Choice
Jacki Huntington
My mom was a little girl
the last time she was in LA
far away from the cold farm town
where she would meet my dad
and get married
with braces on her teeth.
Now here she was again to visit me, her single daughter,
her last baby,
the baby she wanted
before she turned 30,
healing from the choice I had made.
She was there to see me,
but also the LA she saw on TV:
the walk of fame,
the beaches,
the canyons,
and all
the huge family homes in Beverly Hills. That was nowhere
to me, of course. I was renting a
spare room on the east side just
for a few months.
I took her to a restaurant I liked,
Baby Gemini.
She was unfamiliar,
so I got what I wanted
and hoped she would enjoy it, too,
but even the mild was too spicy,
so we stopped at Mickey D’s on the
way home and ate in the car.
She got soft serve,
her favorite dessert.
The next day we drove to Joshua Tree.
I wanted to show her
my favorite desert.
“Is this all it is?”
she asked, unimpressed by
the sparse landscape of monumental, rusted rocks presiding over a painstakingly slow ecology that expresses with such clarity at sunset, when the light calmly evacuates, slicing the atmosphere into a crush of different hues that bleed together and silhouette the decisive arms holding out for tomorrow.
“I think I get it,” she said.
So that day we stopped only for a short hike,
then drove away for more obvious landmarks.
Years later,
the only two attractions she still talks about are
the World Famous Crochet Museum,
a tiny trailer packed with more than a hundred heartfelt reproductions
of little animals handmade from yarn
kept by a woman who loves Jesus,
and the 20 dollar tram that takes you
to a winter wonderland on the top of Mt. San Jacinto.
You can freeze up there without being ready for it,
so they sell hats and coats and hot cocoa in the gift shop.
Once you’ve had your fun, gasped at the novelty, you get
back on the tram, which, over the course of about 10
minutes, can transport you
from the mountaintop full of snow
back down to the empty desert below,
where I still choose to live.
Jacki Huntington is a documentary artist undertaking a long term body of work about abortion stigma. Currently, her work involves digging into her first and only experience of abortion in 2017. You can find her on twitter @jackitellsyou and on instagram @jackihuntington.
