Tag Archives: friends

Friends’ Homes and Peculiar Gifts

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I am almost home from this journey. Almost, but not quite. The trip been the things I expected, but also more. There have been eleven train stations (plus two bus stations for good measure). And when you travel by train, you look out the window a lot and see the trees and the fields and the small-town roads and jails and houses flashing past, then laid gently on top of all that you see your own reflection looking back at you.

Last week I had a long layover in downtown Chicago, so I stored my luggage and bought a pass to the Art Institute. I walked there down full, sunny streets. Wearing a wide brimmed hat and a short flowy dress in the Windy City was an added complication, but I didn’t really mind. This is how you expect solo travel to be: a little complex, but peaceful. I wandered through room after room at the Art Institute, photos and paintings and stained glass and pencil sketches and antique furniture, with the soft feeling that beauty tends to give me creeping along my skin. I took breaks from the art to each lunch in the courtyard and to walk down past Buckingham Fountain to the shore of Lake Michigan.

But most of this trip has not been cosmopolitan like that. Most of this trip has been family homes. Since I last wrote to you, I’ve been in a succession of them. There have been four babies, lots of toddlers and preschoolers, and a few older kids too. The highlights of days have been trips to the park with double strollers, family ice cream runs, and little hikes suitable for small legs through midwest woods. I’ve curled on many different couches to write.

These friendships all have a sweet longevity, sustained by small, unremarkable bits of upkeep when we see each other. We go to the library, and I pick out good grown-up novels for them while they watch their kids play in the children’s section. We color each other’s hair with henna because we’ve talked about it for a couple years now. We sit in the evening and watch something and chat long, holding out memories and future hopes to each other with equal care.

I am more aware than I’ve ever been of my friends’ generosity. Traveling this way requires it, requires people to rouse themselves out of bed at odd hours to take me to the train station, to make space for me in their rhythms and homes and at their tables. Going through this pattern of being cared for in place after place was more humbling than I knew it would be.

But this is what it means to be in each other’s lives.

Last night, bleary and tired I sat on the train looking down at the rings on my hand—the amethyst from my grandma and the pearl I found in that rental car last summer— and thought of all the pudgy little fingers that have reached out to fiddle with them in the past couple weeks. And suddenly, with my head leaned against the window, I was teary.

I am a woman with a natural instinct to mother, but single in my thirties and surrounded by peers who are in what we like to call a “different stage of life” from me. I will tell you, some days I feel as if an important part of me is wasting away, withering imperceptibly month by month while no one watches. The oft-repeated suggestion of pouring that directionless love into someone else’s children almost always clangs like a trite consolation prize, no matter how nice the kid or good the friend.

But as I looked at those rings, and thought of the little people nestled into my side who had touched them, a quiet wonder happened. I was fully, divinely aware of what a peculiarly glistening gift the last two weeks have been. I sat there and cried because, as someone told me once, we serve a no waste God, and he takes our deep desires into his own hands, and uses them in ways we could not imagine.

Because the gift of being with my friends’ young families was not a gift to me only. I’ve spent this time buckling so many car seats, holding so many hands as we cross a street, and swaying with so many fussy babies balanced against my hip. I’ve read more books aloud than I can count, small bodies using my arm or shoulder to somersault themselves into a new spot on the couch. My lap has more real estate for sitting on than a nursing mother’s and I know card games the school age kids haven’t learned yet. I can cook dinner with a thirteen-year-old for a sous chef while his mom runs out to pick up his sister and I can make sure the toddlers don’t touch the breakables in the general store. In return, I’m called “Miss Alice” in a sweet host of piping voices. 

Some kids who a decade ago hugged my legs with head mashed against my hip are now taller than me. The ones who hugged my legs this past week will grow fast like that too, and whether I have my own kids or not, I get to watch, and watching is a joy.

I’ve had much time to think about all this, because my last travel leg home has been a long and ridiculous saga. There were four graveyard-shift hours spent waiting at the Indianapolis Amtrak station, and then twenty-four straight hours on a train, about seven of which were at a total standstill. Arriving in Charlottesville after three this morning, the station attendant sent several of us in a taxi to a hotel outside of town where we would stay for free, but when we were dropped there and walked into the lobby we found that they had no record of us. Eventually I got some real sleep in a clean bed though, and now, after a sticky midday walk, I am sitting at the University of Virginia library writing this to you. I will catch my final train home this evening.

I’d planned to be back in my own space by now, and I’ll be happy when I am. And yet. Despite exhaustion and discomfort, this last day or two has been its own peculiar gift. I’ve been surrounded at every juncture by people who seem straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story, their outrageous humanity busting through all the cracks in their veneer. I’ve watched and laughed and thought about what wonderfully messy, oozing poetry they would make. 

But that’s for another day.

Today I am simply grateful for all of the last few weeks: all the homes I’ve entered, all the beds I’ve slept in, all the plates set in front of me, all the arms wrapped around me, and all the beauty I’ve seen. And most, I’m grateful for the grace of God in allowing me to occasionally understand just how good I have it.

East of the Mississippi

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This summer I made a promise to myself, to the universe, to anyone who cared, that I would stay in the United States and east of the Mississippi. But, because in the last few years I can’t seem to stay put no matter how I try, I immediately planned a trip that tested the limits of that promise: spend most of July journeying around the Northeast and Midwest, visiting friend after friend after friend. Between stops, I would take Amtrak, look out the window, and work on a book about friendship. In my head, this was a satisfying construction. Different friends, themselves homebound with kids or job, affectionately referred to it as my “East Coast Tour” or my “Grand Adventure.” I was pleased.

I boarded the train last Friday in Greensboro—my first time on a train in the US in fifteen years—and immediately found myself glad for its peace. I liked the way it moved. Its glide and shiver suited me. I liked that we passed so many tiny towns called “Crossing” or “Junction” and that I could hear a train whistle (our train whistle) for ten or twenty seconds before we blew through them. I could hear trains from my childhood bedroom and they have always been a home sound to me. And I liked the way mountains and tunnels slurped us up whole like a long noodle before spitting us back out into the green.

Because of a bad delay (the only one I’ve had so far) I spent an unexpected night in DC, courtesy of Amtrak, before arriving outside Boston the next day. Then there was a warm, lovely few days with my friend Heather, seeing her New England. We walked in the woods, ate dinner at an old inn, and drove down many winding green two lane roads. We ate ice cream, visited the ducks at the Boston Public Gardens, and poked around antique and book stores where even my stern sales resistance was put to the test. We wrote together, and wandered round graveyards populated mainly by three hundred year old dead with “memento mori” engraved solemnly on their headstones.

But the best bits were in the rain: hurrying to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through puddles to wander past its tile and courtyard and art and papers and stone and people, and then that evening giggling together under a golf umbrella in Lexington as we waited wetly for early Fourth of July fireworks, which came eventually, lighting our upturned faces with green and red and white. The smoke from up north gradually cleared throughout the week. One evening I sat on Heather’s parents couch before dinner, the house full of the smell of bacon and the sound of a ticking fan and “Clair de Lune” on the piano, and thought that while this was not my home, it certainly was a home, in every good sense of the word.

Early Wednesday morning I left on a train from South Station in Boston. I slept as we sped back down the coast of New England, the way I’d already come, and then, it must be admitted, took some time to check and ponder my students’ newly released AP scores. I switched trains in Philly, and crossed Pennsylvania from side to side, something I’d never done before despite spending my college years there. Here, instead of being encased in tunnels of green overgrowth, there were breaks in the trees and the scenery was lush and simple, homes and hills and fields. We climbed up round edges of mountains rather than shooting through them. This was railroad country in a way my home down south was not. 

Then I arrived in Pittsburgh for my days alone, between proper stops, between friends. Each day I walked downtown a bit—to the park, along the river, where a few people floated along on a buoyant tiki bar beneath gray clouds. After just a couple blocks I was always sweaty, somehow both gooey and squeaky in all my crevices. The people on the street I passed, either swinging along purposefully or wandering lost in their own minds, made me feel both more and less alone. Cutting back up from the riverwalk I found a tunnel lined with tumbling LED-lit waterfalls. It was deserted, cool and fresh.

My AirBnB was convenient and safe and comfortable, but devoid of personality, almost entirely blank. As I curled into its corners to read and write, I wondered how I could, for myself if not for future occupants, fill in that blank. I’d intended an external grand adventure, but I was maybe a fool to think it would not be an internal adventure as well. The Lord usually intends more than we do. I moved home a year ago, and this summer has been my first real break in the action to think about all the changes of my last half-decade. And I don’t intend any more changes for the time being. I’m settling in and that’s significant.

On top of that, the main task of my writing right now is to remember. To catalog many of the most important relationships of my life and try to put into words the way they’ve shaped me. I’m writing about what sort of friend and what sort of woman I’ve become and how. I’ve always been a habitual rememberer, but let me tell you—swallowed in extra-large doses like this, memory is potent stuff. And the faulty memories mold you just as much as the true ones, forming this bright, painfully irreverent patchwork of selfhood.

I am grateful for the ability to remember, to stitch meaning together, to follow steel tracks from one familiar friend to another in a wide slow loop, but something about this trip has made me already hold home a little closer, has made me more hopeful (or at least more desirous) for the now and the not yet, for the settling in to come.

My friend Emily picked me up midday today and I’m now back in the town where I went to undergrad, and then I’ll see Laura and then to Abby and then Hannah. There will be several babies and bigger kids too and I’ll probably stop and see art in Chicago. There is richness in all of that.

But a joyful part of my mind, a part which urges me on, also whispers: You get to go back and write those pieces for church, you get to check on the wildflowers you planted, you get to sketch out improvements to curriculums, you get to paint your cabinets, you get to sort clothing and papers, you get to be in place, your place, and work to make things grow.

Much of May

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May has been much, much, much at school and I am grateful for it. 

I’ve struggled to understand my students in this first year back teaching. They feel not only inherently different from the students I used to teach, but inherently different from me. It takes me longer to really see them than it used to. In the last few months I’ve taken to reminding myself that the world in which they’re coming of age is quite different than the one in which I was fifteen and seventeen. History—the kind that will be written in books—has happened in the meantime and their perceptions of life and fairness and value and the way things should be are sometimes alien to me. 

I’ve cared for them and enjoyed them, but I’ve felt a gulf between us, a gulf which not only seems difficult to cross, but which I haven’t been entirely sure that I want to. I’ve sometimes fallen into annoyance and frustration rather than choosing the patience required by love.

But May has been a slow pulling together of the pieces. I gave a talk in chapel in which I was honest because that is the way I know how to be. My little all-boy class held an NFL-style draft for which elderly residents at the nursing home they’d be matched up with before we embarked on an interview project. The school launched a house system, my freshmen drew the nine circles of Dante’s hell, and some of the boys in my AP class performed “Man of Constant Sorrow” for me for extra credit. And student after anxious student recited Psalm 90, eyes boring into the carpet, then glancing up to me for reassurance. 

All these things have been tackle ropes thrown across that gulf, hooking into the soft flesh beneath my armor and tugging the cliff of me and the cliff of my students nearer to one another, inch by definite inch. 

I’ve had proper sit down conversations with a few kids this week, some of whom I haven’t even taught yet, and have been struck by the individual complexity and openness of their questions, how good it is to laugh with them. I now find myself wanting to feel gently towards them. I want to see their humanness, the lines around their eyes that Graham Greene talks about in The Power and the Glory. When I watch them stumble, I want to choose grief over irritation, love over easy dismissal.

And last week I wandered around a secret place on campus, a place on which for the last twenty years most graduating seniors have had the chance to make their mark. My own seventeen-year-old self is there with my classmates, as well as the upperclassmen I was once awestruck by and many of the boisterous kids I taught myself, all of us immortalized at that odd and painful wonder of a moment, on the cusp of we-knew-not-what.

So many things were felt in that place and then pressed into it in felt-tipped marker with immediate eagerness: joy, confidence, cynicism, vulgarity, wisdom, wildness, complacence, nostalgia. And every feeling expressed by those youthful hearts and hands, from before me all the way to after, promises loudly in that place to last forever. In the deep convictions of our emotions, we did not, a single one of us, really understand how much we would change. We considered our words to be final. 

There was an extremity in our certainty, in our hope, in all our desires which demanded fulfillment in permanent ink. And God at all times and in all moments stood watching us in that place, a resounding magnetic force, drawing the true desire rooted deep in each of us toward his center. 

So here I am, tired and content on a Friday after oral exams, digesting the assurance that my world is not so distanced from that of my students as I thought. The cacophony of the teenage years, its extremity, its color, the rawness of its desire for more and better has always been and will always be. May is much, much, much, and so are they.

2022 Retrospective

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I started off 2022 by testing positive for covid, along with the rest of my family. But I was working a shift with an elderly client within two hours of getting back to Madison and testing negative. The tone, though I did not choose it, was set for the anxious winter of my discontent. I took walks in slate-colored snow that matched a slate-colored sky and wore through a pair of boots I’d loved for years. I made lots of French toast for Bonnie and tried to find shows on Netflix she would like. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes not. I finally finished the novel to my general satisfaction, and spent a few months querying agents on its behalf. Eventually I got fed up with the whole dang circus, but just in time to save my faith in literary dreams someone asked me to talk to an undergrad student who wanted to be a novelist, and he was so serious and earnest that my lungs filled with fresh air again. 

For days and weeks I sat on couches and listened to the interminable sighing of clients’ oxygen machines. I slid into another car on the ice on the way to work one morning and cried, not just because of the accident but because I felt that I was sliding too, away and away. My parents visited, though, and that was good. My mom cooked and cooked in my friends’ kitchen. Other friends brought me food and had me for dinner and I met Joy at a coffee shop sometimes. Also a friend of Abby’s gave one of the cheapest and best haircuts I’ve ever had.

Then after one of the hardest winters, came perhaps the happiest summer. It was a gift dropped in my lap just when I’d stopped waiting for such goodnesses. It began with a flying trip back to Vancouver for in-person graduation and the thousand hugs covid never allowed. The green of it all reminded me how to stand up straight. Back home in Madison, change was coming. Abby and Taylor were house-hunting in Indiana, fell in love with a house they called Big Red, but had their dreams crushed. I sat and held my client Phyllis’s hand as her breath labored its way in and out of her lungs a few hours before she died. I spent a while searching for jobs in Greensboro and realized, with slight shock, that I’m qualified for more than I thought.

Then I took a trip to the UK that I couldn’t afford and in no way regret. I went to the circus with my family and to parks and art museums—sometimes on my own. I gave a paper at Cambridge and choked humblingly at the first question from the audience. I stayed at a castle and toured an artist’s studio and made butter from cream and scrambled up the muddy sides of mountains ahead of friends. I felt both moody and at peace which are two of my favorite feelings. I came home to a renewed appreciation for Abby’s friendship which had housed and homed and fed me for the past year. It is not simple, but it is good. We took her babies to see my client Bonnie one morning in July.

Then fall came with alarming alacrity. And there I was back in Greensboro teaching vaguely familiar kiddos in very familiar hallways except this time I was teaching literature and I knew none of my co-workers. I realized in successive bursts that I love teaching and am good at it, but also that as far as some of my students were concerned, I was going to have to earn my stripes all over again. Eventually things fell into a rhythm. I went to a brewery with friends, sat too near the band, and played a card game. I worked on filling my new place with things, hung a canopy over my bed, and battled with College Board over getting my AP syllabus approved. I successfully joined a community group at church, rediscovered the wonderfully erroneous map on the basketball court at Lindley, had eight solidly pleasant parent conferences in a row, remembered how little I like spirit week, and let my freshmen make chaos on my carpet with acrylic paint. Regula and Mary Frances both came to visit, and I liked watching them in my childhood kitchen, chatting with my parents, disparate parts of my life coming together as if they belonged all along.

This year like, I suppose, all years before it, has been much. I ate brunch and taught poetry and got a large wooden chest upstairs all on my own. I argued with a 102 year old over whether he or I should carry the groceries and drove through WV in the midst of its blazing October leaves. I went to a retreat I hated and to one I loved. I ended up in the ER twice—once for myself and once for someone else. I walked to playgrounds, walked a farmers’ market, and walked a lot of hills. I visited two whiskey distilleries in two different countries, and neither time was my idea. I brought my mom pasta when she ran out and got hit by a bike while on the phone with my dad. 

I somehow managed to start both a writers’ group and a conversation club that meet monthly. When I wonder how that happened, I then remind myself that as an adult I’ve become the woman who keeps activities moving along at a birthday party which she is not hosting, and volunteers to be the timekeeper at a writing workshop and cut people off when their time is up. Those things happened this year too.

I have fewer philosophical thoughts than usual about this last trip round the sun. The one thread which I’ve found it easy to pick at and unravel is that so many things have brought me back to the beginning. My accomplishments are a varied collection of starts and restarts. I picked up paint-by-number and put one on my wall already. I got my first house plants (but also my first traffic ticket) and shoveled my first driveway. I entered a new decade and celebrated it with two very longtime friends.

Even though my writing has largely been lying fallow the last few months, other things long dormant have been poking their heads up from the soil. Within 24 hours of each other I accepted a job at Caldwell (this made me cry) and agreed to take over the lease of an apartment three blocks from where I grew up (this made me laugh). Now I have a picture of that day taped to my desk at work (because this makes me smile). Beyond those building blocks of life, in the cracks of my days I’m reading more than I have since I was a kid—rereads like Jayber Crow and P.G. Wodehouse and new things like Tana French and memoirs about people’s mothers—and also playing my cello sometimes, and cooking for the first time in years. 

All of these returns, these dances with my former self, are reminders that living my life faithfully does not require that I am capable or impressive. What is required is a willingness to step out onto the floating islands where the Lord controls the currents, to say, Yes, I will follow the Mystery, follow it as it takes me over Calvary and on and on all the way to the feast of all things made right. This trust is not easy, but as I watch the ghost of young Alice and her hesitating steps, I realize that it’s easier than it used to be. Perhaps because every year I understand the promise of that feast—and its host—a little more fully.

Last week, though still recovering from a bad car accident, my mom threw a Christmas party. Fifty people stuffed into four rooms and sang and drank and ate and talked. My brother squeezed past me at one point and said wryly, “Aren’t you glad our parents are so popular?” And then we went for a walk to see the lights and at one point a passing car slowed and someone yelled out of it, “WE LOVE YOU, MISS HODGKINS!” And while I don’t know who that was, it’s a worthy sentiment. I’m all for worthy sentiments. Heather comes to visit this weekend for a mini writing retreat, so I’m getting ready to shake the cobwebs off and chase some new lines of inquiry using words on a page. I’m ready and waiting. On Christmas day I got some very good books as gifts and went to church and ate the Mystery with the people of God—full with the richness of promise.

Christmas Past

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In the past few weeks, I’ve talked to several friends from other places and times of my life, including two close friends from Regent who’ve been to visit me, one after another. We talked about much: vocation, biscuits, classes, dating, creativity, brick churches, teaching, weddings, travel, houses, memories, cocktails, and, of course, the world and its problems and how we would solve them if we were in charge but how we’re really glad we’re not.

And something struck me after a few days of long conversation. We spent plenty of time talking about mutual friends, but it’s been a few years, and I noticed that with the ones we’d fallen out of touch with, we referred to the relationship in the past tense. “She always told me…” “I always thought he…” “That was why I liked…” That sort of thing. We spoke of these people with deep affection and even loyalty—we still clearly cared—and yet there was this assumption that some of these relationships were past. If not exactly over, they were permanently dormant, frozen in time at the moment we’d last interacted.

Regula and I decorated the tree I bought on Black Friday, hanging it with ornaments I’d had packed away for years while I was off in Other Places, and I thought about the past and whether it was over or not. 

I live now in the neighborhood I grew up in. And from my bedroom, I can hear the trains as they go past. These aren’t passenger trains—this isn’t Europe—but instead cargo trains, almost interminably long. So when they come through, they take a quarter hour doing it and I lie in bed, blocks away, hearing them continually passing and passing and passing, both here and long gone, all at the same time.

This is the best image I’ve found in all my scrambling for how it is, that the then and the now, the past and the present can be separate pieces, but all a part of the same vast eternity with its overlapping waves. 

For how it is that every year we unbox the ornaments at my parents’ house to decorate, and there are all the ones we’d forgotten: Shakespeare and the Korean masks and the washing board and the fragile construction paper Santa made by small hands that are now large ones. But despite their age here they are again, waiting for us patiently, the same as always, just a little more loved.

Or how it is that, after a very long week, in church this morning we began to sing that Sandra McCracken song, “Come Light Our Hearts,” that always used to close the Advent service at Regent. And I closed my eyes, and time folded right in on itself back to 2019 and a crowded carpeted chapel, my soul remembering for the umpteenth how to “for him in stillness wait.” That memory and reality of those words woke up again, just like those friendships may one day.

Because the passing of time doesn’t matter much more than the passing of trains. Love will return again and again to reassert himself.

The week after Thanksgiving I read “The Second Shepherd’s Play” with my freshmen. It’s a one act play about Christ’s nativity which used to be performed for groups of illiterate medieval peasants who were eager for a show. In it the shepherds bumble around before meeting Jesus, complaining about the cold and their bosses and stealing each other’s sheep, and all the while keep using oaths their Catholic audience would have been familiar with: “Deus” “Our Lady” “By Him Who Died for Us!” till any sense of historical timeline gets scrambled up in literary irony and slapstick comedy. And then the angels bust onto the scene right at the end, surprising the audience just as genuinely as they did those shepherds: “God is made you friend now at this morn!”

This play was performed every year. Unto them a child was born, just as he is to us, every year, here and now: the truth resurrected from its sleep in a cardboard box to announce itself just the same, time repeatedly folding back on itself to a single night thousands of years ago.

The Same But Also Different

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I’ve been back home for about two months now. They’ve been some of the fastest and fullest months of my life. I was happy to be back and I am happy to be back, but the shine of it all has worn off a bit. I’m no longer turning to people who’ve lived here for decades and saying, “Did you know Greensboro had so many trees? It’s green here!” 

The discomfort of transition is settling in. I can identify the feeling, because I’ve dealt with it before—several times now. It starts in your gut and then if you don’t address it properly it leaks down through all your appendages till at last it comes spewing out of your extremities onto other people in the form of illogical irritability that no one in the room understands, least of all yourself. Best to avoid that.

At the heart of my transition-pains this time is the reality that everything around and within me is both deeply familiar and enormously strange, simultaneously entirely the same and completely different from before. So this is me addressing that. Properly.

Things That Are The Same:

-I’m living in the neighborhood I grew up in, the only neighborhood I’ve ever lived in in Greensboro.

-I’m teaching at Caldwell, the place my entire life in this town has centered around.

-My parents are still here growing their garden and reading their poems and inviting me over but requesting that I call before just dropping by.

-My Aldi is the same. I go on Friday afternoons just like I used to.

-My dear little Kia is still here. The time to replace it is fast approaching, but it’s seen so much of life.

-I’m at the same church I was at the year before I moved away, which is full of many, many familiar faces.

-I hang out with the same women on the weekends. We still plan girls’ night.

-Hanging Rock is still here, as is Cook Out and Krispy Kreme and the Goodwill on Battleground. All pillars of my adolescence. 

-And despite the passage of time, the little idealist who sometimes hopefully tap dances in my chest, who sketches out the biggest of dreams, is still alive and kicking.

Things That are Different, However:

-I’m living in my own place, all myself, and am fiercely interested in how the space is arranged.

-I sometimes worry now that I’ve become a cynic—something I think I’m still too young for.

-I’ve written a whole novel set in the place I’m working and sometimes I get the fictional world confused with the real one. Writing feels weightier.

-I schedule so many more phone dates now. (Because there are so many more far away people I love.)

-The clothes in my closet are 95% different (but, let’s be honest, the number of items is probably roughly the same.)

-My confidence level has risen, but so too has my guardedness.

-There are very few familiar faces from before in my classroom—there arose a generation that knew not Alice.

-Horse Pen Creek Road is four lanes now, which really threw me for a loop at first, but honestly, I’m four lanes now, so I guess I’m okay with it.

Basically, if you’re looking to pick my exact location out in all this messy paradox like I’m Where’s Waldo, you’ll find me balancing between the two extremes, same and different, laughing loudly and crying freely and sometimes just watching the quiet carnival of my life.

Good Yeast of Spirit

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I’m finishing up a week at a writers’ retreat in a little town in Kentucky. There’s been a lot of bourbon and wine and a lot of lean-in-on-the-arm-of-your-chair-laughing conversations, a lot of tears and a lot of blue sky.

Yesterday we toured a distillery and one of the first places they took us was a room lined with vats each as big as my kitchen, all full of caramelly brown yeast eating away at the sugars in corn—bubbling, swirling froth. The tour guide invited us to reach down into one of them. The air above was warm with steam, but the liquid I brought to my mouth on my finger was cool and soft and sweet.  Some exchange of life was happening between the air and the liquor and I couldn’t understand it.

This evening I fly back to Greensboro and then on Wednesday I’ll be teaching again for the first time in four years. In four days there’ll be kids in my classroom and I’ll be back up front doing that writing-in-real-time thing of communicating to a live, volatile audience. It seems surreal.

Then I’ll come home at the end of each day to my new place that’s all my own, my place that has a sunny upstairs second bedroom. Soon I’ll get a bed for it and then I’ll be holding a place for others, a place with a chair and bed and two windows and boxes of books that have yet to be unpacked. All on a quiet street under the trees.

And a couple evenings a week when I come home—I’m saying this now so that somebody hears me—I will write, curled up in an alcove with a window. I may come back to more revisions on this novel, I may write some poetry, and I may take a stab at long-form creative non-fiction. In fact, I may try them all at once, switching from one to the next to the next because variety is good for the soul. It wakes you up.

The point is this. I’ve felt just about every way I possibly can about my writing in the past week, but the ultimate truth that has sifted down into my gut through all my tumult is that I must keep at it, even if I’m “planting the crop I will not live to harvest,” a crop stored in barrels for years to come. So I’ll gladly pay teaching the mental, emotional tax it demands, but I’ll also guard that home writing alcove ferociously. I’ll continue to sit down with a blank page and reach out a hand through the mist of words to the meaning. I won’t understand it, but some exchange of life will be happening.

Homing

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My dad writes poems for birthdays, so I have a box full of cards with lines of rhythmic verse in his ballpoint pen. And I’m not sure if he knows this, because he doesn’t save copies for himself, but more than one of them from the last few years is called “Homing.” Apparently, for him, coming back home, finding my way from a distance, is one of the repeated themes of my life. 

He’s not wrong. As of yesterday, I’m back in Greensboro for good and all (at least as far as I know.) I’ll be teaching in a classroom down the hall from my old one and living in a place down the street from my parents. I know that many blessings have fallen into my lap, but despite my usual grandiose tendencies for meditating on place and space during a transition, that hasn’t seemed like the important thing. What’s seemed like the important thing, what I’ve been thinking about more than ever as I’ve moved, is just human relationship. 

Three times in the last couple months I’ve cried when saying goodbye. I never used to do this. I used to do my stoic midwestern roots proud and wave people off cheerfully and go on with my day. No longer. I’ve grown sentimental and gooey in my old age—tearing up and hugging extra tight, trying in vain to stuff down the unseemly rip of grief in my chest.

That’s one explanation at least, but as plausible as it is, I rather suspect the larger thing that’s happening is that I’m coming to understand what we all are to each other. I’m coming to understand that when you know someone for a long time or a short time or any time at all, the friction of the contact, of the bumping up against one another’s shell, wears away at the hard edges. And more quickly than we know, we carve out space in each other—I in you and you in me. We do this over and over, at every turn of our lives. 

Sometimes the process can be painful and sharp, but eventually—in the best relationships—these carved-out spaces become soft, welcoming, just the right shape. Eventually, each person you’ve been close to carries always with them a brief home for you to come to. Because even though they can be hard to access at times, these holes we wear into each other never really go away. And so the more people we meet, the more we love and are loved, the more we’re likely to end up walking around like Swiss cheese people, full of holes just the right shape for people out there who in turn bear the shape of home for us.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been mourning in those leavings, I think. I’ve been mourning those homes cleft in friends that they carry away with them as we part–the comfort and the goodness. But I don’t “grieve without hope.” I’m well-practiced at homing. I always find my way back.

Wayfaring in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

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I have a lot to say.

I had my last day of work on a Tuesday and by Thursday I was on a plane heading across an ocean for the first time in years. The man in my row didn’t have much English, but smilingly offered me biscuits over and over throughout the flight, and solicitously slipped an extra pillow under my knees when I curled them up onto the empty seat between us. When my client Bonnie had said goodbye, she worried aloud that no one was looking out for me. I thought of this, tucked up in that tight plane seat, and smiled.

My sister picked me up at London Heathrow on Friday morning, and, driving with aggressive delight in her little Honda Jazz, brought me back to her place for a shower. Then, within an hour I was with her and friends in the park in Southall doing book table, and a few hours later at youth club: eating pizza in a church basement, then sitting under a tree by a water cooler dreamily watching teenagers play a frisbee game that was slowly devolving, and thinking that these kids were so nice and funny and going back into teaching sounded not so bad after all. I slept very well that night, suddenly in a different place.

Mary took me out into the countryside the next day, to the Royal Standard, supposedly the oldest pub in Britain. I had pickled kidneys for lunch, and then we went on an idyllic walk over rolling hills while I chattered on to her about my uncertain plans for the future. That evening back in Southall her friend made us biryani. I realized that it had been a long time since I had seen Mary in her place—this bright, noisy, curry-scented corner of England—and it had sunk its roots deep into her. In response, she stepped into every room she entered with loud, dependable confidence.

By Sunday evening, my family had all arrived and we went to my sister’s church, Masih Ghar, and then to the back garden at the local pub to celebrate Father’s Day. It was one of only two dinners the five of us had together over the course of the week. It was good and easy and certain. 

Over the next few days I climbed St. Paul’s with George (where I found out that my brother—who for decades has given the impression that he can leap tall mountains in a single bound—does not much like heights) and went to a traveling circus with my family (where we clapped and laughed and gasped while women hung by their hair, and men hung by their chins, and a human pyramid of acrobats jumped rope together). I found myself at the kids club and the parent-toddler group my sister runs and having huge dosas for lunch, sitting in red booths. I’ve spent the last year or two pulling the shutters of myself closed—metaphorically, physically, even metaphysically—but nothing here would let me do that. Something was always in the way. The latch was broken.

*

By Wednesday afternoon, I was walking along the river in Cambridge with my brother and mom, brightly painted canal boats on our left and a park full of lolling students on our right. I wore a long skirt and sandals, like summer. The conference on George Herbert that my dad had planned began the next morning and I gave my paper very first, on a panel which included one of my professors from undergrad as well as a nice man who remembered me from a conference ten years previous. But the whole weekend was full of odd-but-good connections like that: ties to Vancouver and Pennsylvania and Madison and home. Herbert people, like Herbert himself, are gentle and warm and humble, and I liked talking to them, appreciated that they were always eager to remember my name, though when they realized my family connections, they would say, “So your whole family’s at this conference? I’ve never seen that before…” And I’d laugh and say, “I know. Neither have I. Don’t worry about it.”

Throughout the week, anxiety was sometimes still gnawing at my belly, but slowly, cracks began to form, letting the light in. The first night we sat in Little Saint Mary’s for a poetry reading. I had been, more than I think I understood, wrestling with the place of writing in my life—with what seat to give it at the table, with how to keep it from becoming a bugbear—and my heart slowed its irregularities, felt healthy and hungry again, as I listened to people faithfully present the words they had strung together. One poem was called “Reading the Desert Fathers While Eating a Donut.” The audience knew what she meant.

Then there was the banquet in the great hall at Trinity College—ornate wood paneling reached all around us and hands reached over our shoulders to refill wine glasses again and again, and I think I might have had duck five different ways. Afterwards we sat in Trinity Chapel while a vocal ensemble sang baroque arrangements of Herbert’s poems, harmonies rising over us into high stone space like a woven canopy. They were accompanied by a lute player who just looked like a lute player. I could’ve picked her out if I saw her on the street in Kansas.

And on Sunday, Malcolm Guite led us in a Eucharist service at Clare College Chapel, and the words of the Anglican liturgy tumbled around in my head, where they’ve been nesting for more than a decade now—Ye that intend to lead a new life, they say. There was one more keynote talk that afternoon at a church in the countryside where we were greeted with change-ringing from the bell-tower. As I sat on a centuries-old wooden pew, I watched the leaves behind the leaded glass at the far end of the chancel bobbing their heads in the breeze. Yes, they said, new life, yes, yes.

After that we went to Little Gidding where we were served cake and tea in the garden and one of the poets who is also a latinist read T.S. Eliot’s poem in the place of its birth—because what else could we do? “We shall not cease from exploration,” he read, projecting over the windy blusters which shook the tent and made the tent poles creak. That evening a friend I hadn’t seen since 2020 picked me up in Cambridge and we drove through the night up to Edinburgh. I sometimes slept and sometimes talked and was content without pretense.

*

After a negligible amount of sleep in Edinburgh, Tze and I were on the road again by midday, this time in a 20-year-old Land Rover Defender with another artist in tow. I listened to the tick of the windshield wipers and looked out the window. I realized that over the last couple years as I’ve been busy latching the shutter of myself—I know I have—I may have been missing some things. It was as if there had been a rush of water—a rush of newness—over old glass, and now it was time to look out again and see how the views had shifted. So as we traveled north and north, I paid attention.

There are so many blues and greens and browns and greys and purples in the world—more than I ever knew. Gorse and heather grew up over the country, which was sparsely populated by sturdy buildings with little rows of chimney pots. For the last hour of the drive there were constant vistas to our right hand side: wide, slow hills crested by winding stone walls that did not seem to know they weren’t there to crown a king. Beyond that lay the blanket of the sea, striped with sand, and above that the clouds, a landscape unto themselves. 

We talked most of the time, too. I pulled out my clothing interview questions from my project last spring and we all three went through them as we sped past legions of sheep and cows who were living in glory and didn’t even know it. 

We arrived at Freswick Castle, up north of Wick, in time for dinner, a place where they take in artists and strays and seem determined to leave the latchstring out. So I spent the next few days with warm people, people who tell you encouragingly that you seem so comfortable and confident without realizing this is due to their kindlinesses. Our wine glasses were refilled constantly at dinner. I felt more “looked out for” than Bonnie sitting worrying in her chair back in Madison could have imagined, and was often on the verge of tears. It was a combined sense, I think, of inadequacy and gratefulness. It didn’t get all the way dark there, even at midnight. On clear nights in midsummer, the sky just gets drowsy blue-gold-pink and hangs like that for a few hours before the sun comes up again. Murray, who owns the place, gave us a tour and spoke confidently about where the theater and the film studio and the pool would go. In the midst of all that cloudy diffusion of light, it was hard not to believe him.

In the mornings, I sat in the window in my room and attempted writing exercises and struggled over the skeletons of poems—unsure where to direct all my words and thoughts. And one day, using spotty wifi, I managed to obtain an apartment back in Greensboro (a place all my own) and a job (teaching literature back at Caldwell—And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we first started…) The castle is large, but also small, and everyone there had a front-row seat to the tumult of my transition. My friend was filming a video for Wayfarer Trust, which operates out of the castle, and I shot some moody b-roll and a less moody interview with him and continued to wonder where writing would fit for me now. I watched candles reflected in the mirror each night while we drank whiskey by the fire, noticed how the old hearthstones lay flush with restored floors, and took deep breaths.

I took walks, of course—with others at Duncansby Head, where we saw a puffin, and along the cliffs on my own, clammy with clear sweat. In that part of the world, the wind was such an active participant that it was visible in all things, like the Spirit. The grasses bow to it, the water ruffles under its touch, and the birds—hundreds of them—coast trustingly on its back.

*

I was tired by Friday, when I left Freswick. But it was the tiredness of progress. The pages of my journal were beginning to feel safe again, not like a wilderness. Tze and I dropped off one friend in Inverness and immediately picked up three more and headed west to the Isle of Skye.

While we drove and chatted I watched the highlands outside becoming more and more themselves, and thought of too many ways to describe the hills: the lines of the slopes rise like Icarus climbing into the late-day sun…wrinkled knees under sheets in the lamp light…mountain peaks are arms reaching up side by side like Moses at the battle against the Amalekites. 

We did a far-too-large grocery shop before crossing onto Skye, and then the back of the Defender was so crowded that I spent the last hour with a lap full of raw poultry and a bottle of wine in my skirt. Even so, when we got to the cottage we realized we’d forgotten butter, so half-hysterical, and with varying amounts of encouragement from friends, I beat heavy cream till we had enough for the next morning’s toast.

We spent the next couple days scrambling around the island. I liked seeing friends dotted into the muddy creases of a steep green hillside as we climbed, and I didn’t mind it when I stepped in a bog, went in up to my calf, and almost lost a shoe. The sludge that was left on my leg was green at its top edge, like the earth itself. Hiking there was much more about making your own way than following a path, and as we traced along the side of the mountain at Quiraing I always found my feet drifting up and up, unconsciously choosing the high road. At Fairy Glens there were loud American voices that made me smile. “You’re makin’ me nervous and I don’t even know you!” one woman shouted to a Scot high on the rocks, who immediately shot her a look of disdain. Another repeated over and over and over to Lord-only-knows-who, “Lookit the dog working the sheep across the valley!” 

I carried my journal with me everywhere and squinted as the sun reflected off its pages, managing to scribble anyway about the benches cleft of mud and grass, the plush black moss at the tops of things and the ankle-deep mounds of springy orange growth on the descent. My hair whipped all the time into my peripheral vision, so I could only see what was just below my feet. 

At the Old Man of Storr, it was gusty and threatening and while the rest hiked I stayed tucked in my seat in the back of the car and re-read my journal. I found I’d used the word “visceral,” over and over to describe the trip, as if it were a brand new discovery each time—that goodness could be real, that I could taste it. I heard a passerby say loudly to her boyfriend, “You think she looks sad back there?” But all I was thinking was, What a funny place for flowers to grow—in wind and rain and chill.

The last day we left Skye slowly—on the way I bought a very nice felt hat and a sheepskin hot water bottle cover. We stopped at a distillery where they made storm-matured whiskey, a phrase I loved. We stopped for photos by a bridge and by a castle and by a valley and by a beach, and got caught in the rain again and again. Back on the mainland I made them listen to me read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever aloud, even though it was July. We drove along Loch Lomond, which is very long, and listened to sad Scottish songs, and then eventually to James Taylor as well as Peter, Paul and Mary, because it was, after all, American Independence Day.

*

I slept extra the next morning, back at Tze’s house. Then he showed me bits of Edinburgh—from low tide and from a high hill—and we bought pasties at the train station and he saw me off.

I was sad on the train back to London. So I listened to a Kate Atkinson novel and then saw a pure white horse in the middle of a sheep field, which made me feel hopeful I was T.S. Eliot, on the verge of something great and somber. “Costing not less than everything,” I thought (lines from “Little Gidding” kept coming back to me with dramatic import.)

Then the last day I put on a crop-top, a white linen skirt, and the new hat itself, and went into central London alone. I wandered around the V&A, going up stairs and more stairs till I’d climbed out of the way of most of the other people. I looked at tiles and stained glass and golden miniatures and modern furniture design till I was all full up and warm. I got lunch in Hyde Park, and took the tube to Hampstead Heath where I meandered around for a while, ineffectually but peaceably. Then I came back and had dinner in Southall with Mary and some of the short term teams there for the week, scooping up butter chicken and paneer and dal with pieces of naan till I was satisfied, my fingers oily, but clean.

On my travels home, I made friends—on the plane, in the customs line, on the bus—or rather they made me, drawn by my cool new hat or maybe just their own anxieties. And I thought a lot about the Luci Shaw poem “The chair without distinction,” about just sitting on the edge of things, windows and doors wide open, available to be walked into, to be leaned on for a moment. I had walked into the kind doors of so many other people in the past few weeks, more than I could count.

The point is, this trip gave me much. That’s what I’m trying to say with all these too many words. But the thing it did most is it busted me open, cracked through dry skin, and began what may be a long process of cleaning me out. It told me that I must and can write and that I must and can love. I’m already doing them both anyway and I was made for them. So best not hold them in. Christ walks on the water, the wind, the seemingly impossible, and he’s calling me to meet him there, holding out open hands, always open.

As it says over the door of the Royal Standard when you cross the threshold, “Go gently, pilgrim” (but, by all means, go.)

Sacred Work

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A dear friend is back home in Switzerland at the moment, spending time with her uncle as he’s dying. She visits him in his nursing home and they go for drives and have long conversations about where they’ll go for lunch and then she comes back to the family farmhouse and sits on the front steps and sometimes leaves me a voice message. 

And a few weeks ago, a client of mine died, just hours after I finished a shift with her. So I left Regula a message, because I figured that at the moment she’d understand even more than most people—maybe even more than I did. I told her how Phyllis had been scared because her breathing was getting worse and how I’d called the hospice nurse and how I’d sat with her and eventually held her hand even though she usually liked to be left alone and how when I got the call that night that she’d passed, I was a little shocked, even though I’d been dourly predicting it to my housemates for weeks. I think I also told her that at the beginning of the afternoon, as Phyllis’s son was valiantly urging her to eat a little more, she’d rolled her eyes over to me and pleaded dramatically, “A-lice…” and I’d burst out laughing. Even then, she was thoroughly her stubborn self, and it warmed me.

When Regula replied to me she said—more than once—that it seemed that the work that each of us was getting to do was sacred. And I’ve been thinking about that off and on ever since.

I’ve had thoughts whirling around about the sacred-secular divide and about Dorothy Sayers’ writings on work and other things of that sort, but the main thing I keep thinking is that the work that is the most sacred has a sort of unexpected constancy. It carries on unavoidably into itself from one generation to the next. It’s common grace—you get up, you get dressed, you drive to work, you clock in because you need the paycheck, and then heaven breaks through. 

Just today, I gave my client Bonnie a final copy of her life story that I wrote up, based on interviews I recorded with her a few months ago. She was a labor and delivery nurse here in Madison for forty years. As I edited it together, the bit that gave me a little catch in my throat every time I reached it was when she talked about delivering a premie the doctor thought would be stillborn. She caught him in her hands, “and then I felt it move!” So she rushed him to the nursery, and when she came back to the mother—who was very ill herself and in kidney failure—the woman said, shaking her head, “Too bad it’s dead. Oh, too bad it’s dead…” And Bonnie said to her, “It’s not dead! It’s not dead!”

After fifty years, Bonnie has still not gotten over that story and the happy, healthy little boy that baby grew up into, and I think that’s reasonable. She sits in her chair in the living room, reading the newspaper in the morning, and much of the news is bad. But most of the nice news, she cuts out with a pair of scissors she keeps in her drawer. There is a pile she saves for one of her sons, and often a couple piles for her grandchildren. And then there are all the pieces she sets aside for me. Newspaper clippings are Bonnie’s love language, so now they litter my car and mark many of my books—concerts I never go to and information about Vancouver I already know and releases of books I’ll likely never read. But I have them, just in case, padding all the cracks of my life.

All good work, paid or unpaid, which is done well (or even just done halfway) carries about it at least a whiff of the holy. Abby told me the other day about a woman she knows who says to herself whenever she sweeps the floor, “Take that, Satan!” There is goodness in showing up, opening the curtains, scooping the cats’ litter, washing my hands, wiping the pudding drool, listening, laughing, and folding the underwear, because it’s in the midst of these ordered intimacies that life and death make their grand appearances into our unsuspecting hands. I’m moving on to other places and rhythms quite soon, but I suspect that—wherever I go—I’ll never do work more sacred than this.