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 Future Syrah

I stood with the bottle in front of me, corkscrew in hand. The note on the bottle, written in my own handwriting, told me that it was “not to be opened before May 22, 2015.” I cut the foil, and slowly rotated my key into the cork.

Five years prior, I was getting ready to leave a job at a local winery as the summer waned. It was my first post-college job, the answer to the question about “what I was going to do” after graduation. I attended a small conservative Christian college, and I got quite a few raised eyebrows when I said: “I’m going into the wine business.”

The long hours and the free wine created an experience I will never forget, but not a sustainable one. My career in the wine business was short.

As I worked my way through the summer, getting more comfortable with our wine offerings and going tasting with co-workers on the weekends, I noticed that my sense of smell was heightened. On evening walks, I could smell subtle flowers and herbs. I was overwhelmed by the smell of laundry. I could sense the faintest hint of smoke in the air.

That summer, I went on a few dates with someone new. I’d always fallen into relationships somehow, skipping the first few steps of courtship. When he asked me to dinner, it was my first real first date. He came to pick me up and we walked a little ways to a restaurant not far from my parent’s home. We sat on the patio and talked and laughed without looking at the menu. I kept smiling apologetically at our server, but if he was frustrated with our indecision, it didn’t show. Finally, we ordered a bottle of wine.

It was a Washington Syrah, smooth and supple. I hadn’t yet learned then that when I drink wine, I like to eschew the hard edges. I look for something silky that touches my tongue tenderly without a trail of tannins. This was one of the wines that taught me that, one sip at a time. That Syrah is still in my top ten wine experiences.

During my summer of wine, I looked for a way to commemorate the momentous nature of that season. I decided to buy a bottle of wine to store for five years, opening it near the anniversary of college graduation. I consulted my wine stylist, a person I still keep on speed dial, a local wine whiz who occasionally chills bottles for me when I text him so that I can pick them up later. He suggested that a Syrah would hold up well over time. Washington is known for her Syrahs and it seemed the perfect choice, something that would remind me of lunch breaks in the vineyards and my swirling glass in the evening after I got off work, paired with oyster crackers.

When my wine stylist suggested that particular varietal, I knew that I would buy the same vintage as that first date. I wrote the date it was to be opened on a yellow sticky note in the shape of a star before covering it in tape.

That bottle followed me from my parents house to the light-filled one I rented with a purple-painted porch. Every time I went to find something to open, for a date or dinner with friends, I noticed that gently sloped bottle, designed for Syrah. It lay in my wine rack, surrounded by bottles of table wine, Perrier, and other special bottles, waiting for its moment. Though new jobs, publications, relationships and breakups tempted me, I never reached for my corkscrew.

This May, I brought the bottle back to my parents’ house and my mother and I made bruschetta from fresh tomatoes and basil. I opened the wine to let it breathe and immediately, I recognized the scent, my nose still sensitive to all of those stimuli. The wine had mellowed over time, but there was no mistaking it. Even though that restaurant has closed and reopened twice under different names, I was back on that patio with my cardigan draped over the back of my chair. I was hopeful about post-college relationships and jobs and life.

I poured myself a glass, a little nervous that five years was too much after all, that this wine was history. One sip was all I needed to realize that the future Syrah was not ruined, as I had feared. She had not passed her prime sometime in the midst of those years. In fact, she was smoother than I remembered.

***

caraCara Strickland is a freelance writer living in Spokane, WA. She writes about food, faith, singleness and relationships for a variety of publications in print and online.

She’s delighted that her current career allows her to drink wine (and write about it).

Diapers & Degrees

It was around noon, and I was in the men’s room at Target with my five-month-old daughter. The wall-mounted Koala changing table had seen better days, but I was just glad there was one in the men’s room at all. It was clear, though, that installing the changing table was an afterthought because it completely blocked access to the hand dryers. As my daughter squirmed and screamed while I changed her diaper, other men had to decide whether to reach over my shoulder to dry their hands, or to just use their pants. I struggled to maintain composure, wishing I could say that was the only time I had cried in Target that week. As I finished up I asked myself through eyes filled with tears, “How had my life come to this?”

The past year has been one of shifting roles. I quit a tour-guiding career of eight years (which is long for a 30 year old), became a father, and finished grad school. With my new roles came a shift not only in what I do, but also in who I am.

The biggest transition has been from working 40-60 hours a week to being the primary caretaker of my daughter. I have never been good at errands—even simple errands done on my own would exhaust me. So, the prospect of running most or all of the errands for our family with a baby was daunting, if not petrifying. It did not go well at first, which made me question whether I could even be a stay-at-home dad. I wanted so badly to take care of our daughter so my wife wouldn’t have to run errands and care for the home as well as work. The chalkboard-painted wall I used for my to-do list was a constant source of anxiety motivating me more to escape and watch Netflix than to be productive.

Thankfully I started to get better. I hadn’t realized how much practice errands and housekeeping would take in order to do it well. Over the past four months, since defending my thesis, I have grown tremendously in my competency as a stay-at-home dad. I can even enjoy multitasking—managing a list of things to do all while keeping a 10 month old alive and happy. That’s not to say everything is perfect. My daughter’s newest favorite pastime—pulling her bib off while I’m feeding her—is a lot for me to handle, and I get jealous seeing my wife come home and have so much energy to play with her and make her laugh while I often can only muster the energy to prevent her from melting down. I’m sure this too shall pass and I am getting better at finding joy in the present with her and cherishing every little step in her development.

When I’m not chasing after my increasingly fast and destructive daughter, I am attempting to start a career. After years of work and late night study sessions I finally finished grad school in December, and I am applying for teaching jobs. There is a sense of being in the wilderness during this transition, not knowing the path or even the destination. Early on I was feeling lost and hopeless about job prospects. This brought about financial worries and brought up deep insecurities around my fear of being rejected or passed over by prospective employers. You might even call it a mini existential crisis. After some great encouragement from a friend and my wife, and a lot of prayer, these feelings have lessened. I have come to see being in the wilderness as an important experience that allows me to develop patience and reflect on other shortcomings and insecurities. I’ve even been able to see very clearly the providence of God through a few extra jobs and medical expense reimbursements and aide.

IMG_0109Practicing patience and silence is difficult in a time where all I want to do is stress and vacillate between escapism and attempting to solve everything on my own because God is taking too long. Thankfully I have an adorable little companion to practice with and learn from. This morning I spent time in the amazing San Francisco Botanical Gardens with her. As I pushed my daughter in her stroller, along the small dirt paths through the Native California garden, I talked to her about each of the different plants that we passed and we sat and admired them together. Sometimes she would reach out to grab the plants. Taking time to feel, smell, and taste them, to experience them for the first time. At one point she grabbed a California Poppy, my favorite flower which I learned to love during my years driving a bus. This particular poppy was the only one in bloom in the entire garden. I watched her discover for the first time something I have loved and cherished for years. It was so beautiful. I’m not sure what it means, if it means anything, but I will never forget the overwhelming feelings of love for my daughter and God’s love for me in that moment in the garden.

Being a stay-at-home-dad and struggling to find work was never in my five- or ten-year plan. I may have never asked for this experience, and I did not know what it would require of me, but I am grateful for it. There will certainly be other unexpected roles that will challenge me in the future, and I will greet them with fear and trembling knowing that whatever they are, they will bring me closer to God.

*   *   *   *   *

Gluch Bio Pic“Diapers and Degrees” was written by Danny Gluch. Danny grew up in the suburbs of LA with his parents and older brother. He moved to the Bay Area in 2002 and has enjoyed calling San Francisco home ever since. Currently, he, his wife, their daughter, and their dog Madison call the Mission District of SF home. After struggling to find an enjoyable area of graduate study, he found the Philosophy program at San Francisco State University, where he recently earned his MA writing his thesis in Feminist Ethics and Moral Psychology. Any extra time is spent with his church community, or playing golf (or practicing golf, or thinking about golf). Find Danny on Twitter @danandstephinsf.

Hole in the Wall

I’ve shared room 205 with the same roommate for three years now. Early on, the two of us forged a haphazard sort of system to keep the room habitable. But we’ve never been neat about it. We’re close friends with the girls in the dorm room next door, and the four of us are constantly spreading ourselves out between the two spaces. The unique transiency of college has permeated our way of living, almost subconsciously, and we never seem to be all the way settled in.

I never imagined I would live in a place this messy. The closets in our room perpetually overflow. Empty Capri Sun juice pouches sit on the windowsill. There is a hole in the concrete block wall that we duct tape every year on move-in day, afraid of what would crawl through otherwise. Recently, my roommate’s birthday cake sat out on a plate for over a week, becoming crunchy before it occurred to us that we should throw it away.

My room at home, though, has become even more pristine since my absence. The walls are white and the closet is bare and the trash can is empty. At home, I wake up and am completely alone. But always, after I drive the four hours home and I sleep and wake in my own bed, I am more reminiscent for the noise than appreciative of the quiet. I miss has become the mantra of college breaks.

*   *   *   *   *

Home, for the first time in my life, is a fluid concept, always seeming to be where I am not. Family is even more ambiguous . My family, of course, includes my mom and dad, my brothers and sister, all of whom I deeply love. But if a family consists of the people who know where you are and love you despite it, then my family is also a cobbling of young adults, mere semesters away from dispersal. I still have close ties to the place in which I grew up, but each year they are changing. We are selling the house with the pristine bedroom, and I find myself largely apathetic. It is only a place to sleep.

The place in which I live from August to May is different. It is where life together is made rich and loud and colorful. After we move out, our beloved room with the hole in the wall and the small closets and the overenthusiastic heater will be exposed for what it is. There was nothing intrinsically special about those concrete blocks or the bedframes or the thin carpet; they were only bare spaces for us to learn to fill. They will be passed on to new freshmen, who will peel our duct tape off of the hole in the wall and solve the problem in their own way.

*   *   *   *   *

Next year, instead of sharing a dorm room, we will get an apartment, and we will decorate for our climactic last year together. We will hang colorful shower curtains. We will carry oversized couches up the stairs. We will string twinkle lights and maybe even make our beds for once. We’ll have roommate pasta dinners and Waffle Tuesdays. I’m just as excited as I am apprehensive for this brief, beautiful time together. The more I come to love where I am, the more I believe that it is home, the more it will hurt when the time comes to leave.

And yet, in this moment, this is my family, and this is my home.

 *   *   *   *   *

juniors_christmas_banquet“Hole in the Wall” was written by Veronica Toth. Veronica is a junior English major at Taylor University (located in approximately the middle of nowhere, Indiana). She’s grown to love cornfield country and especially the people who live there. She enjoys occasionally writing poetry and always using sarcasm. Veronica is pictured on the far left with three close college friends; they do not keep dorm rooms clean, but they do love each other. She blogs at Tasting Twice.


Moving House

Late last year, I attempted to move into a house not owned by my parents. I sat down with a potential roommate (a friend of a friend) and we established that although we were strangers, neither of us was too strange.

I began to haunt Craig’s List for homes in our price range (which was somewhere between “it has a lot of personality” and sleeping with a gun).

I fell in love with the first house we saw. It was over a hundred years old with beautiful wood floors and a mantelpiece. There was an enclosed porch on the second floor and I could just see my writing desk there with a cup of tea on it, curling steam.

“I want this little yellow house,” I said, after the current renter had left and my not-yet roommate and I were left alone in my car.

“You can’t fall in love with the first place we go,” he said.

But I did.

At my insistence, we drove to the property management company and even began to fill out applications before we realized that the numbers didn’t add up. To qualify to rent this house, we would need another roommate, at least (and it had been hard enough to find each other). Still, I kept hoping.

*   *   *   *

We walked through apartments which looked as though they hadn’t been redone since the seventies (with prices to match). We toured buildings with tiny washing machines, and pools in the complex, and the chance of a garage (if there was a vacancy).

The whole process made me tired, and I kept thinking about that little house.

*   *   *   *

“Apartments are fine,” I said. “But houses just have so much more character, don’t you think?”

We had just realized that we were truly torn over something important. I wanted wood floors, he did not. We were both convinced that the other simply didn’t understand the facts.

“Sure,” he said. “But there’s so much more to take care of in a house.”

He didn’t get it. After years of living in places I couldn’t control, I wanted someplace to care for, some place to love.

“Let’s just see,” I said. “Maybe if we find the right house.”

*   *   *   *

I went to our last showing alone. I didn’t intend to, but my would-be roommate got lost. So, I stood in another little yellow house (apparently I’m strangely drawn to yellow houses) and chatted with the representative of the management company, trying desperately to act like I knew what I was talking about as I asked questions.

StricklandhouseThere are lots of different kinds of little yellow houses. As I think back on it now, with its empty laundry room, draped with blackout curtains and central hood location, this one would have made a good drug house.

This little yellow house, a bit worse for wear, was across the street from the Salvation Army, and two buildings in from Planned Parenthood.

There was a handy bus stop on the corner, and several inexpensive Chinese restaurants close by.

I don’t know if it was the pedestal sink in the bathroom, the bright orange bedroom (with a walk-in closet) or the wood floors, but I found myself asking about the next steps in the application process.

My roommate arrived after the agent had left, and we peeked in the windows. The paint was peeling and chipped, the interior was dark, and the windows were leaking heat faster than it could be generated.

For some reason, we decided to apply to rent it.

*   *   *   *

If warning bells were ringing then, I didn’t hear them.

This was it, we were getting our little yellow house.

We signed the papers and picked up the keys. It was the week of Christmas, and my brother was in town to help me move my belongings from one home to another.

I moved my things, but planned to stay at my parents’ through the holidays.

My roommate moved in with his brand new set of early Christmas Tupperware.

*   *   *   *

I began to unpack, a little each day, setting up my bed, and hanging my clothes in the closet. I thought I was emotional from all of the transition, but as I smoothed my duvet and placed my new set of knives on the counter, I couldn’t shake the lump in my throat. I didn’t open the knife package, I couldn’t bear to put them in the sticky, hand-painted drawer.

I was nervous about going to the house alone at night. I would reach out to my roommate, first, to make sure he was there, or take my brother with me. I would put on a record, and turn on all the lights, hoping I would get used to being on my own.

But something wasn’t right.

It wasn’t long before I started getting texts from my roommate. They were low-key at first. Don’t cook anything. There might be mice. I haven’t seen any.

But things escalated quickly, as they often do.

He called our contact at the management company. She offered to bring mouse traps.

There are mice everywhere.

I called him, after that, and he told me about the nest in the stove, the droppings all over the counters. I thought about the evidence I’d seen in my closet.

Before I knew it, we were on the phone with each other, and then the property managers, trying to break the lease we had signed days earlier.

When it was done, and we were free, my almost-roommate moved back home to another city. I sat amidst the boxes in the room that had always been mine, in my parents’ house, and cried.

 *   *   *   *   *

Strickland“Moving House” was written by Cara Strickland. Cara has lived in San Diego, California, London, England, and Upland, Indiana. Once, in college, she wrote an essay saying that she was from Narnia. She currently lives in Spokane, WA, in a wonderful little house with wood floors and a purple porch, where she is a writer, blogger, editor, and food critic.