Cigarette Butt

Halfway through my outward leg, whistling wheezes cut across my ear. I check the pace on my new Apple watch, 18” 36’. Not bad for a short, middle-aged asthmatic hustling uphill at a bit of elevation. I’m not jogging after all, and my 5’ 1”, 28” inseam legs only turnover so fast. Some days I stroll around my neighborhood looking at the birds, the saguaro cactus, the way the light plays on the Santa Catalinas in the background. Other days, like today, I’m racing against the clock. I’m my biggest competitor. The numbers don’t matter. My body knows when I cross into the zone; on this edge lives my heart’s health.

A cigarette butt lays on the side of the faded asphalt road. The HOA had redone them for the first time in 50 years three summers back. The old geezers gleefully made the newer residents pay for it after they’d been the ones allowing them to crumble through five decades of hundred-plus-degree summers. Just one of the reasons I call my neighborhood the F. Clusters.

Obsessed, I can’t look away from the flat, dirty filter. Who the hell was smoking on their morning walk? Didn’t they know one single cigarette butt could burn the entire neighborhood down? Rain was 90 days in the rearview mirror.

Once, I tried to bring a travel mug of coffee on my morning walk. Even my caffeine addiction couldn’t overcome that awkwardness. I no longer recognize the 19-year-old me who once lectured a United States Marine Corps Captain on the evils of the full pot of coffee he drank every damn morning. Now, I understand his silent contempt. I’d known nothing of the world in college.

For sure, cigarettes are easier to carry packed in pockets with singles in hands. Memories of cigarettes easier to carry in hearts, even ones heavy with grief. Maybe my unseen neighbor enjoyed the deep breaths which pulled in lungsful of toxic haze. After all, my own rasping wheeze wasn’t caused by my buried bygone addition, but by my mother’s.

She’s buried now.

My mom smoked through all four pregnancies; doctors obscenely recommended it in the 60’s and 70’s. The era of peace, love, rock’n’roll, and cigarettes. The final child, I’d arrived a month early, under 5 lbs. My lungs remain my Achille’s heel.

Baby-child me didn’t know my curly hair, tiny clothes, and hand-crocheted blanket smelled like cigarette smoke. Teen-child me didn’t know the comforting haze gripping the adult cousins playing cards in the kitchen late at night on the weekends damned us all. Grown-child me could never have guessed I’d desperately want Mom, risen like Lazarus, stinking up her house or mine. Her addiction now my genetic memory. Spinning forward, orphaned along the asphalt road, battling crackling wheezes and stifled tears. My heart endlessly breaking.