by Nicole Walker
“Everyone knew that January would still get what January wanted. She would be so long and full of dates and dualities and frames that she remained Supreme Court months and lasted as long as Justices do, which is seemingly forever. ”
In the beginning, there were but three months—January which lasted for 180 days, June, which lasted for 30 and August which lasted until January came around again. January is named after the ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus, who is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings, so technically, you could name the whole year January and do away with the small business of June but my mother and my mother-in-law were born in June and thus, without June, I would have no children. My children were once so small I could carry them on the head of a pin—smaller than the small brine shrimp that my sister Paige hatched for me in a specimen cup full of distilled water. Tiny things have specific needs—zygotes love a thick uterine wall into which they can sink their teethy cells. Ecoli need a frothy stomach environment in which to grow. Chads, those tiny bits of paper that stuck to Florida ballots, counting as non-votes, needed a particular kind of Supreme Court to give them meaning.
It was because of the small things that we needed to continue to divide the year and the country I halved and then halved again. Each month/coalition coalesced around particularly small things—September took apples. October took the leaves of Oak trees. November took raindrops. December, stars. Not real stars, mind you, but the kind of stars kids stick to the ceilings of their bedrooms that glow in the dark, similar to regular stars, but smaller. January didn’t have to choose. Everyone knew that January would still get what January wanted. She would be so long and full of dates and dualities and frames that she remained Supreme Court months and lasted as long as Justices do, which is seemingly forever. January also took a few days from February because the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land. Poor February only got minerals, which are not as beautiful as October’s leaves or blossoms, which belong to May. Nor did February become November’s recycled rivers which fall on our heads like light rippling through waves. But minerals at least are useful and February will make big bucks on selling salt, lithium, and copper, as long as the Supreme Court continues to part surface rights from deep ground rights and water in order to chill the ground and heat the outside air. In February, everything gets turned upside down. August keeps the monsoons of the northern hemisphere and the frogs of the southern. July was happy to keep the microorganisms. Someone had to be in charge of the gut biome and the soil.
But in the great court battle of ’68, this is where March and April had to throw down. Easter said one. Passover said the other. Back and forth they went, tribaling their way through the beginning of hurricane season and the end of winter. They tried all forms of compromise: Leg wrestling. Arm wrestling. Mud wrestling. But when they emerged from the wrestling mat, as all creation myths require forms and mud, the Court was called to the sidelines. March made her case. Lions and lambs coexist in my heart, March claimed. I contain multitudes. Give me 31 days of certainty. I will pull those chads straight from the ballots. I will keep the buds of the apple trees tucked into branches. I will be the constancy that April can never provide.
April, shy and bloody, promised foxes and tulips and wind and snow. She promised rainbows and unicorns, ticks and lightning. She promised kindness, and, of course, she promised cruelty. The Justices voted down ideological lines. 6 justices voted to uphold April’s inconstant nature, but to punish it for its relentless wavering. Poems would be written about it. Cliches would be spun. Every year, a clamoring of surprise about how unfaithful she was. She got none of the small, palpable things those other months got. Instead, the hot air of criticism. Three Justices dissented but majority rule is as intractable as nature. April’s main claim to fame is that it leads to the flowers of May, and now, as climates shift, rain showers are rarely in the forecast.
I wrote this essay while working on a book called Writing the Hard Stuff, which is probably why February shows up in mineral form. In the book, I include Moh's Scale of Hardness that runs from talc, being the least hard, to diamonds, being the hardest. But the hard stuff isn't really a competition. What is talc to one may be diamond to another. In the face of the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity, after Roe was overturned, as we were fighting for our lives, or what lives we thought we would lose, it was necessary that the stuff of the world be real, the hardness palpable, but the orientation of the matter be recast. Without a different set of rules and a different kind of imagination, we'll be stuck in whatever season the authorities dictate.
NICOLE WALKER is the author of the forthcoming books, Writing the Hard Stuff and How to Plant a Billion Trees, both from Bloomsbury. She has also published the essay collections Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster from Torrey House Press, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet from Rose Metal Press and Sustainability: A Love Story from Mad Creek Books as well as Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and a book of poems This Noisy Egg. She wishes she'd gone with the original title for her collection of poems, "Comeuppance," so she only had one book with Egg in the title, but like eggs or chickens, the poetry collection came first.