My dad sends me a text about his father’s father and how he drank himself to death. It’s not the sort of text I want to receive at ten in the morning on a Sunday while I’m hiking with the dog in the redwoods in Loma Alta up north in Marin County.  I barely have signal, and even if I did, I’m not wanting to engage.  But he continues on about how his father drank at all hours, even in the morning when the family was eating breakfast getting ready for school.  You think maybe it’s too early for this, dad?  His father would respond, You think maybe you should mind your fucking business?  This was another story my dad would tell me, usually when his father was experiencing tooth pain and didn’t want to see a dentist.  That’s how my dad dealt with it, he’d tell me.  How he’d often catch his father weeping in dark, he texts. Such an Irish word, weeping. Makes me think of Irish women in their island wool, heavy black shawls twisted over their heads. A stricken mother, a character out of a Synge play, a Nora or a Cathleen, looking out toward the black cliffs, half-prayers in darkness, waiting for the tide to turn, for a husband or a son to wash up on the shore.
As I follow a narrow dirt path that edges a patch of California Poppies, that sudden pop of orange in the greenish white  of Western Sword Fern, I try to remember the last time I had a good cry, but I can’t, or I don’t cry anymore because the meds shut all that down. I keep on the path at a steady pace, perhaps too steady, too quick. Slow down, my therapist always tells me, and reconnect with the natural world.  I try to focus on the smell of eucalyptus, of bay leaf, to be in the moment. You need to learn to quiet the mind, to awaken the senses, to shut off the noise.  I trip over a root or a rock and stumble to the ground.  The dog finally stops and looks back; he seems to be smiling. 
My dad concludes the texts with I’m sorry you got all my dirty genes. I was hoping and praying that they would skip you.
As I sit in the dirt, defeated, I look around: In the distance, everything looks so far away now. A fog feathers itself, twists over the tops of mountains, of redwoods, whisks green and silvery gray, banks of white, a stillness, a quiet, and I can hear nothing but myself weeping.

*