Rocks on the Way

I skateboarded down to the park to find a place to journal. In about 5 seconds of tiny wheels rolling on rocky asphalt, I almost decided to go back home. The only place I’d ever boarded is on the smooth concrete of San Jose State University. This was the complete opposite.

I forced myself to ride through my own reluctance, because something within me kept saying that 8 minutes of bumps would be worth the ride.

Once I arrived at the park, I slowed down and looked for a place to sit and write.

I found myself drawn to the place I usually avoid—the baseball field park bench.  As I sat on its cold, aluminum surface, I took in the sun’s heat and the flood of unwanted memories.

It’s been three years since I’ve had the strength or courage to revisit the bench.  park bench

Three years ago, I sat on the bench with the person I fell in love with, who’d eventually leave me. We had been together for less than two months, and in a few days we were to separate for college. Him to LA and I to Spokane. As we sat, I tried to hold on to him because, even then, I was always afraid that “we” would end.

The bench was an evocative object that seized my mind into the past. I had been told too many times that I wasn’t “supposed” to return to those thoughts. “To reminisce is only to miss something that doesn’t exist anymore.”

But in the end, I deliberately chose to sit there. I sat exactly where we did back then, accepted that this time I was alone, and wrote. Writing required me to reflect, to remember and I was forced to verbalize the thoughts that plagued me.

With my pen, I scribbled, “There are three places that for some reason, I’m oddly rooted to. This park bench, an ATM, and a rose garden.” Chewing on the cap of the pen, I realized that these three every-day objects in every-day areas had a hold on my attention.  I struggled to keep up with the memories and insights that were suddenly clear as I captured my thoughts in the hardbound journal..  

On the park bench, we shared a kiss while someone awkwardly passed by. After we noticed their disgusted glare, we eventually laughed off our embarrassment. He looked me in the eyes then and said, “Oh well,” and simply held me. He didn’t care about the world around us. He cared about me.

At the ATM, I stood with him while he withdrew money. He followed through with the chivalrous expectation to pay for me, even though at the time he wasn’t financially stable. I didn’t stop him, but it was the first time I saw myself as more of a burden than a blessing in his life.

At the rose garden, we had celebrated our first month as a couple. When we were leaving, we crossed paths with a little old Hispanic lady who, at my goodbye to her, laughed and said, “There are no such things as goodbye! Only ‘see you later!’” For the first time in my life, I felt comfort at a departure.

I looked around again. Children were scattered throughout the park running, biking, and squealing with delight at whatever tickled their attention. In the distance, a Hispanic family danced salsa with one another to the faint tune escaping their tiny radio. I moved the skateboard back and forth under my feet and recognized that the sun was lowering and it was becoming colder.

But I continued to write. Returning to, sitting, and writing on this park bench forced me to remember for the first time what had actually happened. Once that memory was viewed in full, I watched it all play out through a wiser pair of eyes.

As I sat recalling these vivid memories, I imagined that my current self, with knowing eyes, sat next to my past self.

“You know…one day you’ll return to this park bench alone,” I tell her. ”You’ll come back and there will be a rush of pain like a baseball at full speed.”

My past self cringes at the corniness and unpleasant knowledge.  “If it will hurt, why come back?”

“Because,” I begin carefully, “Although it hurts, you’ll see that things always come full circle. From here, I can see that our biggest fear came true. We loved, we lost. But you’ll keep moving forward. You’ll fall in love again, you’ll get hurt again. You’ll continue on, and then you’ll wind up here.”

We both sigh deeply, aware that truth is never an easy burden to bear.

“Coming back here will not be like regressing to your old thoughts.” I continue with an experienced voice, “It will hurt, but you’ll see that everything that has happened molds you into who you’re meant to be.”

My past self scoffs. “And then I’ll have to do it again, right? Return to places I don’t want to go back to?”

I push a bit more. “You’re right. There will be many benches that we’ll have to return to. Benchmarks of experience. But look– this isn’t so bad.”

The sun was setting, and my mind was tired. I picked up my skateboard and started towards home. Though the asphalt ground remained the same, bumpy and jarring but all I could think was, “It feels a little easier now.”

*****

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Sarah Michelle Cruz is an incoming senior at Whitworth University. She is a psychology and English Writing major, with a Chinese minor. She spends her free time mostly making music, writing, watching Filipino soap operas,  or eating cheap but delicious international cuisines with friends. She is in the editing process of her first novel, and is currently writing a second book called, “At the End of the World.” She hopes to inspire others and help people reclaim their own stories through arts and writing.

A Week on Deer Isle

My shoulder muscles were crying as I lugged two five-gallon buckets of water, one in each hand, up the driveway. “Almost there, almost there,” I panted, trudging the width of the massive garden on my way to the front door. Three steps up, and… there! Stepping into the hostel, I sighed long and grinned, wordlessly confessing my exertion to everyone gathered in the kitchen. The other guests returned my smile—none of us were really used to this. We were off-the-grid tourists, short-term visitors from a planet with running water, hobby gardens, and cellphone coverage.

We were not sure we could keep this up for very long.

But we were glad—so very glad—that our hosts did. And we were grateful to be welcomed into this place. this place where you watched your dinner grow and pulled your water from the ground.

It was good to be on Deer Isle.

* * * * *

It seems ironic that I discovered the Deer Isle hostel on the internet. My husband and I had longed to visit Maine for most of our ten-year marriage, and our anniversary was the perfect excuse to make the trip. I started at the state tourist website, clicking the ‘hostel’ tab mostly out of curiosity. We were cheap, yes, but we also wanted our own room.

Deer Isle Hostel was a top choice, and as I clicked through, my curiosity grew. It was owned and run by a married couple, Anneli and Dennis, who were named ‘Homesteaders of the Year’ in 2013. It was off-the-grid, hand built, and 17th-century inspired. It was solar powered, with hand-pumped water and a hot outdoor shower.

I wasn’t sure I knew what all these things meant. I kept reading.

Every night there were communal dinners from the garden. It was a short hike from the ocean. There was an inexpensive, secluded hut for two. Now we were talking.

I sent an e-mail, a reservation, and then a payment, still having very little idea what we were getting ourselves into.

* * * * *

When we arrived at the hostel in early August we were greeted by Dennis, who turned out to be a wiry man-of-Maine with a smile covering half his face. He greeted us enthusiastically, showed us our hut, and then introduced us to the bathroom facilities. The toilet, which was actually a five gallon bucket in a toilet-like frame, was accompanied by a big sack of sawdust. We read the cheerful sign:

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We also noticed that the bathroom smelled pleasant, not at all like the outhouse we were expecting, but like peppermint hand soap and clean sawdust. It smelled better than our bathroom at home–so much for roughing it.

The shower was next. It was, indeed, outdoors, with high wooden walls and a view of the sky. Dennis pointed to a huge (and again, not smelly) compost pile next to the shower, and showed us the end of the black tube winding its way through the pile. “This is what heats the water,” he announced joyously, almost as if he had come up with the idea yesterday and is still shocked that it works, “and the hot water tube comes out here, next to the cold.” Now he unhooked a silver watering can from above our heads. “Just mix your hot and cold in this. Then hang it back on the hook, and tip it forward when you want water. It’s that simple,” he declared, and he was right.

These people, I thought, have got this down.

* * * * *

We stayed for nearly a week, and I was surprised by how easy it was to settle into the rhythms of daily life. The things that I thought would be challenging, or at least notable–the toilets, shower and all other things water-related–turned out to be surprisingly unremarkable. There were systems in place long before I got there; the patterns of life were well-established.IMG_2279

There was something so good, so refreshing, about stepping into rhythms of life that made sense.

Every night before our communal dinner, everyone gathered near the long table. We grabbed each other’s hands, paused for a moment of silence, and then went around the circle, introducing ourselves and stating something we were grateful for in that day.

Because we were there for a week, I started to notice a pattern in Anneli’s responses. Everyday she was grateful for her guests, her husband, Dennis, and her swim in the pond. The first two I expected, but the third seemed more peripheral, even trivial, especially when she said it for the fifth day in a row. Then, one day, she explained.

Anneli grew up in Northern Sweden and thus knows what it means to savor the summer. She brings this appreciation to her life in Maine. “There are one hundred days of summer,” she said, “and I have committed to swim on each of these, each and every one of them. Summer will soon be over, and so I am grateful for every swim.”

Later, as I reflected on her response, something new occurred to me. I had been admiring Dennis and Anneli for creating this place called Deer Isle Hostel and for organizing their lives (and mine, for a week) around sustainable practices. But, while these things are true, more is going on here. They are not only creating place; they are receiving place.

In choosing to live so closely to the rhythms of the very specific place they inhabit, they are not only vulnerable to its quirks–destructive storms, long winter months, hungry groundhogs, invasive pests–but they are also open and receptive to its very specific gifts–one hundred days of warm air and cool pond water, a garden big enough to feed hostel guests in the summer and still eat throughout the winter, and a compost-hot shower covered by sky.

And though I don’t see a sawdust toilet anywhere in our future, I do carry this question with me:

Now that I’m home from Deer Isle, how can I receive the place where I live?

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A room of my own

Even before we were married, Ben and I enjoyed dreaming together about where we might live someday. Sometimes we explored the possibilities of different geographical locations, but more often we discussed the details of our future house. While we plotted ideal but realistic spaces for each of Ben’s many creative interests, I struggled to know what I would do in a room of my own.

I was a very imaginative child, but even from a young age I set impossible standards for the things I created. As I grew older, I took classes to teach me the “correct” way to create. I enjoyed art, writing, and music, but there was always someone better than me. I grew weary of feeling like a mediocre imitation of someone else.

After college, life was filled with expectations to meet—job interviews, performance reviews, housework, bills. I wanted something that was mine, with no one telling me what to do or how to do it. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but as I struggled to find where I fit in the adult world, I needed a place where I felt free to experiment, make mistakes, and try again.

Simply the act of verbally setting aside space for me to create, even before Ben and I had the means to make it a physical reality, was powerful. The point wasn’t to be fair, making sure each of us occupied an equal allotment of square footage. Instead, it was about recognizing me as a creative being. We were investing in who I was and what I could create, without guaranteed results. My room was a gift of possibility, not something I had to earn. I was entrusted with resources before proving I would use them wisely and well.

Knowing I had space with no strings attached gave me permission to take my time and explore. I didn’t have to try to measure up to anyone else’s standards. I could rediscover my creativity my own way. Setting aside physical space to create gave me the internal space to start believing in my creativity again.

00030In our 525 square foot newlywed apartment, we carved out slivers of creative space. Our bedroom was small, but it became more than a place for our bed and our clothes. Amidst Ben’s drawing easel, computers, and musical instruments, I found room for a sewing machine I purchased from a thrift store. Choosing a less common pastime relieved some of the pressure to perform, and, as a tall woman generally unimpressed with fashion trends, the possibility of making my own clothes appealed to me.

A heather gray pencil skirt was one of the first projects I tackled. I even sewed a back vent instead of just a slit, not realizing it was a more advanced option. I just preferred the way it looked. I didn’t have any sewing patterns and didn’t know how to use them anyway—I made things up as I went, cutting into a 25-cent piece of clearance fabric after examining a skirt I already owned. The resulting skirt isn’t fit to be worn in public—the seams are unfinished, the hem is crooked, and the zipper insertion is appalling—but it still makes me immensely proud.

When the time came to move from our first apartment into our first house, we only looked at homes with at least three bedrooms. Of course we needed somewhere to sleep, but we also wanted to finally each have a room of our own. The house we purchased was old and the bedrooms were small, but they were ours to arrange and use however we wanted—places to experiment freely without worrying about the mess. After the crowded drabness of our apartment, our house was full of character. Built in 1926 in a logging town, it had beautiful birdseye maple floors and decorative molding above the doors and windows. I painted the walls of my room a soothing mid-tone blue and furnished it with dumpster dives, free finds from Craigslist, and anything that made me smile.

It was hard to leave my room behind when we moved to a new city, but I still have a room of my own. For now we’re renting and I’m not allowed to paint the dingy white walls. Bits of thread and fabric beneath my sewing table tangle in the utilitarian brown carpet. But when I feed the coral colored satin and lace of the bridesmaids dresses I’m making for my sister’s wedding under the presser foot of my thrift store sewing machine, I feel completely at home.

*    *    *    *    *

JohannaSchram“A Room of My Own” is by Johanna Schram. Johanna feels most comfortable in places that are cozy and most alive in places that are spacious. Though the city changes, Wisconsin has always been the state she calls home. Johanna is learning to value wrestling with the questions over having all the answers. She craves community and believes in the connecting power of story. Johanna writes at her blog joRuth to help others know themselves and find freedom from the “shoulds” keeping them from a joyful, fulfilling life. She can be found on Twitter @joRuthS.

Then the music begins

On its own, there was nothing special about the room. In fact, it was the antithesis of special: Generic and drab, it looked like hundreds of other tired, 1960s-era college dorm lobbies, furnished to withstand the antics of students whose parents weren’t on hand to tell them to keep their sneakers and snacks off the furniture.

But in that room, tucked around the corner, was a piano. And when China played that piano, everything about the room changed.

*    *    *    *    *

It was June 2012, and I was on the campus of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts for a weeklong of Glen writing workshop with Lauren Winner. Staying in a dorm for the first time in 20 years made me feel a bit like a teen again, brimming with that same sense of nervous excitement. Who were all of the people I caught glimpses of as they came and went from their rooms down the hall? Which ones would I be hugging fiercely by the end of the week, as we said goodbye?

That first evening—after dinner, the opening talk, and a welcome reception—many retreated to their rooms to recover from a long day of travel. But the extrovert in me knew that going to my room would lead to nothing more than a predictable evening: checking email, doing some reading, then falling asleep. If I wanted to open up my evening to surprise and possibility, I needed to venture into a public space: the dorm lobby.

Those who had been to the Glen before and understood how things “worked” had already started to gather. Plastic cups and bottles of wine were set out on the marred coffee table, and several institutional couches had been pulled up close. Bags of pretzels and popcorn were opened, and much talking and introducing ensued. I introduced myself to people, but mostly observed, holding back—waiting to feel myself soften into this new space.

It wasn’t until a few people began begging a woman named China to play the piano, and she finally agreed, that I felt at home. China’s music filled the room—not just with sound, but with energy, each particle of air vibrating in a way that reminded me “I’m alive, I’m a creative being, and it is good.”

*    *    *    *    *

pianomovingNow it is four years later, and China—China who is from Denver, who I met in Massachusetts then spent another Glen Workshop week with in Santa Fe last summer—is in my living room in Central Illinois, moving a piano. (To be accurate, she is supervising the moving of a piano.)

The piano had belonged to my grandmother. During my childhood, the piano’s home was a cabin in the woods of Northern Michigan, where my grandma’s expert playing inspired many sing-alongs. Tonight, China will play that piano, at a house concert we’re hosting for her band Alright Alright.

Life has been scooting along so frantically as of late that it takes my mind a moment to accept the wonderful reality: China and I are together again, this time in my home, with our husbands and children. Now we know one another as mothers and wives, and also as creative women who labor with the words and stories we must tell. As we hug and laugh and both talk at once, rushing around to prepare the space for this new joint venture, I sense our understandings of one another rounding out. But our friendship also feels the same—full of goofiness and grace, with flashes of depth that root us over breadths of geography and time.

We move the piano from its place by the front stairwell across the living room to the fireplace. The Danish modern armchair my husband likes to sit in after work is moved to the living room’s opposite corner, making room for a variety of guitars and China’s husband Seth, who will play them. Katelin, the band’s third member, sets up a small drum set and a ukelele and guitar to the left of the piano, near our tall bookshelf. I arrange dining room chairs on the rug and on the stage’s “wings”—the sunroom that opens to the east of the piano and the dining room to the west. Extension cords are run from outlets, power strips and amps are plugged in, spot lights are directed. The room has been transformed.

Soon, friends begin to arrive. Wine is poured. Introductions are made. Then China begins playing the piano. The space is complete.

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A Still Life

A small antique dining table, repurposed as my writing table, sits by a large window in the breakfast room. The cherry wood has a smooth rich patina ripened by age and signed by watermarks from a continual parade of tea cups, coffee mugs, flower pots, and leaky bud vases.

Out the window, the arborvitae along the fence line sway in the breeze like a happy gospel choir. Sunlight from the east plays with leaves hanging on high branches; light darts in and out between the green like a hummingbird searching for nectar.

The sudden appearance of a chipmunk perched on the head of my garden statue—the sculpture of a little boy sitting cross-legged with a rabbit in his lap—startles me. I gasp. The chipmunk’s bushy tale drapes down the side of the little boy’s head like a furry hat. The animal blends into the concrete. A still life.FullSizeRender(20)

Cardinals, sparrows, and house finches engage in a noisy flurry at the birdfeeder. With an abrupt turn of his head, the chipmunk pauses, perks up like a meerkat, and scampers into the low-lying shrubbery.

A male cardinal, proud and red, with a wisp of red plumage atop his head, wins the battle for position at the feeder. His female counterpart is thin, grayish, and pale. He—I named him D’Artagnan after the most valiant of Dumas’ characters in The Three Musketeers—pecks at the safflower seed in the hanging wire silo, captures a seed in his mouth, cracks it with his sturdy beak and passes it to his lady, like a lover giving a gentle kiss to his beloved.

With a swoosh, Mae West, a round-breasted mourning dove, alights on top of the feeder, causing it to sway as she sashays about with her full bustle. Because of their size, the doves hold the keys to the coffer of seeds. They make merry and dine and grow bloated with time. There are no leftovers. Not one crackle.

*****

In early 2013, I was diagnosed with cancer. My world went still, folding in on itself like useless bellows.

The chemotherapy I received was a benevolent poison; while killing the unhealthy cells, it attacked healthy cells, also, resulting in extreme fatigue, an inability to concentrate, and a weakened immune system.

Words became hazy on the page of a book; it was hard to read a whole paragraph and understand it. The computer screen’s light altered my vision; tears salted my cheeks. It was as if someone had stuck me in a tightly bound book, slammed it shut, and shelved it.

My husband installed birdfeeders in our backyard outside the breakfast room window. He stocked them with thistle seed and safflower.

I watched and waited.

Every morning, I crept toward the kitchen, grimacing when the old wood floors creaked, hoping not to scare away my first visitor. A study in red—D’Artagnan—was perched at the feeder one morning as I tiptoed around the corner from the den.FullSizeRender(23)

On subsequent mornings, brilliant goldfinches, chickadees, tufted titmice, and doves arrived. The rare appearance of indigo buntings and a rose-breasted grosbeak—his chest splashed with red like blood from a dagger wound—pulled me from my chair. Adam must have felt the weight of words when God said: Name them. 

I sat down. With a shaky hand, I scrawled fragments of sentences in my journal.

*****

A small young dove slow-steps along the brick window sill. As I rest my elbows on the table, its old joints creak. The bird stops, turns his slick gumball head, considers me with his black bead of an eye, and with his slender beak commences a gentle tapping on the glass. Tap. Tap. Tap.

He is not looking at me, but at his own reflection wrought by the play of light on the glass making a mirror image of himself. His kinfolk arrive and with a whistling of his wings, he shoots away to the trees.

My blank computer screen stares at me. My journal is open beside me on the table. I begin to type: In early 2013, I was diagnosed with cancer….

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 Images by Lisa Taylor Phillips

Places Unknown

There’s a towering man with a cane walking in front of me. Amidst the hustle of every other person around, his progress is slow, but sure. He doesn’t seem distracted like everyone else. It’s almost as if the massive skyscrapers around us all point downward to him. I slow my own pace and walk behind him, studying the motion. As an animator, unique “walk cycles” fascinate me. I wonder who he is, what caused the limp, and where he’s headed. I wonder if he’s even headed anywhere, or merely walking for the sake of being able, like me. It begins a story in my own mind that I dive into with the reckless abandon of childlike curiosity.

story_NYC_01I am not a huge fan of New York City. It’s big, crowded, and ridiculously noisy. Everyone seems to be in such a hurry, too. As someone who finds great joy in the stillness of a canyon or serenity of the forest, the sprawling mass of concrete and humanity that is The Big Apple tends to overwhelm me.

It’s also a place where I happen to be my most creative self.

I’ve often strolled down 3rd Avenue wondering why this city gets my mind whirring. It’s almost impossible for me to even think, with everything and everyone buzzing around me. Perhaps that’s the reason: The city overwhelms me and gets “me” out of the way. Ideas spring to mind like popcorn shooting out of a hot oiled pan on the stove, leaving me little time for anything but writing them all down before the next round of thoughts invade. There’s no time to judge the ideas, and judgment is the enemy of creativity.

The noise of the city is unrelenting. People shout from second story windows to friends waiting on the sidewalk below. Taxis create their own personal symphony of horns, rising and falling in time with the stoplights that never seem to last quite long enough for their drivers’ liking. I soak it all in, going slowly and deliberately in contrast to the gushing speed that seems to be standard to the natives.

In those brief moments I can almost understand why someone would want to live in such a place. (Then I remember the cost of real estate and am nearly run over by a taxi, and quickly come to my senses.)

Creativity is a fascinating thing. I continue to study and write about it, and one of the discoveries I keep returning to is just how important being “out of your element” is to the creative process. There’s certainly a time and place for being comfortable, but when we stay too long in the “known” there’s nothing to push us towards the new and unique.

For me, New York City is a place that pushes me. But it’s not the only place that does. I find my brain story_NYC_02firing on all cylinders in many unfamiliar environments, whether it’s a rocky cliff along the ocean or a hole-in-the-wall pizza shop I’ve never been in before. Close to home or far away, places I’m unfamiliar with make me wake up from the sleep-walking routine of daily life, and really take a look at the world around me.

Between the rush of people and the constant noise, there only seems to be time for reaction. Dodge a woman with her face buried in her phone while skirting an open set of metal doors in the sidewalk as cases of beer descend to basement storage. Notice the flashing neon sign of a camera shop only to be distracted by the gleaming golden statue outside a towering office building. You get lost in a place like this, and if you don’t keep on your toes you’re liable to lose one. Still, streams of ideas flow from the din and fly right into a trusty notebook on hand for that very purpose.

I wouldn’t want to work through the creative process in such places; that’s where returning to a quiet, well-known environment helps. It terms of sparking that fire in my head, though, nothing beats places unknown and unfamiliar. If you’re looking for something to jumpstart your creativity, you might do well to take a right turn where you normally veer left. See what lies down the road uncharted. No matter if it’s as epic as The Grand Canyon, or mundane like the street two blocks away that you never have any good reason to stroll down, unknown places have a way of unlocking our minds to possibilities we never before considered. It certainly works for me, as I return to the overwhelming streets of New York City with both reluctance and anticipation.

*****

JK RikiUnknown Places” was written by J.K. Riki, an author and animator from Pittsburgh PA. When not lost in the deepest corners of thought, J.K. tries to appreciate every aspect of this journey of life we’re all temporarily on. You can find more writing by J.K. – both in blog and book form – at JKRiki.com which is updated every Monday at 12:01 on the dot. He also shares daily creative insights on Twitter @Creative_Go.

Nails in the Wall

I was on the phone with a friend of mine. She quipped, “You and I—we’ve just got a nomadic spirituality.”

Her tone was half-joking and not necessarily complimentary. Nonetheless, something in me latched onto it.

We joked about our nomadic ways for years. Because giving a gift to a nomad is hard, I made her a playlist of songs about wandering one year. There are a lot of options to pick from.

At the time, I was moving a lot, living wherever was most convenient for the ministry that I was doing.  Because the charitable work was connected to many properties, I had many options. I became the master of the power move—the quick pack without boxes, the shift to the adjacent neighborhood, as few trips as possible.

A friend needed a place to recuperate after serious illness. I moved out.

A donor made a house available. I moved in.

A friend’s husband was writing his dissertation and their family was on a serious budget. I moved out.

The home for homeless mothers was understaffed. I moved in.

And so on.

The moves were a form of loving. If it made more sense for someone else to be living where I was living, I would move. If I was needed somewhere, I would move. If a good opponail-sticking-out-of-wallrtunity opened up, I would move.

Settling in meant hanging pictures.  Forget buying furniture, putting a nail in the wall evoked a sense of stability.

During this season, space and place weren’t interchangeable. My “place” was the community of service that I was a part of. I belonged there. I was rooted in the work.  In all its beauty (and rough edges!), it reflected a big part of me. “Space” was where I happen to live at the moment.

But, something shifted.

Early this summer, I pulled up the dirt driveway of my childhood home with my car full of belongings.  I made the decision to return home and live with my parents, at least for a season.

As I went to fill the closets of my bedroom, I found box after box of childhood trinkets, school memories, and college mementos.

Little yellow baby shoes with daisies. My class photos from elementary school. My sequined costumes from dance classes. An enormous quantity of t-shirts. A binder of research from my college capstone.

Sorting through it all had a weightiness that was hard to bear.

But it made it evident. Here space and place intersect.

Here my hands were pressed into concrete as it hardened. The image remains. Here I notice that the roadrunner population seems higher than normal. I have watched the trees grow; I can see the shift in my own body, aware that I can no longer work as hard as I once could. Here pets are buried in the yard and the turtles return to the porch each season to be fed a piece of fruit.

I’ve been helping my parents with some building projects.  From their imagination and sweat, they are calling into being a place that can welcome others, a place of celebration.  We have different approaches toward meeting the goal.  We’ve bickered and hurt each other feelings as we try to work together.

Maybe I bring city ways to getting things done—I want to work a timeline, not waste people’s time, and stay a step or two ahead.  It’s not clear if I am helpful or annoying.  Maybe both.

Nonetheless, I’ve arranged all the furniture upstairs to suit my sense of form and function. I recently bought a bookshelf and I’ve been eyeing the sales on papasan chairs.

My artwork, however, is still piled up on the table, waiting to be hung.

It’s just so hard to put a nail in the wall.

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The Treehouse

I was 17 when we moved into the house my parents now live in. They had been married 27 years and in all that time they had never owned a house. I grew up in rented places with delightful details like pink bathtubs and red carpet in my bedroom. I took pleasure in the fruit trees we were allowed to harvest in one house, and in the hot tub at another. But this house was different. Here we could paint the walls without asking (or even knock them down if we so chose). Here we could drive nails deep into studs without thinking about spackling them eventually.

My parents bought the house in the dead of winter, while I was at Tae Kwon Do class. I saw it after we had signed the papers, a fact I’ve never let them forget. But I too fell under the cozy spell of the house, sitting in the basement near the wood-burning stove. I began to see the potential in the bedroom which would become mine, the one with the bright yellow walls and the glossy hardwood floors. Even our dog seemed to like it.

Our new backyard was three times the size of the one we’d had at our rental. In the back corner, nestled in the 90 degree angle made by two neighbors’ fences, was a house high up in a large pine tree. It was made of wood and covered with pine needles, inside and out. Pieces of wood had been nailed to the tree, creating a makeshift ladder. My brother was 15, and he and his friends would play up in it for hours, developing and carrying out secret missions and daring escapes.

It wasn’t long before I started talking about having an office again. I’ve been writing almost since I could talk (my mother wrote down my dictated journal entries beginning when I was 4). I thought that if I had my own space, a room, a desk, plenty of office supplies, it would help me along on the path to creativity. I began to research garden sheds, dreaming aloud about how I would decorate one.

Some time had passed and my brother was no longer so attached to the tree house. It stood in the corner of the yard, high in the tree, silent and waiting. After talking about it for months, my parents suggested that I not purchase a shed, but use the structure I already had available. I went to the hardware store.

Friends came to help me paint. I covered the walls with a bright red color (chosen after some color Cara paintingpsychology research conducted with library books). When I rolled it on, it looked like wet blood. The floor was more challenging. I’d wanted black and white tiles, but we’d chosen to paint them instead. My parents helped me tape off the squares and we painstakingly painted them one by one.

I went to a salvage store and purchased old windows and hinges. My dad attached them to the holes in the treehouse and rigged them to swing open if I needed a little air. Next, I went to Target and bought sticky notes, lighting, a chair. (I inwardly thanked the former owners for hooking up electricity to the little house).

I bought my desk from a couple in the country at an estate sale. It was a light green and they were glad to see it go to a good home. I painted it black and my family lifted it, somehow, into the treehouse for me one day as a surprise. I laid down a rug for my feet and declared the space finished.

Cara's "office"I loved everything about my “office” except its reality. It was too cold to sit outside in Spokane much of the year. My fingers would get stiff and I’d wrap a blanket around me, but I had difficulty relaxing into times of creating. When it was warmer, the elevated office was unbearably hot. I would sweat through half an hour, trying to put two thoughts together, while worrying about the buzzing sounds coming from nearby wasps and yellow jackets. I am not an outdoorsy person.

Eventually, I abandoned my office, removing the furniture and equipment. I went away to college. There, I wrote not only for love, but for a grade. I curled up on the futon in the dorm room I shared with two other women, or caught a ride to Starbucks where I’d plug in my earphones. Sometimes I’d snag a room at the library or sit up in bed, typing away. I almost never wrote at my desk. I couldn’t get comfortable.

In my efforts to create the perfect place to write, over the years, I had failed to remember that I writeTreehouse best curled up on a couch, tucked into blankets, or in my queen-sized bed, a mug of tea next to me. I do my best to remove distractions and make myself comfortable, but I know the truth: when I’m held in thrall, I can write anywhere, and I do.