NOTHING BUT TIME
by Joanna Grisham
I followed you through the tall grass to the pond on the other side of the field behind our house, careful not to fall because you didn’t want to hold my hand, wouldn’t want to carry me. Already, I knew I shouldn’t need you too much. Late in the evening, when the sunset turned honey-gold like those fields of hay where our neighbor’s cows endured like hulking statues, we sat by the algae-green water, both silent, both happy for the longer days, more time for you to spend outdoors after work, more time for me to follow you around, a five-year-old, desperate for her father’s love, though I couldn’t know how much I’d long for it in the coming years. Then, we had the water. We had the sunset. Then, we had nothing but time.
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Once, you woke me early on a Saturday to hike in the woods near our house, my ten-year-old self bleary eyed from staying up too late playing video games. We spent the morning wandering through walnut trees and swaying cedars, collecting leaves and sticks in our jacket pockets, ones you’d repurpose for art projects, though you’d never call yourself an artist. You’d say art was “sissy shit,” return to building a world with your hands that you never knew how to enter with words, never knew how to share with me. That day we found an old house at the edge of a field, forgotten and left to fall apart beneath the red and orange trees. And for years, I begged you to take me back to that house, asked you to lead me through the woods again so that we might discover something, together, one more time, but you said you didn’t know the way back. And I thought I might have dreamed all of it.
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Every Christmas Eve, after I had grown up, found love, moved away, I returned to those Tennessee woods to give you a gift, a book I thought you’d like about beekeeping or chickens, or a t-shirt for a band you once loved. We watched those cartoons with Charlie Brown and Rudolph, ate pie, plugged in a plastic-needled Christmas tree, and pretended we knew what we were doing, imagined we had something to give other than gifts wrapped in shiny paper under the tree. We sat side by side on the sofa, holding our own hands in our laps, our heavy hearts thumping with want. We kept our eyes fixed on the blinking screen, something we could count on.
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When you died in March, I was pregnant and sick with grief. Two days before it happened, I took my turn sitting with you in your living room. I graded essays from my students, their thoughts on poems of love and loss, while you watched black and white movies from your childhood, wheezing and choking, your last cigarette stubbed out days earlier. You asked what I was doing with all those folders in the corner,
if I liked my students. You asked if I was happy, now that I had found someone to love. Are you and Jenny going to have a baby one of these days? I didn’t tell you, didn’t want you to long for someone you’d never hold.
Bio
Joanna Grisham (most folx call her Joey) holds an MFA from Georgia College. She recently won the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning's Next Great Writers Contest and was a semi-finalist for The MacGuffin's Poet Hunt 28 contest and a finalist for the 2024 Page Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Bangalore Review, On the Run, Still: The Journal, Gleam, The Emerson Review, The Write Launch, and SHIFT. Her first chapbook of poems, Phantoms, was published in December 2023 (Finishing Line Press). She lives in Tennessee with her wife and daughter and teaches at Austin Peay State University