The next day I find myself at Bible study, for all the wrong reasons. Because I’m only there to meet up with my friend, I pay no attention to the woman who is preaching the word of the Lord. As far as I’m concerned, God evacuated my life long ago. Why should I listen to him now?

  After Bible study, I wait for my friend while Sister Shareese prays for her. Then, suddenly, the preacher is looking directly at me. I try to make a run for it, but she touches my arm, then places both hands on my shoulders. “Is there any special request you would like to ask God to grant?”

  My anger rises in me and I blurt out, “God abandoned me years ago.”

  Sister Shareese doesn’t try to tell me I’m wrong, or that God loves me and will be my salvation. She just stands there with her hands on my shoulders, her gaze holding me. It is almost as if she knows my story and my pain without my having spoken a word. I stare deeply into her brown eyes. I see an incredible peace in them—a peace I want.

  Seasons’ Rhythms

  BY KELLY DONNELLY (FOR SHA SHA)

  Early spring, she walks

  the soft, damp trail,

  delicious with the smell

  of leaves, decayed by

  snow and rain. Soon,

  this decay births dark,

  fertile earth.

  She bathes in the energy

  of summer’s sun. The tide

  guides her, edging along

  sapphire waters.

  Her spirit soaring,

  she feels its rhythm.

  Memories of hiking a sun-kissed path—

  trees the color of fire—accompany autumn.

  Aroma of oak, maple, and birch,

  thick and smoky, return.

  She celebrates her birth.

  Winter quiets her, carrying with it

  a companionable silence that warms

  her soul like the burning logs

  making comfortable

  her heart and home.

  Flight of the Bumblebee

  BY KATHLEEN WYATT

  Seated on the overturned bucket, I coax him from the flower to my fingertip. I cannot believe this: I can pick him up and lift him into the air with impunity. I nudge two more from their perches, balancing all three bumblebees on different fingertips. Their plump bodies vibrate ever so slightly against my skin, their bristles vaguely tickling. These bees are drunk on sun-fermented nectar. I return the intoxicated insects to stamen and pistil, leaving them buzzing in the brilliant morning light.

  The garden—my sanctuary, my escape—is alive, breathing, bursting with purple phlox, daylilies, and snapdragon. Yellow finches play a game of chase overhead and a cluster of mahogany irises lure the butterflies. A hummingbird drinks from the trumpets of the morning glories. The garden floor is bejeweled with wild petunia and a humble footpath that I fashioned from stones turned out of the soil. Ladybugs, with their appetite for aphids, are always welcome visitors, unlike those twilight gate-crashers, the skunks and cottontails who fancy tender blooms, shoots, and crunchy bulbs for their late-night nibbling, or the slugs who leave long trails of slime across stones and pebbles as evidence of their passage. Tiny toads appear at watering time. I detain one in the cup of my hand, tenderly rubbing its smooth belly, cool from the earth. I feel its tiny heart beating against my palm and loosen my hold, letting it leap free.

  A lake glimmers a hundred and fifty yards to the west of where I live. Mature pines frame the water, stretching to the sky and creating choice hunting posts for the osprey. Wild turkeys parade past, the toms showing off their finery. One evening I glimpsed a red fox slipping in and out of the woods, playing hide-and-seek with an unseen opponent. Frequently at sundown, I catch sight of deer darting across the trails heading for a cool drink. Sometimes they stand at the forest edge, staring back at me as I stare at them. Then in a flash they turn, their white hindquarters disappearing into the brush.

  As dusk draws near, with the garden tended to, I look to the west. The sky melts into ribbons of oranges, violets, and pinks, lingering at the horizon, then melting into the lake. I stand hypnotized until the last cast of light has vanished.

  I close my eyes and draw a deep, inward breath, giving thanks for the favors bestowed upon me. Deliberately, gradually, I exhale, steadying my gaze on the drab ugliness of concrete, steel, and double-pane glass. The homestead that lies before me is my residence: a maximum-security state prison for women. But I have learned to look past the razor wire–crowned fencing and the heartache it surrounds, instead finding peace in nature’s arena. While working in the gracious surroundings of the prison garden, I am blind to other inmates, sometimes even to the guards. The thick sweetness of the daylilies perfumes my senses, and I meditate on this dragonfly, its sleek, cobalt frame hovering above the daisies. Like those intoxicated worker bees that have escaped the drones, the queen, and the keepers of the hive, I too am at large, if only in the chambers of my mind.

  Reawakening Through Nature: A Prison Reflection

  BY BARBARA PARSONS

  I. Falling

  After school today, I went directly to Grandma’s next door instead of stopping at our house first. Now I find my suitcase on our front steps. The door is locked. It’s October 1957. I’m nine. “Mom!” I yell, trying to force the door handle open. “Let me in!”

  My mother appears at the door. “You want to spend all your time with your grandmother? Go ahead! Move in with her!” When she walks away, my tummy gets tight. There’s a bad taste in my mouth. I pound on the door, crying and screaming useless apologies.

  After a while, I drag my suitcase around back and head down the steep hill that levels off to a field surrounding a lone apple tree. I lay the suitcase flat on the ground under the tree and sit on it. The sky through my tears is a blur of blue. I’ve spent a lot of time down here at this old tree, climbing in it or playing house beneath it. A cool breeze shivers the leaves. I feel safe in this quiet place, where I’m close to home but away from Mom’s moods.

  I look up at our house, on the hill above the field, and just beyond it, at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Grandpa, my dad’s father, died two weeks ago from cancer. Since then, I’ve gone each day after school to visit Grandma. She is sad lately, but before Grandpa died, she was loud and talkative, giving her opinions all the time or gossiping on the telephone about other people’s business. Grandpa was quiet. After work, he liked to sit and watch TV or, when Grandma got going, escape to his garden. I wouldn’t be far behind.

  “Barbara, if you don’t give those peas a chance to grow, there won’t be any left for your grandmother to cook,” he’d say, smiling. But I loved the sweet taste of the raw baby peas, the smell of tomato vines and rich, sun-warmed dirt. Now Grandpa’s dead and no one will tend the garden. No one will give me piggyback rides, or make me smile, or watch out for me when Mom turns mad.

  It’s getting dark now, and the shadows make everything look spooky. My knees are stiff from squeezing them against my chest; I’ve been sitting on my suitcase for hours. Up the hill, the lights go on in our house. I feel a lump in my throat and a pull in my chest. Too scared to sit alone in the dark, I gather my belongings. The suitcase seems heavier now and it takes all my strength to drag it back up the steep slope. Why isn’t Dad home? Maybe he’s not coming home. Maybe no one wants me anymore.

  At the back door, I knock and call, “Mom? Can I come home now?” I’m trying hard not to cry. She doesn’t like it when we act like babies.

  The door is yanked open. “Get in here, Barbara Ann! And stop making a scene.” I slink into the house, holding my breath, fear lifting my shoulders almost up to my ears. I’m afraid Mom will crack me over the head with something within her reach: a pan, a cooking spoon. “Go to your room and stay there,” she orders. “I don’t want to see your face until morning.”

  My room seems miles away. If I run, I might get Mom madder, so I have to remember to walk at the exact right pace. Both my hands are on the handle so I won’t drag my suitcase along the carpet and leave a mark.

  When I reach my room, I ease the door shut, set down my suitcase, and crawl onto my bed. Safe!

  Black smoke billows from windows shattered by the impact of a jetliner converted by terrorists into a bomb. The flames are hot enough to melt metal, they say. Those trapped on the top floors have a bleak choice: wait to be burned alive or leap to their deaths. Some hold hands as they drop, others fall alone. Later, we will watch in horror as the towers implode and crumble to dust, but it is seeing the desperate descent of the jumpers this day that launches me into a downward spiral in my struggle to live with post-traumatic stress.

  Mom believed it was the responsibility of the eldest daughter to assist with the household chores. She also believed that if she spared the rod, she would spoil the child, and I was the child she was least interested in spoiling. She threatened, hit, threw things: a pot of peas, boiling away on the stove; a plastic hairbrush that hit so hard, it broke against my arm.

  My mother’s first hospitalization at Fairfield Hills Psychiatric Hospital occurred the summer I was seventeen. The nerve-racking drive in fast-moving traffic took over an hour. But if the travel drained me, the visits were worse. I went every day. Mom needed company and no one else would visit her. I dreaded that daily walk down the long corridor to her room, ignoring, as best I could, the stares of the other caged mental patients.

  From visit to visit, Mom’s moods were unpredictable and subject to abrupt shifts. Sometimes, my getting up to leave at the end of visiting hours would trigger hysteria. “Mom, I can’t take you home with me,” I cried during one such episode. “They won’t let me.” She howled so loudly, resisted my exit so strenuously, that the attendants had to restrain her. “Okay, we got her,” they told me. “Go!” On the long drive home, I catalogued a list of reasons why this hospital stay was good for Mom. But my heart wasn’t in it. I kept seeing them straijacket her and strong-arm her back to her room. All that summer and into the fall, I kept my feelings in check, pretending to myself and others that I was stronger than I was. It was a pretense I would carry into middle age—a pattern of denial that would eventually land me in prison.

  On September 24, 1990, my mother ended her life by jumping from a window of her sister’s twelfth-floor apartment. Mom’s terrorists were the fear, depression, and paranoia that raged in her head. It wasn’t until I watched the World Trade Center victims jump to their deaths eleven years later that the full force of her desperation finally hit me.

  Mom had loved the outdoors. She kept a small flower garden but preferred the flowering bushes—lilac, mock orange, bridal wreath, rhododendron—that stood sentry around the border of our property. Squirrels played in the large maple and oak trees in our backyard, and bird feeders swayed from their branches. Twigs, leaves, and acorns littered the ground below, and Mom would bend daily to scoop up the debris. When she was well, my mother was meticulous, and her yard had to be as neat and orderly as the house she kept. When she was not well, chaos took the upper hand.

  Often, Mom would pack my younger brother and sister and me into the car and drive us to Macedonia State Park or Kent Falls, where we’d wade in the brook or hike the trails in search of salamanders. In summer, we went almost every afternoon. My siblings and I would try to catch small fish with our plastic pails and nets. “Here’s one! Quick! Hand me the bucket!” But the fish were always faster than we were, and the brook water was so clear, you could stand still and watch minnows and baby trout whiz right past your legs.

  Today, on this summer day in prison, I close my eyes and hear that brook that’s a hundred miles and a lifetime away from here. I see my mother, alive and young again, at peace. She is sitting on the rocks, watching us play. She’s taken off the short-sleeve blouse she wore over her navy blue bathing suit but has left on her shorts. There’s a contented look on her face as she leans back, tilting her face to the sun. When she arches her neck, her brown hair falls behind her.

  Mom was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when she was in her early thirties and, I, the eldest daughter, became her caretaker. I married and had children, but serving my mother’s complicated needs remained one of my most important priorities. When I was in my thirties, my seventeen-year marriage began to fail. I had a full-time job, four kids to raise, and friends who kept advising me to stop serving everyone else’s needs and take care of myself. And so, instead of checking on Mom every day, I began stopping by once or twice a week. When I did, she’d attack. “Just get out! I don’t want you here! You’re nothing but a tramp!” I’d leave and try again a few days later.

  The final rift came when my mother accused her friend Gladys of telling someone a secret that Mom had told her. Gladys had no idea what Mom was talking about, but there was no reasoning with her. For Christmas, Gladys’s daughter Amy had bought her mother and me tickets for a Broadway show, Me and My Gal. Mom was furious when she found out I had gone to New York with “those people.” She never spoke to me again, except to tell me, “You’re no longer my daughter. You are dead to me.”

  Then she was dead. We had never made up. Mom had died hating me, and I felt, once again, like that little girl on the front step with her suitcase, locked out of her life and guilty of something I couldn’t quite identify.

  In her open casket, Mom looked shrunken and strange. Her dyed blond hair had been neatly arranged in the fluffy style she’d worn during her later years, but the bruises on her face were visible beneath the thick makeup. The white sweater they’d dressed her in covered her broken arms, but her lips, slightly parted, revealed the plastic thread they’d used to cinch her jaw.

  In the months after Mom’s death, a solitary crow began to perch on the rail of my father’s redwood deck outside the back door. It would stay for hours. Dad was convinced it was Mom watching out for us. At first, I dismissed that possibility, but the crow showed up with such frequency that I became a half-believer, too. At work, I would look out the window and see a solitary crow ambling across the parking lot. I began to feel stalked. What were the crow’s intentions? Was it watching us to protect us from harm, or to harm us?

  Since my incarceration, whenever I see a crow, I wonder if it’s my mother, sitting restlessly on the branch nearest my window, cawing, reminding me of a guilt I am not likely to forget.

  II. Bird Feeders

  Danny, the eleven-month-old golden-Labrador retriever I am training for the York Prison Pup Partnership, looks out the window, his head darting from side to side. I get off my bed and go to the window to see what he sees. At the bird feeder, blue jays bully the other birds, and the squirrels, those thieves, perform acrobatics to try and take what isn’t theirs. The feeder hangs from a big oak tree on the side of the building where I live. Thompson Hall is on the minimum-security side of the York Correctional Institution compound.

  Danny and I sit side by side on the large gray plastic commissary box I have placed in front of my window. As we watch the daily goings and comings at the feeder, my knowledge of birds grows. The chickadees are well-mannered; the nuthatches and juncos eat daintily. The male cardinal is a dandy in his scarlet coat, his mate a drab and faded counterpart. Ironically, Danny has developed a fascination for crows. As soon as he hears their calls, he is in the window, watching.

  Our staff at Thompson Hall keeps the bird feeder filled. Officers toss peanuts, sunflower seeds, and breadcrumbs on the ground beneath the feeder. Inmates have more of an opportunity to converse with the staff on this side of the prison. It is a more humane atmosphere here, and the filled bird feeder becomes a reminder that our own freedom grows closer each day.

  For the first four years of my incarceration, I lived on the newer, more punitive maximum-security side of York CI. Occasionally, from the permanently sealed windows, I would notice seagulls sitting along the rooftop—silent, vigilant corrections officers with wings. The thought of a bird feeder hanging in the stark, regimented world of the maximum-security facility is beyond belief, as is the idea that a staff member might take the time to fill a feeder. Danny would have had a hard time surviving the daily fluctuations between chaos and isolation enclosed within those gray cinder-block walls. Clink. Clang. Jingle. Clank. Steel doors, locks and keys, recycled air, dark rooms that discourage emotional growth.

  After I was moved to the minimum-security side, I could hear the gulls, and their cries reawakened me to the natural world. At Thompson Hall, I had the freedom of choice to open my window, even on the coldest night. Three years later, that window has never been completely closed. In prison, you take freedom in whatever form it is offered you. Unlocked doors. Open windows. Silence instead of shouting. A puppy.

  We train our pups to become service dogs for disabled clients, some of whom are wheelchair-bound. The dogs are taught to open doors with a tug rope attached. They learn how to turn light switches on and off, “bark” for help, retrieve telephones and keys. They learn how to tow a wheelchair back to a client after it has rolled away. The dogs arrive at York as eight-week-old pups Each trainer works with her assigned pup for about thirteen months. They leave us at fifteen months, headed off to a National Education for Assistance Dog Services site for their advanced training.

  While the dogs are with us, volunteers from a local church take them on outings to acclimate them to sounds, smells, and situations not available at the prison. They may visit a grocery store or a shopping mall, ride on a bus or lie beneath the table at a restaurant filled with wonderful aromas. We rely on these volunteers to help our dogs overcome problems such as car sickness and separation anxiety. It’s ironic that the puppies’ socialization outside of prison is a high priority, whereas, for us, the inmates, the community outreach excursions that reacquainted us with the outside world were discontinued long ago. Maybe that’s part of the reason why the dogs never return once they’ve left York CI but nearly 70 percent of the women do.