Visiting With Ghosts

About once a month, I wish that I could revisit a place from my past. It’s not always the same place (though some are recurring), but my terms are always the same: I want to be alone and undisturbed. I want to be able to look around to my heart’s content, and I want it to be exactly as it was when I was there.

I’m not sure what I think this would solve, exactly. I’m not sure what I would gain by sitting again at the bar of a restaurant, closed for the season, where I ate several breakfasts and dinners with a boy I once knew, who worked there when it was open. I remember the way he made coffee with a practiced, professional hand, and how we cooked together in the industrial kitchen in bare feet.

I spent one day there, alone, meeting food writing deadlines. Autumn sun flooded the floor where tables and chairs usually would have been. If I close my eyes, I can still remember how strange it was to be in a restaurant which wasn’t fulfilling its purpose, as if I were living in a post-rapture world and businesses were no longer relevant.

When that boy moved out of the country a few weeks later, he took the keys to that restaurant with him. I know that if I were to go back, it would not be to the same place where we danced to “Summertime Sadness” in the dark, or watched “You’ve Got Mail” together on Halloween. “That’s my favorite movie,” he had told me. I believed him.

Then, there’s a triplex in a small college town south of Spokane where my ex-boyfriend used to live. Floaty, grey sheers hung on his windows and the frozen early spring light filtered in during the day as I sat on the couch. Sometimes I would drive the hour and a half to spend a day off with him; we would sit together, enjoying our closeness. On those visits, I would arrive before he finished with work. He left the door unlocked for me, and I would lock it behind me immediately, the difference between my San Diego upbringing and his in rural Idaho.

From his window, I could see the local grocery store. Sometimes I would walk over and buy vegetables or salad dressing. He always had plenty of frozen things, chicken, beef, and vegetables, but I was the one who bought and roasted asparagus, quartered brussels sprouts, or sautéed mushrooms in butter.

I spent many hours in that three story house waiting for him to get home. I’m not sure why it still haunts me. In the afternoons there was a silence about it that reminded me of nap times when I used to babysit. I kept an ear out the way I listened for a child who might be stirring. I watched out the window for his return, tuning my ear to the sound of his truck.

Most often though, I find myself mentally walking the halls of my mother’s mother’s house, the one she sold quite a few years ago. Before I even get inside, there is the fragrance of gardenia along the path. There is a bush where I hid a Lindt truffle from my grandmother’s jar, hoping that it would be there for my next visit (it wasn’t). The lawn is split into two levels by a rock wall where we sat to let our sparklers burn out safely every fourth of July.

Inside, I step carefully into the marble-floored entry, remembering how hard it could be in an unexpected fall. I pause in the living room for a moment, remembering the year all of my cousins got gymnastics Barbies and we twirled them all over that floor. Upstairs, I run straight to the Tulip room, so named for my grandmother’s favorite flower and all of the tulip decor, mostly pink. This was where I slept when I visited and where she kept all the toys.

Across the way is the yellow bathroom where I steeped in oatmeal baths during my chicken pox and brushed my teeth with bright blue bath salts the color of my Crest gel.

Downstairs there is a den, beneath the kitchen where the food rested expectantly on holidays, ready to be heaped onto plates. I can’t quite remember how it worked, but I know that there was a bar. That was where my grandparents kept the biscuits for Jebby, their faithful dog, who patiently accepted one from each of the six grandchildren.

That den was where my Poppa, my mom’s dad, introduced me to Indiana Jones and Star Wars in those tender years we shared before he passed away, followed soon after by Jebby. If I pause in this section of the house and squeeze my eyes tight, I can hear the splashes from the waterslide into the pool just through the sliding glass door, and the echoes of a hollow ball meeting paddles and a table, down the hall in the garage where the coordinated are playing ping pong. Any moment now my Poppa will wrap an arm around my shoulder and ask if he can make me a drink. I guess, maybe, when I revisit a place, I don’t always want to be alone.  

Where the Heart Was

Home is the grit and gray of streets and parking lots and the widest freeway in the world. It’s being glad for a commuter train, so you can read while you sit in traffic. It’s the surprise of one of the largest urban parks in the United States, offering green respite. It’s watching the trails in that park erode,  years of play degrading into memory.

In the fall, after 32-and-a-half years in my hometown, I left in a rented truck with husband, dogs, bicycles, and a few scraps more, for a 2500-mile move to the north.

Here in this place, everything is different. Things I thought I knew slipped away when I wasn’t looking.

This place is beautiful. I ride my bike from the house to views that evoke the word ‘pastoral’: cornfields and rolling green hills and a giant, weathered white barn etched against an enormous blue sky, wrinkled mountains lining the eastern horizon.

This place is about as diverse as vanilla ice cream, and as sticky-sweet. When I travel through a nearby metropolis, I get harassed the moment I step off the train: ah, the anonymity of the city. It’s not that I miss being cat-called. But in the way that a survivor of abuse places herself in abusive relationships, I suppose the familiar–even the unpleasant familiar–offers some brand of comfort. I didn’t know I missed the sound of sirens til I heard one and noticed how odd it sounded.

In the winter, 936774_10201102501273563_1510282701_nI traveled back south, to revisit places and people I know, love, and miss. Already home was a place I could not access, although I was comforted by a Southern drawl, a Cajun twang, an East Texas pacing of speech. The molasses air felt like a hug. I swallowed my pride, and told the loved ones I’d abandoned that I had not found eternal happiness in committing this crime against home.

Home is eating out: Mexican or Cajun or Greek or breakfast-all-day or Italian or Indian or Turkish or Vietnamese or sushi or Jamaican or burgers or dirt-cheap, clean, enormous oysters on the half-shell served with a smile and an ice-cold glass bottle of Tecate. Home is hearing many languages, and bilingual street signs, and the good and bad of smelling everybody else’s life and toil on mass transit. Home is people smiling on the sidewalks and saying “excuse me” when you step out of their way, or “thank you” if you hold the door. It’s being asked for change.

In the spring, I reversed direction, to husband and dogs in the north, entering again a vast, coldly beautiful loneliness. “What have I done?” I thought, as I climbed into our new bed in this place. “I’ve killed ‘home’ forever.”

Home is not pretty. It is somber: concrete and steel, cars and smog, flatness and pavement. It is where a friend used the line, “hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire,” as we mountain biked in all seasons and the temperature hit three digits in the shade before humidity factored in. But858353_10200727243412351_1337074395_o there was what I called urban scenery: railroad trestles along a bayou with a junkyard in the midground, viewed from a grassy path. Definitely a different kind of picturesque, but a memorable picture nonetheless.

In the summer, I remembered home: thick, damp, oven-like air and open, friendly faces on the street, a cacophony of smells–tortillas cooking, Indian spices, garbage, diesel fuel, body odor, stale beer–and multitude of skin tones. Memories as terribly distant as they were deeply felt. I felt tattooed by Houston, as I have been tattooed in Houston, and am tattooed with Houston’s skyline and the shape of the state of Texas. I can’t reach home, even when I’ve had the outline of it permanently inserted under my skin.

Here, the house we inhabit is imperfect, as all houses are. I have been here long enough now to mostly know which light switch does what. Knowing how to make the light shine, for eating, reading, or just dressing myself, has got to be an important step on the journey toward making a home.

It is fall again.

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Julia is a book reviewer, librarian, beer drinker, dog lover, mountain biker and native Texan now residing in Bellingham, Washington. She thinks a lot about concepts of place and home. Her favorite color is green.

 

When Your Bedroom Disappears

Days before, I found the phone number by searching the address on the Internet. A young woman answered, listened, and graciously agreed to give us a tour of our childhood home.

When the day arrives, my older sister and I drive familiar roads in a rental car. We’ve traveled from opposite sides of the country to this point in Illinois; she from Massachusetts, me from Colorado. Park Ridge is one big suburban grid of long, mature tree-lined streets and sidewalks on the northwest edge of Chicago. I roll down the window and whiff the familiar aroma of fresh cut grass mixed with airplane exhaust from nearby O’Hare Airport. It is the smell of roots and flight.

The rental car engine goes quiet by the curb in front of the two story brick bungalow at 704 South Crescent Avenue. Our parents raised the four of us kids here; three sisters and a brother. This was the address on all official forms and most letters addressed to me from 1973 to 1989; from Gerald Ford to George H.W. Bush.

We ring the doorbell on schedule, and a young, upper-class mom answers the door, smiles, and invites us in. We politely walk through renovated rooms where I am tossed between a sense of happy familiarity and disorienting displacement.

We walk through room upon room of fresh paint and updated designs: The front entry minus the cuckoo clock, the living room minus the teal carpet and large flowery wallpaper, the front sitting room minus the TV and plaid couch, the upstairs plus air conditioning, the kitchen plus new appliances and a stunning renovation. We linger in the kitchen and I notice the one big minus. They knocked out this wall, she points and explains, we wanted to make the whole space bigger. That wall once divided the kitchen from my bedroom. Every morning I used to lay in my bed on the other side of that wall, listening to my mom’s early morning WMBI radio programs and dishwasher clatter.

music-box-ballerinaNow the wall has disappeared and my bedroom evaporated entirely, replaced by functional upgrades and a redesigned floor plan. I lost the container that had been crammed full of my girlish years,

the hanging macramé plant holders,

clouds of Love’s Baby Soft Jasmin’ perfume,

the sound of tiny nocturnal pet hamster feet running on a creaking wheel,

the wind-up jewelry box ballerina spinning in front of a tiny mirror,

the puffy pink gingham quilt my mom sewed,

and the way I always slept beneath it facing the door,

the muted bass of bands like Boston booming from my brother’s bedroom,

a closet full of off-limits clothes my little sister borrowed anyways,

that one spot on the floor by the cast iron radiator where I sobbed over boys that I loved,

a secret drawer full of seashells and saved letters,

midnight poetry taped to my window.

Gone. The inner sanctum of my childhood entirely dematerialized.

Why do I feel so sad? It’s just a room, I say to my sister as we drive away. She nods. Gets it. Siblings hold pieces of each other’s’ history.

We head out of town and curve through neighborhood streets, past the red and white marquis of the Pickwick Theater and the stadium lights at Maine South High School. By that park swing, I feel the sway and twirl of the six-year-old version of myself. In that parking lot by the high school band door, I feel the wild heartbeat rush of my first kiss; under that one elm tree, the between-two-worlds melancholy of twenty-something. And somewhere around the corner on my way back home, I find the room of my childhood again.

Rooms are the containers that hold the past, for good or ill. They are the spaces that store roots and fragments of who we were, the lives we have lived. Writer, author, Frederick Buechner describes it this way:

“But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” *

Sometimes my little sister and I end our texts or emails with the first line from Harry Connick’s song, “Forever, for Now.” “Meet me on the corner of close and soon,” we write. Then, “oxox” we sign off. Over the years, we’ve come to shorthand it. “Meet me,” we say and understand in a way only siblings can.

Meet me.

Meet me in the place with no address.

Meet me where the remnants of a past still live in pieces and fragments unclaimed, shared by few, in a room no longer contained by walls.

The name of the room is Remember.

* Quoted: Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (1992)

*   *   *   *   *

unnamed-2“When Your Bedroom Disappears” is by Kelley J. Leigh. Kelley is a mid-life writer and mom of four sons.  Kelley’s home base is a quirky little mountain town in Colorado where she writes openly about intimacy issues and recovery in marriage and faith. Find her over at www.kelleyjleigh.com and on Twitter: twitter.com/KelleyJLeigh

 

 

Ink, Blood, and Tears

I got off the bus at my new school and saw the parking lot filled with cars. This was nothing like my  former crowded, noisy, urban Philadelphia high school with the dark stairwells and constant police presence. I’d never seen so many Ford Tauruses in my life. Some even had monograms on the doors. I didn’t even have a bike. I had a skateboard. A skateboard. I couldn’t even do an ollie, but for me, my board was transportation. It had worked in the city.

Out in the suburbs, I’d tried to skate to the mall but only got about four blocks away when I encountered a county road. With a 55 mph speed limit. I tried for about 15 minutes before I gave up. This was a real-life game of Frogger I was not willing to play.

I was 17 and had lost too many places to count: foster homes, schools, churches, playgrounds. But this was the worst so far. I’d made this move alone. Three weeks before, I’d had a family, my own room, my chair at the dinner table, my hook on the coat rack. But when they discovered I was cutting, they sent me to the hospital. My foster family of 7 years felt they couldn’t handle me anymore, a social worker told me. I wasn’t going back. My parents couldn’t even tell me themselves. They’d gone on vacation.

I was too old to tammyperlheaderpicplace, and I was going to age out of the system soon, so I was assigned a bed in a Supervised Independent Living facility managed by the children’s home handling my case. It was in a suburb of Philadelphia, an apartment with a roommate and a Residential Adviser. I was supposed to be learning life skills like banking, shopping, getting a job, making a budget, cooking for myself, doing my own laundry. I wasn’t great at most of those.

You’d think I would’ve reveled in this staged independence, but I didn’t. This was just another address I wouldn’t even have for a full year, and it felt like a punishment after my psych stay. I was removed from the home I’d lived in for middle school and junior high and taken from the city I loved. I would spend my senior year of high school, and my last year as a child, with strangers.

One afternoon a week I took the R2 train into Philadelphia for my counseling appointment. I don’t remember the building or the therapist. What I do remember is wandering the streets of Old City after my appointment, getting a soft pretzel and Pennsylvania Dutch birch beer at Wawa and just walking.

I would head toward the Delaware River and pass through Christ Church Burial Ground at 5th and Arch, where Benjamin Franklin and four other signers of the Declaration of Independence were buried. It was usually deserted except for tourists throwing pennies on Franklin’s grave for good luck. The earliest legible marker is from 1723. It was the perfect place for a suicidal teenager to spend hours alone. My time there didn’t make me want to die, in fact, it had the opposite effect. I felt at home there, comforted by a sense of permanence and presence.

I didn’t have much in the way of family or stability or even a future, but I had cobblestone streets, colonial flags, comforting row homes, historic markers, marble stoops with ornate cast-iron boot scrapers and hitching posts. And it wasn’t just the beauty I saw that made it home, it was the ugliness too. The empty lots, abandoned houses, broken windows, Free Mumia graffiti, and the box cities under the highway were the landscape of my heart. The soundtrack that sung in my head was the rumbling, shrieking el trains and the sparking, clattering trolleys. I claimed it for myself and it was all mine. Even Ramona Africa and the houses firebombed by Mayor Goode during the MOVE tragedy, consuming almost 4 city blocks, killing 11 people, and leaving 240 people homeless. They became a part of me, seared into my brain by flaming buildings seen on a cast-off motel TV with a tuning knob.

What little estranged family I have left in Philadelphia decreases by the year, but it’s not the people that draw my thoughts and my heart there. It’s the land–baptized by Franklin’s printing ink, revolutionary blood, and my own tears.

And William Penn in the distance, watching over it all. He prayed for his city to be preserved from those who would “abuse and defile thee, that you mayest be kept from the evil that would overwhelm, that thy children may be blest of the Lord.

Tammy Punnamed (1)erlmutter writes about unabridged life, fragmented faith, and investing in the mess at her blog Raggle-Taggle. She is the founder of The Mudroom, a collaborative blog making roo
m in the mess. Tammy writes flash memoir, personal essay, and poetry, leads writing groups, and preaches on occasion. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Mike, and daughter, Phoenix, who has been called “the most interesting girl in the world.” She is the force behind Tammy’s blog series: “
Life Along the Spectrum: Weird and Wondrous Tales of Everyday Autism.”

 

Photo is by Michael Perlmutter.

Leaving Home {part one}

I remember the emptiness of the moving truck after I backed it up to our garage in northern Virginia. I parked that behemoth, the largest truck they had, and walked quietly around to the back. I lifted the gate and pulled out the ramp. My two oldest kids ran up and down the clanging metal, jumping around in the back and leaping from the wheel wells, shouting their names and marveling at the echo.

I remember that echo.

The  emptiness was everywhere. The trees were shedding their leaves. The immaculate houses looked down on us disapprovingly, like a row of unhappy teachers,, their shapes dim against the slate gray sky. I felt like those beautiful houses (or perhaps their occupants) held us in contempt – we had not been able to make it there. We were not good enough.

Inside the house, rooms were either empty or had stacks of boxes huddled in their centers. I walked through the rooms to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. There, the third-floor room we brought Sam home to after he was born with that perfect knot in his umbilical cord. There, the room I painted pink for the girls. There, the kitchen with its marble countertops, the countertops we had leaned against with friends on late summer nights, the countertops that held me up when I told Maile the business wouldn’t take us through the winter. We were drowning in debt.

We didn’t breathe so much as sigh. I felt like a failure, unable to make enough money to keep my family in the place that we loved. I felt lost and fragile, as if one more tiny bit of bad news would be enough to send me over the edge, into the emptiness of midair.

That emptiness was everywhere. Including inside me.

* * * * *

My wife later told me a story about those last days in Virginia. Last nights, actually. She woke up after midnight to the sound of nothing. Our children were all sleeping, the neighborhood outside was silent. There was a large window by the bed that looked out over our tiny back yard and into the tiny back yards of the houses behind ours. Street lights threw dim shadows on to the ceiling, drowned out the stars.

My wife woke to a ball of anxiety about what was happening, about our business going under and all the debt weighing us down, about us having to leave a place we loved and move our family of six into my parents’ basement 150 miles away. She slid out of bed, down onto the floor, and put her face in the plush carpet.

How can this be happening? God, how can you let this happen?

She heard the closest thing she’s ever heard to an audible voice from heaven, and it echoed in her mind, one phrase reverberating and growing.

This is a gift.

When the phrase faded off into the darkness, disappearing beneath the whirring of the ceiling fan, my wife shook her head.

Well, she muttered, it’s a pretty shitty gift.

She stood up off the floor, crawled back into bed, and went to sleep.

* * * * *

I can’t decide which is easier, packing up an entire house and moving truck on your own, or having your entire community come out and help you do it. The first is physically difficult, nearly impossible. The latter is emotionally difficult, nearly impossible.

We walked beside friends carrying our boxes, our furniture. We laughed and joked about how only the best of friends help you move because everyone hates losing friends and everyone hates moving. We let one of the guys take over the truck packing duties, and he wielded his engineering skills like a champion-Tetris player. The door to the behemoth barely shut, but everything was in. That slamming sound was it. The latch clicked. The lock connected. Our four years in Virginia were nothing more than a closed door.

We hugged them, perhaps the closest friends we had ever made, and we promised to stay in touch, though we knew it was unlikely. They walked off into the night, one family at a time, and we went back inside the empty shell.

I can’t remember if we spent that night in the house, slept on the floor, and left the following evening, or if we drove off after our friends left. It seems like something one should remember.

What I do remember is making the three hour drive to our new locale through the pouring rain. I led the way, alone in the truck, my wife and our four kids in the minivan behind me. I remember the way the headlights of oncoming cars streaked down the windshield.


That was one of those drives I’ll never forget, when my thoughts weren’t deep inside me, but out in the open, like residue on my skin. There was a tangible sense of loss, as though someone had died. One phrase kept circling back through my mind over and over again with the rhythm of the windshield wipers.rain


Now what?

Now what?

Now what?

I remember arriving at my parent’s house – it was quiet there. They were away. We left our stuff in the truck and carried the sleeping kids to their new beds in the basement. Our new home. Our new life.

Our “gift.”

***

Shawn Smucker (1)Shawn grew up in a ramshackle farmhouse with one of those enormous porches where he would sit and read far too much for a boy his age. Across the street was everything he could ever need to live an adventurous childhood: an empty church, a large cemetery, a winding creek. Every book he read during that time is set, in his mind, somewhere in that square mile.

The Rumor of Bears

My mother tells me that we only went to camp a few times before the tornadoes came.  How can this be? I remember it all so vividly. Then again, how could I forget a place so full of real and imaginary bears? I was only a young child.

‘Camp’ was my Uncle Davey and Aunt Sue’s hunting cabin in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, generously shared with extended family like me, my mom, dad, and two little brothers. It was about a two hour drive, due north, on winding Allegheny mountain roads, and as a town kid from a smallish city, it was my very definition of middle of nowhere.

When dad turned off the paved road and onto gravel, I knew we were almost there. Now the real adventure began–the rutted road was barely driveable, and our van inched and bounced along until the green and white cabin was in sight. Camp! Camp! Let us out! We pulled onto the grass (there was no driveway), fell out of the van, and begged my parents to hurry-up-and-unlock-the-door. Inside the musty smell of damp wood, un-aired linens and old furniture filled our nostrils, and my brothers and I ran through the three small rooms, drinking in everything familiar and forgotten.

At camp, there was no running water, so we carried jugs down to and up from the spring.  At camp, there was no television, so we hiked to the big rocks, went spotting for deer, and cooked mountain pies in the campfire coals. At camp, there was an outhouse, so you ‘held it’ through the night and held your breath during the day.

And just behind this outhouse there were berry bushes, frequented–it was said–by black bears. Early in the morning, I would wake up, wishing-with-all-my-might for an indoor bathroom, and picture them–hiding behind the outhouse, waiting for me.

Despite the rumors, I never saw a bear in those berry bushes, or (thank the Lord in heaven) in the outhouse. To see a real Pennsylvanian black bear, I had to wait until we ran out of milk and bread. Then we climbed back into the van and bounced our way to the store.

The closest convenience store doubled as a mini-zoo, with animals in cages in the parking lot. There was a fox who was always hiding, and friendly deer you could feed. There were several other smaller animals I have forgotten completely, and there were… bears. Two bears, in steel cages, pacing back and forth, tracking us with small round eyes. Stay close to us, my parents warned, though the bars were thick and the bears well-fed. We stayed close. For a time.

When I was about seven, the bears were suddenly gone, and my parents said they heard someone shot them ‘out of pity.’ Shot them out of pity? This made absolutely no sense to me. If someone was so worried about the bears, why didn’t they just let them go? My parents just shook their heads sadly and let go of their tight grip on our hands. Go on, they said gently, go see the deer. After that, we still came to get our bread and milk, but the parking lot wasn’t so magical anymore.    

I was left only with the rumor of bears. And soon, I was left only with the rumor of camp.

On the last day of May in 1985, a week before my eighth birthday, twenty-one tornadoes touched down in Eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. One of these raced through the woods behind my aunt and uncle’s hunting property, shifting the cabin two feet on its foundation, disappearing the outhouse, and turning over the berry bushes. The cabin was spared, but ‘camp’ was ruined.

We visited only once after the tornadoes came, and I can still see it all with my eight-year old eyes. The mountains, stripped bare. Trees turned into toothpicks; trailers flung like toys across the fields. The root balls of the trees towered above my head, ugly and unbelievable, and we couldn’t hike to our beloved big rocks because of all the destruction, blocking every trail. Thirty years later, I’m still not sure I’ve gotten over the shock.

Where can the bears live in a such a world?

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Photo by Jethro Taylor

 

The Grown Up

Two years ago, I entered adulthood. Not by virtue of turning eighteen; I’d already done that. I found myself at thirty-one, untethered. Until then, I’d led a life of quiet habit and order, hoping that eventually I’d be recognized as a great talent. But I tired of waiting and so I quit my normal routine, church, and several lifelong friends.

There were now gaps in my weekly habits. I went around industriously filling them up by hanging out with people I hoped would become my friends, getting involved in bad romances, and spending money I didn’t have. I tried to get several people to marry me. Along the way I learned that the last thing that will endear you to someone is to suggest marriage in the first three weeks of a relationship.

My problems were threefold: I was not married (and badly wanted to be), I was a writer who did not write, and I was not in the kind of job I dreamed, when I was in college, that I’d have at thirty-one. Instead, I worked in a sleepy realty office, reading ebooks all day long, and dreaming of being the next Barbara Pym.

I tried to solve these problems by switching to a new job in downtown Hartford that promised a more lively environment, and moving back to my parents’ house. I’d spent the previous five years with roommates who married and moved regularly, which meant I always had to find a new place to live. Living with my parents again—in the basement no less—felt like a big step backwards. I continued seeing one of the well-intentioned but frightened men I was trying to convince to marry me.

But what had happened? Why had my life curdled and become so wretched? Why was I walking around in a desolate daze of dreariness?

Most days at at my new job, in the well-appointed office on the eleventh floor of a posh skyscraper, I forced back tears while balancing spreadsheets. My job performance suffered, something that had never happened before. I grew despondent.

I could not sleep, partially due to perpetually analyzing my life with its dearth of accomplishments and partially because I spent most of my non-work hours with the boyfriend I was afraid to leave alone for fear he’d have time to assess me and conclude we’d be better off apart.

I wanted peace, but I was heading toward an internal crisis of massive proportions. It was like drowning but not wanting to call attention to the shameful fact that I couldn’t swim.

Finally, in a fit of desperation, I told the boyfriend that I needed to be alone for good. I told my bosses I would start work an hour later in the mornings and make up for it in the evenings—I decided that time to read and write in the mornings was essential for my recovery. I began reading Madeleine L’Engle’s book Two-Part Invention, a memoir of her early artistic development and later marriage to her husband, the actor Hugh Franklin. I began writing in earnest. I began to listen to the advice of my worried parents asking me to sleep and eat more and go to writers workshops.

photo-1428790067070-0ebf4418d9d8The nascent grown-up in me began to move, struggling for breath and life.

I had tried to extend my adolescence for years: the naive expectation of what I thought life should  be. I thought it’d be an easy, pain-free way toward accomplishment, like the stories of people getting discovered by a famous producer and becoming famous overnight.

I quietly put the adolescent away in a shopping bag I used to deliver used clothes to the thrift store. She would be happier companioning a younger person, anyway.  

My grown-up was far more peaceful than the adolescent had been. Yet real peace was elusive for me. I think it is stated best by Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote: “O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu/ Some good!/ And so he does leave Patience exquisite,/ That plumes to Peace thereafter”. I clung to patience as a new adult. Peace could come later after patience laid its groundwork. Patience helped me start writing a book. Patience sat with me when loneliness made its frequent visits.

My grown-up showed me how to sit, to work, to choose to be alone, to be silent sometimes, to avoid bad relationships, to say “no thank you”. She showed me how to accept sleep as a friend and not a thief of time. To not get tipsy every time there was wine present. She showed me the promise of good work that only my hands could do.

****

image1 (1)“The Grown-up” was written by Elena Shekleton. Elena lives in Denver with her husband, the artist Dan Sorensen. She is currently working on a novel and a book of fairy tale short stories. Elena loves hiking in the Rockies, and exploring the breweries and book shops in her city.  Her apartment is now free of roaches.  

Homeless Stuff

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At closing time, we count the daily till.  $22.50 in coins and small bills.

During our time volunteering in the store that day, five people made their way through the door. A young man, clearly mentally ill, rambling in a stream of consciousness. A single mom, in cowboy boots and a white t-shirt, prowling through the clothes. A woman with a long, gray braid down her back, carefully eyeing the mess that I’ve created. A talkative man walking with a cane as he searched the store for yarn; his companion standing near the front of the store trying to be patient.

Folks making ends meet.

In our little town, where many are struggling, that is a feat.

A ragged copy of the poem “Footprints” is thumbtacked askew to the wall under a detailed plastic crucifix. An indication of origin and intent.

We’ve thought about washing the front windows. “I’m not sure the glass is strong enough for a deep cleaning,” Mom fretted.

The landlord recently made some repairs after the vintage tin roof gave way, sprinkling insulation dust over a third of the store. The improvement added fresh paint to one wall, bringing the number of visible paint colors to seven.

I try not to wrinkle my nose in judgment when I walk through the front door. I try to remember the committed souls who volunteer their time to keep the doors open, and the humble funds that are poured back into community. But looking around kicks my “fixer upper” streak into high gear. “We should have a day of service,” I blurted out a few weeks ago, “and get rid of some of this stuff that will never sell.”

There is plenty that won’t sell. A constant stream of assorted junk and treasures arrives on the doorstep. To sort one from the other requires discerning eyes and a fair amount of heavy lifting. With a holder for floppy disks in hand, I ask, “Is this junk or will this be vintage at some point?” Hard to say.

The clothing racks are made from 2 x 4’s and silver pipe and wire. Functional and clunky, not beautiful. I spend an hour digging clothes out of a garbage bag and hanging things that pass my two second scan. Many have initials or a name marked in black Sharpie on the collar. Later, scanning the obituaries in the weekly newspaper, I recognize the letters. His earthly belongings were for sale before his body was laid to rest.

Everything in the store once had a home, perhaps even an important purpose or a place of honor. For a buck or two, they might have a home again. The confines of the thrift store are a temporary shelter, an in-between place. I pick up a decorative mirror with cracked edges from a crumpling box to set it on the display table. My image is reflected back at me. I, too, am in an in-between place.

The store is a place of creating small pockets of order within chaos. It is work that serves but doesn’t demand. It is what I can do right now.

I find a pair of black shoes in my size and slip $2 into the register.  

I’ve always had a heart for the homeless.

Cactus PhotoMary lives in her childhood home at the base of a small mountain range in southern Arizona.  She is daily torn between “inside work” (i.e. consulting and coaching maternity homes) and “outside work” (i.e. home improvements and helping her dad.)  She is a founding member of You Are Here and a regular contributor.