Settled in the Spring of 1584, Roanoke was the first English colony in North America. We built two story houses with stone walls on dry mud, the island a crumbling sandbar pummeled by wind and waves. We erected fences and fence posts, laid claim to a patch of wilderness like Ptolemy mapping the heavens, giving titles to congregations of stars. We found a bay with oysters more numerous than pebbles and a seashore bright with starfish and sand dollars. What we didn't find was gold to fill our ships or rain to coax our harvest. For three years no sails appeared on the horizon. (The way I waited for you, love, absent on the horizon.) Only the blinding clarity of a cloudless sky ushering us towards winter. Disaster is the absence of events. The sun wheeled the heavens like a flour mill, everlasting waves lashed at the shore; no boats in sight, the sea rolled back our memories of home— The reek of urine in the streets of London, the towers of Parliament spearing the sky like a row of bayonets above a river of blood. The hulls of abandoned vessels lurking beyond sight. 2. CRO – Letters carved into a tree stump at Roanoke before the colony’s disappearance in 1590. Nothing remained of what we owned. No pottery, no tools, not even our own bones. What we brought with us was filched by the fingers of the ocean and the shadow of the moon. Not even a dream in which you appear, a shadow behind a wall of water. Beloved, did I imagine us walking hand in hand in the city of cathedrals, your hands smelling of baked bread, the afternoon sun glazing rooftops and sidewalks with gold. I hold on to evidence— a pebble plucked from the Rue Monge, a sprig of lavender from the apothecary, the dress I wore the last night. On the island, the letters CRO, a bird with a golden beak and black wings, all that’s left to tell of our departure. No violence had been done. We simply gave up waiting for salvation to appear like a chalice falling out of the heavens or the waters parting to reveal a road. I gave birth to a child. Even without news of you, we are happy. How bright the moon shines without city lights! I remain ever your loving, Eleanor 3. 500—The number of mountains destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, including Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. We named her Virginia— land of blue ridged mountains, fish chocked rivers and timber stands vast enough to build all the battleships of Europe. After centuries we are still after what brought us here: timber, fur, coal, the exhumed remains of ancient forests we burn to light our homes. Today asphalt cuts through this valley like a ribbon of steel and explosions shave the scalp off of tree covered mountains. Rocks shatter like fragments of a skull. Men excavate hillsides, blast through rock, bringing down avalanches of boulders, mud, and branches, bodies tumble down like logs, the women buried them in their coal stained clothes with the children they miscarried. Some abandoned this place, let mud and rain pull their houses back into the earth. Most stayed, subsisting from the mountains they helped to destroy. This gutted Appalachia is a war zone, but one we still call home. 4. Arlington, Virginia June 1992 Dear Chen Ying, Virginia is a beautiful. I walk to the Potomac River with mother every evening, and we watch the sun go down over the mountains, orange slices on the water, geese gliding over the surface like the airplanes landing at Reagan airport. Everything here is bigger and faster, we ride in dragons shaped like cars. Here we play with Barbie dolls instead of silk worms, and in the autumn the leaves turn read like the lanterns during the Spring Festival, and we light candles inside pumpkins carved with hideous faces; unlike our friendly family ghosts, they have no names and confer no blessings. I am learning new words: crow, cloud, kite. You must speak here in order to survive. In social studies, we learned about a group of English people who sailed here in a tiny ship, build a settlement on an island, and disappeared a few years later. Eleanor's father came back to look for them, but he never found his daughter or his grandchild. I am thinking of her today, the family she abandoned, who abandoned her, the beach extinguished of stars, the country's interior so vast and full of terrors, the night rustling with strange sounds. Sometimes wonder overtakes fear: the air is clean here, it smells like daffodils. The children have yellow hair like the tassels of corn, and like scarecrows, it's hard to tell if they are real, but when they fall they cry like we do. Next time I'll send you the flowers I'm growing, heliotrope and nasturtiums, pressed into dictionaries we should study but use as weights. Until then I subsist on the memory of your smiles, the sticky buns we ate together on festival days. Missing you, Chang Xin