Conneaut
Catharina Coenen
This piece was submitted as part of our Her Words on the World digital series, a partnership with Hedgebrook Women’s Writers Retreat to showcase the work of six talented women writers whose work explores nature and the environment. Visit our exhibit page to learn about the authors.
Conneaut Marsh rust-brown: sun slung low on sumac fruit
storm-blue: the ice of cloud-swept days
Go slow. Lakes exhale frost, down-shift a zone of hardiness, blow snows well into May.
Conneaut place name on Lake Erie’s southern shore
Conneaut Lake a molten ice block from the Pleistocene
Conneaut Creek a tributary to Lake Erie
Conneautville one square mile of creek bank, inhabited by
848 (2000)
774 (2010)
752 (2017)
humans
of whom two are Native
I am not from here. I walk un-seeing, barely hear solid puddles whine beneath my cell phone’s ding. Spring’s lateness speaks through rock-hard mud, pummels boot soles, sings silence into rime.
I want to watch the mouths who named the name, to hear the feet that stepped from ice to thaw.
Erie. Lake. Forge. City.
A people, first: Erieehronon
Eriechronon
Riquéronon
Erielhona
Eriez
Nation du Chat
Not what you call yourself, but what white people think they hear your neighbors say. White people pay for Beaver’s pelts. They hand out guns to other Iroquoians. Not to you. Your neighbors burn your stores of corn. Like them, you build longhouses, palisades, and don’t name babies until spring. Some of you walk south, or west, or north. Some melt into Susquehannock, Seneca.
Conneaut Maybe: Stone at bottom of standing water.
Lie down. Look up. Breathe under hemlock boughs, listen to wind-sighs rise and fall. Be still. The frozen vernal ponds hold mirrors into which you don’t yet have to look. The sword lies under ice, all demons banished under winter’s spell.
Ga-nen-yot Iroquois?
Standing stone?
Maple and beech, here, wait. Boulder-like. Feet tucked in snow. Sun-kissed trunks push sap from root to bud, yet no one has to dance. Sit. Drop into songs that sleep in soil. Or glance from down to here: the red-winged blackbird calling, over, and over, from the tip of the bare ash; claw- scrape of squirrels chasing across rock and bark like thoughts. Your mind tastes weed-seeds, asleep in frozen earth. Nothing must be done today.
Gunniáte "Indian."
It is a good while since we went.
For twenty winters I have walked snow-buried leaves. Who, a thousand years ago, named the sun’s angle that says “soon?” Did she hear sugar rise beneath warmed bark the way I hear the early-morning thermostat click on the gas-fed heat?
Konyiat Maybe: Seneca.
Maybe: Place where the snow lingers.
Maybe: River of large-mouthed fish.
Stay. Lie frozen for a moment more, eyes closed, unstirring and unstirred. I love March in this place like I love minutes between sleep and wake: dream images afloat beneath white drifts, deep-words coiled to jump into my hand like bass.
Catharina Coenen is a first-generation German immigrant to the northwestern “chimney” of Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Her creative nonfiction has recently appeared in The American Scholar, The Southampton Review Online, The Christian Science Monitor, Appalachian Heritage, and elsewhere. Read our Q&A with Catharina here.
“Conneaut” was originally published in the Split Rock Review. Find an audio recording of the piece here, and read Catharina’s contributor spotlight here.
All photos by Catharina Coenen.