Instead

There are at least four layers of wallpaper on the living room ceiling. Cracks threatening to split it inch their way over, and several bubbles have formed at the curve. I'm not going to touch it.

In an old house, you pick your battles wisely. You decide what you spackle and what you reinforce. Especially if you know you won't grow old in it, you change colors and pretend the new layer will hold.

The bathroom floor is leaking upward. The vinyl tile is somehow swelling--off and on--and spills over a seam when you rise to flush. I don't want to touch it.

I wish I could say better for myself, but fudge is easy and quinoa is hard.

Getting started

This week I'm having flashbacks to grad school: the slight numbness in my fingers, the shallow breaths, the frantic mind, the twitchy eyes, the anxiety. 

I try and trace it to an origin, and maybe it's this grant I'm trying to get right or maybe it's my weight that's gone too far or maybe it's too many hours of screen time. Maybe it's all of the above. The irony is that my anxiety is such that I have anxiety about starting things that would help calm my anxiety. Getting started. That's always been a cause of anxiety. Changing my habits. 

Because my habits extend to procrastination about something I don't understand. Decision fatigue. Overwhelm. Lack of control. 

Was it easier in college because I still felt young? Was I more likely to exercise because I was still in shape? Was getting a grade easier than meeting expectations for a grant? 

One thing's for sure: it's not necessarily the classes in school that prepare you for a career but the discipline and deadlines and structure of it, the practice. 

I believe this will pass, and maybe it's all compounded because Phillip is on second shift this week and it's he who calms me and it's he who's gone. Our one year anniversary is Saturday. I guess they say the first year of marriage is hard, but I wouldn't say that about us. I would say that we do the marriage stuff really naturally, really well (except doing the dishes, but neither of us did that on our own either). There's just a lot of missing involved. And that's what has made this first year a blur. Australia was our mid-point, our escape together. I think the hard part is finding that next opening to dive deep into each other and life, get out of the cycle and come up for air. I really need some air. 

Five acts of gratitude

1. The quiet dark of a room when the only light is my computer screen and the only sound is my fingers making words on keys.

2. The empathy of a three year old when he notices a bug bite (which he pronounces with a German accent), looks at you and says "oh no" with so much sincerity it makes your heart ache with love, finds his silkie and wraps it around your wound as if the love and softness can heal all. And it can.

He meant that feeling something was never simply a state of submission but always, also, a process of construction.

[...] We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. The feelings of others matter, they are like matter: they carry weight, exert gravitational pull. 

-Leslie Jamison, "The Empathy Exams"

3. The elder gentleman who stops you at Carl's on your way back from the bathroom and says, "Excuse me, miss, but have you ever lived in Tennessee?" It's a Monday, and you've been drinking--but just two beers. Because you're honest you say, "No, but I did live in South Carolina for a few years." He doesn't miss a beat before responding, "Cause you're the only ten I see." You laugh and say thank you and mean it.

4. The neighbor who asks about the art in your living room and you get a chance to point out the pieces by your friends. "Waving Goodbye" by Sara Hamilton, "Yellow Energy" by Kerri Ammirata, "John Petrucci" by Steve Snell.

5. The friend you ride tandem with for the first time, who takes the back, who trusts your steering, who says "I got you" when you slow to stop because her feet touch the ground and yours don't, who understands the metaphor of teamwork.

Phillip

I could keep writing about Australia in pieces--snapshots of curtain figs, fake Aboriginal villages, croc-prone waters, curlews calling in the night--and I might, but at the heart of it all is Phillip.

For me, our honeymoon was perhaps what it should be: the fact that it was the two of us together exploring the world was the best part of it all. We could have been anywhere, and as long as he was my partner, we would have found our way. For me, it was those small moments with him that made the experience. When, somewhere between Rockhampton and Townsville, he suddenly pulled the car over and asked me to take photos of the grassy mountains, near monoliths, at our side; those are some of our best and favorite photos. When Auntie Florence started calling him Prince William and he blushed and shook his head. When I watched him jump full on into waves as they hit Trinity Beach, joyful like a child, and snorkel in the distance for hours on his own personal journey of the Reef. When he dropped his Coke into Paul the five-meter croc's enclosure because I startled him yelling "Mosquitoes!" as he was photographing ants on the ledge. When he lifted a kangaroo's tail to feel its heft and lounged next to one to get the full effect. When I thought he was taking photos of me jumping--a classic beach pose--in the shallows of Hervey Bay but when I asked if he got it he said he'd been taking a video because I looked beautiful. That's my husband. That's my best friend. That's the man I'm so grateful for, who took this leap of faith with me and went abroad, went to my grandmother's homeland, and when we got home we wanted even more of each other because we get so little sustained time.

I loved all of our time in Australia, but I loved it more and because I shared it with Phillip. That is the real story.

Strokes

There is a cross above our front door, stenciled black on the flat green wall. It was the former owner's, her personal reminder of grace or god or love or sin, perhaps instead of one she could wear around her neck. Perhaps these fifteen foot ceilings felt like a cathedral to her, majestic and meant for symbols of something higher. It's the most detailed piece in this house; elsewhere, lines are sloppy, and brushstrokes tell of laziness. Perhaps, like Jesus supposedly saved our sins, the mere presence of the cross saved her from finishing edges. The end outweighed the living.

I've begun our claiming. First, azaleas in the front bed, hostas on the corners. Then impatiens where once were weeds out back and, now, a front door that from the street sings hello in yellow. Next, the living room walls, where blue samples in patches are teases for completion. The cross will soon be gone. I will tape my trim and fill in gaps with small brushes. I will sand down cabinets and slow cook hinges. I will sit quiet in the dark and listen to the house breathe, a hush I only hear when I slow.

Outside, a garden spider will make its nightly home across our stoop, swept from the tree to the post. I duck under it when I can but don't always anticipate the angles. It builds its home point by point, hoping for a catch, a meal and some peace. I watch its confidence as it hangs in the air, reaches its legs to the future, and think that this creature, one small miracle, is our grace, our connection, our wonder in this one life.

"We are here to build the house." And we will do it on our own, with diligence, with detail, with love.

Spirituality emerged as a fundamental guidepost in Wholeheartedness. Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves--a force grounded in love and compassion. For some of us that's God, for others it's nature, art, or even human soulfulness. I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits.

-Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

On nostalgia

Sentimentality is about lies, he says, nostalgia about "real things gone," not so much about what we remember, but itself "an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanence of loss." The body cannot remember a lie. 

[...] I used to believe that my nostalgia was so intense because I felt I had lost something I never possessed. But the truth is that we do not possess our lives. As true exiles know, we stand too easily to lose them, and in the end we are all just passing through. It is what we remember of the journey that we possess. 

- Lee Zacharias, "Mud Pies"

 

 

 

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Jardine and Lanigan

"I feel vulnerable--and not the powerful kind." Phillip stands on the sidewalk, looks down the street both ways, puts his hands in his pockets. "We're driving."

I had forgotten winter meant darkness before 6pm, even in June, so I hadn't planned to arrive in Rockhampton after dark. We weren't downtown, in any nightlife district. There was fast food a few blocks down, a McDonald's, KFC, Subway. American stuff I said we weren't allowed to choose in a foreign country.

He drove to a BP to fill up. American was okay for that. Here, you fill and then pay. They trust you with it, I guess.

"I have gas on pump one," Phillip said at the counter, with his two Powerades. More American, more world.

"Huh?"

"Petrol. The white car." Phillip pointed.

"I don't like this place," he said when got in the car. "We're going to Hungry Jacks."

Because Hungry Jacks advertised the Whopper I knew it was Burger King-made-Aussie, but I didn't argue. The man in front of us said, "G'day, mate," when he got to the counter.

***

I feel a tension in me here in Rockhampton, though it's different than Phillip's. Mine is born of this tension between the small town on the range I envisioned my grandmother's hometown to be, and the generic town I find. McDonald's, KFC, Subway. It's too familiar to be true to my created history. True, it's not the 40's when she left it. Nothing is. Not her, not the husband she found waiting for her at the train station in Kansas.

The house may be, but we don't know how different it is inside. I thought I would feel connected when I stood in front of her childhood home, but it's just a pale green house on the corner of Jardine and Lanigan. I imagined the land flat, like Kansas, but instead it's hilly, mountainous, surrounded by the Berserkers and Athelstanes. It's hard to picture her in there, alive and young. It's hard to picture her with views of mountains. It's hard to picture her Aussie at all. Only the Kansan with an Aussie accent, a far off landscape I longed to know. I am disappointed in myself, this disconnection, when I've come so far to bridge our births. She is long gone. Am I?

***

Marge and Frank show us around. Her house is more what I'd imagined, tucked behind trees on what feels like the plains. She doesn't like the coast, she says. Frank lives everywhere, sometimes in Marge's side yard, sometimes far west, sometimes at an in between. Frank lives in a caravan he pulls with his Ford F250. He's done so since the early 2000s, and he doesn't think he'll stop.

Phillip asks them what they really think of Americans. "We like them when they're at home," Frank says, and laughs. Earlier on the radio we'd heard a woman call in, tell about her recent trip to America, and how the customs agent said, "Welcome to freedom." Every other person wants to talk about gun control, how we don't have it, how they do. They roll their eyes at their president. They make $600 a week, minimum wage.

The coal trains here can be two miles long. They are handsome, fresh, no graffiti. We pull over to watch one, follow its cars north.

All low ground floods from the Fitzroy River, from all of the mountain runoff in the wet season. Sometimes there is no way around. In one of the standing ponds, Marge says a crocodile lives. We learn later that 80% of saltwater crocodiles never enter saltwater in their life. This misnomer kills them.

Dimensions

The sea was the green you see in ads the first time we saw it at Hervey Bay. It was warm, too, sun baked and shallow. By Yeppoon it was brown, stirred up and loose from winds like Kansas. And by Cairns it was gray and cold, a reflection of the clouds. 

When you visit the sea, you must bury your feet in sand. You must stand in the surf to feel the pull. You must read the waves as low or high, natural breaks or manmade angles.

Our biggest adventure was supposed to be snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef. But our biggest adventure was the nearly two hour boat ride to the Great Barrier Reef. The day before, when we booked the tour, the girl said, "Tomorrow should be just like today (read: sunny, calm, warm), but it will get windy starting Tuesday." The morning of, when we checked in, a different girl said, "Wind is 20-25 knots. It will be choppy." What is a knot or twenty on the sea? Isn't choppy the natural state of open water? She suggested we take ginger tablets. 

Phillip vomited first, into one of the stacked bags on our table. I ignored it, focused on the "one meter waves" bouncing our boat like a carnival ride, like a goddamn pirate ship, like an inconvenience. I breathed out with each sinking. My hands shook as I gripped the table until the breathing wasn't enough, and the heaves and screams of those behind me caught up, and I went, too, into a white coated bag, and then handed it to a lifeguard in plastic gloves whose job on the boat is to protect the interior from puke. I hadn't eaten breakfast. I didn't want lunch. 

When you're seasick, and you get off the boat onto a pontoon, and you're still surrounded by water, and the only land you see are fogged-up mountains far on the horizon, you stay seasick until you get in the sea. Snorkeling is a game you play with yourself. You float on the surface, flap your flippers, and adjust to breathing through your mouth. You see common water around you, you feel common water around you. But you look down and all you see is color, coral, zebra fish just inches from your fingertips, movement in schools, another dimension. Phillip was out there for hours, bobbing in and out of color. He touched a sea turtle. He turned orange coral purple with the brush of his hand. He covered the roped-in geography edge to edge. I lasted maybe thirty minutes, most spent grasping a PVC square for stability in the small swells, unable to adjust to this different way of seeing. 

The way back was smoother. Perhaps because we bought the $3 seasickness medication. Perhaps because we traveled with the wind. Perhaps because we were too tired to notice. 

Expectations

I was not too jet-lagged to pay $20 to hold a koala, soft and solid like a stunted baby. We arrived on the Queen's birthday, and most attractions, businesses, and restaurants were closed. But not the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. Koalas don't rest for the Queen of England. Koalas rest because that's what they do, bunched up in the crook of a tree. They're just as adorable as you'd imagine. They look unreal even in person, but perhaps that's because I've only ever had a stuffed koala. They're not bears. They're only safe in eucalyptus trees.

A kookaburra stole fresh meat from a Tasmanian Devil. A sheepdog herded sheep down the hill. A platypus, full grown the size of my forearm, swam laps in a tank. Dingos--just Scooters with pointy ears and mean appetites--lounged on cots. Kangaroos spread out their tails and let you pet them and prod them and photograph them but not sit down next to them to chill. One large male pulled a female in, his hulking upper body gripping her belly, and mated for minutes until she wiggled away. He hopped after her, through the amused tourists, for more. 

Arrive alive

We drove up the east coast, flanked by the Berserker Range and the Athelstane Range, and through the Great Green Way. Brisbane to Cairns, on the Bruce Highway, going 110 or 80 or 60 kilometers an hour. Keep left unless overtaking. Past ranches of cattle, past vast fields of pink-topped sugar cane, past kangaroo roadkill and billboards for resorts, island dreams. We drove a Hyundai i20 with no power. We named it Gemma. 

The first twenty minutes, in the center of Brisbane, felt like a video game. It was a test of your senses, keeping left while driving on the right. Carl, our Garmin, lagged, and we missed turns, missed one-way streets, missed the hotel twice before landing. Later, the reverse would become normal, I would stop flinching at right turns, and Phillip would merge seamlessly into roundabouts. Survive the drive. But day two, after leaving Hervey Bay, we weren't comfortable yet, and we'd question Carl's logic about turning right when we were naturally curving right, and we'd get waved into a lot by a police officer in neon yellow gloves, and we'd be asked if we knew we'd entered a school zone because we were going 58 in a 40, and we'd say no, and he'd tell us he'd give us a warning but that we could be prevented from leaving the country if we got a ticket and didn't pay up, and he'd give Phillip a breathalyzer test at two-thirty in the afternoon, and we'd drive off religious about speed limits toward Rockhampton. Free driver reviver ahead.

Your Life Your Call

I used to title every blog post the name of the song I was listening to when I started it. So, in honor of nostalgia, it's Junip to receive that honor today. Junip is ridiculously wonderful. Watch this video. And only after, watch this video.

It's March 1st, and it's snowing, a blowing wash of flakes, again. A few months ago I heard that the day of the month on which the first snow falls is the number of snows we will have during the season. It was the 18th of November. I haven't counted, but I don't doubt that this is the 18th snow of winter. Welcome back, Kansas says. You love snow, Kansas reminds me. You wanted extremes, right? 

Right.

It's snowing, and I'm watching it from my fifth floor office in the First National Bank downtown. I don't often spend my Saturday evenings in the office, but tomorrow is a grant awards ceremony, and there were programs to design and print. Have I mentioned how amazing my job is? Come back home, Kansas told me last year, your dreams will come true.

True.

Meanwhile, I'm dreaming of Australia, of our honeymoon this summer, of visiting my grandmother's hometown, of meeting Aussie family, of scubadiving in the Great Barrier Reef, of hugging koalas. I'm dreaming of a new stove so I can bake again, of a kitchen renovation, of a fenced-in backyard for Jack and Scooter to run and play. I'm dreaming of being debt free (by December 2014!), of saving for a family and retirement and renovations, of feeling caught up and even ahead for the first time since leaving home at twenty. You're building a beautiful life here, Kansas tells me in the wind, the snow, the sunset, surrounded by people you love.

So much love.

The big question

Today's accomplishment: finishing Brothers & Sisters on Netflix while having a good cry. Perhaps I can add to that cleaning the house before 8am or growing my nails out long enough that I can't stop pressing them against my palm.

I've had some great accomplishments lately, including an overflowing room for the first talk20 Hutch and helping nearly 400 people get inspired at the Hutchinson Community Foundations' 25th anniversary event. And my marriage, my husband, this beautiful life we're creating in a little cottage with Scooter and Snickers and Jack whenever we can.

But, internally, there are struggles. Since July, when the stress of the summer caught up with me, I've had digestive issues, a pressure that won't go away. I went to the doctor in September, they took a blood test, and they said I was fine, that I should just try cutting some things out of my diet that may be bothering me. But it was a suggestion with a shrug, with no definite road map forward. So a few months and a lot of confusion later I started with a chiropractor/acupuncturist. That was two months ago, and though my meridians and hips are more aligned, though we know through x-rays that there's no medical blockage, the pressure is still there.

Two weeks ago I got a food allergy test back. It tells me I'm sensitive to banana, cottage cheese, swiss cheese, coconut, crab, garlic, gluten, malt, peanut, and wheat. The doctor tells me I need to avoid all of those things for the next 6 weeks to clear out my system, and then I can reintroduce one food every four days. Turns out going gluten- and wheat-free is not the hard part--going garlic free is.

I appreciate the restrictions--specific rules are what I needed for changing my diet--but I don't think it's working. There's a part of me that still thinks it's psychological, psychosomatic. The the stress of 2013--though most of it good--balled itself up and found a home in my large intestine. It's highly possible that the behaviors that would fix me, relieve my pressure, are the behaviors that I'm most afraid to do: exercising and writing.

Exercising and writing. The two acts that I know calm me, strengthen me, make me feel alive. The two acts that are just for me, that require me setting aside other peoples' needs and focusing on my own. The two acts that I convinced myself I wasn't worthy of last summer when I didn't know what I was doing with my life. The two acts that I gave up on when I felt lost are the two acts that could bring me back.

I'm dedicated to everyone and everything I care about except myself. This isn't a new revelation.

But what's the road map forward for that?

The receptionist at the chiropractor hands me a new pamphlet to read nearly week. They are always laminated and bound by an O-ring. She never has a conversation with me about the content of the pamphlets; she just hands it to me when I sit down, and I hand it back before I go into the room. They talk about subluxation and patience and Dr. You. You have to fix yourself, they say, and you have to have the patience and discipline and determination to follow through.

All this has me thinking about sacrifice and pleasure and humanity and confusion and the ever-present question HOW IS ONE SUPPOSED TO LIVE? On a diet? On a rigorous routine? Alone in a room? With lots of social commitments? Without anxiety? With pain?

Perhaps one of my ways forward is back to this blog, if this is the way back to writing, if writing is a way back to health. 

There's my girl

I lost my grandmother this week. I lost my grandma Lentz, her Aussie accent, her greeting me: there's my girl. I lost my birthday-mate, my brave hero, my reason for watching Wheel of Fortune.

Our last moment together, before I couldn't bear to watch her go farther, was a moment after the seizure that took her to the hospital, after she'd spoken or tried to speak her last words. I knelt by her bed at Hospice, caressed her delicate hand, and said I love you, Grandma. She nodded. Because of course she knew, our bond secured from the day I was born.

I've written about her in more ways than I remembered, in poems and essays trying to capture her story, her spirit, her home. These are a few poems that should speak for themselves, because I can't write anything new yet. I can't write as if she's gone.

Thank You

Lively embarkings
down your driveways,

flimsy grasps for fingers,
limitless: dry goods

displayed in the nook,
naughty flirtations drink

your savings and non-sins,
silly kittens with gum

for eyes, ceilings sag
rain and mold over taught

sheets, silkless drapes
conduct neighbor ramblings,

his winter shorts and orange
shaved legs, dangling

love--your pearlescent
beads, mis-shaped vases:

you could wear white
hair and I'll adore you no

less.

Mariposa, Once

And now, with his Ford permanently

parked, his Veteran flag framed

on your dresser, his cats begging

milk from some other front porch, you go

back to Rockhampton. But not on The Mariposa.

You're the only war-bride

sailing not through seas but skies to find

the white corner ranch, the lopsided

outhouse, even to scream, feel

a spotted toad slick

over toes like it used to--

but you’ve kept his name. You have forgotten

the sound of your mother's goodnight under

his whiskered licks of your ear. Queensland can’t

reclaim you. Only select words lack R's

as always. Absent R’s in a kitchen

stocked with food of your choice alone. Absent

R

leather-stitched on the belt he wore

when he died and dropped

your accent into your trunk of possessions and

locked it.