Rebecca Goss on being a Stepmother, Geographical Distance and Travel in a Time of Ecological Crisis
Harvest
You are in the sky, heading to a hotter sun and I know nothing of California. Your flight is longer than the day I will fill, walking the edge of fields now stripped of charged yellow; dogs missing their frantic trespass into bright oblivion.
In the aeroplane’s hold, the chattels of your 27-year-old life. Already my uneasy longing for you to come back. Before you have even landed, before your body has punctured new air.
Daughter, not daughter. It is August. A time to sever the crop. And when they cut you free, swathed in blood and vernix, it was not me, the residual mother, who held you above harm. That mother loved you, kissed you and died before you ever understood her. Later I came, took your father’s arm, your brother’s hand and raised you.
The feast consumed at your leaving. A Dalston pub garden. Your father and brother in sunglasses, not sitting down. Historic losses compounding in their quiet mouths. No one has said you may never come back. My cauliflower swims in too much cheese. There are leftover deep-fried halloumi sticks. We drive out of the city bereft, and into a rural summer at its peak. Alongside the car window, a gold reel.
Your photo of the airport sign, in five languages, is shared many times. [I]n Norfolk they would drag their sickles along the floor to announce their arrival.
Outside, the hunt hounds are howling at the moon, and I am overwhelmed by cliché. Your father sleeps his agitated sleep as I cradle phone-light and your voice. Inside The Company apartment, you tell me you have risked your life walking to get groceries. I am learning time zones. And trepidation felt at a freeway’s edge. You are talking a lot; I scrutinise every vibration. Thirty large dogs keen into sky.
I renew our passports so we can save you from the earthquake, the flood, the lunatic with a gun, anyone with a gun, the bridge collapsing at the exact point you step onto its aging suspension.
At a daytime party (drinks in a tended garden) a stranger talks of their holidays. Your father and I have no lexicon of travel. We tell the stranger it is over twenty years since we sat in an aeroplane and the stranger asks us why, three times. Your father and I must absorb the explicit pity of others, who are sorry that we have ventured so slightly, seen so little. We don’t ask the stranger to concede a lack of wanderlust. Or holiday funds. Or deficit of sustained, domestic calm that did not involve anyone dying. I look at the sky behind the stranger’s shoulder and imagine myself within it. If you are gone for a very long time, you will require me to scale that broad blue space.
Never did I imagine you learning to drive so far from home. I send you a poem called ‘The Cars’ by Kathleen Fraser and worry for your body in fast, metal current. If I wanted to, I could watch your 40-minute commute on YouTube. Someone else heading back to Downtown San Francisco! Dashcam panorama, five sun-drenched lanes. Anodyne soundtrack as soothing loop.
When you were a girl, you drew the most incredible picture of a flower. Many parents will think their child capable of drawing the most incredible picture of a flower. I still have it. In a folder of paper pieces your father and I have deemed valuable. The Company were drawn to your creative skills. The Company does not think you might need more than money.
Your father enters a warm house, hears you playing with your brother, smells food cooking and it disturbs something so buried in him, so lost to hospitals, it causes him to tunnel upstairs and weep before he can walk into the kitchen to greet me.
(Some details have stored in me like bees.)
Kathleen Fraser, on writing: [It] is in part a record of our struggle to be human, as well as our delight in reimaging/reconstructing the formal designs and boundaries of what we’ve been given.
I write about being your mother and not your mother.
The Company christens you with intelligent accessories. Buzz in my pocket: Napa gives me such Parent Trap vibes. Lol
A farrier in the supermarket carpark, his tools laid out. Owners idle by the horsebox, its backdoor tongue lowered to the tarmac. I place bags of shopping in the boot of my car and stand to watch as he grips the brown silk of a fetlock, cold shoeing begun; the setting not incongruous to anyone. Data Center Emissions Probably 662% Higher Than Big Tech Claims.
It was crazy. It was crazy not to. It was crazy not to go. It was crazy not to go and be in Napa Valley on your day off. We all said so.
On Sundays we call and watch you cry into our screens. The loneliness has become thick and visible. Your boyfriend flies to New York to meet with you at a halfway point. Your brother works briefly in LA , sends a video of you both drunk and singing in a bar. Your father and I use our fingerprints to watch, rewatch.
The Company sends you for a medical and the eye doctor tells you to buy better sunglasses. I WhatsApp bales in gold haze, field shimmer.
A journalist doesn’t know they’ve written a poem: The sky is orange and a part of your body that you did not know you had feels and screams about its sunlessness.
I am Googling wildfires. I am Googling maps, and unfathomable distances.
A farmer tells me an oak spends one hundred years growing, one hundred years living, one hundred years dying. His children sometimes sleep out here, with owls. I don’t know how to detach my body from these fields.
Child living with her father, her brother and a mother’s absence. Child in tiny tartan Doc Martens. Child behind her father’s knees. Child’s resistance to anyone new. Child in Portugal learning to swim in blue water. Countless photos of child holding my hand.
I am acquiring ways to miss you. Hollyhocks cling to the sky in my garden. …all summer now they’ve climbed through their own dying…
You are all I talk about. There are other things I could talk about. A Return Flight from London to San Francisco Emits Around 5.5 Tonnes of CO2 Equivalent (CO2e) Per Person.
In the heatwave a friend comes for cool drinks, but I take your call on the landline, leave her alone in my kitchen.
The Company arranges a team social. You sit in a minibus rental watching the faces of people you don’t know well and feel uncertainty about a place. You spend time buying furniture that you will not bring back.
Flint struck by combine becomes tinder, fire leaping, a dance from one field to another, forty acres raging. I see the plume from my car, its blackening curl at a distance, the source a dropped pin on your father’s workshop, his bench, planes, stacks of timber all burning. I pull over to dial, alarm in my voice until his voice speaks back, his conjectural death fading, a crop yield becoming cloud, ash.
I haven’t told you of early days, when I sat and pissed in your bathroom, not staring at my toes or pale hairs on my thigh, only the shelf above the radiator. A deep jar of moisturiser that I opened once, saw the fossilized wipe of her fingers. I haven’t told you that I pulled on your father’s arm, led him to the shelf and your father thought I had placed my things there, that I had unpacked them, that I was staying.
You are discovering more about your mother because she gifted you her skills and when you come back you will look like her.
There are gales. Your voice in my phone the past hour, so at dawn I’m awake to open the side door and feel the garden’s windswept leaping, ghosts in a rush, before I hurry back to bed, press my ribs and breasts against your father’s sleeping back.
This dream: a path in the wheatfield. Your height in raw stalks. Crop’s murmur urging us further into green prospect, your body in my body’s lee, route cut for us, fetching us from dangers.
The Company assures that no figurative bridges were burned: What an extraordinary light you are! In an attempt to define not failing, I write to you about what a return will mean.
You are not quite mine, yet I’ve seen you bloom, change with unrealised grace.
Tomorrow your body will be surrendered to flight, raised in five thousand miles of sky.
Outside the day is filled with combine. Fundamental labour in a field’s standing expanse.
The coming of you into view will be a reaping.
It is not long now until we can give thanks, give thanks.
Notes
Italicized text in this essay features outside sources. The offset text featuring definitions of mothers was taken from ‘Stepmother definition’, a Google search on 7th September 2024. “Napa gives me such Parent Trap vibes. lol” was taken from a WhatsApp message, received 18th Jan 2022, 22:32.
This article also draws on the following sources:
Countryfile (2022) ‘Guide to the British harvest season: history and traditions’, September 5th. <https://www.countryfile.com/how-to/food-recipes/british-harvest-how-long-does-the-season-last-when-is-harvest-day-plus-history-and-traditions>.
Leighton, Angela (2015) ‘Hollyhocks’, in Fanfare: poetry by contemporary women poets. Eds. Wendy French and Dilys Wood, Second Light Publications.
Loufboorow, Lily (2020) ‘When the Sky Is Orange: The sky, it is not supposed to be orange; that I know,’ Slate, September 11th. <https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/09/climate-change-orange-sky.html>.
O’Brien, Isabel (2024) ‘Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse?’, September 15th. <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech>.
Poem Talk Podcast (2009) ‘Can’t Stop the Cars: A Discussion of Kathleen Fraser’s “The Cars”,’ January 12th. <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/75259/cant-stop-the-cars-a-discussion-of-kathleen-frasers-the-cars>.
Timperley, Jocelyn (2020) ‘Should we give up flying for the sake of the climate?’, The Guardian, February 18th. <https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20200218-climate-change-how-to-cut-your-carbon-emissions-when-flying>.
Rebecca Goss is a poet, living in Suffolk, and the author of four full-length collections and two pamphlets. Her second collection, Her Birth (Carcanet 2013), was shortlisted for several prizes including the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her latest collection Latch (Carcanet 2023) was longlisted for the New Angle Prize, 2025. Her essays have been published in Poetry Review, Banshee and with The Emma Press.
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