Outing

I had guessed that Scooter would hate the snow like he hates the rain. That he would press his paws into white the first time and glance back at me, bewildered. That he would stick to the edge, do his business, and scurry back to the door. But the shar-pei in him that wrinkles his forehead, keeps his ears small and silky, and makes him hate the rain remained hidden today.

No, he bounded out my parents' back porch onto a half-inch of snow and didn't stop running circles until I lured him back with a cookie. The little guy loves snow, so says the husky in him. So says his relation to me. It's been two years since I've seen snow--that freak winter storm that shut down Spartanburg for three days at the beginning of 2011. That was the year much of the natural balance of my environment was off. Things fell apart. The world froze over. We all recovered in 2012.

You miss snow, but you forget how cold it is, how your feet shrink up, how your eyelashes collect flakes and nearly freeze. But it's worth it. I ran around my elementary school's playground today with my dog and then walked him home to my parents', his keepers while I'm in Hutchinson. He's good for them, a change of routine. I still haven't seen it, but my mom tells me about walking Scooter to the vet each morning just to say hello to the girls there. I imagine Scooter pulling her along and her purse bouncing more than usual against her hip. I imagine my dad being led around corners by my golden pup, and I smile. They have not been dog people, so Scooter is teaching them.

Meanwhile, I'm snuggling with my man while the world turns over. That's right, snuggling. It's the only way to live.

Fun

G, my 'Little Sister,' and I had our holiday hangout today. It began with Imagination Station, moved to Wreck It Ralph, and finished with a little hike along the Duncan Park Lake.

She loves Scooter, and Scooter loves her.

She's pretty special, and she will go far.

The best book club there is

We meet every six weeks and then have the liveliest discussions about books (Gone Girl, this month). It's a beautiful thing. These women are part of my Spartanburg family, and I'm so grateful to them for welcoming me. Love!

Kristi, Liz, Sara, Susan, Erin, Rebecca, Devon, and Ana. xo

Sunrise over Duncan Park

A cloud can be whatever you intend;
Ostrich or leaning tower or staring eye.
       But you have never found
A cloud sufficient to express the sky.

--from "Rural Reflections" by Adrienne Rich

On hiding

"For we must have hiding, places to lick our wounds, if only for a little while. I am troubled by this, and moved. We must have hiding, places where we can drop all pretenses not to just be ourselves but to dissolve into something else. We must have hiding, because we are not private people after all; we are in our own dreams the pull of the same ocean, waves that break and crest together. We can't avoid our human obligations. We must have hiding, because it is only here, away from the processes of society and people-forming that the divine kernel of ourselves is lit and stays glowing among the hypocrisies of the day; we hide because we need to, to let the fragile wick catch fire, burn innermost, keep going, keep going."

--from "Dreams I Had of Hiding" by Robert Vivian

On heritage

"Strange how we'd wanted to get as far away from that life as possible, we'd wanted to escape any chance of daily reminders, and yet all three of us were using art to express and re-create and revisit the past.

Heritage.

The farm would always be ours, even if we were no longer there. We could claim it in writing, in music.

--from "The Orchard" by Theresa Weir

Kansas

Decked out

Erin and I worked 12 hour days at the Hub City Bookshop on Friday and Saturday to sell you books, to talk about books, to decorate around books and with books. It was fun and exhausting. This is the result.

On Thanksgiving

I didn't gorge today. I didn't eat seconds. I didn't want to.

I made a meal of my favorites: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and apple pie. Most everything was out of a box, but that's the delicious Thanksgiving taste I was raised on. Those are the particular flavors I crave, what makes up my favorite meal.

It's because I think of my grandparents and the way my Grandpa Lentz would fill the turkey with stuffing and taste the skin as he carved. The way my Grandma Jackson would tenderly pass the dishes and make sure everyone was happy before she sat herself. The way my Grandma Lentz would take the china out if the cabinet only for these meals and wash them right when we had finished, and how I would help her dry.

This is my third Thanksgiving without family. But I don't feel alone. The food is a connection. The way I approach the day.

I started by running/jogging/walking the Turkey Day 8k this morning in 1:05:11. Not the time I'd wanted, but my left ankle was giving me trouble and so I couldn't move like I'd hoped. But, hey, I can move, and that's the important thing. I legitimately completed an 8k, and that's something new.

Then I took Scooter out to the Pacolet Preserve to run. He celebrated our little hike by chasing some deer and munching on a found cat leg, its foot still hairy with claws. Snickers seemed to know because when we got home she smelled him all over.

I do miss my loves back home, but I'll see them for nearly two weeks around Christmas. My first holidays with Phillip. My first holidays in Kansas since 2009. My first holiday road trip with Scooter.

Yeah, I'm pretty grateful.

Diagnosis

I have returned to woods and words.

Scooter and I have started taking evening walks (when there's time before dark) on the trails that start just a block from my house in Duncan Park. It's surprisingly dense and mountain-like once you set in, and the paths are already littered with leaves, the best kind of fall. And I let Scooter off leash to run ahead and veer off into the growth leading down to a small creek. He collects stickers and mud, and returns to me with his tongue hanging, happy with his speed and freedom.

I walk slower, breathing deeply the fresh air, and listen for rustles. I wish for more silence like this, so tomorrow I am going where there's more silence, where there are more trees, where the colors are brighter, where I can climb higher. I need it. I need it before life gets even busier and the world gets colder.

The last two months have been blurs of long days and big projects, short nights and deadlines. Even my journaling has suffered from a lack of energy for words, but I'm back at it, opening files and adding syllables, images, scenes. It's such a relief.

Times like these I recall something my grad school professor Michael L. Johnson said in a workshop. He said he was struggling with anxiety and went to a therapist. The therapist said, "How's your writing?" Johnson replied, "I'm not." "Well, that's your problem."

I hate to equate writing with therapy, but it is a path to well-being. For me, it is a necessity to a healthy mind. It is a need, a desire, a must. It is an occupation I must attend to, return to, live every day.

Finding your place in the world means finding or making a place where your needs work for you.
--from Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips

 Tomorrow I hope to inch closer to my place in the world, both as a writer and a lover of nature.

Start again

Sleepless morning number four. I wake uncomfortable and stiff, sometimes from strange dreams and sometimes just to the whir of the ceiling fan and the still dim streetlight glow of the windows.

I haven't been able to shake it these mornings, that weight of lack behind my eyes, that presence of unsettledness, that want for an easy start. In between attempts to sleep, I wander out into the dark house to feed the animals, a need I know I can satiate. I shut the door behind me again, a second goodnight, and press myself into the mattress. There is no good angle of legs, no satisfying proportion of sheet and exposed skin, no texture of pillow smooth enough to bury into. Once day comes, my eyes tell my body there is no more trying.

I press my palms to my eyes. Where has sleep gone? I search for ways to recover the day and start again. A smoothie, maybe, or a slow walk around the gorge. A favorite song. The next essay in the collection I'm reading. Before I make any real progress, I realize it's noon and I've not only lost some night but my whole morning, and now day is slipping into its other half without me.

Tomorrow is open, wholly mine. Maybe I'll embrace the early hour, if it comes, and sit on the porch to welcome the color behind the trees. In not fighting, perhaps my body will relax and wiggle into whatever comes, grateful for another sun.

Together: One year

Aug. 30, 2011

Aug. 30, 2012

Wildness

I've been musing a lot on growth lately. And time. And the way we think about our home land. And what it means to explore. And what it means to take risks.

Two years ago I completed grad school. Two years ago I up and moved to Spartanburg, a place I'd never been, for a job. Two years ago I set out on my own like I'd never done before. I started climbing mountains, to be exact. I wanted to go as high as I could, to test my body, to see how alone I really was, if alone was a state of being or a place I could go when I chose. I set out to escape from and be found by my self. Discovering my self was the only thing I could do.

I discovered that I can go far, both high and low. I can stand on the edge of the continent and not be carried away. I can stand on a cliff and not feel like falling.

Two years ago in August I touched the ocean for the first time, wading in to my calves on a rainy Saturday on Hunting Island. I sat in the sand where the water washed over me and left, taking pieces of my foundation and burying me more each time. It was a surreal sensation, and I wasn't convinced it was actually me in the water, me following waves, me writing "I am here" in the sand. I felt so alone that I didn't answer my phone, cutting myself off entirely from what I knew. I drove home sunburnt and sand-filled, the only proof.

"If only we could keep going, out of harm's way, and take with us only the best part of ourselves; if only we knew why we dream at the wheel or think more clearly while moving down valleys and across rivers."
--from "Hereafter in Fields" by Robert Vivian

One year ago today I brought home a golden year-old puppy named Scooter. He was afraid of the car, afraid of the stairs, afraid of my leaving. He wouldn't sit when you asked but would sit and not budge when he felt stubborn on walks. He was a wonder, my first dog after a lifetime of cats, and his presence in my life terrified me. Suddenly I had committed to this dog's well-being and future. I stressed constantly about how much he was barking when I wasn't home. I walked him so many blocks those first months, convincing him we were in this together, just him, me, and Snickers. And, though, at the time I adopted him there was still another person pulling me in and pushing me away, I already knew that it was over before it was over. I took my dog to my favorite trail; I moved to a duplex surrounded by kudzu and birds. I was alone, and I was going to be good.

"We use the word 'wilderness,' but perhaps we mean wildness. Isn't that why I've come here, to seek the wildness in myself and, in so doing, come on the wildness everywhere, because after all, I'm part of nature too."
--from "The Source of a River" by Gretel Ehrlich

Perhaps this summer will ever be known to me as the summer of adventures with my eyes open. This was the year I began to see, to open up, to breathe in my own wild nature. It began back in January, internally, a wild seeping out that you probably couldn't see. This recovery of my self, a return to true being, propelled me. It led me to May, to build a structure and sleep under it on the forest floor in the rain, plucking just two ticks from my thighs in the morning. It led me to take a road trip--going forward by going back--to see good friends along the way and spend more time with my family than I had since I left seven years prior. It led me to Phillip, a man who makes me feel full, who keeps me smiling and dreaming, who knew me then and knows me now, who has me believing.

The road trip was supposed to end with me camping on the beach in the Gulf, right where Isaac has been hanging out for the last few days. But it was storming that day, too, thick sheets of rain blanking the ocean. So I returned to Hunting Island last weekend with Scooter to celebrate one year together, to take another step in my journey, to finish my summer of adventure.

And a funny thing happened: I didn't feel alone.

Yes, I had Scooter, but I had no desire to write my name in the sand as physical proof I was there. I walked into the ocean up to my ribs at high tide, rippling gushes of water aimed at my chest, and took it on; the waves shook me, set me off balance, and I walked right back in. All evening, I wrote and read in my tent by lamp light. I wasn't afraid of noises in the dark, of the racoons who visited, of the buzzing against the tent wall. Each time I awoke in the night I woke to stars peeking through branches above me. In the morning I gathered my books and notebook and reached the ocean by sunrise, catching the sun's bowl as it lifted from the horizon, and I stayed through morning on a silent stretch of beach to write some more. All the while, content. All the while, eager to read more, write more, soak in the rhythm of waves and slant of sun before it caught day. All the while, thinking I didn't need to escape to be alone anymore, that what I really wanted was to be sharing the sunrise with someone else, to see the orange glow on each others' faces, to walk into the waves holding hands.

Saturday: 1

Two years ago Saturday became my day of exploration. I would drive to a mountain nearly every week on my only day off and push myself to hike it, to see how it felt to complete a challenge on my own. I was new in the South, new to mountains and the ocean and weekends alone.

It began with Grandfather Mountain and continued to the Atlantic and back up into the Blue Ridge. And it was in the Blue Ridge that I found my Southern home: the Art Loeb Trail from Black Balsom Road over Tennent Mountain and Ivestor Gap. Recently, my fourth time on the trail, I finally made it to Shining Rock, the cluster of white quartz you can see from miles away. The first time I took a wrong trail to find it, the second I got rained out halfway, the third was colder than I had prepared for. But this time I had set out with the intention of going all the way--6 miles to stand on quartz and say "I made it."

The morning was heavy with clouds. On the drive up I-26, treed tips of mountains hovered in the air above white. Fog lifted from the Green River Gorge, and clouds moved unimpeded over the Blue Ridge Parkway. The forecast called for a 30% chance of rain, but I needed the hike too much call it off. Scooter and I both needed exercise, and I needed to walk out my distraction of late, to complete something worth my time.

 "...mountains are providers: they catch clouds, shed water, give refuge, cleanse the spirit. Standing up straight, they seem to represent the highest spiritual attainment of the human; they are the natural sacred site on whose summits we express our gratitude and awe."
--from "The Bridge to Heaven" by Gretel Ehrlich

Twelve miles later I had completed my quest, finally tired out my dog, and spent the day amid rocks and trees I love. And I had done it alone, again. My feet were caked in mud, calves shaded by dirt. As I descended the last section of trail through pines, brown rooms meant for bear and rattlesnakes, I wondered if I will ever make it down to the water heard deep in the valley: a rush below green, a depth lower than my feet tend to go.

On Shining Rock

Shining Rock (white quartz) itself

In cloud on the Art Loeb Trail

Contemplating clouds and trees

Abode

I've lived on Lakeside for eight months now, enough time to paint the walls and watch kudzu claim the gorge across the street, to get used to the refrigerators' hum and the basement door that I have to kick in through spiderwebs every time. I'll be here until the next step comes.

You've already met the living room. Here is the rest of my little home.

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need--but are at risk of forgetting we need--within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.
--Alain de Botton, from The Architecture of Happiness

Walls: Tranquil Bay. Prints: Mark Rice. Cat: Snickers.

Scooter claims the only rug in the house, and Snickers cozies up to her favorite lamp.

Tree print: Tess Ellis. Broadside: HC Palmer. Goat in the Cusions: Mark Rice (HUGE WEATHER: DATA #14).

Desk: Where the writing sometimes happens. Postcards c/o Diane, Shannon, Roanoke, and Texas.

Walls: Oyster Bisque. Collages: Kerri Ammirata and Corinne Manning. Write, Learn, Read: Beth Rankin. The rest: office, life.

Where visitors sleep.

Doilies, koala hankie: a tribute to Grandma Lentz, all hers.

Snickers' perch above the backyard kudzu.

Two rooms. Chinese animals: a former Chinese student.

Walls: Crushed Cumin.

Home, Where Your Story Begins: c/o Mom. Others: reminders about living.

Peaches. Snickers. Haires. Home.

Dear Kari

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. –Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet. --Dear Sugar.

No matter how carefully we defend ourselves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships. --Jonathan Franzen, from "Farther Away"

You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotions. --Mary Oliver

One of these days you'll be born and raised, and it's such a waste to grow up lonely. --John Mayer, from "Born and Raised"

Because SC needs the arts, and so do I

Change.org|Free Online Petitions

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 13, Sense

The banded tail of an armadillo disappearing into a bush at the first rest stop in Texas, and Scooter's confused pulling.

The truest tacos in the land, from a food truck in Houston, with cilantro and onions and only $2.

The sky I woke to in Indianapolis, and the morning scent of growth in the garden.

The glass of sangria, rich and cold in my hand, against the couch's intoxicating softness.

The slip of Scooter's fur as he ran past and into the grasses higher than his knees.

The breeze only found atop Mount Oread, gazing beyond the stadium to the haze of Kansas fields.

The turkey on focaccia, greenest stems of daisies, flat tire donut, essence of loved books in Aggieville.

The quiet of 4am, made quieter by a leaving.

The difficulty of drinking hot water.

The pull of speed on flat roads.

The laugh of my mother.

The sweat dripping.

The hugs, all.

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 12, Reminder

3. Reminder Stone

All who pass, pause:
from a source inside
we hunt the goal.

This journey you are on--
how far? Look down:
this place?

It may be here.

--from "Roadside Markers for West of Dodge" by William Stafford

Thunderless lightening lit the black sky of Hutchinson the night I arrived. I could see it from miles away because trees weren't blocking the distance. It's one of the things I miss most about Kansas: sky all storm, end to end.

The next night it stormed for real. We watched from inside as the rain slanted sideways and filled the street, my car wading up to its rims. I shivered in the after-air, drove home with damp skin.

I learned there's now a wind turbine manufacturer in Hutchinson. I saw a blade the length of three semis crossing through town, the curvature and gloss what set it off from a wing. My high school has its own 5 kilowatt turbine providing partial power, harnessing wind I wish I'd known how to use years ago.

Ad astra per aspera. John James Ingalls believed in Kansas, and wrote that "the aspiration of Kansas is to reach the unattainable; its dream is the realization of the impossible." Ingalls, a native of Massachusetts, chose to live in Kansas because he believed the state had a bright and promising future. To the stars through difficulties.

I slept under the stars for the first time on the trip, the tent top exposed to a clear sky. Sunset had fallen in rainbow over Cheney Lake, full moon behind. It was light enough I was not afraid. In the morning, we found raccoon tracks along the water's edge and ants all over our food. We listened to the calls of birds we couldn't identify, stood silently with our feet covered in clay, practiced following waves to the horizon.

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 11, First

This was in the middle of my nightly coughing fit, when Scooter wouldn't lay down for more than ten minutes, when I watched GIRLS on HBO while I sat cross-legged chugging water on the bed. This was on my first night of the trip at the Motel 6 in Knoxville, where my room was on the second floor and next to the outdoor staircase. Every few minutes someone walked by the door or down in the parking lot. Voices. Coughing. GIRLS. Barking. Then the knock. 9:30pm. I grabbed Scooter's collar to keep him from growling. I'm not here, I'm not here, I'm not here. This was when I choked back my coughs and hoped the knocking would stop, hoped that Scooter wouldn't need to go out again to the rocky parking lot by the highway, hoped I could speak when you called.

***

I can't tell you how many Jackson Counties I passed through, the name telling me "all these places feel like home." I called you from the one in Indiana, when I got gas at this little shack of a place off the highway. I was shaking when I called, and sweat dripped from my bent elbow. "I'm calling you from somewhere in Jackson County, Indiana," I spoke to the voice mail. "I thought you'd appreciate that." Then your voice mail asked me if I was satisfied with my message, and I wasn't because it hadn't let me finish telling you about the adventure I thought we should have when I got there. No, I said, and laughed at the woman who wouldn't let me finish. I pushed 2 to go back to my message. It asked again if I was satisfied. If I hadn't been nervous about the others shouting directions to each other across gas pumps, nervous about calling at all, I might have left you a series of 5 second messages spelling out firsts we might have, adventures with our eyes open.

***

The first fish was far away, a small white splash I couldn't identify. Then silver leaps created a trail as you ran toward land, and I squealed at the sight your path made. We tried to repeat it again, and again.

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 10, Escort

I had accepted the lack of air conditioner as a challenge. I had acknowledged the two pennies wedged in the dashboard to keep it from rattling, the leak in the driver's side door from the way it was poorly replaced before me, the scratches up its side from someone who had angered its former owner. I had been prepared to mildly curse the CD player when it interrupted playback with static of its own creation. I had replaced the brake stop switch and gotten an oil change.

But I wasn't prepared for how the wind would work its way under the windshield sealing and whip black rubber against my passenger window at 70 miles an hour somewhere in Missouri. It's unsettling to watch your car peeling back on itself, thwacking its own side like some masochistic image I'll let you conjure on your own.

I pulled off at the next exit and parked in the lot of the Association of Christian Truckers. For real. I stuffed the sealing back in its groove and it stayed for the rest of the trip, mostly. My grandpa glued it back in, along with the other side, while I was in Hutchinson. And because I had been sunburnt and sweaty and windblown from the windows down across 1700 miles to Hutchinson, my family contributed to my experience by paying to get the a/c fixed. Which wasn't a coolant problem at all, it turned out, but the control box that runs the a/c. Thanks to them, I drove South with a little more insulation, and I could hear my music over the road and wind at last.

I've only ever owned an Escort. Two, actually. Two white four-door Escorts, the first a 1995 off the Laird Noller lot (where my brother just starting working) when I was 16 and the current a 1999 that my brother handed down to me when he bought his first truck four years ago. Not by choice but by destiny. I carried the Escort to South Carolina on the trailer behind the Budget truck, and it carried me back home two years later, with only minor complaints.

The first Escort tried to strangle me more than once. The automatic seat belt attached to the door frame, that moved along its track at each open and close, forgot me and kept tightening back. It constricted my chest, my neck, until I was able to free myself by unclipping the strap. It took months and months to fix, and it was expensive.

But so it goes with cars. They try to kill you, they protect you, they leave you stranded, they take you farther than you thought you'd go. An escort is protection, safeguard, or guidance on a journey. Though I keep threatening to replace it, to stop fixing it when another strange thing cracks, this little Ford four-door economy car has been all I've known and all anyone has known me in. You won't find the KTBSPA personalized license plate anymore, but you'll find evidence of my loves in the decals and little stickers. Not overwhelming, just pieces of my self that I carry, or carry me, wherever I go.

Now the driver's side windshield sealing has lifted and knocked on my window. I stuffed it back in, bought some white duct tape to keep it down at the base, and on we've gone. 

1995 Escort

1999 Escort