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The Blade and the Earth

Posted on by under Guest, Hope and Place

A courthouse is designed to provoke obedience. Everything from the unforgiving stone floors and stuffy silence to the polished rails and guards in their creaking leather belts demands order. And why shouldn’t it? It’s a place where justice is meted out. A place where disappointments like us went to be punished.

We were nervous before we stepped inside, and the cop who checked us in certainly didn’t help.

“Sir!” he barked at my husband. “You can’t bring that in here.”

We looked around, wondering what contraband he could possibly be carrying.

The guard sighed and pointed at the waist of my husband’s carefully pressed black suit pants. “Your knife, sir. No weapons are allowed in the building.”

Born and raised in the country, my husband carries a pocketknife everywhere he goes. It’s as much a part of his ensemble as a watch, wallet, and cell phone, and neither of us had even considered our destination that morning as we prepared for what promised to be one of the hardest days of our married life.

“I’m so sorry, sir,” he stammered, sliding it from his belt. “Can I leave it here with you?”

“Nope,” the guard replied. “We’re not allowed to keep personal items at the desk.”

There wasn’t time to make the long walk back to the parking garage, and we stared, genuinely flummoxed and more rattled than we had been when we arrived. But then my husband saw a stand near the door that held plastic umbrella bags. He marched toward it, ripped one from the peg, and headed back outside to the courtyard. I couldn’t help but follow.

img_6399Choosing the closest planter, he wrapped the bag around the knife, tied it securely, and then began to dig a hole in the moist earth between a row of freshly planted purple and white pansies and the concrete wall. Then he dropped the bag in the hole and filled it in.

When he stood, I saw his hands were dirty—as dirty as I felt.

For weeks, I’d known this day was coming. It had been inevitable ever since we discovered the condo we’d bought, along with hundreds of others, hadn’t been built to code. Despite tens of thousands of dollars spent on repairs, which more than doubled our mortgage, the place still wasn’t close to passing inspection. In a few months, our savings account was siphoned dry, and bill after bill slipped into “past due” status.

Rather than continue to throw money into what had become an 1,100-square-foot pit (with new carpet no less), we’d opted to file chapter 13 and cut the rope keeping the financial albatross around our necks. Now, I imagined everyone who looked at me saw a scarlet “B” on my chest.

There was something so final, so disheartening, about stashing his knife that I couldn’t help but sob. It was like he was burying everything we’d worked so hard for—hopes for home ownership and putting down roots. Of finally being able to paint a wall yellow or blue instead of sterile rental white. All of it was going into the earth with that blade.

The rest of the day passed in a florescent-lit haze. We entered the courtroom and numbly sat down next to our lawyer. And when the time came for us to officially declare our insolvency, we stood and locked hands—more grateful than ever for each other. Shame, heavy as it might be, sits a little easier on two shoulders.

As the judge droned on for what felt like hours, we waited, letting the waterfall of meaningless words fall over us. The entire time, I imagined I could still feel that dirt on our hands, ground into the whorls of fingers and the crooked lines of life and love.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I thought. From it we were made, and to it we shall return—all at once or one piece at a time.

After the papers were signed, we escaped into the sunlight of a perfect Florida afternoon, exhausted and looking for the closest bar—unsure what to do now that we were, for all intents and purposes, homeless. We were so desperate to leave, in fact, that we nearly forgot the knife, but my husband remembered and went back. It reemerged as clean and sharp as when it went in, and—though it didn’t feel so at the time—the same would be true of us after seven long, lean years.

I won’t lie. Being flat broke and without credit was rather close to the bone, but it also had a way of clarifying things. The finances were tight, but somehow, there was always enough. The few things we did have were enjoyed richly. My husband and I grew to love each other in truer and more meaningful ways, and each day, we found the answer to Jesus’ question “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” (Matt. 6:25) was a resounding yes.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Jamie A. Hughes“The Blade and the Earth” was written by Jamie A. Hughes. Jamie is a writer, editor, and unapologetic St. Louis Cardinals fanatic who currently lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband, two adopted sons, and a pair of needy cats. A former high school teacher, she now works as the managing editor of In Touch Magazine and is struck dumb by her good fortune. She blogs at tousledapostle.com and can be found on Twitter @tousledapostle. 

It all began on Hope Street

Posted on by under Hope and Place

Hope Street, 1998

I’m leaning over my daughter’s crib, daring to get my nose as close to her head as possible, in order to imbibe her baby fragrance.

Today, like any day with a two-month old, included its share of unhappy baby wails, new-mama exasperation, and waylaid plans. But since finding her thumb a week ago, my daughter has been a champion sleeper, granting some margin for gratitude, hope.

img_6032Heady with baby aura, I lower an ear, holding my breath so I can hear hers. It’s deep and slow, with a slight rattle in her throat. While listening, I’ve almost forgotten to breathe for myself, as if she could for both of us.

Straightening up, I take a long pull of oxygen that fills my body with a momentary energy. I marvel at the duplicity of motherhood. My daughter and I are always linked, but also separate. It’s a concept I’m just beginning to grasp—to grieve and also to welcome with a tinge of relief. The inner struggle of motherhood has already begun.

I gently place my hand on my baby’s silky head, fingers following the curve of her skull as if to cradle it, wondering what seeds lie sleeping in that head, waiting to unfurl and carry her from crib to bed and into the world.

My heart forms a wordless prayer—one that’s open-ended enough to remind me that my love and her autonomy are not mutually exclusive, not even now, while she depends on me for everything, my milk her only food.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Race Street, 2004

I’ve finished unpacking yet another box of kitchen miscellany, trying to find space in a half-sized kitchen for things I rarely use—a large funnel, a hard-boiled-egg slicer, a pastry cutter.

Trying to find room for the unessential seems to be a theme in my life as of late. Over the weekend, I moved into a duplex—half of a house, for half of a parenting team in possession of half of the books, furniture, and art.

Since the divorce, I feel less sad, but more overwhelmed. My two girls, just six and four, are so busy, full of thoughts and ideas, calls for help, emotions that require extra patience, consistency, and love, and I’m wasting time staring at the contents of my former kitchen, wondering if I’ll use a funnel in the next year.

Today, bedtime couldn’t have come soon enough. But now, two hours after singing one last song and flourishing one last “tickle-scratch” on each back, I miss them.

In their dim bedroom, I carefully step around boxes they were told to “unpack” after dinner. My earlier annoyance with the mess melts into understanding: Unpacking inspired play—happy reunions with toys they hadn’t seen for a week, opportunities to pretend being teachers and mamas who take on challenges, fix problems, and comfort hurts.

Standing by their bunk bed, taking in one sweet face then the other, I still feel the ache of missing them. Am I missing the babies and toddlers they were? Or is the missing in anticipation of the day these daughters, fully grown, will sleep under roofs other than mine?

I decide I’m missing the busy, silly, awake versions of my sleeping girls. And I’m tempted to wake them up, but I know better, so I kiss each girl’s temple and take myself to bed.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Oregon Street, 2011

Jason and I can’t keep our eyes open. So this is what it feels like to be old, we joke, setting down our books to move from the sofa up the stairs to bed.

For years we’ve been the last ones up each night at our house, but these days it’s a toss-up. Our oldest two girls are legitimate teenagers, at 15 and 13, with busy after-school schedules and stacks of homework crowding their evenings. Our youngest, at 11, is developing into a night owl—the one who’s forever begging to read “just one more chapter!”

On the landing at the top of the stairs, we begin our nighttime rounds, noting the knotted brow of our oldest, my stepdaughter, as she tackles advanced math, then calming the chatter of our middle-schooler, who somehow has several hours of life to update us on, even though we last talked less than an hour ago.

We gently scold the youngest for not turning off her light when we told her to, but night owls will be night owls. This is not our battle. I smooth her hair and hum the song I rocked her to each night as a baby.

In our own bed, Jason and I share a weary high five and a kiss before turning out our lights. We’ve completed another day of “doing our best” as parents, even though what’s “best” has become increasingly fuzzy.

All we know for sure is things are getting real. Before our eyes, all of the knowledge fragments we’ve dispensed along the way have become a collection of tools our children are ad-libbing with out in the world. Each bit of freedom and autonomy, while terrifying for us, is an opportunity for them to practice and learn. We can’t stop any of it—they’re already on their way.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Orchard Street, 2016

I set down my mug of rooibos, tucking a bookmark between pages so I can reach my phone, which just buzzed at me from the coffee table. It’s a text from my oldest daughter whose mind is fixed on the many plans she has for Thanksgiving break, her first week home since moving to college. Smiling, I thumb a response. She’s always had so many ideas and plans—they just keep getting bigger as she becomes more capable of making them happen on her own.

The oldest of our three is also off at college, pursuing a science degree and being a wise, steady support system for the students on her floor, where she serves as RA.

Only our youngest still occupies one of the bedrooms upstairs. She’s now in possession of a driver’s license, along with the new level of autonomy it brings. After years of playing taxi, I’m still surprised when she arrives home on her own from her favorite cafe, as she does now. Plopping next to me on the sofa, she pulls the edge of my afghan across her lap, offering her back for a tickle-scratch before bed.

Kissing my daughter’s head as she says goodnight, I realize it’s time for me to think about bed, too. Just one more chapter.

As I turn another page, my phone interrupts with another text, this time from the bedroom above me.

Are you super busy or could you come play with my hair for a couple of minutes? I can’t sleep. And I miss you.

I miss her, too, I think, setting down my book, mid-chapter. I miss them all—even if they’re not mine to hold back, just to encourage forward. Switching off the lamps, I climb the stairs to my baby girl’s room.

To Paris and Back

Posted on by under Iconic Place

We drive the long, dark distance from the countryside, deep into the heart of the city. It is 4:00am, and the roads are empty. Even the London streets are deserted, the shadow of our car revolving around us as we approach and pass the street lights, circling the roundabouts. We park our car, find our train, and fall asleep even before it pulls away from the platform.

We wake and sleep and wake and sleep while the train leaves the station and clatters over and under the London streets, into the English countryside. It ducks under the channel, sweeping faster and faster, emerging into France like a bullet. Telephone poles flash by in a blur. Condensation forms outside the windows, the drops swept away as quickly as they form.

The rails curve towards Paris, first the suburbs, and then the ancient city itself. Domes and spires rise to greet us. When we get off the train, we are overcome by the smells of the city: coffee and urine and baking bread and another train leaving. And another. Black smoke churns and follows us out into the early morning streets.

There is no quiet place and not a word of English. Following the trail laid before us by the magazine you read, we go from place to place, from patisserie to patisserie. Flaky croissants and bichon au citron line up inside bright displays alongside macarons and Mille-feuille. We cannot take a bite without moaning and rolling our eyes. We walk the cobblestones down vacant alleys, the sugar coursing through our veins. The sun is barely up.

We stroll into the square and along the river and disappear down into the Louvre. The Mona Lisa stares quietly, at us of all people, her gaze skimming the top of the crowd. This place is like another culture, an ancient civilization, and when we come back up from that land of oils and sculpture I’m surprised to see we still have cars. We still have airplanes. I had expected the world to revert back a thousand years.

downloadIn the heat of the afternoon we sit on a bench drinking bottled water, pulling apart a fresh baguette, watching people from all over the world. It is like Babel: the languages, the laughing, the confusion. People talk with their hands, pointing here and there, asking questions that go unanswered. It is a beautiful chaos.

The afternoon crawls onto our backs, slows us, weighs us down. We meander. We lie down in the grass across from Notre Dame and you fall asleep. I watch, your eyes closed, eyelids fluttering. The sky is blue. People wait in a line to enter the cathedral. Then, suddenly, it’s time, and we’re back on the sidewalk hailing a cab to La Gare du Nord with its sweeping face, it’s glaring glass. We’re back on the train, the countryside vanishing into night. We are under the channel once again, rising up into the London skyline, then under the streets.

We drive the long drive home, the highways emptying, the sky a splash of stars. Trees bend down to touch our car as we pull in the long lane. The high hedges whisper, “They are back. They are back. They are back.”

shawn bio YAH

Whistle Stop

Posted on by under Sound & Place

When I was seven, my family moved from California to Washington State. At that age, you don’t question why the palm trees are turning to evergreens, or why there is suddenly snow. You accept it. Sometimes I miss the days of taking the hand of change willingly and giving it a squeeze, already thinking about the fun in store for us together.

I’d always shared a room with my younger brother, but in the new house, we had our own rooms. Mine had red carpet and two closets. From time to time, I would rig one of them up as a cave or outer spaces, using my trusty tape recorder and a few well chosen props. Tights from the clothes bar were stalactites and I always included a flashlight for closer examination. Mostly though, I would count on my audience to picture the asteroid fields, or the underground rivers. Once ready, I would send my mom or brother into the closet, turn on the tape recorder and wait expectantly for their reactions. During the day, I loved the idea of a room all my own, with a lock on the door. Still, at night, I wanted someone to talk to, I hated being alone.

But, I was a big girl. I was old enough to have my own room. It was something prized by all of the little girls in the books I loved to read. It signaled that they were their own people, and as they grew up, more exciting things were going to start happening to them. In those days, everything was linear. I fully expected that I would go from my own room to becoming a babysitter, driving my own car, and spending evenings with a high school boyfriend who called on my landline and kissed me at the movies.

At night, I tried to focus on the plan. I needed to stay in bed, there was nothing to be scared of. The girls in my books didn’t get scared for no reason, they weren’t afraid to be alone in the dark. I couldn’t see my beautiful red carpet, or take comfort in my brother’s even breathing. The normally inaudible sound of the living room clock sounded ominous, and every creak signaled an intruder.

My fears were not helped by the fact that someone did break into that first Spokane house. We weren’t home at the time, but when we returned from the store and found the door open, the smell of cigarette smoke still hung in the air. It seemed perilously close to danger, to what I’d always feared would happen. My parents kept saying that they were thankful that the thief had only taken things, that we were all safe, but they took more than things, they took away my ability to whisper in the middle of the night: “Nothing bad will happen.” The red carpet did not stop calamity.

Whistle StopIn that house, we lived close to a set of train tracks. At first, I noticed every time they sounded their whistle, but after a while, it became part of the soundtrack of my life, so woven into the texture of my days that I would never have mentioned it. It would have been like mentioning that my eyes were green.

It was different at night. There were few sounds in our neighborhood, but I would strain to listen for an intruder or an animal. I contemplated which of my closets to hide in, should the worst happen. I wondered how expensive it would be to turn one of them into an elevator that could take me to the roof in times of trouble. Then a train would go by.

When the whistle danced into the night, it felt like a secret message for me. The blasts were long and shrill, sometimes they almost sounded hoarse. The tension in my chest would ease and I would start breathing normally again. No matter how fast my thoughts were running, they would slow, settling into a comfortable rhythm.

When we moved from that house, away from the train tracks, I worried about the quiet nights. What would I do in the new house, the new room, to combat my fear? I put on my pajamas and settled in to sleep, apprehensive. The whistle blew, more faintly, but I could still hear it. It filled my ears with an audible warmth. This whistle was lower, a closer cousin to a foghorn than my wooden train whistle. I still can’t tell you where the train tracks were near that house, but they were close enough. I fell asleep, lulled by the familiar sound in a new place.

Once I started treating my anxiety, my therapist and I quickly realized that I’m quick to jump to the worst case scenario. I wanted, I still want, to go back and comfort that little girl, but sometimes I’m not sure what I’d tell her. “I made it this far,” I could say. “I’m still scared sometimes.” I’ve learned that life isn’t linear, that the job and the boyfriend don’t follow having your own room. That sometimes the thing you feared the most happens, and you survive. I’ve learned that even if you pride yourself on being deeply logical, you can be calmed by something that has nothing to do with you, something that never promised to keep you safe. Even now, in bed with my lights out, when I hear a train whistle, the tension drains from my body. I accept that I am safe, and go to sleep.

cara YAH bio

Waking Up

Posted on by under Sound & Place

I am three, and I’m waking up from my afternoon nap in the right way: Slowly. Contentedly. In my own time and space.

I’m in no hurry to open my eyes. The bedroom is dim from the pulled curtains, anyway, and I’ve memorized every sight I would see from my place on the bottom bunk.

6259167128_a64b881939_bAn airplane flies overhead. In our house, below a well-traveled flight path to the airport, it’s a sound as common as a truck roaring by on our busy inner-city street. Whenever the house is quiet and I’m quiet, it seems there’s the sound of a plane somewhere in the sky.

The window is open in the bedroom I share with my brother, who, at almost-six, is too old for naps. I can hear the neighborhood kids playing outside. Laughter and shrieking, then protests, complaints.

Now the sound of a hose as more water is added to the plastic wading pool in the yard next door. I can picture the blue pool, the grass clippings floating on the glistening water.

There’s the voice of the bossiest girl, who is not the oldest but is the most sure of what she wants and how to get it. Just the tone of her voice conjures a snapshot of her hands on her hips, one hip jutted out to the side.  

My eyes are awake now, primed by scenes my ears have fashioned. I get up, my pigtails lopsided from their time on the pillow, and leave my bottom bunk to follow the sound of humming to my mother.

*    *    *    *    *

We lived on the ground floor of the house on Walnut Street until I was five. It was my first home. There are photographs to inform my visual sense of that place, but I can’t really claim them as memories. What I truly remember, from deep in some audio file my mind, are sounds.

Like the sound of my mom humming.

Our living space was small, making it easy for sounds to travel from one room to the next. My mom loves silence, but sometimes I think she loves it because it’s like a blank canvas—an open space for her to hum or whistle into as she folds laundry or chops vegetables. In the house on Walnut Street, her humming was my homing beacon as I navigated the waters between independence and security.

Sometimes upon waking from a nap I could hear my grandmother’s musical voice coming from the kitchen—a one-way, joyful conversation that meant an “audio letter” had arrived in that day’s mail. With my grandparents far away in California and long distance phone rates too costly for either household’s budget, my mom and grandma regularly recorded newsy updates on small, table-top cassette players. The tapes were mailed back and forth in padded manila envelopes.

If Mom was recording a letter to Grandma rather than listening to one, she would announce my appearance into the small microphone, inviting me to talk. “Oh, here’s Krissy! She just woke up from her nap. Krissy, say hi to Grandma and Grandpa! Tell them what kind of cookies we baked this morning.”

My dad’s arrival home each evening was inevitably announced through the stereo speakers: the pop-and-crackle of the needle touching an album. When Dad was home, there was always music playing. Aaron Copeland, Miles Davis, Stephen Sondheim, Bela Bartok, the Beatles, Peter, Paul & Mary—their electrifying, silky, surprising, earthy, and complex notes were the soundtrack of my childhood (the volume always a bit too high for my mom’s taste).

During warmer months, the sounds in our home mingled with the sounds of the world outside. In 1970s Michigan, no one had air conditioning—certainly not those of us renting old houses divided into duplexes in the city’s core. We opened windows, turned on noisy box fans, and spent as much time as possible playing outside with water, or sitting on shady stoops. Private lives were aired to the neighborhood: Everyone’s music and arguments, their clattering pots and pans and crying babies, were heard alongside the passing boom of car stereos, loud mufflers, and barking dogs.

After being tucked into my bottom bunk each night, the sounds of Walnut Street played on, each sound telling me a story. Some were as comforting and present as the hum of my mom’s sewing machine on the kitchen table; others were as mysterious and distant as another plane in the night sky, its seats filled with strangers traveling who knows where. 

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Kristin bio YAH

Rooted to Rise

Posted on by under Reclaiming Place

Maybe it’s because I moved a lot as a kid–I’m talking five cities in my first decade. Maybe it’s because I’m an only child, and I’ve learned to expect constant entertainment. Maybe expiring quickly is just a character flaw: I seek serendipity over stability, whimsy over work, daydreams over doldrums.

But to say I fit the millennial stereotype of always going, never staying wouldn’t do justice to my DNA–I’m a master of zipping through zip codes. So it probably won’t surprise you that after ten years in Minneapolis, a city I love (with one tiny hiccup of a detour in Texas), I up and left. Two months ago, my family and I made a cross-country move for my dream job in a city that just happens to be somehow warmer and cheaper than Minnesota. But let’s not talk about why I left or where I went. I want to talk about staying, because that’s where the real story is.

People like me are good at leaving; the “let’s get up and go while we can/you only live once/Minneapolis will still be here when I get back” comes a little too easily. The the real risk is in the staying. So, in varying degrees, I had been plotting this move for years. First, it was Seattle, where my in-laws moved after I got married. Next, it was San Francisco and Austin, where our good friends and good coffee lived. I even considered a jaunt over to small-town Wisconsin, where I grew up, with student-loan payoff as an excuse. Really, whatever city looked good on Instagram that day was the next destination.

My unstable relationship to place is no surprise to me, since historically, the same has been true of my human relationships. But through the confines of marriage and mothering, I’ve learned a few things about staying, and more than that, about loving. Even when it takes work.

As a new mom, I haphazardly resigned to the slight possibility of postponing my whimsy in favor of offering my son a stable childhood (he’s lucky, right?). So we found a house on a street that felt like Narnia. We joined a church community that felt like home. We got to know the servers at our neighborhood restaurants. Little by little, year by year for almost three years, I grew some roots. I learned how to have a home.

Finally, I had let a city romance me, and like any love does, it messed up all my paradigms. What was once a launching pad for my future adventures became a home. Nights down the street at Tracy’s Saloon with a baby in one arm and a margarita in the other became my upgraded version of excitement. A quick jaunt to Northeast Minneapolis became a little escape when I needed a change of scenery. Baristas at Peace Coffee who knew my name and my order added an exciting sense of rhythm to my week. Familiar became my new normal, and I kind of loved it.

15390947801_a764a2bb13_oSo when I was offered a writing job across the country, I knew what I needed to do. I didn’t wrestle with the same doubts as I once did. I said yes to a life change that would affect me and my family profoundly. Because moving wasn’t about fixing my life anymore. It wasn’t about my next round of entertainment. It wasn’t about running away. Because really, how could I have run away from home when I had never let myself have a home in the first place?

Minneapolis, I’ve left you, but you will forever be my home and my soft place to land. My backdrop for finding out, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, that the best kind of adventure isn’t uprooting, but staying put and learning to love something and let it love you. And most of all, you’ll always be the soil where I grew into the brightest, most beautiful version of myself–because without roots, what flower can blossom?

* * * * *

aw9EpOYxNtQ_5wD5vr8XWXzPa6Iro_jnVEzyv2-XODAAshley Abramson’s natural habitat is any combination of words and people. By day, she crafts content for a creative agency, and by night, she writes stories for blogs like Huffington Post and RELEVANT. She, her husband, and their toddler son make their home in Redding, CA, but you can find her online at ashleyabramson.com.

Flower photo by Halocastle in Creative Commons

 

At Home With My Mom

Posted on by under Guest, Reclaiming Place

I spent a few days back home recently. At my mom’s house in a suburb outside of Houston. I’ve actually never lived there. Not in that house, not on that street or in that town.

DSCN6768.JPGI’ve never scaled those walls in the hallway. The back bedroom doesn’t have two different styles of wallpaper. The newer one from my high school years; a strip of the older wallpaper, from before the basement fire, in the closet still. The cement on the back porch doesn’t have my younger handprint engraved in it. The familiar items in the kitchen aren’t all in their right spot exactly. I mean, I can still find the sugar and flour in their Tupperware canisters to the right of the stove. The notebook, pens and scissors still have their exact spot so you can always find one when needed. But the cereal is now kept in the pantry closet, not in the cabinet above the dishwasher.

It’s a little unsettling seeing the stuff from my childhood in another setting.

Even though I’ve only frequented the suburbs of Houston in my adult years, I do have my list of favorite places to eat when I visit. Of course, it’s not the Hy-Vee grocery on the edge of my hometown where there’s a tenderloin sandwich special on Tuesdays. Or the Chinese buffet that makes the best American-style chicken strips because my friend’s dad, who owns the restaurant building, taught the owners how. Or the new donut shop that opened recently. I frequent all of these when we go back to spend time with extended family still there.

We have our list though. My favorites in her new town don’t hold the childhood memories that I have of that small town in rural Missouri. But they’re new memories I’m making with my mom.

We were sitting in her living room one afternoon and I mentioned how at home I felt in that moment. She reacted with great surprise. In a shaky voice, she said, “Really? Because it always makes me feel bad that we can’t meet up at the old home place. I never imagined leaving there.” My mom grew up in a town so small it didn’t even have one stoplight. She married young and knew no greater joy than being a wife and raising a family. In that one statement, she expressed her ongoing incredulity at where life had taken her.

When Dad died suddenly in 2006, everything changed. Actually, things had been changing years before that. Divorce always changes things. But when Dad passed away and we uncovered the debt he’d been incurring, it became clear pretty quickly that the family property outside of my hometown would need to be sold. Mom already lived in town by then but I think we’d all thought the property would ultimately be our gathering place. Even though my brother and I lived in other states. Even though my mom had left behind her lifelong dreams some time ago along with the house they had built together.

I think a part of her never forgave herself for walking away from it all. She really had no choice. We understood that. But the heart always wonders.

“Mom,” I said. “Since the divorce you’ve lived in a few different places. They’ve all felt like home to me because you’re there. When I visit, my heart knows I’m going to see my mom.”

There will always be a part of me that wishes my mom still lived in the little ranch house on Route 4. I’d enjoy watching my daughter set up a picnic under one of the trees in the front yard. We planted them in the 70‘ so they’re probably mature by now. It would give me endless pleasure to set out walking on the dirt road of my childhood, three generations across. We’d take a walk to the old Methodist church, although its doors are closed for good now. On the way back, maybe we’d swing by the cemetery and have a short visit with dad. But it wasn’t meant to be.

Life takes us so many places. I’ve learned this along the way. Wherever it takes mom, my heart will find a home there.

11923208_10206213051718939_6918748677159137139_n-3My name is Traci. I live in southwest Michigan, somewhere in a triangular section connecting Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids with all things Lake Michigan. My husband and I parent one daughter. We have dogs, cats, pigs and chickens. Their number is always changing, as farm animal counts tend to do. I enjoy watching sports, reading, cooking and all things Bible study. I am a writer.  When I first started blogging, I wondered about what unique voice I could bring. I’ve landed on this one line: A country girl goes to church.

Pretending that Nothing has Changed

Posted on by under Reclaiming Place

I married a beautiful woman and we moved away, across state lines and  dark oceans and into new skin. Ten years passed—ten years of having children and getting lost and finding ourselves over and over again. After those ten years passed, we moved back. We moved home.

I was introduced to home when I was six years old and my family moved from the scorching, dusty heat of Laredo, Texas, back to the cold, wintry farmland of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where my ancestors had farmed and lived for hundreds of years before me. It was December, and the sky was low. The slate grayness of it scraped the tops of the rounded silos and tugged on the rooster weather vane standing watch at the peak of the tallest barn.

That was the year I learned what a cousin was, and how to tie my skates together so that I could hike through deep snow all the way to the frozen pond. That was the year my father taught me how to ride a bike by letting me drift over the steep bank in the front yard, where two tall oak trees watched over my shoulder. That was the year I learned how to put a wriggling worm on a small hook and cast it into the creek without snagging the low branches.

That was where I learned a place can feel as familiar as the wrinkled hand of your first child the moment they’re born. You can know a place before you even live there.IMG_1034

I’ve wondered for years now how that can happen.

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Not long after returning to these familiar back roads and broken road signs, still not fixed or set straight, I decided I wanted to take my children to the creek that runs behind the old church, the one across the street from the farm where I grew up. It was a small, brick, steepled church with a parking lot full of fool’s gold that I had, once upon a time, pried from the macadam with an old dime.

So we drove there, and as we drove, I told them all the old stories about what made the loud breathing sounds in the deep shadows of the barns, and what flashed just out of sight in the empty other half of the farmhouse, and how the cemetery beside the church where we played hide-and-seek shifted and sighed, and how we always ran home scared of ourselves.

Some things had changed. The two old oak trees were gone. The church parking lot was newly paved and painted with fresh white lines, and other trees had been taken away. We slid down the steep bank behind the church and I realized the field along the creek, the one that used to be full of grazing cattle, now stood tall with late-summer corn, seven feet high and staring at us. The creek moved slower, as if old age had mellowed it.

But other things were there waiting to be reclaimed. The old tree, for one—the same one that used to steal our fish hooks—stood with its hands outstretched. The smell of the mud. The snagging tug of a small fish on the line, and the way it gasped for breath while we carefully removed the hook, the way it paused in the shallows, elated at this chance at new life. The way the time passed, slow and heavy in the heat.

It is a relief to me, and it is a sorrow, the way these places wait for us to come back, the way they welcome us as if nothing important has been lost. And we go about our business, trying not to look directly at the empty space that once held a crucial thing: an old oak tree, or a fishing buddy.

I tell my children to cast in the line one last time. I fix my stare on the small plastic bobber, and I pretend that nothing has changed.

shawn bio YAH

An Unmatched Life

Posted on by under Mess & Place

At 15, I read in a home décor magazine that you were only supposed to fill things two-thirds full in order for it to look neat and orderly. So when I got my new bedroom at 16, a room I helped build on to the house, I intentionally left some of the walls and closet shelf space empty to try and create that feel.

Once the room was finished, I picked a blue-floral bedspread and curtains from the J.C. Penney catalog and took a pillowcase to Home Depot to have the color matched. I sponged the gray-blue paint onto the baseboard and molding before we nailed it to the walls.

I was trying to keep it all together, I think. Trying to make it right. I am the child of a parent with chronic mental and physical illnesses. As a child, that meant taking on the responsibility of taking care. I wanted things stable and orderly and, above all, correct.

For a few years before I moved to college my junior year, those empty spaces and coordinating color scheme were a retreat. The aesthetics calmed and centered me.

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bedroom

My first apartment

After landing a full-time job after college, I moved into my first all-my-own apartment. I dove into decorating it just the way I wanted. Things matched less, but they still coordinated. I bought sofas and curtains, lamps and end tables brand-new from the store. I wanted it decorated and soon. I bought fabric and made my own upholstered headboard and hunted down antique picture frames for the walls of my bedroom.  I took a page from an interior design magazine and recreated a wall collage behind my dining room table.

When Christmas came, I bought new decorations that sparkled and shone in perfect complement to my décor.

It was common for me to lock myself in my apartment from the time I got home from work on Friday until I left for work on Monday. “Introvert re-charge,” I would say. And sometimes that is needed. But in truth, it was easier to just stay in, not interact with anyone, and piddle away on some new home décor project. I even started a short-lived blog full of recipes and decorating tips.

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When I was 29, I moved into graduate on-campus housing, complete with an R.A. and roommates. The apartments were built in the 1930s and, aside from the random rules that come with campus housing, I rather enjoyed the cozy wood floors and the old bathroom mirror with the flower scroll etched across the glass.

Perhaps the thing I was most nervous about as I prepared to move to grad school was that my home would feel like a dorm. That I would feel like a kid. I was afraid of ugly furniture and plastic storage bins and cramped spaces. I was afraid it was all going to feel like a mess.

And things didn’t match—except for the industrial, boxy, bedroom furniture. My bedspread was black and white, my roommate’s was bright neon colors. The bathroom linen closet was stocked with a haphazard collection of multi-colored towels in various states of wear. The empty wall of the small galley kitchen was a jigsaw puzzle of mismatched shelves holding extra dishes and cookbooks and pantry staples. Every third of the bedroom walls were lined with furniture. Desk, dresser, bed, repeat. Shelves were stuffed full of textbooks and binders and picture frames of family and friends in other states. There was no money to spend on new, matching furniture. There was too little space for all of my things.

Yet, that apartment was home to one of my most well-lived years. There was nothing more satisfying than to find the sink full of mismatched coffee mugs, evidence of another night of friends studying together or talking.

Mismatched Dinner Table

An Easter table

On Sunday evenings, friends and neighbors gathered and we made dinner. One person would cook, filling the small sink of the small kitchen with pans and cutting boards and wooden spoons.Then we’d eat—mismatched chairs crowded around a table with mismatched glasses in front of matching plates, the thin blue and white Corelle dishes I had inherited from my grandmother.  

As the year went on, dining together just became a habit, no matter the meal.  We had a French toast feast as the snow piled deep outside. On the days it never stopped raining, there was a crock pot of soup ready and warm.  We decided JFK’s Birthday needed celebrating, so we researched and recreated his favorite meal.  One warm night, we picked up a few “gourmet” ingredients from the grocery store, put on a record of classical music, opened all the windows, and laughed and talked and ate as the cross breeze drifted through our impromptu dinner party in that mismatched, unrefined, no-color-palette home.  

That year, we managed to live life together instead of just being roommates or neighbors. It happened with overcrowded shelves and walls and it never once felt like a mess.

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Nicole bio YAH

The secret lives of messes

Posted on by under Mess & Place

Even before our waiter asks how he should split the bill, I can feel him eyeing us with each visit to our table—trying to suss out our relationships to one another. Our teenage girls had arrived at the restaurant with me and my husband; the four of us were seated at our table for seven about five or ten minutes before the girls’ dad, stepmom, and preschool-aged half brother joined us.

After our plates are cleared, my eldest daughter, whose birthday we’re celebrating, rests her head on her dad’s shoulder as I take a few photos of them, and my husband entertains the little guy, who is blonde like his big half-sisters. I lean toward my girls’ stepmom, who is sitting on my left, to show her the sweetest of the photos I’ve just taken. We “Awww…” together at the expression on the face of this girl we both mother.Version 2

“How would you like the check?” our server asks, his eyes darting around, not sure who exactly to address.

I look at my ex-husband and hesitate—we’ve been known to not gravitate toward the same answers to life’s questions.

“Should we each pay for one of the girls or just split it down the middle?”

“Down the middle seems easiest,” he replies.

When you’re co-parenting and blending families, easiest—when it’s available—is always the right choice.

*   *   *   *   *

The real mess of divorce starts long before the divorce. Emotions become frayed and tangled, territories that used to be shared are sloppily divided and staked, and any path forward that once seemed clear becomes so overgrown with weeds and briars it can hardly be called a path.

Even before the decision is made that one of you has to go, the emotional seed of the mess begins sending out physical roots that can trip you up. But it’s when you actually begin dividing household items—pulling all the cooking utensils out of drawers and spreading them on the counter, attempting to make sure each person has a fairly complete set of tools to see them through the cooking of a meal—that the mess becomes tangible. It can’t be ignored.

There it is, all laid out there on the table before you—every drawer and cupboard emptied, each item evaluated, falling somewhere on the broad spectrum of worth: meaningful, useful, expensive, replaceable, and I-didn’t-even-remember-we-had-that. The process is repeated again and again, room by room. Now every book and CD you jointly own is spread across the living room rug. Then the artwork takes its turn and is divvied up.

Even after he has packed up and moved his share to an apartment he is renting, even after my things have been put away, I’m still faced with all of the things he didn’t bother taking but I don’t want, either.

What I do want is a Dumpster in the driveway. What could feel more decisive and freeing than filling a receptacle big enough to contain all your junk—literal and figurative? Because I realize part of my longing for a Dumpster stems from a desire to clear my life of certain memories and regrets, along with the boxes of odd books and knick-knacks my husband had a habit of picking up at garage sales, thinking they might one day be useful for something.

*   *   *   *   *

A decade later, I know there’s more to a mess than what meets the eye.

IMG_6029The pile of shoes perpetually cluttering our front entryway tells of a home where people feel welcomed and comfortable, of teenagers and their friends coming and going, of volleyball games and dog-walking in the rain.

Clothes all over the bed represent progress—they’re no longer stinky and stained, stuffed in the hamper, they’re clean and fresh, waiting to be folded. Soon enough they will make it to their rightful places in drawers and on hangers, and our bed will be ready to receive us at the end of a long day.

The more cluttered the garage gets with bags of leaves, the cleaner the yard is. It feels like a trade-off in the moment, but each time I navigate around the bags on my way through the garage, they speak of muscle-work done in fresh air, and multiple sets of hands making progress before the sun goes down.

And inside our front door, not far from the perpetual pile of shoes, hangs a painting my ex-husband made of our first house. It still has a place in my home today—not because he painted it or because it was our house, but because he is my daughters’ dad, and it was their first house. The painting hangs where it can help us acknowledge and honor a piece of our past.

Sometimes, I’ve learned, we get to decide what will be messy and what won’t—even without the help of a Dumpster.

Kristin bio YAH