Iris Was Here.
A scar, a farmhouse, and two nights I keep returning to.
There’s a scar on my upper thigh. No longer than an inch. The contrast between my skin and the collagen formed over what used to be a gash only becomes more obvious when I’ve been in the sun.
I remember exactly where I got that scar. What I was doing. The time of night. I remember being with my two little girls at the rented farm house at 7,000 feet in April. That early in the season, it’s still frigid once the sun goes down. We’d just arrived there. Our lease date said April 1st, 2019.
So did the divorce petition I’d filed.
My baby was 6 months old. Her dad had found that farmhouse on Craigslist. It was his grand master plan once his sisters announced they were moving out of state. He could work on the property to shave off some money from the rent. The house faced the West Elk mountain range on Highway 92. It was the most beautiful horizon I’d ever seen. Every night, the sun sank over the hills toward Utah. The ranches and farms and fields spanning between Crawford and Hotchkiss shone bright gold as the sun lowered beyond the horizon.
The night we arrived, I brought over a load in the back of my Honda Pilot. Cooking utensils. A crock pot. A water filter. Necessities. Wool socks and sweaters. Spring at 7,000 feet is slow to start. The days start to warm up but the nights still feel and smell like December. We slept on blankets on the bedroom floor upstairs. The shag carpet was easily 40 years old.
My husband had turned around to head back to the old apartment. He’d be over in the morning with more of our things, he said. My eldest daughter had just turned 3. There we were, alone at a new farm house. The wood stove hadn’t been reconnected so we huddled together that night beneath our quilts. My six month old baby lay facing me, nursing at my breast. Her sister on the other side of her, holding her pillow.
I slept with her like that since the night she was born. It was the last time her dad ever slept beside me. For months we snuggled together in bed beneath the quilt, nursing, holding each other. She was my smallest baby at 6lbs 12oz. The same weight I was at birth.
That first night she was born, I remember lying awake staring at her, wondering how I got so lucky to have another daughter. The shock of learning she was a girl hadn’t yet wore off. I was just as surprised then as I was the day in June when my friend and boss surprised me with a onesie that bore some feminine touch - a bow or a ballet slipper stitched on the front. I can’t recall. I just remember unfolding a little girl’s onesie tucked into a gift bag. We’d done one of those surprise gender reveals where I handed her an envelope containing a sonogram, and she selected a little boy’s outfit, or a little girl’s.
"What!? It’s a girl?! I’m having another girl?!” I shrieked in her children’s store.
The shock still hasn’t wore off. I recalled that same feeling the night I delivered my second son just a few months ago.
“Another boy?! How lucky am I? I have two of each,” I said to my husband as he stood beside the bed while my doctor stitched up my perineum.
