TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Ohio, where I live, and where I was born and raised, is a very green place. It’s so green that when I first traveled to Ireland, “the Emerald Isle,” I remember looking out across the fields and thinking, “Huh, it looks a lot like Ohio.” We have fields of sheep here, too, and cows. Rolling fields of grass, and also soybeans and corn.

I feel at home in Ireland in part because of how green it is. It feels like home to me. And yes, I also have ancestors from that part of the world, so maybe it feels like home for other reasons, too.

Feeling at home somewhere new is surreal. Surreal and comfortable. Freeing, in a way. I’m not where the memories of my life took place, but because of the landscape, and the people, my senses feel at home. And so my memories seem to be at home, too.

Sometimes, knowing that I’ve called Ohio home my whole life, people ask me where else I might want to live. My answer has always been the same: I don’t have a specific place in mind, but it has to be green. I’m not particular about whether or not I live near a coast. I don’t need the ocean nearby; a river or lake or even a creek would do. I don’t need mountains. What I need are trees and grass. I need green.

Today’s poem spoke to me for reasons that will be obvious, and I hope it speaks to you, too, whatever landscape you prefer.

The Grass Could Be Yours
by Emily Lee Luan

When my friends and I would drive through the valley,
we’d say My cows! when we saw cows lazing
by the road. It meant the cows were yours, 
and whoever had the most cows at the end
of the drive had the most cows. Around that time, 
I went to a farm with a few brown cows
who were allowed to grow old, and we drank
the raw milk they produced to know what it tasted 
like—it tasted like grass. We could taste the green 
they loved, and the people from town would come
to pick up their weekly taste of green too. It meant
the green could be yours. Sometimes the air
breathes of that season of my life. And just catching
its scent is enough to make me want annihilation
of the simple sort, to be eradicated of fondness,
that soft longing for what once could be named
and therefore claimed. Today you drive me
to all your old houses in the country in which
we both survive. There, the older boys did handstands
in the back row of the mosque. There, your father 
treads up the small mountain and down again.
And there, you used to pull what was dry and growing
from the ground and offer it, in your small palms,
to the cows at the far fence behind your elementary
school. I imagine time growing gentle—the animal’s wide
face lowering to yours, asking for what it loves. 
You meet it with green, and you meet it with green.

"The Grass Could Be Yours" by Emily Lee Luan. Originally published in BOMB Magazine. Used by permission of the poet.