representing life. I’ll ask if it matters, this representation. We will discuss and we will look for hope because it’s too horrible not to. After class, I’ll sit at my office desk and open another worthless email from the administration and read their surface level announcements about the progressiveness of our university. I’ll think about the banners flying above our library to symbolize our inclusivity and our acknowledgement that this campus is housed on the stolen land of Cherokee peoples. And what, beyond these banners of acknowledgement, real and truly tangible things have we done? 

I’ll think of the first student meeting I had after my first nonfiction workshop here at this school. We discussed revisions for the essay she was working on, an essay that detailed the terrible treatment she received by the Title IX office when she reported her assault. I read her pain and remembered how a white male colleague told me during my first month on the job, “Assault isn’t a thing on our campus.” He sits on the school’s faculty senate now. 

I’ll pack my bag for the day and go home to my partner who I know gets bogged down in the inhumanity he discovers in his own research—currently economic disparity and labor inequality in West Virginia. He will be making dinner, our animals bustling about the kitchen to eat up whatever mess makes its way to the floor. I’ll laugh at his terrible singing and feel grateful for our laughter, for the light in this world. I’ll feel a little bad, too, because I too often take for granted that I’m so lucky to have this light and this love.

In the morning, I’ll inspect the yard carefully for deer before I let my dog out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel M. Hanson’s essays can be found in Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Best of the Net, American Literary Review, and many other literary journals. Her poetry was selected for Best New Poets and has been published in The Minnesota Review, Juked, New Madrid, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship in Nonfiction at Colgate University, Rachel holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville.