Since when

Since when did I start saying "baby girl"?

Since when did I get nervous to walk around my block?

Since when did I begin thinking slaw goes on everything?

Since when did I love the fiddle?

Since when did keeping the thermostat at 55 in the winter become exciting?

Dogs I walked/loved this week

Ricochet. He lives up to his name, running around like crazy. And he pees when he's excited. Like, straight out when you're getting him out of his cage. Straight out at you. But, really, he just wants to sit on your lap, even when you're outside, which isn't crazy at all. 

This is Norris. I'm completely in love with this brindle terrier and have been since I first walked him three weeks ago. He's two years old but the sweetest ever, and he likes to stand up and hug you. He knows how to sit, and he walks so good on the leash. I wish I could bring him home. This face, it makes me melt. We're pals already, but I want so bad to make him my hiking and loving and everyday buddy.

Kyra is a young one, just barely over 6 months. But she's the sweetest blue heeler baby girl that I've ever been with. She's still round like a puppy but good on the leash and loving. And the softest you could ever imagine. Sweet, sweet girl that got surrendered by her owners because they couldn't afford her. I'll afford you, baby girl!

Oh, Mojo. I technically walked him last week, but he was just so good and sweet. He just wanted to be my companion--didn't so much care for balls or running with the other dogs outside. Just wanted to look up and you with love.

Play, play, play. Skip, skip, skip.

After my workout tonight, I determined to update my workout playlist. It was suspiciously lacking in certain raise-the-roof songs. And so I started from the top, from the A's, and went through my library.

I had forgotten how much music I love and long for until I realized, as I clicked through and sampled old loves, that I suddenly wanted to listen to everything I loved all at once. I couldn't decide what to stick with, what to play all the way through, because I wanted to play so much all the way through. Albums, whole albums that I wanted to swoon to like I have before. But all at once. I don't have time to listen to 20 hours of continuous music tonight.

It was also startling to see that it's been over a year since I last listened to some of these songs. They still feel so present to me, so dear, so familiar, that a year feels like a week or two.

After the run-through, I pressed shuffle, as I often do when I want to hear what I love but can't decide what to focus on, start with, commit to. And then, as is iTunes' want, shuffle only wanted to play the songs that it always wants to play--songs that I like but don't love. Skip, skip, skip, skip, skip.

Sometimes I just want to be 16 again in my room, sitting on the floor in front of my stereo with albums on repeat. Matchbox 20. Backstreet Boys. The Wallflowers. Or 19, when my tastes began to expand. Keane. John Mayer. Howie Day. Or 20, when I discovered Limewire and downloaded song upon song of new music or rare songs of my favorites. Or all of these days in between, days of music in the car and through the apartment. Tired Pony in the car in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Snow Patrol on my last drive across Kansas. James Taylor on I-26 to Beaufort. The Beatles all over Manhattan, all over Topeka.

And now I want to read everything I love. All at once. How can I choose?

White night

Lately, I have been falling asleep at inconvenient times. Like, while watching a documentary on stress at the dining room table. Or during the 4th quarter of a division championship game. Or, just now, while reading one of my own essays, one that I was reading to remind myself what I think I'm capable of writing.

Not a good sign, me thinks.

But, perhaps it has nothing at all to do with the stimulant that is clearly not sustaining my alertness. My head feels heavy constantly, like the substance between my ears is folding in. Yet then I wake at 4am, 5am, or somewhere in the nether regions of night that purposefully doesn't get named, I wake to a cat staring at me from the pillow. She stares, and her weight changes the pillow's weight, and my head shifts, and I stare at her white chest only as long as it takes me to realize it and then shove her off the bed. Not on the pillow, Snickers. Not now. Go.

I listen for the thud and the meows, her standing on the ground waiting for her next move. And a few moments later when again her face is looking at mine, the questioning grunts in the night.

After I shower, I come out to find her asleep on the foot of the bed for her morning nap. I poke her but she only purrs.

Holiday Letter 2010

Hello, friend.

Just beyond the trees of the Piedmont, a rugged silhouette of gray stretches east to west, land that rises, rises, rounds. Mountains. Blue Ridge. When I reach the peak of a hill as I drive north on Church St. in Spartanburg, there they are. “Hello,” I say. “Good morning.” 

 I drive north on Sunday mornings to walk dogs at the Humane Society. Hello, walk, love, home. I fall in love every week, and I keep their names with me when I get home and greet Snickers. I practice saying a dog’s name next to hers, and it feels right. Soon, I will bring one home and keep him. Then we’ll be three here in this apartment of light in downtown Spartanburg, where my walls of windows overlook the city. 

 

Just out of view, Morgan Square is two blocks away, with its clock tower, fountain, and, on the west end, the Masonic Temple where I work. I moved here six months ago to work for the Hub City Writers Project, a literary nonprofit organization that runs an independent press and bookstore. Our offices and Hub City Bookshop are on the ground floor of the Masonic Temple, shared with a coffee bar and bakery, and pigeons that click atop the awning with hurried feet. All this time I’ve been working part-time, mornings, and another part-time job at Starbucks, afternoons/evenings, in the hope of going full-time. And January 3 I will. Starting then, I will be Assistant Director of the Hub City Writers Project and will leave Starbucks and its endless nights gladly behind. Once again, as I did in Lawrence and Manhattan, I will spend my days among books—manuscript submissions, advanced reader copies, books new and used, books published by our press, and books fresh from the world beyond—and writers, friends.

I am far from Kansas, from the Flint Hills, from campus, from the mad world of school. Finished with my MFA degree in Creative Writing, I am free to write here—when there’s time. On my one free day a week, Saturday, I write, I read, and I explore. I cross the Carolinas in width and height, from a suspension bridge above Raven Cliff Falls in the tip of Upstate South Carolina to the edge of the continent at Hunting Island State Park, where I saw and touched the ocean for the first time. I crave hikes, crave height, crave challenges over rocks and ledges. I crave views; I will climb for them, drive for them, alone. I find trails and sometimes take friends but, when safe, I prefer to go with only my self. 

  

"I have a hunger for nonhuman spaces, not out of any distaste for humanity, but out of a need to experience my humanness the more vividly by confronting stretches of the earth that my kind has had no part in making."  - Scott Russell Sanders

When Jedsen visits next week, after four months apart, I will show him those peaks in the distance I have come to love. For him, my boyfriend of six years, I will cook my first Christmas dinner and brew cups of coffee. What was once distance is now long distance, and long-term distance. We rely on the other’s voice at the end of a day, a voice so familiar and comforting it might as well come from the next room—not eight states away. 

The streets are curved here, angled, askew. They change names mid-way; they become highways, lose their words and gain numbers. My world is new here: three stories high, and flanked by crape myrtles and Southern drawl. I speak the same but am changed by clouds that drift from the mountains and a morning sun that lights every corner. You should see the way Snickers sniffs at the sky, like the air is purer up here, all full with the living.