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Ecology of Home

Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem but in patriotism--pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood. What I come from has made me who I am.
--from Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray

What I come from has made me who I am.

What I come from is a home with yellow shag, a dishwasher never used for washing but fake baking of Play-Do, windows stiff to open, popcorn ceilings and overhead lights that dim. I come from the hands of a printer, the belly of a woman who only longed to be a mother, the skin of Germans and English and not farmers. From a land with brown water, more sky than you need, trees that try for height, and wind everlasting.

There is sand beneath me. Sand driven from faraway oceans by that everlasting wind and cast down, orphan to the sea, on rolling prairie. Sand hills provide elevation, if only slight, so that the paths you took to reach them wind away and lose themselves in the horizon, just like every word you ever say. Just like old friends, plastic bags, memories of your youth.

In that plant I was looking for a manera de ser, a way of being--no, not for a way of being but of being able to be. I was looking for a patch of ground that supported the survival of rare, precious, and endangered biota within my own heart.
--Ray

Because there is sand beneath me, and because what I come from has made me who I am, I study the trees for their strength. How do they grow in the full blow of the sun? How do they not rise higher than trees anywhere else in the world with that full blow of the sun? How did they get here? When will they go? Can I claim one for my own, a sister tree, and follow it on its slow extension, sleep when it sleeps in the winter, sing when May turns us green?

Sunning

Yes, we are Kansas animals, shot through with heat and light from a sky not masked by land or growth but cumulus clouds, here and there, darkened only by our depths and hesitations of our own bright selves. We lift our chins and squint, We live here now. 

Going forward by going back

Snickers, my 7.5 year old cat, has decided she wants to explore the outdoors now that we're rooted in a home. She must convene with the 4+ roaming neighbor cats at some point in her adventures, but I always see her alone, swaying up with driveway when she sees me at the back door. Scooter nudges her in the face to say hello. She rubs my leg. She is herself, still, but with stories to tell of the outer life.

The other morning I took Scooter out to the backyard for a stretch and heard her meow. I knew it was her; we've lived together over five years now. I walked around the yard, looked up in the trees, and then spotted her stripes through a slit in the solid white fence. But I saw now slit large enough for her to fit through and now way, beyond opening the neighbor's gate, to help her out. And so I went back to Scooter, thinking she could get out if she knew how to get in. And of course just a few minutes later she strolled up to say hello. Clearly her habit of opening cabinets has paid off in her ingenuity during her outdoor pursuits.

I know, I know. It's much safer for cats to be indoor cats, but we're home now, where we'll be for a long time, and so I couldn't keep her inside anymore. I wouldn't want that for myself if I were her. Because I, too, am attempting the outdoors now, finding the wild in Hutchinson. For now, it's the Arkansas River (Our-kansas), meandering the middle sandbars last week and this week skirting the edge because the water is actually high enough for it to fill most of its banks and flow. Flow like a true river.

Yes, I'm mourning the mountains. I'm mourning friends. I'm mourning friends in the mountains.

I'm mourning the loss of who I was in Spartanburg, the girl I got to know, the girl who got to know the world. And realizing that starting over is the hardest part. Starting is the hardest part.

But I'm starting. 

Today I begin teaching online composition at Hutchinson Community College, the place where this whole journey began. It was my Honors Comp I professor and the head of the department, Trudy Zimmerman, that saw something in me I'd never considered: a writer. She encouraged me to study English, to try working on a magazine, to consider grad school down the line. She got me working in the department as a scholar and tutor. She took me to Europe. Simply, she opened up the world to me, and now she's giving me the opportunity to give that back to students ten years later. Going forward by going back.

So much has come full circle from ten years ago, when I had just graduated from high school. I remember a busy Memorial Day weekend at Alco, the discount store I worked at for four years, and meeting the new hot guy with blond curly hair who would work the garden center that summer. Over the next two years, Phillip and I would become close friends. I would tell him things I didn't tell anyone else. We would share music and coffee at Hastings. I would go to his concerts and sit with him in the pep band. He was a friend, nothing more, but a friend I could never fully let go of over the next seven years of lives far apart, with different relationships and evolving passions. And so a year ago we would meet again, pick up right where we left off, and take it farther. And eleven months after that he would drive me and all that I'd gained in all of those years home to Hutchinson to start our life together. Together at last. Going forward by going back.

Those two anchors from ten years ago, Trudy and Phillip, have given me two roots to ground myself in Hutchinson as I recreate myself once again. From here, I'm spreading out into the community to go deeper.

It has been a quick first month here, mostly spent at home. But I'm starting to kick myself out of the house to explore the city and myself. I'm returning to writing, to reading, to learning, to teaching. I'm opening up the door to let in old friends and new friends and possible passions and pursuits and, sometimes, a sweet tabby cat with some new stories to tell.