The following is an excerpt from All the Lands We Inherit by Darby Price. She received her MF from George Mason University, and her writing has appeared in No Contact, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Redivider, and Zócalo Public Square. Darby is a Continuing Lecturer at UC Irvine and makes her home in Long Beach, CA.
All the Lands We Inherit is a hybrid memoir told through sixty-six lyric vignettes, tracing a daughter’s fraught, tender relationship with her ailing, devoutly religious mother. As Darby Price navigates the weight of poverty, addiction, faith, and silence, and asks what we inherit beyond blood, and what it costs to break from the past. The debut is now available from Black Lawrence Press.
Birthright not as lands and blessings, but the inheritance we cannot avoid. My trust is the stubbornness of a great-grandmother whose tuberculosis shortened her leg, and who rowed herself to work each day before marriage and children put an end to all that. The sensitivities of a grandmother who was kind and addicted to drink. And not above all, but clearly, the impulsivity of a mother who is like a buoy unmoored, still afloat but wildly adrift. It was she who taught me, If you’re sitting in the pew and something doesn’t sound right, go to the source and read it yourself. The memory of bouncing on her hip as she danced across the living room. One, two-three-four-five, she sang, taking four rhythmic steps forward. I squealed with delight. Mighty Tigers don’t take no jive! Four steps back. A cheer routine my sister had learned. Six, seven-eight-nine-ten! she sang as I clung to her, thin arms wrapped around her neck. Back it up and do it again! My mother and I move forward. We move back. The hip, the neck, the dance. The song in the throat and the child begging Again.
***
Darby means free spirit. My mother didn’t know this when they named me; she chose it to honor the Irish side of her family. She didn’t know, or forgot, that her family wasn’t Irish, they were Scots: angry Presbyterians tight-lipped and laced up like a whalebone corset. Still, I feel that my name has given me power. Free like an ocean bereft of its moon. No continent or flag making I as much as the feel of my hand in the lake. Nothing left to inherit anyway except the nerve and the good sense to go when everything else has gone sideways. My mother always called me bohemian, and I wonder if that has borne out. I do not smudge her room with burning sage or press crystals to her skin. I do not make a vision board or send her self-help books. I make a logical argument for X. I show my work: numbers and facts laid out carefully for her to destroy. I could have wished for more compassion, she said. There’s a heart in here all right, but it hangs from a ceiling, crystalline and jagged. A hardened and lengthening spur. A highland kind of heart, after all.
***
Everything I’ve done has just been to keep her alive. I will—I must—fail. Before then, I do as much as I can. Fill out applications for Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, free meals, free rides. We turn out our pockets and find faith struggling among the lint. Little trooper. Little traitor. Little bit of love choking on her admonishment: I’m not a charity case. We talk about moving her to Alabama, to North Carolina, to a place where her children can watch her more carefully. Nobody mentions California, where I live—too far away from everyone else. Too expensive, too strange for a woman who has lived in the South nearly all of her life. When my mother starts teaching a bible study at the senior center, the rest of the family relaxes: What a community she’s building, they think. Perhaps we should leave her in place. I eye the curtains at stage left, expecting the swing of a pendulum axe. When my mother said Maybe I’m here to redefine what can be done I lost a breath I couldn’t get back. Back home from rehab, she slept on the floor with her dogs. Their old bodies shuddered against hers as they inhaled exhaled. The gap between what happens and what I imagine is full of the same old guilt. You cannot keep her alive, my husband says, sad-eyed. I know it but cannot believe. The gap between hope and what’s hoped for widens at the river’s mouth.
***
It’s summer in California, and the ships gleam as they slide toward the distant port and its rows of skeletal cranes. My lungs burn as I make my way down the runners’ path on the beach. Next to me, a bike route winds in tandem and all kinds of people go by: rollerbladers in cutoffs, cyclists in padded shorts, tourists in four-person canopied carts that require synchronized pedaling. My mother got on an airplane today. It was a birthday gift from my sister. The device she carried on is a compact, flyable version of the long green tank my sister and I named Marge. A tiny streetsweeper drones by, kicks sand off the bike path and into my face. I splutter. I think of my mother, mask fitted to her nose and mouth in seat 30C. I press my hand into a side cramp and watch a pelican disappear beneath the ocean’s surface, and for some reason, I think of the bald cypress, a tree that has learned how to breathe despite the marsh’s best efforts to drown it. Adaptation: the best response to a hostile environment. I slow but do not stop.
***
Kant wrote, I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. My mother ignores the note on the trailer. She ignores the pain in her blackening finger. She quits a job she can’t afford to quit because she never wants to work again, but she says that the Lord has a plan. But there’s cracks in that foundation. Years ago, when a drought hit her town, I heard an anger in her voice I hadn’t heard before as she described some sparrows hopping in the yard, heads tipped back and beaks cracked open to the sky. She read this as a desperate thirst, and her anger at their pitiful dance found an unlikely home in God himself. Why doesn’t he do something about it? she spat, her own mouth lined with dust. Why will he not send the rain? When her own diagnosis is grim, my mother will pretend that nothing is wrong. She will see the hand of God in a woman who tells her she made six figures blogging. She’ll insist she can sell glass on eBay, or rent and drive a car for Uber, or become a home-care nurse. Her house will descend into filth. She’ll go back to a full pack a day. She’ll start to have trouble with eating, or more honestly, keeping the eaten food down. My sister will say it’s a symptom of late-stage COPD. Nobody will tell that to my mother—no point. I’ll think of the sparrows of summers ago, and wonder—all this space you made, all this room. Is your faith enough to fill it?
***
Marry me Marry me Merry me in faded photograph: toddler clad in buttercup yellow, bottom lip tucked in a crook-toothed grin. Or more serious me in a home video, shot at a snowy resort. Behind the camera my mother cajoles: Darby, say something! I look up and through the puffy red hood of my suit. I think for a moment. God says Be kind. My mother laughs. That’s right, she concedes. I look at her seriously. Always so serious, always so worried. (Always the practical one, she will huff twenty-seven years later.) I look into the lens and right at you and say, with all the gravity of a death-aware child: But we can’t say oh my god. You can see me this concerned, of course—always uneasy and overworked, always inundated with the world’s debris. But you cannot hear her voice, unburdened by longer years. You cannot see her as I saw her then, with beautiful dark hair that hung to her waist and a face less lined, more merry. The years have eaten the resort, the powdered hills, the cotton stuffing in the old red suit, but my mother and I are stuck on that mountain in time. She laughs again. I furrow the snow with the toe of my very small boot.
***
Tipping a vase, my mother would inspect its bottom: Fenton. Cambridge. McCoy. Names scrawled, pressed, or stuck where they were least intrusive. She got good at spotting a gem, and I, her constant companion, learned too: flame crest. hobnail. epergne. The lush opacity of milk glass or paper-thin green of Depression. This was an extension of her own mother, who got into antiquing later in life. I wonder now if this was another way to find her, buried not in a family grave in Massachusetts but in the shelves of Westmoreland and Steuben. Her laugh released from a hand-painted atomizer. Her interests and tastes kept in a footed compote. But this was only part of it, after all. It was the dream of the internet, too, the eBay buzz of chat rooms and auctions and a community that called themselves Glassies. It was meet-ups and conventions, it was a digital camera that my father resented (Squandering your money, he scoffed)—the first that a novice could buy. I remember the charm and the gloom of antique malls. But mostly, digging through the old box of my brain, I remember: a true kind of happiness in her. How far away it seems now, but how real. Trapped in time, as an ancient ewer submerged in the old city’s ruins.
Excerpted from All the Lands We Inherit. Published with permission from Black Lawrence. Copyright © 2025 by Darby Price.