In The Body That Once Was Mine

My body matured on the flood plain of Lake Erie, weather-maker, nearly ten thousand square miles of freshwater surface area upon which winds kick up violent waves. I grew up on its eastern shore, fifty miles south of Buffalo, New York, in the rural village of Silver Creek, surrounded by vineyards and apple orchards, with a population of only twenty-five hundred. Its once-vital Main Street, where my parents could buy our shoes, clothes, fabric, groceries, hardware, jewelry, notions, toys, gifts, and greeting cards, was eroded gradually by the building of malls in the suburbs of Buffalo, then by the demise of the steel industry in nearby Lackawanna. . . .

Correspondence

Although I grew up on an apple ranch in Washington State, a continent away from Eva Saulitis and the Upstate New York vineyards of her youth [“In the Body That Once Was Mine,” January 2017], my exposure to manmade toxins paralleled hers. From the first budding leaf to the last apple harvested, the orchards were drenched in pesticides, the names of which all seemed to end in -thion. I dragged a hose from tree to tree, dousing each with the potent chemicals. When a young coworker and I met at the end of our rows, we would spray each other to cool down.

Other pesticides were applied by crop-duster in early fall. As the plane buzzed our houses, we rushed out to stand in the mist. I worked harvests in the packing shed where I ate a half-dozen apples daily — fruit that had been bathed all season in toxins and then dunked in tanks of fungicide on its way to the packing lines.

The toxic exposure has yet to affect me. I can only conclude that my survival is testimony to the explanation Saulitis’s oncologist offered her: “We live in a poisoned world. Some people have the genetics to handle it, some don’t.”

T.M. Johnson Monroe, Washington

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January 2017