Studies in Erosion                                                                    

Kristen Holt-Browning

Reading Time: ~3 minutes

“Studies in Erosion” originally appeared in Issue 15 of Tahoma Literary Review. I was drawn to this flash essay in the same way I’m drawn to the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series of books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In this case, Kristen Holt-Browning takes a metaphor and briefly and deftly applies a personal prism. I’m partial to pieces like this, which effectively weave in river and waterway imagery, as they are so integral to my own inner and outer life. 

What do you take away from this flash essay? Chat us up over at our Facebook page, or reach out to us on Twitter. Thanks so much for reading.

Ann Beman
Nonfiction editor

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It had been a time of erosion. I’d begun to see in metaphor.

(Dani Shapiro, Hourglass) 

I.

The funeral director handed me a heavy cardboard box. Heavy only because I expected lightness. A life reduced to flaky dust: a heavy knowledge. My father. 

I dug a hole beneath the lilac bush I had planted two years earlier. It was struggling: green all season, but it never blossomed all that much. I scattered the ash in the soil beneath the plant. Would this kill it? I didn’t know, I didn’t want to follow the twisted paths of the internet this query would lead me down. I dug a hole and tipped the ashes in. The lilac did not die, but it still didn’t flourish.

Four years later, we moved to a big, shiny new house across town. I still drive by our first house sometimes, my two kids strapped down in the backseat. The new residents put up a fence, so I can’t see the lilac, don’t know if its still there, if it died. One-third of my father in a yard of strangers, who never see, never know, what’s beneath their dirt.

II.

The creekside beach has gone vertical. Once a gentle slope, it has been worn at its base by the ever-passing water. The reservoir upstream is regularly released; the surge of tide has scraped the beach out from beneath itself, and now it’s a steep hill. Ropes run its length. You heave yourself up the slope, dripping wet and sand-encrusted.

I never liked this snake-filled place. The water murky, the swim instructors insistent that you jump into the deep end off the dock, that this would somehow teach an eight-year-old the mechanics of moving arms and legs to stay afloat. 

I haven’t been back in more than twenty years, when I was just swimming out of adolescence, grasping at those shiny-sharp crags of adulthood. I didn’t need this dinky creek, this crumbly beach, this tired non-town. I was big-city, I was metaphor, I was the oldest story in the book. My father was alive. 

I am forty-two, and my ten-year-old son is jumping off the dock. Time has eroded my boy’s soft baby places into sharper angles, bonier elbows and knees. I look down on him and watch his cannonball body slice the air above the water in the second before he goes under.

“Was it always this steep?” I ask my best friend, standing next to me with her toddler perched on her hip. 

“No,” she tells me. “It keeps getting worse.”

III.

Some words, at some times, bear the additional weight of meaning beyond meaning. For months now, this word—erosion—has been jammed in my mind, stuck against a hard rock in my subconscious.

It’s a beautiful word. It’s a gentle degradation. But is it too pretty?  

Hard bone ground to ash. A shoreline impossible to scale. 

     I would not want, I think, a higher intelligence, one

     simultaneous, cut clean

     of sequence. 

                  (Jorie Graham, “Erosion”)

I interpret this divine horror as: no movement, so no decay. No breaking down. But then no rising up. My father alive and dead. My son a baby and not. My little human mind nauseous as time bucks and falters. My body not built to house such higher intelligence, if that’s what it is. It feels more like a flattening, a ravaging.

In that same poem, Graham writes about “trying to feel the erosion.” This I understand. I, too, want to place my hand on rock and feel the crumbling, the invisible, the inevitable. If I can hold the body decaying, the baby aging, the ground wearing down beneath my feet—then, what? I want to imagine there’s a power in this knowledge: You’re not fooling me. I know what’s happening. 

Maybe this is all the arc of time bends toward: ashes forever disappearing in the breeze. Sand shifting and roiling beneath feet. 

At this point, I will cling to any metaphor that will have me. Even if it crumbles in my palm. Even if all that remains is the single shard of bone in the ash. That rock forcing the water to part around it. Always losing infinitesimal parts of itself. All of this is metaphor. All of this is true.

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Reprinted with permission of the author

Holt-Browning had this to say about the piece:

The piece started with that one word: erosion. I wanted—and still want—to write about the big stuff: death, growing up, growing older, falling apart. But I knew that, in order to do that in any meaningful way, I needed to start somewhere small and precise, so I started with that single word. I write poems too, so I’m often thinking and writing on the micro level, engaging and playing with the word or the phrase. Here, I wanted to transpose that tendency into prose, to see if a different genre might offer me a new way forward. 

Kristen is a freelance editor. You can find her at kristenholtbrowning.net, and on Instagram @theholtbrowning.