This is where I’ll scribble.
This is where I’ll think.
Monday Afternoon as a Human
Sometimes I wake up with both socks placed neatly beside my head when I don’t even remember taking them off.
I told my sister yesterday that I thought you could tell we’re Appalachian by just looking at the inside of our house. I think it’s because we like to “reuse” things, we like things with a history. Or it could be the bowls full of fruit and veg on every surface from June to October, basins with imperfections and stories of their own. Our grandma’s house also looks like this. It’s probably us mirroring what is comfortable.
Or it could be something else.
Recently, I’ve been trying to find my motivation. This sounds very dramatic and profound but really it’s just a simple question I’ve never really asked myself before. When you Google it, they give you a list of more complex questions to ask yourself that seem just as daunting. How would I know why I do what I do? Why I love what I love? It seems like we only just met yesterday.
Speaking of which, I’ve been having trouble writing again. You only know this because I’m about to tell you, but I had to pen all this down just to get it out. I guess that’s my go-to for a blockage, watching my hand form the letters out one-by-one until that other part of me can take over and put down the word that’s supposed to be next.
A lot of people seem to have trouble sleeping these days. You’re weird if you rest well. There’s too much noise. Everything has become so cluttered with sound. Next time you’re out in a public place, stop for a moment and notice the moments that are quiet and still. There aren’t any, are there? We think we’re all used to this until we lay in bed at night and feel it thrumming back over us as our minds rewind the clock of the day to remember all that we’ve experienced, like still feeling the waves of the ocean rocking us back and forth hours after we’ve left the water. The discourse and the racket follow us. Cling to us. I think we have trouble finding the quiet so we have trouble being quiet. The silence can only be awkward because it’s so foreign.
I had a friend once who absolutely couldn’t stand the quiet - or sitting still for that matter. If you didn’t speak for any length of time she thought you hated her. She didn’t see that the biggest compliment I could give someone, personally, was to just sit in comfortable silence near her. But I don’t really blame her, a lot of people tend to think that way.
I have been reading a book on Buddhism lately. I think it was a gift. I am not technically a practicing Buddhist, I think it’s just that any time I’ve heard something they had to say I found myself nodding. But I bring it up because of the topic of being afraid of things and avoiding them. The book teaches readers about the fact that everything in life is a balance. Kind of like the whole, “You can’t have the good without the bad,” thing. How suffering can teach us to cherish life, pain highlighting pleasure. How we too often run from emotions that are deemed negative like fear and discomfort instead of sitting in them, looking at them, and trying to understand them. The author is a Buddhist nun and what I found to be a small surprise is that several times when explaining something she curses. I guess that makes sense considering the philosophy of just letting things be what they are. I like that Buddhism doesn’t believe things are necessarily bad or good. That they practice letting life - letting themselves - flow naturally as a river would, without judgement. Even those pesky intrusive thoughts some of us get. It teaches us to accept them as what they are, just a thought, and then let them float away.
That’s the phrase I like most.
Let it float away.
Photo Credit: Reese Roush
Whistle-stop
My grandpa had a woodworking shed. I think that’s what it was, only because there were always piles of sawdust on the floor, old doors stacked against the walls, and tools everywhere. I distinctly remember a pulley hanging from the ceiling but I don’t remember seeing it used. I do remember the smell.
My grandparents on my mother’s side have a church on a hill right by their house. It hasn’t always been theirs but they own it now and for at least as long as I can remember it has been used as storage. It has always smelled of dust and hay to me. They used it to keep bales in it for the cows I think. Now it stores everything else. If you let the air hit you when you walk in, you still get hints of what was.
In the same way that the smell of fresh cut wood on a warm day makes me happy, so does the smell of the hay but the funny thing is it’s never quite right. It’ll never be the exact same formula.
Sometimes I remember I can’t go back to these places, for one reason or another. Some of them just don’t exist.
My great grandma had a closet that connected two rooms. This seemed like magic to anyone under the age of twelve. She couldn’t keep us out of it. I wouldn’t be able to visit anymore and make the short crawl between. I don’t think I’d fit, she’s not around to yell at me on the other side for sneaking through, and her shoes aren’t lining the bottom for me to creep over. It’s not the same, the formula is off.
I hope a lot that when we die we get to go back to these places, just once at least. I hope that god or the universe or whoever saw us in these moments and knew before we did to jot it down on a recipe card for later. It’s hard to tell an eight year old to remember anything.
I would like to go back to the end of our old property and play with the tulip poplar flowers again or to have a free ride in the little wooden trailer my grandpa made to pull behind the lawn mower. I would like to have one more scary story in the graveyard on the hill, the church looming up behind us in the dark, and for it to actually mean something. To actually believe. And I would like to go back to the mornings where we’d all wake up beside one another, piled into the two rooms grandma had to spare for all the cousins and aunts and uncles to sleep through the night, and actually see it. To make sure to remember it in a little brighter of colors. To smell the breakfast cooking and hear the first few people to rise whisper in the kitchen as if we couldn’t still make out what they were saying. To hear the whistle in my grandpa’s S’s as he explained how to do something tricky.
I would like to read the recipe again, please.
The Axle
I wonder what people’s houses look like from the inside. I wonder if they’re really clean or if, like most of us, they lose track of things and the dust or the pet hair settles into all the nooks we forget about ninety percent of the time. Do we use the same dish soap? Are the sponges you use to scrub those cups industrial and yellow-green or do they smile up at you before you clear the plate?
How do we all grow up in subtly different ways when we live right next door or the next town over? We all went to school together but that doesn’t mean our parents let us eat Pop-Tarts for breakfast as a whole.
I wonder what people think of my home from the outside. This is my first and I still have yet to find a power washer for the green that has overtaken the left side of the building. This is not a new development and yes, it has been on my mind every day since I noticed it.
But even though my grass often needs some weed eating around the edges, I’m not sure if this whole appearance gives up anything that is on the inside. Do I see it with rose tinted glasses because it saved me? Because it’s my safe space?
There are sections of flooring that need to be redone or touched up and the paint on the kitchen cabinets has started to peel back to the original mustardy color underneath. I don’t think this makes it a bad home though, and much like someone attacking a sibling, I’d fight with teeth and nails before I let them bad-mouth it.
I wonder why I write about homes and houses so much. To me, it’s the axle of a person’s life. It kind of makes or breaks you, or at least it gets close. I think one reason I write about houses so much is because of the trauma I’ve had with them. The first two places I lived in I left so abruptly that I didn’t get much time to say goodbye or to process the fact that I wouldn’t be back. I wouldn’t be allowed to live there ever again. The space I’d made to fit me would now have a me shaped hole in it. I think I anthropomorphise my surroundings too much. These places, in my mind, think I’ve abandoned them. They think they’ve done something wrong and I let them go at the drop of a hat. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to let that thought go.
I know many people have moved around a lot more and under worse circumstances but these are just my own thoughts on my experiences and I thought perhaps they might make someone else in a similar boat know they aren’t alone in thinking the childhood bear they left behind misses them. That your old kitchen is lonely, remembering the smell of your cooking and the music you played while stirring the pasta just about to boil over.
I think it’ll be okay though.
I think it’ll be okay in another kind of life.
Between the Panes
Wasps like to nest in my windows. Every summer they come back and at the moment, in my office, there are three scouting out the glass and buzzing around. I’ve worked a little bit to not immediately want to get rid of them. You see, I like to grow things and whether wasps want to sting me or not (probably for something I did wrong) they are good pollinators. No tomatoes without even the hornets, the bees we’re afraid of. We need little creatures, not the other way around. So, I’m trying to follow lessons from childhood. Remembering - as something with a few more legs than me skitters across my foot - my mother’s hands catching and releasing. How she likes to give them a second chance and how I must have picked up a similar habit of overruling the initial fear in my mind of picking them up and sending them on their way. It’s not their fault they ran across you on this particular day. It’s not their fault that you think your life is more important.
In my garden, I do struggle with pulling out what I know won’t thrive. I always have a tiny voice in the back of my mind asking if maybe I gave the plant a little more time or the right fertilizer, it would survive. On the other hand, my step dad's voice always pops up, calmly giving advice about trimming the downward facing stems and thinning out a forest so the mature limbs have room to reach. Just because there is space right now doesn’t mean there always will be. We all deserve a chance but at the same time we all need room to breathe. I guess it’s a lesson in being careful what kind of lives you start in the same vein as what lives you choose to end.
I have always wanted to be a gardener.
There is no better clarity that comes to me than after I’ve been in the dirt.
I realize that like life it will forever be lesson after lesson but this has always been one of the few things that I don’t mind the learning curves or the patience you have to find when mistakes are inevitably made.
I feel out of step almost everywhere else.
Everything is either moving too quickly or with too much noise. There are rules that I haven’t and probably never will understand, things that are unspoken but somehow everyone else seems to intrinsically already know. Sometimes I wonder if I ended up as a person by accident. Maybe there was a switch up the day I was thought up and instead of a bird, the soul found a human form. Or maybe I’m just wistful about a past life. Perhaps I’ll be a bird again. Perhaps I never was or will be. All I know is that there’s always been an odd feeling in my middle when I stare at the sky, especially on a day when the clouds look as if they’re showing off. It’s almost like I’m hungry or spotting pictures of a person you know you’ll never see again. I think it’s also a little like recalling all the tricks you could pull on the playground as a kid and knowing your body would never allow you to do it again. Like a time that has passed, was what it was, you lived what you needed to live in that moment.
I have also always wanted to fly, but I guess the call of the soil and the seeds was stronger this go around.
We Are Spinning
We are spinning.
That pretty much sums it all up. Everything is spinning and will be into the foreseeable forever.
Isn’t that amazing? I have said it many times that whenever I feel unbalanced in any kind of way, it helps to look up at the sky for a while.
We are all so small and this is all very fleeting.
Some people might find that scary but I think it’s comforting. That in the grand scheme of existence, nothing can really matter all that much because it’ll be gone in a blink. Or maybe that means it all matters a little bit more. Even the smallest actions and lives.
For me, it’s the first one that hits the part of my mind that needs quieting. The thoughts that won’t stop talking and weaving webs of what could happen or what someone might have been thinking.
But if the sky doesn’t care, then I guess I can let it go for now at least.
I think every one of us is confused. As soon as we act like we know what’s going on we’re proven wrong. As soon as we get comfortable the universe has to kick up the dust. You can’t stay in one place for too long; you’re not a tree, unfortunately.
Although I would love to have a quiet plot to spread my roots and live out my days in a blanket of bark, I think some of us are much more like the sky. We are ever changing. If we stand still for too long we become a nuisance to society. We start to implode.
A lot of the time I wonder if my grandpa was like this. It has nothing to do with anything other than the simple fact that I miss him and didn’t get to know him as a person much at all. If I can’t place the ways that I am in the family around, I start to wonder if I shared it with him. Was he restless? Was he good at managing these things?
There’s a certain spot in my office that the view out the front window makes me, every time, want to talk to him and I have no idea why. I could be walking through and glance out - then it hits me - or sat on the floor meditating and open my eyes for a minute to the thought of it. Maybe he likes this room. Maybe he likes the light coming in through the glass.
I think we continue spinning even after we die. The whole universe and beyond is just one big top. Everything would be stagnant otherwise. It’s sort of a rule of it all to be in continuous flow.
I think everyone we ever knew could be turning just outside and still with us in the way the atmosphere is around the Earth. We can’t see it but it’s still necessary. And one day we’ll spin so fast and so far that we’ll fling right into that layer with them, continuing to go around.
I like that we are spinning and I like that there’s no way to stop it.
But I assume that is because I am very much not like a tree.
What’s Heavy
I think I have trouble letting things go.
What I mean to say is that I have a lot of stressful dreams. They follow themes: what’s happened to me, people I never see anymore but who I used to see every day, and places that I no longer live in or visit. I haven’t been able to let them go and I don’t think any conscious part of me realized it, only my body and the part that awakens when I dream.
It’s been troubling me. More and more I cannot sleep well.
So, last night I decided to go find myself and bring her home.
I went back to my oldest bedroom and I saw her sitting there in the empty room alone. She was just the same as those months we came back from college, scared about what to do next and trying so hard to stay put together, to still grow. I said it was okay. I told her thank you and that she did so well. That she wouldn’t believe where we are now and the beautiful people we’ve met who’ve changed our lives. People that have helped us even though there was nothing in it for them and they guided us to grow immensely. That we found a family, a healthy one.
I told her it was time to come with me.
Then we walked to the next bedroom, the one on the opposite side of the stairs. The place we stayed just before we left. There she was, a little older and ready to move. This room was empty too and she was standing, thinking about how she was going to miss the yellow walls and the wood floors, wondering if she did the best that she could in some of the hardest situations of our life. I held her hand, looked her straight in the eye, and told her how wonderfully she’d handled it all because nobody else had. I told her thank you and that she did so well. That I wouldn’t exist without her. I let her know that she didn’t need to worry so much, I was waiting for her and always had been.
I told her it was time to come with me.
And so, I took both of their hands and walked them out of their rooms. We went down the old stairs into the empty dining room, the kitchen we hated and out the front door that had led directly into the tired living room. I made sure to hold the car door open for both of them. In my mind, as I was the last to get into the driver’s seat, the final piece showed up before we drove away.
It was us, not in all these times that we struggled but when we were little - in single digits. When we still played spotlight with our brothers out in the country. She sat so small in the seat and looked up at the me that was just next to her, smiling broad and swinging her legs against the seat.
Then she said to each of us, “I was wondering where you guys were. We missed you. You’re going to love our new home. We have plants everywhere!”
And finally, we drove off.
Photo credit: Reese RoushOne Orange
I took advice from another writer and started jotting down the little things that catch my attention in a day. I feel as though she meant that this would encompass anything - good and bad - but so far I’ve noticed it’s mainly quirky things or what makes me smile.
I found it funny one morning at the grocery store when I passed a woman intensely examining a single orange. Later when I passed her again, this was the only thing in her cart other than her purse seated right next to it. It’s something insignificant to most of us but you rarely see someone buying one of something like an orange. Another man, maybe in his sixties too, had a giant bag of cat food and one other item that was strange like lightbulbs.
Our carts tell silly, interesting stories. You can see all the projects we keep putting off or forgetting, what’s run out and favorited. Sometimes it shows that we’re alone or part of a big group at home, oftentimes if we came shopping while hungry (my own recurring problem).
The advice from this other writer was probably some of the best I’ve found. Her book was full of golden words. Most lines I found myself nodding, finally agreeing with someone else in the way they love and work with stories. Not just to mass produce and cater to all our cravings, but because you have something to say. To tell the truth. It’s everywhere, in each and every regular day. I think most of us, underneath our hunger for a quick fix of dopamine, hope that someone else will come out and meet our eye to say, “This is how it’s been for me, in all honesty. What about you?”
I love when people just blurt things out. It’s like they suddenly can’t help but tell you about this thing that’s changed them. As a person who is constantly worried I’m making others uncomfortable, if you come up to me with your own special piece of life I’ll probably keep it forever.
It’s like numbers, the way they never change. Numbers are a calming constant, so if you tell me something about yourself it’s ingrained in my mind as this part of you that will never go away in the same way that two plus two is always going to be four. We keep our experiences whether we like it or not. This is why everyone fascinates me so much. Just being human is wild.
What We Keep
I have always parted my hair on the same side that my mother decided when I was little, so much so that it falls that way if I let it free.
I have her voice but my grandmother’s hands.
When I smile I can’t tell if I look more like my dad or his; I think it depends on the day, the subject, and the lighting.
If anger sweeps over me suddenly, the only way to find any ounce of calm sometimes is to remember how much I’m reminding myself of my brothers.
On the rare occasion that I am kind for no reason other than to just be, especially to a stranger, I feel my sister. Even if it is a mask of her I’m borrowing, I am beyond grateful for its effect. The world is better because of this.
We become so much of the people we love. So much so that it’s scary. I feel it’s the spirit’s way of keeping them with us if they leave. No matter the distance or the reason for parting, they’ve clung to you and you can’t get rid of them. It’s good and bad.
I’m not usually very good at writing anything other than when we’re all afraid and sometimes I wonder why that is. I have to practice putting into words other people’s point of view when they’re in love or bursting with joy, if they’re happy to see someone coming home after a long trip or simply excited for a new day.
I think one of the best traits you can have is to be patient. To know when to wait and to listen, not just hear. It’s an area where I’ve often found myself lacking, and I practice and practice to improve. Some days are better than others - usually these are not the days where I am channeling my older siblings. But, many of the people I know have the grace to be patient. Or maybe the “will” would be a more accurate word.
Someone once asked me what was the last thing I regretted not saying and my answer was that I couldn’t think of one, that I was often upset with myself for speaking my first thought. Which is funny because a lot of people say I don’t talk.
It would be a lovely thing if we could choose what we keep from our loved ones.
Blue Plates
We are all human. We are all constantly reclaiming things.
It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to remember, to remind yourself of every once in a while.
There was a show on tv where an actress was talking about this wall of blue plates she finally had and it was the tone of her voice that struck me. It was the excitement of getting something you’ve been dreaming about for years, maybe even since you were a child. It was something small but still a longing intense enough that it stuck to her. Her whole house was beautiful and extravagant but that wall of simple blue plates seemed to have such a peaceful effect on her.
We all want things, but it’s the little wishes that when fulfilled bring us the most peace I think. It’s not something that can be taken with us, it just calms us while we’re here or strikes joy when we’re reminded of it.
I do this every time I walk up and down my staircase.
I’ve never had a staircase of my own before. It needs refinished and creaks dramatically when you’re traveling up or down, but I will take a second to pause most of the time when I’m there to just pat the walls and the railing nicely, to try and almost imbue some amount of love into the structure whether the past owners did the same or not. I like to try and put emotions into things, to do my best to fill them with lightness.
I think my childhood was very tense. When I think back, all of those memories come to me as if the whole time I was holding my breath or maybe even waiting. I’m not sure what I was waiting for other than the next thing. I don’t want to make it sound as if it was entirely a “bad time”. Sometimes I get tired of hearing everyone say they had a terrible time growing up. I’m not trying to discredit anyone else’s experience and say you didn’t go through what you went through - there’s just this cresting sort of sadness that fills me when someone shares their facts and at the same time it can be somehow comforting. To better explain: it’s horrible that it happens so often but a dark kind of solace to know you have all these people to compare notes with.
But I know the tension was real. I can still feel it squeezing me if I look back too long. It’s kind of weird to wonder if you were loved by certain people. I don’t know that a child should be questioning that, but that’s just my opinion. I’m still wondering.
Maybe this is why I’m trying my damndest to open my mouth and love people, and if I can’t do that, try to show them their importance in my mind, and if I can’t even manage that, throw some of that lightness in their general direction from somewhere inside and hope it sticks.
Even if that someone ends up being my staircase.
We’re all human, all learning and unlearning, and simultaneously looking for our wall of blue plates.