My mother is a beaver.
Not because she chews through wood or slaps her tail against coyotes. But because she builds.
And builds.
And builds.
But to make the water still.

Beavers cannot stand the sound of running water. It agitates them. So they work until the sound disappears. Until the water is all soft and silver.

Mud.
Stick.
Stone.
Repeat.

My mother is like this with chaos around her. She gets rid of clothes and conversations. Where others see a normal room, She sees a current of water to be engineered.

She empties out drawers and boxes, She doesn't take photographs.
She doesn't like colour in her bedroom,
She keeps the walls pale, bone, sand, light ashes of her old lives.
She says it helps her sleep, let go. But I know it helps her hear the silence.
I know that like a beaver, she is afraid of drowning in her sleep.

When there is no sound of water in her dreams, there is no flood.

But I understand why her walls are so white and her drawers are so empty,
Why she is so good at what she does, finding an opening,
Never accepting the flood,
I understand now how she hears the river from a pebble.

And why she still can't sleep easily at night,
Even though she has taken all out,
Built her seawall taller than our house.

Like all beavers, my mother has seen the worst kind of floods.
Swallowed water,
Swam through hell
She doesn’t say but she has walked on glass, and a hoarded life
She has been preyed by coyotes and dragged down by the waters
Like all beavers she has swam against the current

I think how she survived is similar to them: go underground, go dark, sketch, plan, map, and open your eyes; work with whats around you, the sticks and stones, the plain old mud, work under rain, and clear blue sky.
Beavers do not wait for perfect materials, the perfect weather or the perfect partner.
They use what is available. They always did; that makes them one of the most creative engineers in the animal kingdom.

Their nails are always full of wet mud, and that's okay.
I understand something by looking at her, and beavers.
You do not need to conquer the river.
You do not have to be good.

You just need to slow the part that reaches you.

She is so strong, never out of sticks, tricks and mud, that I adore her.
I envy her, for we are different species my mother and I.
Only if she knew how wild she always has been, Like a beaver,
Swimming and thinking and chewing things.
Whatever dam she wants, I know she will build it.