Jon is on his way to Iowa. I’m watching traffic along Highway 17 from my front window. The gothic farmhouse painted a beige bordering on butter yellow depending on the light makes me think about Walla Walla and all the old homes there, mansions in their day. I miss loess soils and Horse Heaven Hills and The Three Sisters and the lone alpaca who lived on Electric Avenue and Mill Creek and the closest crossroad to the home we rented when we first moved there: Stahl. That’s Jon’s mother’s maiden name.

Then my thinking stops. My mind hangs on the word Stahl, which in German means steel. Family of steel, of armor, of pounding the table until everyone shuts up, of long days and short conversations, of bending life like metal to their will.

But also of stall, a small compartment or enclosure from which an animal can’t escape.

Also an impediment or a stoppage because of an overload. A lack of progress where there was once progress. A deliberate way of speaking that buys time by being vague. A delay. A diversion.

Stalled life. Stalled death. A stalled family in a rural town that stalled years ago before or maybe because industrial plants moved in with their boxcars, silos, cranes, ladders, oversized pipes, midair walkways, pole-mounted alarms, and smokestacks puffing nitrogen and sulfur dioxide into the air inside billowing clouds—all of it larger than human scale, larger than the family farming that came before, larger than a faithful community, larger than a downgraded family.

I’ve learned to interpret my body and to know when I’ve reached the limit of what it can hold at any given time. The word Stahl was that limit this morning, so I turned to language as my mind stalled. It’s not that I don’t want to say more about Walla Walla, about my husband’s family, or about that little house near Stahl that we shared. This just isn’t the day.