What Big Teeth We Had
on missing teeth, fruit-glow, and rerouted hunger
Life often lays down storylines in miniature, and it is only later when you follow a trail of white shards and fruit-glow that you begin to realize they all belong to the same animal.
I seem to have been shaped by substitutions:
a note for a tooth, canines for missing incisors,
a classroom for the child who never came in.
The Swallowed Tooth
When I was little, I swallowed a tooth while eating a pear.
Typing those factual words gives me a small shiver, for they read like a sentence escaped from folklore: a child, fruit, and something vulnerable vanishing into the dark.
The event, and the later mythologizing, would not have happened to my younger sister. At the first warning of a wiggle she began preparations to intervene with household instruments—pliers, string, a door—and gumption. She did not believe in waiting for a thing to leave naturally if she could yank it over the threshold herself.
I, by contrast, kept chewing.
Afterward I left a note beneath my pigtails and pillow detailing the problem to the late-night custodian of milk teeth: no proof available other than my word.
In the morning, a gleaming quarter for my earnest account.
This may have been one of my earliest lessons in writing:
when an object cannot be produced, a story can stand in its place.
A Letter to My Canines; or, Edited Wildness
Dear Canines,
The mouth expects symmetry:
two front teeth,
two beside them,
two canines,
two,
two,
two
repeating
neatly.
Hypodontia, our hereditary oddity, disrupted this order and you were filed down into another role and taught to impersonate what never came in.
With orthodontic correction,
tearing teeth became display teeth;
our smile rerouted.
While you’ve done admirably well as courtly teeth, we both know your first allegiance was to something older. An unedited mouth would have left a little more lore visible.
You have served me well, and I am grateful.
Still, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if no one had asked us to behave.
Yours in belated loyalty,
C.G.
The Pear Returned | Returns
I find it uncanny that I couldn’t carry a child,
and yet received a pear, a fruit I cannot help
but associate with Crivelli’s Madonnas.
I know, in the plain language of physiology, that I did not keep the swallowed tooth and bit of pear. The sensible body would have passed it along and out.
Imaginatively, I have never believed they fully left.
After the loss of our only pregnancy, and our swallowed diagnosis of infertility (not every loss gets laid under the pillow and paid for by morning), the pear returned in a vision. Whether it was deity, daemon, or longing itself that set a glowing pear in my palm, I will never know. But that fruit-glow arrived as a prophetic sign and I rerouted my hunger into teaching for a long and fruitful season, though not all of that harvest was sweet.
Symbols can outlive their first interpretation.
I am elsewhere now: restless under fluorescent light, claw marks visible on my company-issued keyboard. Several keys are damaged, particularly those most involved in minding my tone and filing down my bite.
Where is the next fruit-glow to guide me?
Has it been thinned by screens?
Pixelated past recognition?
Perhaps this is the eerie business of waiting for a thing to loosen, to ripen, on its own.
Not all thresholds yield to pliers and doors;
sometimes we have to live inside the liminal.
Symbols—like wolves—are faithful without being tamed.
But symbols, too, can be worried over like a loose tooth.
the uncanny body • thresholds & liminality • altered architecture • hereditary marks • decorous surfaces • secret interiors • written testimony • substitution & doubling • returns • the undigested past • domestic folklore • the (un)domestication of wildness
Questions from the Woods
(Answer all, some, or none, as appetites vary.)
My little sister, the one with implements and a plan, now thrives as an emergency department charge nurse—almost too perfect a casting. She was always the one who could pull the tooth.
And me: I still write notes.
Which one is truer to you: tooth puller or note writer?
What is wobbling right now? What will be your method: wait, force, swallow?
Where and/or when have your “wolf teeth” been filed down?
What stories or associations gather for you around fruit, or pear specifically?
Thanks for reading and being here.
This house breathes a bit differently with you in it.
From the corridor (and the woods),
Chandler
P.S. Perhaps wolves and pears and teeth have always belonged together for me.
After all, there is a little shapeshifting in my smile.
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There is a haunting beauty in the way you trace stories through teeth and fruit, through the wildness both tamed and lingering beneath the surface. Your words carry the weight of what is lost and what quietly returns, glowing like a secret light in the dark. I’m moved by the delicate balance you hold between waiting and pulling, between the tooth left to loosen and the note left beneath the pillow. Thank you for weaving such a tender reflection on the markings we carry, shaped by nature and myth alike. It lingers like a whispered story I want to return to.
As summer approaches, I find myself thinking of visits to the local orchard, picking peaches with their warm, fuzzy skin and the sweet delight of their juiciness. There is so much that can be made from a peach, each one a small celebration of the season’s abundance.
(My rewritten reply)
Dear Chandler,
Yet another mysterious post in which you manage to combine the (very) personal with a theme that’s relevant to it and turn it into a compelling story. Your secondary title “on missing teeth, fruit-glow, and rerouted hunger”, draws me into this in a way I start to recognize by now, but will never tire me.
Losing a tooth by biting a pear, a personal (yet also shared) memory, throws me on the hazardous path to your conclusion, that is in no way final, other than the textual confines of your post. You also include some poetic lines to peak my interest further.
Mentioning your sister (not for the first time) as your closest-in-blood counterpart helps to understand what you’re getting at, without spoiling anything of the outcome.
The loss of canines (“Edited Wildness”) and the orthodontic corrections (filing) have come to mean the loss of what could have been the wilder side of you coming to the fore.
The Crivelli’s Madonna image is an association that you have with pears. In Christian art, pears often symbolize the incarnation of Christ and his love for mankind. For you though, that is hardly relevant, and I like that aspect of this post; it underlines the fact that personal history, associations and feelings very often outweigh the general ‘meaning’ of art works.
There is a deep symbolic connection though, about which you bravely tell in your article, as it’s related to your undoubtedly painful memories of the loss of your only pregnancy. Your vision of fruit glow comes from being connected in my opinion, as you say “whether it was deity, daemon, or longing itself”, revealing a level of openness that is rather rare.
Your presence at the office, where your fingernails leave claw marks on your keyboard, damaging the keys most connected to minding your tone and filing down your bite. It seems your wilder (or should I say unadulterated?) self is now waiting for a next sign like the fruit glow, but at the same time aware of the dumbing down our society and limitations can put on the appearance of such a sign.
Now, to answer your questions:
-I’m not sure if the tooth puller or the note writer is truer to me, as I am certainly both at the same time, but I gravitate towards the note writer.
-What’s wobbling right now is my shoulder (literally), and the sense I’m on the verge of revealing my deeper (and darker) thoughts to the world, yet feel too ‘controlled’ to do so.
-My ‘wolf teeth’ have been filed down early on in the physical way, my mental wolf teeth have undergone a very long life of (sometimes harsh) suppression by my upbringing, schooling and career, but still feel sharp enough to bite when really necessary. Testing that feeling is, to say the least, risky.
-Fruit stories: the first fruit I think of is peach. About ten years ago, after a long and hot day in southern France, I ate a cooled but overripe peach that was so juicy, its juice poured down my chin and neck onto my chest. Its taste was so heavenly sweet, that all my senses were totally overwhelmed for a moment by the experience. Association: the album ‘eat a peach’ by the Allman bros. band, of which I’ve been a fan since the early ‘70s.
The fruit I enjoy most for its own typical sweetness is pear, preferably in the form of a sorbet. Association: the many pears in the surrealist paintings of René Magritte.
When I was a child, I learned that raspberries and blackberries could keep you going for a long time, and they were growing abundantly where I grew up, being typically northern forest fruits. Until this day, when going out to watch and photograph birds, I can’t stay away from the blackberries that I come upon frequently. That association with life force is quite a strong one, that has occurred in many of my dreams. No (external) associations have been strong enough to come to mind now.
Thank you so much, Chandler, for writing this! Your posts have been a rare find for me.