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.