The Peach Tree
a visual journal about making kin through chosen family and neighboring in Harrisburg, PA
“The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.”
-Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble
Shannon at my house for my birthday. February, 2021.
We were talking about grief.
We grieved for each other this year. Our loss—the mutual and collective loss.
The magnitude of our struggle designed the equal and opposite reaction.
And still, we continue to grieve.
Lucy in the backyard with a sparkler. May, 2021.
Watching you grow has been magic.
Elena in one of the blue chairs we bought for the window. October, 2020.
The windows in this place are freakin’ huge. Sheer curtains flutter as the breeze floats into the rooms. In the living room, we can see the Capitol building and down the river as it bends to the southeast. It was a perfect spot for two chairs.
We had to scour the bowels of the internet and marketplace, secondhand and regular furniture stores to find them but by golly, we did. Light blue swivel chairs that looked nice from every angle. Two chairs turned the windows into an intentional nook–for coffee, for beers, for connection. Two chairs that brought people together.
Sometimes I think to myself, “there’s no one else in this entire world who does this with me like you do.” From the inception of the idea to planning to searching to finding or making and finishing. I know you’re always my girl.
Emily at home on the couch. April, 2021.
Who’s caring for the caretaker?
It’s not him.
Steve, Rik, Andy, Lucy, and Veronica playing pool at the tavern. November, 2018.
You are all my pleasures.
It was one of those snow days in the city when the state workers get out early and we all walk to the bar for activities. I don’t remember what was on the jukebox but I could venture to guess that Veronica probably played Paradise By The Dashboard Light for me. I love a fucking power ballad and a snow day, playing pool, unabashed joy and all of you.
The clothes we stripped off in the hall one night. May, 2021.
It might have been the night after the full moon that you went down on me on the roof or another night. Maybe the night we were sitting at the pub and you said something dirty to MJ and then ran your hand up my thigh and whispered something in my ear about wanting your hand to be your mouth.
Self portrait in the bathroom mirror. May, 2020.
My back has felt like shit since I can remember.
Probably the consequence of being a bartender for a decade then being draped in camera gear, poor posture and variations of being rode hard and put away wet.
Or maybe my body remembers something before me.
Dad’s side of the bed. August, 2020.
Michael at a cabin in the Poconos. March, 2021.
This memory is all a vague figure–the sensation of my hands shaking, head throbbing, soft morning light and a pause in the door, your belly moving up and down. Up and down.
I go into the woods with Michael to fill my belly for you now. All that breath you couldn’t catch.
Veronica with a cocktail in the window to celebrate her graduation from Penn State with a Masters in American Studies. February, 2021.
The shadow of the monstera on the night of the full moon. January, 2021.
We sat here the night I moved in and cried after you helped me unpack my entire kitchen—joy and exhaustion. And here we are again after your graduation.
A bouquet from the market that I dried. February, 2021.
Will standing behind the dormant rosebush in the backyard of his new home. March, 2021.
I couldn’t bare to lose you too.
We seldom talk about it these days though—just enough to acknowledge it but not so often that we’re wading in the muck.
Elena in Savannah, GA. October, 2021.
Martha’s house in Darien, GA. October, 2021.
Otis, a perfect loaf. October, 2021.
You are a menace.
Leaving pieces of my ghost in Feaster’s 3rd street apartment. January, 2022.
The sponge painted wall of my childhood bedroom. March, 2021.
Lunch at a fish shack with Dan in Barbados. July, 2021.
Mom had the wall in my bedroom sponge painted by the neighbor when we moved in. I feel like that sort of thing was popular in the late 80s and early 90s but I mostly saw it on furniture.
Mom really went for it though. Pink sponges with blue and green ribbons patterned across the wall behind my bed. It was perfectly imperfect for a 4 year old about to move into her big kid room with a big kid bed.
The house sold in September this year.
All this to say, the things that are familiar to us change and sometimes childhood homes get sold. I pray on all my gratitudes, which are so many, including the time to grieve, a friend like you and a life like this.
Dad’s cardigan, Dad’s ashtray with spent cones, Dan’s silhouette at our house. May, 2021.
I saw you in the mountains. It was driving up to Nesquehoning through state game lands and somewhere between the shiny new pickup trucks that lined the edge of the woods and burly men in orange carrying their rifles. Could have sworn I saw the dark green Blazer blending into the rhododendrons and your figure in the tree line.
You never did come home with a deer. Mom always said you just loved being out in the woods.
I’m saying final goodbyes in this home with the stale smell of menthol cigarettes still buried in the walls.
You’ll have been gone for ten years this December.
I couldn’t have imagined that I would want this in my home until I did. I thought my life would look too different from yours.
In May we became a two person household.
A cohabiting platonic relationship so typically severed from the importance of care and energy given to it.
Our milestones are changing.
My kin is here.
The living room shelves and family photos in my childhood home. March, 2021.
Dan at home making coffee. June, 2021.
Our past and present are additive.
And here is a form of institutional memory—the lightness of home.
Lucy on the sidewalk out front of her house in a pink and purple dress. August, 2021.
I marvel at your bright mischief on evenings when you refuse to eat the meals I’ve cooked but beg for me to read you a bedtime story.
My nephew, Anthony, and his friend, Kyler, using chicken livers as bait—fishing on Luna Lake, Ohio. June, 2021.
A Barbados bullfinch on the porch of the eco lodge. July, 2021.
Little bullfinch, daring to come close enough to attempt to steal seeds from my breakfast. I have searched the internet a dozen times or so–I swear that at some point I was told that the Barbados Bullfinch would tend to live near people because they got lonely. But I’m now resigned to the thought that maybe it was just local lore. Our companionship is still so sweet though, a dance around my balcony in the morning.
Feaster waking up. January, 2022.
One morning a week–no work, no overtime–to wake before you and feel our softness under the sheets and the cool spring air drifting in the window. I clumsily turn my body into yours and run my hand down your side. You are so beautiful in my bed and if I prop the pillow just right, I can peer from behind your clavicle at the reflection of your draped figure in the mirror on the back of the door.
It’s brief though. And tomorrow you will rise before the sun and again the day after and the day after and the day after that and so on.
“I just don’t want to die on that dock.”
Emily at the beach house in Ocean City, MD. August, 2022.
Lucy and Michael at the beach house in Ocean City, MD. August, 2022.
Lucy’s drawing at the beach house in Ocean City, MD. August, 2022.
Kaiti, Lucy, and Go Fish at the beach house in Ocean City, MD. August, 2022.
The ferris wheel at Knoebels. October, 2022.
Lucy and Feaster on the beach in Ocean City, MD. August, 2022.
Fresh strawberries on the table at the beach house in Ocean City, MD. August, 2022.
Kaiti eating a caramel apple at Knoebels. October, 2022.
I want to eat the seasonal fruit. The strawberries you buy at the roadside stand on the way to the beach house. The fruit that sweetens our bellies before walking down to the ocean. I want to eat the seasonal fruit and then watch Feaster and Lucy build a sand castle and hold Emily’s hand in the sunshine and watch Kaiti run maniacally into the waves.
I want to eat the seasonal fruit. The apple on a stick that the lady with a cart dips in hot caramel–that you realize is going to be very difficult to eat but very delicious. I want to eat the seasonal fruit and then take the long way home through state game lands with trees adorned in gold.
Frances’ rearview window. March, 2023.
A portrait of Frances in front of Little Amps in Olde Uptown. March, 2023.
Leaf portraits on the sidewalk in Midtown. November, 2022.
New York painted a gritty salt rainbow on your rearview window.
These Northeast winters are so bitter and I was delighted that I got to see you on your way south again—you were delighted that someone at the gas station around the corner called you “sir.”
I dread winter but the leaves printed themselves onto the sidewalks–a delightful way of invoking their memory for a while during another grey Pennsylvania winter.
Orion chasing the light through the hall. January, 2022.
You were chasing the light, ripping through the house and I was desperately trying to wrangle you into your blue puffy winter coat. We had to walk the two blocks to daycare and it’s bitter cold out there, kiddo.
Mom in the pool with a margarita. Her and Bill’s home in Lakeland, FL. May, 2023.
Feaster lounging in a hammock, a roadside surf shop in Cabarete. February, 2023.
Veronica setting the table for her vernal equinox gathering. March 2023.
V danced through the doorway and threw her arms open to present an adorned dining room table: candles and flowers, a beautiful rose and almond cake she baked, a tart of some kind, a rogue white cat (Frenchie) prowling about, a poem that Dan sent, bubble wands, and a collection of seed packets.
I went outside and pressed tiny seeds into one of the garden boxes in the backyard and with them a small, crudely torn slip of paper with a scribbled intention. “Love in a Mist,” a whimsical dancer of a flower struck me as apt to sow for a vernal gathering.
We’re all here in ceremony–emerging from another winter.
A swallowtail in the butterfly bush behind Veronica’s Mom’s house. July, 2022.
We had a beautiful afternoon in the pool.
You stopped talking to your mom shortly after and we never did go back.
John and Fritz in the kitchen of their home in Pittsburgh, PA. February, 2022.
Scoopin’ babies is a far cry from where you were.
I still love you like a brother.
Dan having a cigarette in Feaster’s backyard before dinner. June, 2022.
This fucking city. It destroyed both of us back then. And when you left, I understood why.
I know that over the course of our lives we will be undone and done again and over and over, but Denver nearly killed you too. And when I asked you if you wanted to come back and live with me, I knew that you needed to save yourself.
Two years in and the weight has returned to your bones and you’ve found some clarity.
But you’ve also tried, unsuccessfully, to quit smoking half a dozen times in the same tenure.