Long Virginia Sleep

Life between summers.

2012-02-04T09:11:00.000-08:00

I finished my journal a few weeks ago. It felt very significant to have finished something that I had been working at for so long. The aim of a journal is not to finish it, of course, but it is a first for me. I started writing in the thing on December 15, 2005. I have been toting it around for seven years. I am sorry to have filled a book with so much sadness, but glad I filled it nonetheless. Rilke provided the last words: You must change your life.

I am in DC, and have been for almost a month. I've been a big baby about it, too. I managed to make it through the whole of my month-long winter break having spent only 72 hours in this city, and though it did me some good I returned to find myself feeling rather irritated to be here. School provided a welcome distraction, and I've been very busy. Still, I miss Mathews. I think it gentles me to be there, and in the city I find myself feeling less patient, harder. There are so very many people here, and so many situations to negotiate and avoid. I find I've been a bit reclusive. This is, in part, because I'm trying something new. I quit alcohol about three weeks ago, and, for the most part, have stuck with it. It's part break and part experiment. It also wasn't born of necessity; I haven't been particularly worried about the amount of I was drinking, nor was it out of control. I just woke up done with it, in the way I occasionally have concerning cigarettes, and thought, Well, hell, might as well try it. So I did. Three weeks later, still done with it. It's been unnerving more than anything--recognizing just how woven into my life a glass of wine or a beer had gotten. It wasn't dependency, but it was habit. I think the hardest part of it has been other people, to be honest. The people I tend to share time with are not what my grandmother would call teetotalers, and I love them for it. But, as one might imagine, my sudden refusal to partake of things bubbly and mouth staining represented a rather bizarre and baffling departure. I am left feeling like I'm not always sure what to do with myself, as I suspect are they. Still, I am happy with my decision and its results.

And I have been getting a hell of a lot done. Writing, cleaning, errand-running, cooking, reading. I have an excess of energy. The weather has been particularly enabling. This winter is suspicious in its warmth and total lack of horrific forms of precipitation (slanty rain, floaty rain, ice rain, ice, floaty ice, wet snow.) I fear that real winter is yet to arrive, and that I'm going to find myself trudging through snowdrifts in May. Fingers crossed that this isn't the case. I am, as ever, pining for summer with an intensity that I think people typically reserve for their lovers, or chocolate cake. I try to conjure it, sometimes, but my grown-up person skills of make-believe provide a sorry substitute. One of my junior high yearbooks had a title that's unexpectedly stuck with me: Life Between Summers. I'm sure it was meant in a sort of hah-hah school sucks we're adolescent sort of way, but I'll be damned if that's not just how it feels, especially in February.

Darlings

2011-10-08T21:52:00.000-07:00

Writing is so hard, really. I think I used to think it came easily because I didn't know what I was doing. Not that I really know now. But, somewhere along the line, I think I've gotten accustomed to the act of self-criticism--something that absolutely eluded me during my time at Santa Cruz. Faulkner advised that we kill our darlings, and I think I'm just learning it now, after five or so years of writing with intent. It's horrifying to admit you've been so arrogant, but yes, absolutely so. I think some of this is coming up because I'm attempting to rewrite completely a piece I first tackled three years ago. It was part of my senior thesis for fiction writing at Santa Cruz, and I read a portion of it at the graduates' reading. And I thought it was pretty great.

It wasn't. It was chock full of darlings, so choked with them that I'd sacrificed scene for pretty summary and repetition. Just a mess from start to finish. An exercise in wordplay without an ounce of structure or restraint. What a nightmare. Also, it had the worst title imaginable, something I remember commenting on at the reading itself: The Winter Ham. Don't even get me started.

It's an amazing thing, to get some years between you and the things you have loved. Whether they be people or the ideas of people or the mere shadows of people you once met. Be they places or dances or songs, impermanent as tide. Some things get stretched and faded and some just get distilled. They come through time reduced but not the lesser for it. I took sick glee in slashing through that old piece today, wreaking havoc of all things beautiful and indulgent. Delete delete delete. It's probably a fitting project, given the nature of the week. I realize now, days after the anniversary, that perhaps what's bothered me so much about this one is that if Laura had lived, she would today be as old as I was the day she died. All of twenty-two. Someone asked me how old I am this week and when I said twenty-five I saw her half wince and force a smile. But it's okay, I wanted to say. It's well earned. I come through this week with some goals, better realized given the task at hand. I am seeking discipline. In writing, in trying, in hoping. Because these things aren't so easy, really, though we make them sound that way sometimes.

God. The Winter Ham. I can hardly believe it.

1095 Days.

2011-10-02T19:11:00.000-07:00

She died three years ago. I was twenty two years old, and she was nineteen. There are a lot of numbers to associate with this kind of event. It seems easier, sometimes, to simplify it to the numbers. October 3, 2008. The hour of the day, the minute. But if I've learned anything in the three years since my sister died, it is that there is no simplifying this. It does not reduce. The grief changes, becoming more like an old, deep bruise than the fresh blood that it replaced.

Other things become stranger. It is strange to grow up without her. It is strange that she will always be nineteen years old. And it is strange that as I grow up and change and move I become less like the person my sister knew. When Laura died, I was twenty two years old. I was one year out of UCSC, and still living in an apartment in downtown Santa Cruz with Hannah. I was as a newly trained projectionist at the Nickelodeon. I had been dating Colby for about half a year. A lot has changed since that afternoon in October. I spent another half year in Santa Cruz, working at the Nick, dating Colby. I don't remember a lot of it, to be honest. I did what I had to do to get through. I went to a therapist, I cooked a hell of a lot. And then in April my therapist said, If you could do anything right now what would you do? I said, I would go to my grandparents' house in Virginia and live there. And she said, Okay. In July of 2009 I sold the bulk of my belongings, put my furniture in storage, and crossed the country with what little could fit in my car alongside Hannah, Alex and a fern. I arrived at Homagin on August 1 and spent the next year in the house. I spent a lot of that year by myself, a time during which I dismantled and rebuilt myself to the best of my ability. In the winter, between building fires and riding my bicycle on slow-laden roads wearing a man's bulky overcoat from the downstairs closet, I applied to graduate school. I got into American University's MFA program, and left the island for that in August 2010. I moved into my DC apartment on California Street Northwest and started school in a week period. In the year since, I've written upwards of one hundred pages, made a whole new bevy of friends, and come to value the little Virginia county I left behind more every time I've returned for a weekend, a week, a month this summer.

If my sister could meet me now, I wonder what she would think. It is an unfair proposition. It depends so much on the suspension of so much disbelief. It requires a lot of what-ifs, and those aren't something I readily indulge in anymore. In truth, I left them behind on October 3, 2008. There are some things that a "what if?" can't remedy. Some things are too hard to pretend your way out of. My sister died, and as the years grow between that day and today, I find there's a lot I can't imagine my way into anymore. I do allow myself to think that if she could, Laura would be proud of me. I would like to think she would like to know me. I can't say for sure, but I'm getting more used to that.

Joy

2011-09-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

I am in search of joy--collecting it, hoarding it. It is an odd thing, because to be completely honest, the pursuit of joy was never something I gave much time or energy to in my before life. I revile the word, even. I associate joy with holiday greeting cards and insincere salutations from distant relatives and unfortunate names for children. It's a small word, but one that is so over-used and cheapened. It's used until it's bereft of meaning. According to the extremely reliable dictionary.com:

joy: the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation.

So that is what I am looking for, and I think I have been, without knowing it, for a long time. There have always been moments of incredible happiness, of course, even when I was at my saddest, or saddest-ish. I've had to recalibrate all that a bit since Laura died--"saddest." This all might sound very navel gazing and, well, silly, but this is a new realization for me. A lot of people talk about wanting to be happy, myself included. Just happy, which I suppose means that we all want to be happy most of the time. I think this is an impossible demand. It's a difficult thing to feel genuinely happy when you're in line at CVS on a Friday night. Sure, you may be contented. You may be satisfied with your life and what/who you've surrounded yourself with. With the layout of the little universe you inhabit. I think that is feasible, and something I hope for. But, to be happy. I just can't be happy all the time. Instead, I'd like to experience moments of true joy. I think this all comes from the idiotic bike ride I took on Saturday night, with Kathleen and Scott. It was totally a bad idea in every sense, but in that absurdity I found myself experiencing total joy. I think Kathleen and Scott did too. It was impulsive--a "hey.... why don't we just bike there?' moment followed by ten minutes of all-out hollering. But it was absolutely joyful. And, as I said in my previous post, I felt young. I felt my age. The inevitable result of what has happened in my life is the feelings of aging I've experienced. Laura died, and I feel older than I am. I didn't in that moment. I think this summer has been full of joyful moments punctuating long periods of contentment, which is really all I could ask for.

Joy: swimming in Barn Creek late at night while the low tones of Blind Willie Johnson and Billie Holiday float down from the house and Uncle David sits on the bench on the dock, making sure I don't drown. Biking to the beach and swimming to the sand bar just as the sun sets, with walnut jellies glowing where my hands hit the water. The barn party in Tick Neck, and standing outside looking in as two women try and force their friend to dance. Learning to hula hoop on the Courthouse green outside Southwind on a Saturday afternoon. Running down the escalator at the Dupont metro. A cloud covering the sun at Bonnaroo. Showering in a hotel outside of Manchester having just left four days of dust and sweat behind. Riding the second tallest roller coaster in the world at Cedar Point and crying from the wind. Watching Kathleen epically wipe out at the Black Cat on Saturday night, only to pop up bleeding profusely but laughing even more. Handing out a story to my workshop and knowing that it's really, truly the way I want it to be. Picking vegetables from my Homagin garden. Kayaking in the late evening, following the wingtips of cownose rays. Pulling into the driveway of my family's home on Gwynn's Island.

District

2011-09-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

I've left my island refuge for my life in the city, and though I'll admit to some pining for bicycles and gardens and beers at Southwind, it is good to be back in DC, and to have a schedule. I have returned to school as a newly minted second year, which comes with a great deal less anxiety than I experienced as a fledgling, lost first year. It is raining in the city today, and I keep looking out my window to see if the leaves in the big tree are bouncing and finding nothing--just the city skyline. The tree was taken down while I was last on Gwynn's Island, cut off at its knees and leaving my view much altered. While my privacy remains largely intact given the height of my apartment, my neighbors across the alley must find theirs hugely changed. Today a striped cat in the living room of the house just below me stared up at me while I sat on my balcony--the first time I've ever been "seen" by any neighbor. I waved at it, unsure of what else to do, and went back inside.

I've got a story due a week from today, which means I'm spending most of my waking time worrying about it and slowly hacking away at the piece. By that, I mean writing. I find my approach to writing is somewhat like that of a sculptor; I spend a great deal of time considering what I am about to write, unwilling to write anything until I have at least a rough image of what is going to come from this great hunk of stone (meaning, all of the words in the universe and all the images and stories swimming around in my somewhat unfocused brain). And even then, I won't actually write down a word until I have the perfect sentence. It's all very perfectionistic of me, and probably doesn't serve me. This all used to be very effortless to me, and whether that indicates a change in my life at large or simply a change in my expectations of my own writing, I don't know.

What have I been up to, other than waving at cats? This weekend I went out with Kathleen, and we went to a party at her very good friend's apartment with the intention of leaving to dance after a few drinks. A few hours later, where do I find myself but whipping down 14th street on an oddly clunky red bicycle, rented from a Bikeshare kiosk in Columbia Heights. We wound our way through streets and among the usual herds of people going every which way on Saturday nights, whooping in delight, and I felt very young. We danced at Black Cat's Moon Bounce/Dance Affair until late into the night, and it was a great, great night. I met Azwa, my UCSC freshman year roommate, for brunch on Sunday morning and spent the rest of the day sculpting, with little to no result until the moment before I fell asleep. So, island-pining aside, my return is going well.

Walking After Midnight

2011-08-22T17:26:00.001-07:00

Late August nights find me torn between contentment and mourning, for I know it is ending: summer. Fall is creeping in, at first a threat and then, inevitably, a fact. The light has changed, and the warm, saturating haze of summer days gives way to the cold edged evenings of coming September. The water cools and the nettles vanish, and with them, the ease I find overtakes me in June and July. There are hot days left, I know, and on those that the humidity holds its ground I could almost convince myself that it's not over yet. I harvest butternut squash from the quickly waning summer garden, and the tomatoes ripen on dry, brown vines. I do love autumn in Mathews--the wild persimmons and the rashes of brown and red in the island meadows, but for me, summer is the magic time. I find myself a bit nostalgic for weeks only just past. It has been a good, strange summer. Bonnaroo and Pittsburgh, hot District nights, and long sojourns here, on Gwynn's Island, a time I spent swimming at Tin Can Alley, biking along the lanes, and sitting comfortably at the new bar at Southwind, drinking cold pints of Legend Brown and Lager while listening to the Usual Suspects, Runaway String Band, and Mixed Grill. I can't complain about that kind of summer. The cooling days make it easier to leave, to return to school and DC friends and the little life I've built for myself three hours north of where I sit now, watching the sun bow out to darkness over Barn Creek. But I am sad to leave now, as I am every time, at any time of year and in any circumstance. My car will leave Mathews with Virginia plates, an admission on my part to my love for this place, and my anticipation of my return.

Some Sad Shit.

2011-08-12T15:49:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, without any

real telling why, I become aware of a sadness. It is pervasive and real, and I sometimes fear that if I let myself stop to consider it that this sadness will overtake me. I know that people who have lost people as I have lost my sister know about this sadness. Maybe those who haven't lost anyone know it too. It's not to say that I am not okay. It's just to say that there is a piece of me now that feels like it doesn't belong to the rest of me anymore. Like I've lent it out. It's the piece where the sadness is and can stay and grow or subside as it will, given time and experience and age. And I keep it there because if I don't allow this place for it, I know that I can't do all the things I need to do: the grocery shopping and the metro riding and the dancing and the growing up that continues to put years between the person I am and the person I was the day that Laura died. We don't really have so much time to live, in all, and I am not going to spend my time circling around events that cannot be undone or a person who is not here. I fear I've teased this piece too completely from the tangle--that I don't allow it enough moments. It's difficult to negotiate the desire to be fun or funny or easy to be around with that to express who you are, when so much of who you are is determined by a terrible loss. I guess that I am trying to say: I miss my sister.

How We Go, When We Go

2011-08-03T21:31:00.000-07:00

It has been a very busy summer, which is quite honestly ridiculous, as I have been neither working nor in school. At the outset I told myself that I would do Bonnaroo, visit California, and go to Nevada for the Air Sailing contest. The first is the only thing on that list that I've managed to do. And yet, I feel I've winnowed away the time in three day increments. Three days here, three days there, occasionally punctuated by a week long sojourn on Gwynn's Island. Between visitors and visits, I find myself in August, less than a month away from the start of my second year of graduate school. I visited my Yankee relatives in Pennsylvania over the weekend, stopping off in Springfield to pick up my youngest cousin, Marie (my mother's brother's daughter) before heading off to Pittsburgh, where my cousin David (her older brother) is enjoying the bizarre and fast-changing terrain of post-college life. Quite unexpectedly, I found myself in Ohio riding the second tallest roller coaster in the world. It was in Ohio that I realized that I'd never been to Ohio before, and I found myself mentally tallying the states I've visited since July of 2009, when I up and left California. What follows is that list.

Road Trip of Danger and Excellence, July 2009:

California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia

And I haven't seemed to slow down. In Virginia I lived, quiet and alone, and learned to recognize the trees. In Pennsylvania, I've slept in the bedroom my mother slept in as a child and trampled brilliant yellow leaves at my uncle's cabin in the autumn-lit Poconos. I've screamed upside down on roller coasters in Ohio and dressed as a pigeon at Jessica and Travis's Halloween-bedecked brownstone in Brooklyn. I've watched New Jersey and Delaware's backyards whip by from the window of the Acela, and cracked lobster in Maine. I've moved to DC and burnt brown under the dust-choked Tennessee sun, eyes trained to the stage, where the members of Old Crow Medicine Show stamp their feet. I have been tired and I have driven for eleven hours and I have flown and flown. I have grown to know the three hour drive to Gwynn's Island better than that to Santa Cruz from Fremont. I find I want to know this country and its cities and its hills, its deserts and softly sloping Eastern mountains. I used to wake nights in Santa Cruz with the most overwhelming urge to run, to step into my car and drive and drive until the past fell away. I am not running, I think. I am seeing.

Nettled

2011-07-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

They have arrived. At first, they were phantom-like: impossible to detect in the water, but for the screams of the children inevitably being stung on shore (usually when I was way out in the water, uneasily imagining my voyage back to shore). I've not been stung since my time here with D'uncle, about three weeks ago. I was out night-swimming in Barn Creek, the dark water cradling me as David sat, monitoring my survival, when a nettle brushed against my torso. I could feel its tentacles brush my skin like ribbons, sliding across my side. It felt like burning and vinegar in my eye at the same time. I climbed out, threw myself in the hottest of hot showers, and recovered. I still find that I fear them, floating white and bulbous in the cloudy bay water. And they're here en masse. They are beautiful--I can't deny that. Odd, otherworldly. They really don't seem like they should exist. Jelly-like tentacled floaters that sting like hell, just wafting about the Middle Peninsula like underwater balloons? I sort of really do hate them, admittedly. I haven't had a proper swim in days, ever since I stuck one toe in the water at Tin Can Alley and jumped backwards, reeling at the sight of them, trailing across the surf.

But. Something else, that is amazing. At night, as harmless as the sea nettles are venomous, the sea walnuts slap ashore, emitting bright bursts of blue-green in the milky tide. The same beach that by day seems beset by a mean-hearted attack turns magical. Stingless and glowing, the sea walnuts, jostled in the waves, phospheresce. If I was brave enough to swim among their less delightful cousins, they would bump against me and the water would light blue and green. I find myself biking to Tin Can Alley at night to sit on the salt-worn wood and watch them spin and tumble in the water I'll avoid until late August, glowing.

Day of Attempts

2011-06-19T21:33:00.000-07:00

Granddaddy and Lynne departed Homagin this morning, leaving me to my own devices. I'm islanding for a few days, recovering from the considerable exhaustion and excitement born of my recently completed trip to Tennessee for Bonnaroo. Bonnaroo consists of a multi-stage, 80,000 person music festival on a large piece of farmland in Manchester. I went with my long-standing California traveling companions, Hannah and Alex (of the cross-country trip that delivered me to this fair coast in summer of 2009) and we deigned to camp in the inconceivably huge, hot Tent City for four days. It stayed in the 90s for the duration, driving me to drink gallons of water, buy a cowboy hat, throw myself fully clothed beneath a huge mushroom fountain, forego proper showering for four days, and strip down to my bra in public. The music was amazing, the experience memorable, and the survival of it a matter of some pride.

Anyway, after returning to DC for a few days, I needed a break from the masses, be they half-naked hippie-hula-hooping Rooers or Blackberry-toting suit-wearing DC dwellers. The island seemed ideal for this purpose. Today I elected to be incredibly lazy (which is really very easy on Sundays in Mathews, as almost everything is closed), make a ridiculously elaborate meal, and spend time outside. Homesick Texan's Sour Cream Enchiladas were the pick, and I scurried off to Food Lion in search of corn tortillas. Sadly, corn tortillas were not to be had at either Food Lion or Best Value, and I could not in good conscience justify driving to the next county just to go to the Walmart Supercenter just to buy twelve corn tortillas. My rampant perfectionism somewhat frustrated, I bought flour tortillas, in what turned out some two hours later to be a fine substitute.

After dinner I decided I was going to take a swim in the Bay, despite witnessing several stinging nettle stings the day before (though no nettles, oddly). I am rather wary of stinging nettles, even after having been recently stung. Arriving at the beach, I found myself a bit timid. Standing waist deep in the decidedly opaque water, I couldn't help but be a bit nervous about the whole endeavor, especially given that I was alone and should I be dragged under by some kind of huge jellyfish monster there would be no one to report on it. Finally, it was the sight of the shark-like wing tips of a school of cownose rays (or skates, as they are referred to locally) some twenty feet offshore that drove me from the water. I have heard that rays are friendly unless stepped on, but again, alone, I wasn't so keen on testing that theory.

I returned home and climbed into the one person kayak, determined to get a closer look. A large school of rays has returned to Milford Haven this summer and tends to arrive in the water in front of the house right before sunset. I didn't see any wingtips breaking the smooth surface, but I clamored into my bright red vessel and made my way slowly up the shore towards Hole in the Wall, eyes trained to the water. No sign of cownose rays--not even a ripple. I lay back in the kayak with my legs inelegantly thrown over the hull and drifted, watching for rays but only seeing the occasional nose tip of a terrapin emerge from the shallow waves. Right around the time I was ready to give up, a looked up and noticed that the current had delivered me to the water beside the dock my as-of-yet unseen/unmet neighbors' new house, and a troop of rather oafish twenty-something boys were headed up the dock in my direction. I threw an embarrassing wave in their direction and took off. Ten minutes later, pulling up to the stairs in front of Homagin, I looked to the sunset and saw, in the water just off my own dock, a cownose ray's wingtips breaking the surface.

And The Livin' Is Easy

2011-05-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

This is what summer is.

Barbecue brisket sandwiches with cole slaw and sweet corn, dripping on white china plates as we sit on the indoor porch, a wall of screens the only thing between us and the sun setting over Milford Haven, and the first summer mosquitoes. We eat them at the long kitchen counter the next day, washing back the settling flavor of the meat with long draughts of beer from the outdoor fridge. We bike to the beach at Tin Can Alley with full bellies and swim to the sand bar in the sun-warming water, and the Chesapeake smells of oysters.

Jam night at Southwind pizza. A circle of men sit atop stools playing songs they've played before, many times, some bedecked with new mustaches. The drummer turns forty, looking all of thirty-five, and everyone hollers and raises a pint. We eat fried crab bites, a stringy, delicious pot of artichoke dip, and petite pizzas with perfectly crunchy bottom crusts. People dance in the back of the bar, and it is the kind of loud born of people who not only know each other, but are happy to. Everyone sings the choruses, and the waitress pouring off pint after pint of Legend Brown Ale grins as people congratulate her twenty-four-hour-old wedding, and she is beautiful in her happiness.

Campground house party. The campground, empty and desolate all winter, fills with pick-up trucks and trailers and golf carts. Boys throw lines into the bay off the high-deck and old-timers park their carts side by side on the sand and gravel road, chatting over steering wheels as in the tent grove, country blasts and men whoop from the bumpers of their truck beds. Teenagers gather on the beach and smoke cigarettes and slurp at stolen beers, eyeing me suspiciously as I whip by on my bicycle, still wet from my dip in the water. A man yells at me: Slow on down, girl!

Billie Holiday and asparagus hash on the new creek-side deck. I poach eggs, smooth and white as pillows, to slice atop a hash of asparagus, bacon, and potatoes. We watch the sun slide down below the trees on the point and don't say much at all.

Jumping off the dock in the last light of the day. The dock is alight with rarely used lights, and from the water they look like strung lanterns dangling between the salt-beaten pylons. A small boat trawls for flounder in the shallows in front of the house, and I leap off the end of the dock, carefully tucking my feet up under me so I won't touch the bottom of Barn Creek, its mud as soft as pudding. I float around on my back and watch as the first summer fireflies draw blinking trails across the marsh and over the lawn. My gin and tonic sweats on the dock's sink, where brackish water pumped from the Haven powers a hose used to clean blue crabs, or spot, or trout, if we're lucky. A neighbor sets off high, illegal fireworks, and the water is lit red and white and gold and the forested shore rings with the pop and crackle. I cheer aloud, toes grazing the creek bottom.

Big Time Lightning

2011-05-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

Today I became determined to go swimming. It hasn't been a warm May, and as such the water, though summertime briny at this point, has remained cool. Now, I'm no wimp about cold weather; I have frequented many a cold body of water, including the Pacific and Lake Tahoe. I've spent so much of my life accidentally falling into water (fountains, creeks, ponds, puddles, ditches, you name it I've fallen in it) that I have a pretty good tolerance for unexpected swims. Last year, I very gracefully fell into Milford Haven while trying to board my kayak in the middle of December. Everything you just read reflects extremely poor judgment on my part, though in my defense I think it was the darling dog, Zoe, that sealed that particular icy fate. Her excitement over what she was sure was going to be an unexpected, mid-winter ride in a one person kayak proved too much for my not-so-considerable ability to maintain my balance. Anyway, today I was bitten by a mosquito while trying to clean my car. If mosquitoes don't mean summer, I don't know what does. Swim-suited and bitten, I made my way down the dock. The osprey nesting on the platform some forty feet away shrieked at me, but I paid her no mind. I was going to swim, dammit. I boarded the boat, dangled my feet into the water, bracing myself, and just as I was about to slide into the smelly, murky waters of Barn Creek, the weather announced its intentions. An outrageously loud rumble of thunder almost sent me tumbling into the creek. I looked out across the haven to the mainland, and sure enough, quite without warning, black, dramatic clouds were rolling towards the island. Branches of lightning lit the clouds, and I sighed and ambled back to the house, feet itching with quick-drying salt. I would say summer has arrived.

Gwynn's Island Time

2011-05-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

My grandparents left this morning, leaving me alone at the house on Gwynn's Island. It has been a while since I have been here by myself for more than a day or so. I am finished with my first year of graduate school, and find I am overwhelmed. This place is a fixed point, an unmoving mark by which I can measure myself and the distance I have traveled since I was last here. Little things change, but largely, Homagin remains Homagin. The house smells of my grandfather's pipe smoke, the attic of summer and dust, and the marsh like salt and mud and raw oyster brine (which I am attempting, at the insistence of my grandmother, to develop a taste for.) The woods are green again, but I know the trees now, and though I marvel that they have made it and have grown or broken or tilted askew in the quick-sinking mud of this island, they are familiar. They do not surprise me now. A young bald eagle, brown and somewhat less magnificent than the adult he will be, frequents Barn Creek, and I watch the returning osprey pairs chase him down the water, swirling behind him like kites over the marshes and docks. I watch the spring mallards on the pond, and the red-pointed claws of a blue crab in the muck, and sink barefoot into the swamp, sacrificing the cleanliness of my toes for the fresh, crisp taste of the wild asparagus that grows among the reeds. Everything is as I left it, before DC, before American.

On Saturday I shook off some leftover come-here nervousness and went to the Sausage and Beer Festival put on by the Rotary Club, hosted at the community art school. I sipped tiny, tiny, tiny, cups of local micro-brews and found I knew more people than I expected to, and met more still. DC has made me braver, and a little more willing to open my mouth and speak. Unlike DC, Mathews lacks anonymity. I have a feeling that as I meet more people here this will prove wonderful and a little bit awful. I like it, and I like the people here more and more, as they come to know me a bit better and I grow less wary of them.

The wind came up fast this afternoon, and I'm sitting on the new porch on the side of the house, just out of the gusts off of Milford Haven. The male mallard lands in the pond, where I suspect he has left a lady-mallard nest-bound and waiting. I have a few days to myself, and I find I don't quite remember how I did this. I am happy, but antsy. I find myself making lists, anxious to forget what it is that I'm supposed to be doing. I try to remember how to just be here, but I'm afraid it's going to take a little more time than it used to, so accustomed am I to the pace of the city and the demands of my school schedule. For tonight: gin and tonic, mallard watching, spaghetti and meatballs, and an early rest.

Nonfiction

2011-02-15T22:47:00.001-08:00

I had a strange evening. I am going to leave up my last post despite the fact that, in rereading it, I find it almost maddeningly generic. It lacks me. I have found it difficult to write in this context since my arrival in the city because I find that my writerly energy is so wrapped up in the work I am endeavoring to create for my workshops. I think there is also a way in which I am living less in my own interior, and find I have less to say in regards to that interior. My time in Virginia was largely lived out in my own head, and my writing reflected it. Now I find that, given that much more is happening in the exterior of my life, I have less to say about the goings on of my mind. That isn't to imply I've had some kind of personality-death in DC. It's simply a relief, in a way, to have something to do with myself other than think about the ways in which my life has been inalterably twisted about, and the ramifications of that on my thinking and feeling and living.

I bring this up because tonight one of the workshop pieces for my creative nonfiction piece dealt very specifically with some of what twisted my life up in the first place. The workshop descended into a chorus of questions. None of this was directed at me; it wasn't my piece. But, the simple hearing of the questions sent me into a sort of panic state, and I was shaken. How did the sister's illness effect the family? What did our narrator sacrifice for the sake of her sister? Is the narrator judgmental of her own anger regarding her sister's illness, or is she judgmental of the illness itself? What is healthy? Is this story about the narrator or the narrator's sister?

I am handing out a nonfiction piece next week. I haven't completed it as of yet. I am taking up a memoir piece that has lain unfinished for almost four years now. I wrote it as an undergraduate, and it concerns my history of depression and struggles with disordered eating, my close, somewhat twisted relationship with my sister, and my increasing anxiety over my sister's illness. It is saturated in death. I have not touched the piece since my sister died. I was frightened by what I had written, and by how accurately the fears my text detailed were enacted in my living-life in the years following the time when it was written. The piece is feeling increasingly difficult. I have been laboring on it in a surface level--fooling with tense and striking prose. In rereading it now, from this distance, I find my writing indulgent and sloppy. At the same time, I am startled by the immediacy of the emotion the process of editing and adding to the piece is stirring up in me. I am realizing how much I have managed to forget of the two years preceding Laura's death, and I find it unnerving. Difficult too is the revisitation of the times long before Laura was ever ill--our childhoods, the shared time. The time I no longer share with anyone. I find myself wishing I could call her to check the facts of her illness--her hospitalizations and threats and time in treatment--in the same way that the author of today's workshop piece was able to do. I can't. I can ask my parents, but I find I don't want to. It seems unfair to drag them back into the mud with me for the sake of a workshop piece. It is a strange thing to be frightened by what you have written and what you know you need to write and by what you don't remember well enough to write truthfully. The pressure I'm putting on myself over this is doing nothing to improve my outlook. I find the echoes of post trauma deafening me, and old anxiety flooding my system, potent with time.

Pull Yourself Together, Lady

2011-02-15T21:47:00.000-08:00

I have found I have been rather at odds with myself of late. I am finding it difficult to summon the energy necessary to try new things and places in these winter months, and as such am feeling stagnant. It is an unpleasant sensation. There is so much to do in DC, and I must admit I've, to some extent, failed to take advantage. At first my excuse was school, and now it appears to be school and weather combined. I swore when I arrived that I would try one new location every week in DC, but that quickly fell to the wayside, the demands of school and intrigues of my brand new social life effectively shelving my initial ambition. I find myself asking, What have I accomplished in DC? It's a stupid kind of question, and one designed to breed discontent. I am intolerant to moping, as those who know me well have likely been rudely informed, and suddenly I find myself a bit guilty of a thing I detest. So, in an attempt to annihilate my own will to mope, the following:

What I have accomplished in DC:

The completion of four rough drafts of new fiction, totaling some 56 pages of writing completely unique to my time at AU. This, after a full year of no writing, followed by a year of blogging and unsatisfactory and incomplete dabbling in attempts at fiction, is an accomplishment I can both abstractly recognize and exactly quantify. I have written something, and three of four of the stories are pieces I will undoubtedly return to, and refine. The work also represents a significant improvement than that which I produced in UC Santa Cruz's Concentration, and I am proud of it. "Wolf Trap", "Forest" and "Gravekeeper."
The reestablishment and strengthening of a friendship with one Michael Bierne. I am lucky to have an old friend in DC, and my relationship with Mike has proved an absolute pleasure. And he sent me a Valentine in the mail.
The creation of a solid group of AU friends, some of whom I met through my first fiction workshop, and some of whom I met through the magic of a true graduate student passion: drinking at the end of the day. I have my core group of often offensive but awkwardly charming man-friends (Steve, Marshal, Chuck) and one female peer in general snark, Kathleen. It may sound ridiculous, but after a year of watching most of my undergraduate friends make new friends while I languished in the senior-populated island of seclusion, making friends absolutely feels like an accomplishment.
Nesting. I mean this in both an apartment and neighborhood sense. I have my haunts, and though my comfort in said haunts is something I fear is now enabling my general laziness/stagnation, I am glad to have found my pub, my coffee shop, and my preferred Chinese takeout joint. I have a neighborhood flower shop that I visit on Fridays (they have a new labrador puppy named Gunner), a favored Whole Foods, and a favorite bartender (Chris, possibly the sweetest man I've ever encountered tending bar). My apartment is furnished, and though the walls remain a bit bare, it is comfortable and lived-in, and I am glad to come home to it at the end of the day/night.

I feel better having written these things down, stupidly enough. It's a silly thing, to have to prove to yourself that you are doing an okay job of things, but sometimes life necessitates some silliness. I am left thinking of the many things DC has to offer, and what accomplishments and experiences I hope to incorporate into the next six months. Museum visits, more film watching at E Street Cinema, dining, further neighborhood exploration, neighboring neighborhood exploration, the continued branching out into new nightlife spots, East coast road tripping, visits to my family in Pennsylvania, decoration of my apartment walls, and general living life type of stuff. I find myself eager for Spring and the energy I hope it will enliven in me, though I hope to face the final half (half!) of winter with renewed ambition and a lot less moping. I suppose this is me getting in the swing of the New Year, cliched as it may be. It's supposed to be 68 degrees this Friday, I have a nonfiction piece due next Tuesday, and I am ready to wrestle this general malaise into submission.

Winter

2010-12-21T20:56:00.000-08:00

On the drive from DC, the snow lined the rows in the cut corn fields. I have always loved the way corn fields look after the corn harvest. The stalks are cut a foot above the soil, and left. And now, grass gone and ground frozen, the left-stalks rise hard and jagged from the fields in strange, wind-tilted rows. In the spring it will be plowed over and churned under. But today, with great streaks of white only highlighting the spears of the cut corn stalks, the fields were so cold and beautiful that I stopped and stood outside my car for a moment. I watched the crows peck for the last remnants of summer beneath the crust of winter white. Winter in the city is so different, so winter.

It's cold and hard and the wind whips between the buildings so fast it feels barbed. You steel yourself against it. The snow has stayed, and the sidewalks are icy. Pedestrians dart across the streets in front of cars, emboldened by their need not to freeze to death. I have to admit, I find the winter difficult in DC. More so than on the island, which is saying something. In some respects, my time on the island now seems surreal--imagined. Perhaps because it isn't an understood thing to do. When I say to people, Well, I spent a year living in relative isolation on an island in the Chesapeake Bay, I don't think that they grasp that I am entirely serious. I think to myself, now, what was I doing this day one year ago? Today, I likely built a fire in the morning. Maybe I made a trip to Gloucester to buy wine and vegetable broth (which is inexplicably impossible to buy in Mathews County). Maybe I watched a film, arrived red-slipped from Netflix in PO Box 188 at the Gwynn's Island PO. If it was above forty degrees, I rode my bicycle to pick up said mail, hands buried deep in the pockets of my red, hooded coat. The locals stared at me from their well-heated cars in disbelief and I nodded to them, face mostly obscured by one of the many scarves I knitted last winter, while watching West Wing. Maybe, just maybe, I wrote something. Most likely I agonized about the fact that I hadn't. I made myself dinner, something ridiculously labor-intensive, and drank Pinot Noir, and winnowed away the dark hours. Last winter, my winter here, was difficult.

I miss summer, as I always do, every year. When I was a child I stole a little plastic bottle of my Great Aunt Margaret's perfume. It was a dark, dark amber color and came in a little round bottle with a cheaply painted gold top. I don't know why I took it. It smelled so like my summers, I guess. Every year I would spend a night or two with Aunt Margaret, in Chapel Neck, at her little figurine-filled house on North River. Her second husband had gone to sea and brought her treasures. Her indoor porch was a museum of his travels--reed-covered wine bottles from Italy, delicate blue china, tiny boxed bamboo houses from Japan, a mobile of tropical seashells, and dozens of porcelain statues of birds. I chased fiddler crabs in the yard and plunged my foot through a rotting plank on her dock, beside which a long sunk wooden boat sat in the shallows, filling slowly with sharp edged salt grass. I took her little bottle of perfume and at home, in California, a state I hated beyond reason until I was old enough to enjoy things like rampant liberalism or farmers markets, I dropped a single amber drop on the last page of the Elizabeth Enright novel Gone-Away Lake. I still have the copy of the book, one of my favorites from my adolescence. It was published in 1957, and is about two children who, while visiting the country home of their cousins, stumble upon a long-forgotten Victorian resort community at the edge of a long-vanished lake, and the two elderly eccentrics who still reside there. For whatever reason, the book always made me think so hard of Virginia that it broke my heart a little bit to read it, I wanted so badly for it to be August, when we would go East. So I put the drop there, that strange cheap old-lady perfume, and sometimes in the middle of winter, when things were particularly hard at school or hard at home or hard in my head I would open the book to the last page and breathe in. And instantly, every time, it would be as if it was summer, and I was here, sunburnt and freckled, knee-deep in the Chesapeake.

I suppose what I'm saying is that, shuddering against a particularly fierce onslaught of winter wind on my way to the Dupont metro, I can't help but wish for my copy of that book, or the smell of my great aunt's perfume, or the feeling of humid hot so humid and hot you can taste it.

Time Flies

2010-11-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

I think I am happy. It is a different sort of happiness than what I found on the island--that strange, quiet happiness. A self contained happiness. My DC happiness goes in all directions, tumbling. It's a spinning in place kind of happiness. I used to do that as a child--spin until I fell down, dizzy and laughing. That's how I often feel here. Off-kilter and a little bit disoriented, but glad and unafraid. In some ways everything seems very easy here. It's a funny thing, learning to handle things on your own. On the island I learned how to be by myself. I learned how to handle long stretches of time with relatively little human contact, how to be silent, how to entertain myself. I learned that I could be okay without people there to make me okay. Here, there are more people than I really know what to do with, and though I am still forming my little world, I have never felt lonely. I'd imagine I could be very lonely here. Living alone, five floors off the ground, in a city I've never spent more than a week in prior to moving here. I am lucky to have Mike here, because he has made the whole experience of reintegrating into the big bad world easy and comfortable. We go on forays out into the city, trying and tasting and talking. But it isn't even just that. It's that compared to keeping myself sane for the long, dark winter months on Gwynn's Island, coming home to an empty apartment in a strange city and being okay with it seems pretty damn simple.

So what have I been doing. Facts. I made it through midterms unscathed. I find I can't summon anywhere near the amount of anxiety and stress I used to be able to as an undergraduate. I like my classes. The writing is the hardest part, which is an odd thing, as it is a difficulty you have to create for yourself. No one else can make it difficult. The challenge is yours. I've managed, but I don't think I'm at the top of my game, yet, yet. I am rusty. What else? Mike and I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity, which was pretty fantastic, honestly. It wasn't a high-high, if that makes sense. It was more a subdued, contented thing. We jumped and clapped and laughed with the most polite group of 250,000 people imaginable. I saw Frightened Rabbit perform last week, and that was lovely. They put on an incredible show, and I would recommend seeing them should you ever find yourself in the position to. I've yet to set foot in a museum, which is, I know, shameful. There's so much to do here that I find I have to pick my battles. I have to say, one of my favorite things to do in this big strange city is to sit at the bar down the road from my apartment, drink a Guinness, and read the workshop pieces for any given week. It's loud and comfortable, and I love it. Strange, that before I know it December will roll around and I'll have five (?!) weeks off. And then before I know it, May will arrive, hot and green, and I'll have finished my first year of graduate school. But I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I?

Twice Over

2010-10-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

Making friends, making plans, writing stories, walking and riding and laughing, trying. It has been a hard week for me and mine. Two years on Sunday, two long short horrible normal years. Sitting in class I found myself remembering what I was doing two years ago, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Driving with Aunt Lynne to San Jose looking for a flower designer--hydrangeas, green and rose-studded in tall glass vases. Sitting at a round table at Chapel of the Angels, barely barely keeping it together until I broke and went to the parking lot. Buying plants at the nursery in Santa Cruz, gently prodding the dangling fuschias, phone to my ear as my mother told me that she had died instantaneously. Staying up nights, later and later, pasting photos of her face to cardboard for the memorial service.

I didn't think about any of this last year. Last year was all about the day of it, the day she died, and the drive and the clouds and Colby on the phone and sitting in the living room with my parents, in the room none of us ever used. This year was all about the days after, the days between October 3 and the day of the memorial service, the following Saturday. The convoy to San Francisco to pick up her car. The phone calls to her friends. The arrival of my relatives. The food, the wonderful bizarre food delivered to our doorstep and often left. Lasagnas and apple tatine and more bagels than I had ever seen in one place. And the plants, the flowers, lining every surface of our house. We ran out of vases, room.

Last year my parents came to Homagin and we huddled together, our little family. This year they went to Tahoe and I stayed here. My father asked if I was going to be okay and I said, What's the worst that can happen? I'll be sad. I find myself saying that a lot these days, in all sorts of situations. What's the worst that can happen?

Watch it all change some more.

2010-09-14T10:59:00.000-07:00

Suddenly busy, suddenly so busy, and I am trying so hard to remember how to be busy. It makes me think of the last time I was busy, in June of 2008, in the weeks before graduation. It seems so very long time ago. It seems like another life, somehow, and incomparable to the life I am trying to live now. If you permanently alter a fundamental, defining aspect of a person's identity, do you fundamentally alter the person? I feel different. I feel so different that I have trouble remembering June of 2008, and what it was like to be that busy busy crazy girl.

It is good to feel busy. I like my classes and generally I like my classmates, although sometimes I feel strangely old/young. Being around young people for the first time in a year makes me feel like I am twenty-four. At the same time, being around young people makes me feel used and beaten up and beaten down and like I've already lived my share, and I am just too damn young to feel this old. How to explain that to anyone? How to avoid having to? The freshman are teensy and nervous and too-loud and slow to load the bus and I find myself staring at them, awed that only six years ago I was one of them. I wore red shoes with paint stained boy's jeans and horribly knit scarves and cut my own hair in the dorm bathroom and couldn't imagine that I would ever graduate from college, that I would ever be grown up.

I went down to Homagin over the weekend to try it out--this whole visiting the island thing. I was excited on the way down and excited on the way up, so I suppose it worked fairly well. Admittedly, it was strange to be there. There were new baggers at the Best Value and some old pines had been cut down and the lawns were all brown. It was Fall, totally and completely, and I felt the same rush of sadness that visited me last Fall. These beautiful Fall days, all blue-skies and shapely clouds and new light, are heartbreaking in a way that makes me hate them. Yesterday I realized why, of the two metro stops I am exactly between, I always choose the one that gives me an uphill hike (the station at Dupont Circle) rather than the Woodley Park Zoo station. If I get off at Woodley I have to cross a bridge, something I thought didn't bother me. It does bother me, I find, unexpectedly, crossing that beautiful bridge. And I think, Damn. Uphill it is.

Washington D.C.

2010-08-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

The view from where I'm sitting has changed significantly in the last two weeks. I find myself at a coffeehouse in Adams Morgan, drinking Guinness and surrounded by young people similarly engrossed by their laptops. I spend my nights in an apartment on the fifth floor of a brick building on California Street NW. In the morning I drink coffee and walk down to the Dupont Circle metro, where a train whisks me about the underside of this city. I emerge, blinking, fumbling for sunglasses, as of yet unsure of where I am. I find that the surreality of it hasn't yet lifted, and I sometimes feel like I am an actor in some kind of play, or that I am playing make-believe. My classes at American University started Monday, and I was nervous and skittish and shaky. The campus is small and there are no deer and I have yet to detect the wafting scent of marijuana. It started raining on Tuesday as I, chagrined, searched high and low for the campus bookstore. There were no naked freshman running pell-mell through the quad, and no drum circle, and I did miss Santa Cruz. It also made me glad of my own college experience, and envious of the freshman who as we speak are nervously preparing to descend on UCSC, where I expect they will be met in the Porter Circle by eccentric TAs wearing pink tutus, a sight that upon my arrival filled me with a sense of immense relief.

When I received my first syllabus (for National Cinema, which I can take for literature credit, wonderfully enough) and found it twenty dense pages long, I felt as if I'd been hit in the head with a brick. Yes! You have returned to college, on purpose! It wasn't that I regretted the decision; it was more the realization that I'd made it. After attending my first few classes, I find that I am a little bit excited and a little bit nervous. Carolyn, graduate student. Goodness gracious. It was unspeakably hard to leave Virginia, and I have yet to love DC the way I love Gwynn's Island, but sitting here, surrounded by people my own age and the sound of voices and music and cars and sirens, I am looking forward to the next few years, and what I will find. I left the island in a car full of the same things as had arrived with me from California a year before, but I knew I wasn't running from anything, and that was new.

Moon Jelly Nights

2010-08-08T09:31:00.000-07:00

I see my departure date fast approaching, and am trying to enjoy everything, everything I can think of. I am doing everything I can. And I haven't been sleeping much.

A few nights ago I was up late, restless, and could see lightning flashing out over the bay. I climbed on my bike and headed out into the moonless dark, a sensation like flying, and ended up at the beach at Tin Can Alley. The clouds were lighting up, and I walked in the shallows, nervous of stinging nettles. I ran into some boys bait-fishing for croakers off some of the salt-beaten pylons lining the beach, and sat with them a bit, talking and drinking awful beer. Hot, we jumped overboard and swam a while. They spun their hands in the water to show me the phosphorescent moon jellies, lit by the movement like strange little lanterns beneath the waves. I got my first jellyfish sting, and barely noticed until the next day, when my arm was striped in red bands where the nettles had glanced across my skin. We swam and looked at Mars and watched shooting stars and the clouds flashed at the edge of our sight. And it was one of those strange happenstance nights where it seems like reality has been suspended, and all bets are off, and strangers impulsively swim in the jelly-lit Chesapeake.

Last night I went to a show at the Southwind Cafe; The Delvers played, a neat little string band with a viola for a fiddle. I sat at the bar and sang along with Bob Dylan songs and met a dreadlocked boy named Bradley who may as well have been beamed straight out of Santa Cruz. As he explained to me that he was trying to live sustainably, and grew his own organic food and filtered his own water, I found myself shaking my head in disbelief. They played my favorite song, "Wagon Wheel," and half the bar sang along, and a 93-year old watermen in white pants and a cowboy hat got up and danced, eliciting whoops from the crowd. I realized after leaving that I had known almost every person at the cafe, and by the end of the night I had met most of those I didn't know at the start. It is a small county, and seems to be getting smaller all the time, and I am sad to leave it just as I feel I've become a real part of it. My only regret is that it took me as long as it did. But summer isn't over, and there are more nights to be had, and I am so glad.

Land of the Pines

2010-07-31T09:17:00.000-07:00

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

--Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

Today marks the one year anniversary of my arrival on the island, when I crossed the bridge sunburnt and mosquito-bit from ten days of driving in a car packed full of friends and one unfortunate fern. It is fitting that we arrived in August. It has always been my favorite month. It is a portentous month, heavy and hot and bittersweet. I counted its days as a child, dreading the erring chill moments of fall, the first browning leaves. It always seemed to me the last chapter of a book you didn't want to finish.

I have been thinking about what to say about this year, this long, strange, short, surreal year. This grounding year. This feet planted on the dirt year. This isolated year. This year of figs and persimmons and cherries and butter beans. This year of snow and hail and thunder and tide. This year, almost two since my sister died and left me to figure out who I was if I wasn't her older sister. This biking, kayaking, swimming year. Sand year, mud year, brackish year. This year on an island in the Chesapeake Bay, bounded by water and family and fable and memory. When I left Santa Cruz I didn't much care to try. Try, try anything. I just wanted to leave, to move, even laterally. I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I could find my way here I would find some strength again, some sliver of passion or pride. A year ago I described myself as a forest burnt to the ground. I did feel that way. I underestimated my roots. I underestimated this place and my people. I find myself buoyed up and held by my eastern family, those people who I saw but barely knew, shared blood with but never a home. This year could have been indescribably lonely, and while it had its hard days, my aunts and uncles and grandparents visited and ate and laughed and treated me like I hadn't been raised thousands of miles away, tethered to them only by phone line and photograph. I expected to find my strength in the place, and while I love this island with a desperation that I have reserved only for Laura, I found as much, if not more, in joining the family fray. I see Laura sometimes, in the turn of my grandfather's head or the narrowing of my aunt's eyes or the quietness of my grandmother's company. I see myself, too, and feel as close to complete as I have in two years, in more.

I made the right choice, and I am ready to try now.

Golden Years

2010-07-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

I've had visitors abound on Gwynn's Island. Lacy and Greg followed by the Breingan family, soon to be followed by the whole catastrophe. I love to share this place with people who appreciate it, but it does make me feel vulnerable sometimes, like I am exposing my underbelly. It is a house of memories, especially precious now that some of the players are no longer in play.

While Lacy and Greg were here we watched a movie I made in 2004, documenting a one week sojourn in the family hurrah's nest. I hadn't seen it in quite a while, and found I still liked it. It was odd to see the family then, before a lot of what would make the next few years hard had even threatened us. Granddaddy rules the dinner table, making grand proclamations about the intelligence of pipe smokers. Laura appears frequently, and I see things in watching the film now that I had missed before. The sadness just creeping into the edges of the frame, like spiderwebs. Everyone looks older now, and more tired, and our laughter is perhaps lacking in some of its old irreverence. It seems that you never realize you're living in the golden years until they've changed into something else. Laura is dead, Zoe has cancer, and my grandfather can't remember to claim that smoking a pipe is a sign of intelligence. We are still here, and we are still laughing, and in a week most of the whole catastrophe will gather her at my insistence. We have done this every summer since I was a child, and I am not letting go of that. I am glad that the film exists, a time capsule to remind us of the before now that we're living in the after. It doesn't make me feel sad so much as thoughtful, and when I watch Laura onscreen, wiping peanut butter on Zoe's head after feeding her a cracker, I am glad to see her.

Prunus serotina.

2010-07-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

It's wild cherry time on the island. When my grandmother went away to college her parents would cut branches from the wild cherry trees and ship them to her, and she would sit on the floor of her dormitory room and eat them off the branch. I bike all over the island looking for the best tree. I rate them based on accessibility, the size of the fruit, and the sweetness of the cherries. Of the largest cherries I find, grandmother says that they must be growing over an old outhouse, and I have a sneaking suspicion that she is correct. The cherries turn jet black when ripe, varying in size from a pea to a marble, and there juice stains my hands and teeth. This taste, more than any other, is my summer. Sweat soaked cherry picking days. When we were children I would drag Laura along on my quest for the best tree. She never ate the fruit; she didn't eat fruit. Now I bike home with handfuls of fruit and spit the pits in the ditches, hoping to sow black cherry trees up and down Gumthicket Road. My grandmother used to walk with me to the closest trees and hold the branches low for me, so I could strip them of their fruit with greedy young hands. Now I drive to DC to stay with her, a bag of wild cherry branches on the passenger seat, and she sits in her chair overlooking the city and eats the black fruit from the branch.

Maybe You're Right

2010-07-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

I've been in DC for the weekend, and have been extremely productive. I bought a new computer (old one spontaneously died early last week, and this is why I haven't been updating anything/existing online), found and secured a beautiful apartment for August, managed to have my data transferred from my old, dead computer (thank you Ted), toured my Grandmother's potential new apartment, saw the DC firework display from the roof of the Watergate, sketched a to-scale floorplan of the new apartment and cut out to-scale little pieces of furniture that I've been arranging and rearranging, went to the first farmers' market I've seen in a year, and attended an orientation for my department at American University. I now have a DC apartment and an AU ID. It has been quite a weekend. This is good, because it had the potential to be a difficult weekend, and while I found I was sad, I was okay. It is hard to watch all of your old friends march into the future holding hands, and to not be a part of that, but I suppose marching off into my own future distracted me, and lessened the hurt a bit. I do miss them, and their company, and feeling as though I was a part of their lives. It would be easiest to be angry, but I find that I am not. And regret, I have learned, does not serve me.

Salt Days

2010-06-21T20:49:00.000-07:00

My summer days are whipping by and I feel myself toeing for the brakes. I try not to miss it. I try not to let the uncertainty of what is coming steal joy from my summer. My summer, my summer. Laura's birthday was last week and I found that it was not much at all. What would she think of this, of my presence here? What would she think of everything that has happened? What would she regret missing, had she the chance to regret?

In the hot afternoons I bike the mile and a half to the beach at Tin Can Alley and dive into the warming waters of the Chesapeake Bay. I am afraid of jellyfish, but haven't seen any yet. The salt water is hot now, and at night if the temperature of the air dips into the low eighties the wind off of the bay is warm against your face. I swim out to a sandbar, far from the beach, and float around on my back. Once, walking on the soft bottom, I scared a stingray and it went streaking through the shallows, three feet wide and dark. I'll admit, I screamed. Islanders and non-islanders come to the beach and lie on the sand, a half-collapsed house in an abandoned field the backdrop to our summer. Kids play Marco Polo near the shore, and I laugh at their game. The bay is so expansive, so free from a swimming pools boundaries, and they never find each other. They just yell and yell and burn and I wonder, who came up with this stupid game? On my way home I often stop to pick wild blueberries. I get poison oak and poison sumac and mosquito bites all up my legs but somehow it feels just right--like the summer I never fully had as a child.

The kids on the island are out of school now and they run free, racing up and down the lanes long past dusk. Chasing sunsets across the island with a camera in one hand, I run across them. They hunt lightning bugs in the fields and play hide and go seek in the woods and sometimes they play tag on the main road, hiding behind houses and cars. Their home is an enviable one, and I am glad to share it with them. I feel more kinship with them, often, than with their parents, who wave at me from cars and lawn mowers and their front porches. I ride by, sunburnt and salt-haired. This evening I was passed by one particularly unfriendly teenage boy who shares my road, and said hello, and was ignored. When I reached the main road, there he was, handing smuggled beers to two teenage girls from a Jansport backpack. I laughed aloud, so anxious were their faces. As I biked past one girl opened the tab of her beer and it exploded, eliciting screams. I went to the beach and hung my dress on my bicycle and jumped in the water and tried not to think about leaving. I try not to think about regrets, and I am happy. Some moments I am so happy in this place that I feel like I am brand new. I remember, we were children once, before this happened.

Company

2010-06-13T20:42:00.000-07:00

We all met in Santa Cruz, California. Only two of the five now reside in California, Alex and Hannah. Travis and Jessica now hail from Brooklyn, a world apart from mine. Once upon a time we sat on meadows and lay on beaches and did homework splayed on beat up dorm carpet. Once upon a time we shared rooms and none of us were in love, and once upon a time we didn’t know each other at all. We meet now under different skies, in changed skins, in a place I never expected we would all be, together. There are so many stars, so many stars, they say, and I see them again, the way I did when I first arrived. We speculate on constellations, realizing that these are those we have never been able to see before, so bright are the lights of our homes. We ate crappy French fries in a dining hall and bathed in co-ed showers and knew all the same people. Have we grown up?

The world has stretched now and it has all turned out so differently than we may have expected but we met there, on my island, under skies with too many stars in a world with a few too many questions. We are, none of us, assured. We can’t imagine what our futures might be, or if we will remain friends, or if we will ever be in such a place again, together. So we barbecue corn and ribs and boil butter beans and steam asparagus and bake strawberry rhubarb pie and spoon bread and eat eat eat with abandon and dance in the kitchen with young legs that feel old. I make crab cakes and fresh bread and scrambled eggs and BLTs and hot dogs and cole slaw. We stomp our feet on linoleum we couldn’t afford to buy and wave our arms to music made by people now dead, and laugh. We bake too long on the beach at Tin Can Alley and our skin, our barely age beaten skin, burns bright red in places, and freckles splatter my cheekbones like spilt coffee. We drink, oh we drink. We went to college, see, and that’s the place to learn how to drink. Watermelon sangria and beer and Virginia root rum and whiskey coke and g/t. In the water of a new ocean we fear sting rays and try to dig our toes into the sand beneath the salt water but can’t; the tide keeps taking us, again and again. We ride bicycles on country roads and our teeth chatter on the gravel and sand. The air is so hot here, not like California. Sweat curls our hair, longer now than it once was, and wets our clothes against our skin. All together we drive to Southwind and play music with people who would hate our politics and religion, singing aloud and dancing on old hardwood floors. People with decades on us watch and laugh and ask, Who are they? And I see, I see, how it must be to be the old looking upon the young. I see how it is to mourn time spent, or not spent.

At night, we walk Gumthicket Road. Fireflies like dreams flash in the marsh and trees and the road before us, like lights on a Christmas pine. When we reach a certain stand of gum trees a half mile away, we stand in silence. There is so little to say. What seems like hundreds of lightning bugs flash flash flash in the trees and I will spend the rest of my life trying to tell you what it looked like, but I suspect there aren’t words to say. It was so something that my eyes couldn’t follow, and I felt like crying. We stood in the dark, listening, watching. I think we all felt as if we were seeing a moment apart. Apart from it—from growing up or growing old. Apart from life as we see it and live it. I think we may have time traveled a little, to a time when we were not so worried or afraid or in a hurry. What I saw there, in the trees, was indescribable. I think my friends, my good old friends, would agree with me. To describe such a thing in words would be to attempt to ruin it, and I can’t. At night I climb on an old rusty cruiser and bicycle Gumthicket and it is like biking through starshowers. How to forget it? How to leave it behind? How to grow up, if growing up is forgetting this?

Calendar

2010-05-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

Time is going very fast now. Why does that happen? With a finish line in sight the days slip by, paper calendar pages. I haven't had much to say. No, I have. But I don't much like talking anymore. I visited my mother's side of the family in Pennsylvania over the weekend, and stayed with my Uncle Billy and his family at the house my mother's parents lived in for my entire childhood. The basement smells just the same. I talked nervously, self-consciously. I had a very nice time. It is strange to see your mannerisms crop up where you didn't expect to see them. My mother's parents planted a tree for every child and grandchild in the backyard. My tree is tallest now, a blue-grey pine that dwarfs everything but Gil's green pine. He is closest to me in age. I am the eldest cousin. Laura's tree is gone--died. I try not to read fate in botany. I eye my overlarge tree with distaste, and Uncle Billy talks about donating it as a Christmas tree to the city of Philadelphia. Yes, I think.

In Virginia a school of cownose rays spend their afternoons and evening in the shallow water in front of the house. They are broad, sometimes two feet wide, and their wing tips breach the water like shark fins. Guppies jump out of the water and Zoe refuses to go overboard. She stands on the steps watching the gray fins break the water's surface in twos. Aunt Lynne and I stand at the water's edge and scream when we see a particularly large ray skimming the water's surface, its shape alien. There are dozens of them, whirling and gliding, and I have never seen anything like it. Skates, they call them here. We find a recipe for fried skate wings, but all agree that after seeing them, smooth as sharks, we would not eat them.

My garden has doubled in size in my absence, and the first eggplant and zucchini blossoms are just opening on their respective vines. The hydrangeas at the yard's edge are blooming, pink again, despite Grandmother's attempts to turn them blue. Aunt Lynne brought me my first bouquet of peonies from DC, and they burst open, gaudy and pink. The day stretches into the evening and we all sit on the porch after dinner, Granddaddy asking the same questions as we supply the same answers, over and over.

Thundershook

2010-05-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

I can think of nothing I like better than to take a bike ride in a light summer dress and to be caught in a warm Virginia rainstorm. I climb onto my worn out bicycle and pedal out under darkening skies. The air goes suddenly heavy and still and the hairs stick to the back of my neck and then, all at once, the rain begins to fall in curtains, as if someone somewhere has pulled a lever. I bicycle with arms spread open to catch what falls, warm and wet as the air in August. On the main road gruff men in pickup trucks smile and wave, arms outstretched, amused by the drenched come-here on a already rain-rusted bicycle. People wave from their porches and laugh and shout hello. And when thunder drumrolls in the unseen edges of the sky and the clouds fall so gray they almost look purple, I pedal home, exhilarated and foolish. Frogs chant in the ditches and I pull up my driveway just as the darkest clouds begin to alight like lanterns on the horizon, flashing. I sit in my great grandfathers's porch chair and watch the lightning strike white out beyond the trees and count, 1, 2, 3, waiting for the thunder to shake the house.

The Bridge

2010-05-10T20:59:00.000-07:00

This week's episode of This American Life is called simply: The Bridge. I didn't have to read the synopsis to know that I shouldn't listen to it. It speaks to the way that my life has been altered. Bridges will forever be symbols of grief. I am no longer surprised by how often the Golden Gate Bridge appears in media culture. I have not set foot in the city of San Francisco, aside from the airport, since we drove to pick up Laura's car in the week after she jumped. I have no plans to go there again. It is difficult to explain the strength of my reaction to that city, let alone the bridge. When I am confronted by an image of the bridge it feels as if I have placed my hands in boiling water, or stepped on a nail, or fallen. I saw it once, just once, from an airplane upon arrival in California. I found myself twisting in my seat just to stare, fixated. I could not look away. It is a unnerving to see this massive thing, this beloved thing, and to know that right there, in that place, a life ended and your life became this thing, this unrecognizable thing. People frequently post pictures of themselves in front of the bridge on facebook, and it is always making appearances in film, usually without warning. I understand. It is beautiful. But what people don't seem to see is that for more people than can be counted, this bridge is a symbol of horror, of loss. So many, so many people have died there. Innumerable people have died there. It is literally the most popular place in the world to commit suicide. But people do not like to think about that. They like a beautiful bridge over a beautiful body of water. And while I can understand it, it hurts me to feel isolated by my sorrow. It hurts to hate people for their ignorance, or their unawareness, or their ability to live easily, without pain. It hurts to think of it, that orange metal wrapped in fog. But I know that there are things I can not change, and bridges I can not will to sink into the sea, and people who can not, will not understand.

Watermen

2010-05-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

I managed to get in my first kayak trip of the season last week, right before I descended into a four day hell of allergic insanity during which I was confined to the house by an influx of some unknown, unseen assailant. I am amazed by my body's ability to overreact. The kayak trip was lovely; I paddled out to the Hole in the Wall, the little chain of sandy islands that protect Milford Haven from the rougher Chesapeake Bay. I walked around the largest island for about an hour, hoping to come across either a duck nest or some wild asparagus. I found neither, but enjoyed myself nonetheless. Asparagusin' is a local past time. Wild asparagus is common in the marshes, and if you know where to look you can reap a plentiful harvest of pencil-slender spears of the most delicate, lovely asparagus imaginable. Knowing where to look is the hard part, and in the days of yore it was the crabbers who tended to know best. They marked off the patches during the summer, when the asparagus fern is easy to sight, and returned in late April to asparagus. My granddaddy used to asparagus as a boy; he and friends would scrounge the muddy shallows for the elusive vegetable and sell big rubber banded bundles to the neighbors in Mobjack. Novice that I am, I failed to note the some four asparagus plants on my property before winter fell and the fern disappeared. By the time I could find the plants this spring, the asparagus had gone woody--past the point of edibility. Next year I will not be so unprepared.

Despite a lack of asparagus/duck nests, I did have a lovely time on the little island, scaring sandpipers and poking around the empty duck hides. I'm glad I did when I had the chance; my allergy induced convalescence lasted out the hot weather, and I find that now that I am well it is cool and windy. Crab season has begun, and the crabs are plentiful this year for the first time since I was a child. The local restaurants and seafood shops proudly boast signs for soft shell crabs, a local delicacy that I have never quite wrapped my palette around. Soft shell crab sandwiches consist of a deep-fried whole soft shell crab (they look like spiders) in a bun. The legs hang out the sides. It's a little too much for the come-here in me to handle. Look at some pictures online. I dare you to claim you would do better. Crab cakes I can handle. Cracking crabs I find sort of viciously delightful. We used to throw our own crab pots overboard at the end of the dock, baited with an unlucky croaker from the morning's fishing adventure. Sometimes Laura and I would sit at the end of the dock with little lines baited with raw bacon, teasing blue crabs from the water and into a waiting net.

Water is a defining aspect of life in Mathews. It is said that in the old days, when Mathews boys went to sea, captains were warned to never let a Mathews sailor on board, or he'd soon have the helm. RC went to sea, as did many in our family. Granddaddy marvels at it--that boys from the edge of nowhere would leave the County and see the world, only to come back.

May Things

2010-05-02T15:50:00.000-07:00

There are two mallards showing up in the yard every day: a male and a female. The female appears to be pregnant. The male arrives first and scouts out the lawn, and then quacks until she flies in, all wobbly and rotund. They waddle around the yard, the female feeding from fallen seed beneath the bird feeders while the male keeps watch. Then they sit side by side in the shade and just hang out. Zoe was here over the last week, and chased them off again and again, but it doesn't seem to have left an impression. I am glad to have them. I'm hoping that they're nesting in the marsh, where I see them feeding at night. Maybe I'll have ducklings. Grandmother tells me that a mallard pair had a nest in our juniper bushes a few years ago, but a black snake ate the eggs. The black snakes really are something out of southern gothic fiction. They are like giant pitch black garden hoses. RC hates snakes, and kills them every chance he can. I wonder what it is like to be a duck.

The spring weather didn't seem to last very long. It was 90 degrees today, and humid as August. Not that I'm complaining, as I am just the kind of weirdo who loves this jungly weather. I managed to get my garden in last week. RC begrudgingly cleared me a dirt patch in his magnificent lawn, telling me repeatedly that that was the end of his involvement in the garden. RC hates vegetable gardens. I am not sure why. Anyway, it's a fairly small patch, but I've packed in as much as I can. Zucchini, cantaloupe, eggplant, bell peppers (red, green, and orange), tomatoes (cherry, beefsteak, and better boy), and cucumbers. I planted marigolds all around the edge, hoping to deter insects and rabbits. No telling if this plant husbandry stuff actually will work here, where insects and rabbits abound. I have a little container kitchen garden on the other side of the house. I am pretty excited about all of this. I haven't had a proper garden since elementary school. Thunderstorms are supposed to be rolling through tomorrow, and I'll welcome a break from all the watering I've been doing to combat the temperature.

The mosquitoes and tourists have arrived. I am glad I have a few months here before I start school. Months to sit on my front porch and watch the boats and listen to the drawbridge horn at night. To sip gin and tonics and end this sojourn just as I began it, but happier. I am comforted in knowing that the island will change very little in my absence.

The County

2010-04-30T07:26:00.000-07:00

I have never been on the island in April, and I am just amazed. A month ago there wasn't a speck of green, and now the forest has erupted. The azalea bushes all over the island have turned out amazing displays of hot pink, peach, and red on plants so large that the look like clouds. Being in London got me thinking about the reasons I love Virginia, or rather, one reason: that it has a real sense of history. Not to say that California doesn't have history; it surely does. But more so that history is more evident here. In California the land is so valuable that things don't linger the same way they do here; old buildings are mowed down and new stucco atrocities spring up. There isn't much sentiment. Or at least it always seemed that way to me.

There are a great number of old, old houses in Mathews County. Not old compared to the houses you walk by on every street in London, but old by American standards. Many of them are pretty run down, or even uninhabitable at this point. Salt and water and forest can be hard on timber homes, and there's an abundance of all three in Mathews. The County, as from-heres often refer to it, was established in 1791 after it split off from the larger Gloucester County (there's still a healthy amount of mud-slinging between the two neighboring counties, and things apparently come to a head every time the high schools' teams face off). What's interesting about Mathews County, among other things, is that while it has a total area of 252 square miles (which isn't much), 166 square miles of that is water. That's just about 67%. My grandfather likes to say that there isn't a place in Mathews over a mile from the water, and he's most likely correct.

After the collapse of the steamship industry and the decline of the fishing industry, Mathews went into an economic decline that seems to have persisted through to this day. This economic decline is probably the reason that Mathews remains largely untouched by the quick-changing technological and social aspects of American society, for good or ill. On the lovely side of this, Mathews boasts no Walmart or Starbucks--no chains at all, really, besides one Hardees on Main Street. The shops in the courthouse are all locally owned and run, and the restaurants that manage to stay open (Southwind Cafe, White Dog Inn, Lynne's Diner, etc) are definitely more interesting than a Chilis, Chevy's, or TGI Fridays. People buy shrimp, scallops, jumbo lump crabmeat, and (in the right season) watermelons, tomatoes, and cucumbers off the back of pick-up trucks parked up and down Main Street. The manager of the local grocery store greets you by name and your postmistress knows your entire family. There are no traffic lights in the entire county.

Of course, a lack of modernity comes with its negative aspects. Mathews can be a little prickly towards outsiders, particularly the Obama-sticker-sporting-Prius-driving-come-heres that own riverfront and bayfront property all over the county. This prickliness, which is born of a fierce local pride, has helped preserve Mathews County's identity while Gloucester County got its Walmart, Starbucks, and traffic lights. It has also preserved some of the regrettable prejudices that Obama-sticker-sporting-Prius-driving-come-heres associate with the South. It was interesting to be in California when Virginia's governor declared Confederate History month, much to the shock and indignation of a lot of people. I could only shrug. You see a lot of Confederate flags around here, Confederate History month or not. You see a lot of bumper stickers (often on pick-up trucks, for whatever reason). I barely notice anymore. The rebel flag is as common here as those offensive lawn jockeys, and almost as common as the American flag. Racial prejudice is still very much alive, especially among the older generations, so it's of no great surprise that the racial slur that comes with flying a Confederate flag isn't much of a deterrent, even if the implication is meant to be more southern pride than anything. Gwynn's Island, despite the large come-here population, is no different. It's probably worse. You can't help but be a little shocked and dismayed to discover that the postmistress who keeps you in Netflix and dumdums is an old-school racist, who ever-so ironically sneers, in reference to Dorothy Height, that she guesses "now we'll have to lower the flag for every colored person that dies." The island has had a purely white population since the early 1900s for a reason. Of course, that is not to say that everyone who lives in Mathews, or on Gwynn's Island, thinks this way--it's most likely a vocal minority. But it's there, and it's common, and people don't seem very surprised by it.

It's difficult to reconcile the unpleasant undercurrents of this place with the sheer beauty of it. They occasionally break across the surface, reminding me that I am a come-here and that some of my political and religious beliefs would undoubtedly be met with fury by the people whose paths I cross on a daily basis. I sometimes appreciate it, the overtness of it. It isn't hidden and no one pretends it isn't there. Just because you rarely see a rebel flag in suburban California does not indicate a total absence of racism, or hate. I am trying to take this place as it is and understand it, even when I absolutely despair at what I see and hear. It reminds me that this isn't paradise--that this is a place like any other, despite my love for it.

Eyjafjallajökull

2010-04-20T18:54:00.000-07:00

I am in London, caught in this limbo. The circumstances are peculiar; on still days the ash hands low on the horizon, a gray curtain over the city. Foreigners listlessly wander; at a tavern outside of the British Museum, we met two other groups of Americans stranded by the volcanic ash. Everyone talks, sharing hearsay and legitimate news. We discuss contingency plans: Frankfurt by Parisian train? An overnight to Madrid? Days revolve around evening and morning airport announcements. Heathrow, it sounds, reopened tonight. Now the waiting game, as thousands of limbo citizens attempt to escape to the continent, or the States. The sense here is that of a blackout, when the bets are off and everyone aimlessly wanders from their homes, unsure of what to do in their lightless houses. I always loved that as a child, and later, in Santa Cruz. Neighbors who never spoke spoke, sharing speculation about downed trees or failed grids, clustered on the cement corners of my suburban neighborhood. And in Santa Cruz, we gathered on the front porch, drinks and tea lights in hand, to chat with our neighbors and watch the people gather. It's all very odd, really. We haven't been detained for very long yet, and London is a pretty ideal place to be marooned. We see Billy Elliot the musical, which we wouldn't have had time to do before, and become all too familiar with our underground station, Lancaster Gate. My parents do laundry at the laundromat and I return to my room every night to find the blankets turned down and the curtains pulled tight shut. I buy a red Marc Jacobs wallet and wander through the Egyptian wing of the British museum, examining cat mummies and taking pictures of a flock of elderly Chinese tourists gawking over the sand-leathered body of a young Eqyptian woman, body curled with skeletal hands over her face. It is all a dream, anxious and surreal.

Family Trip

2010-04-12T14:09:00.000-07:00

I am leaving for London tomorrow morning on the first real family trip the Whites have taken since Laura died. We used to take family trips yearly, and usually more than one. Yellowstone, Santa Fe, Mesa Verde, Yosemite, Hawaii, Amsterdam. We visited Homagin every summer, usually in August, which by no small accident came to be my favorite month of the year. My father had plenty of vacation time, and so we traveled. We also took trips with the extended White family, usually to celebrate birthdays or anniversaries. Alaska, Hawaii, Florida. I saw a lot of this country before I was really old enough to appreciate it. The memories are a bit faded and fuzzy, little specific events punctuating lost time. On Maui, I told my Great Aunt Margaret that there were geckos in her bed, terrifying her. In the Alaskan rainforest, a wilderness guide tells our tour group that the bogs are so deep bicyclists get lost in them, and shows us a tiny carnivorous plant that looks like a little orange gummy candy. At Mesa Verde, Laura and I climb through the sandy windows of ancient plateau homes, where the Anasazi tried their hands at agriculture. In Santa Fe, my mother buys me a turquoise and silver bracelet, which I still regret the later loss of. At Yellowstone, Laura is terrified of the geysers and boiling springs, and is miserable. On our cruise ship on the western coast of Canada, we run up the escalator the wrong way, and I fall and bruise my knee. On Gwynn's Island we play bicycle tag with our cousins, the whole island our playground as we tear through the thick woods on secret roads. In Amsterdam Laura is sad and we stay in our hotel room and eat bowls of asparagus soup; she doesn't want to go outside.

We spent hours in the backseats of cars, many of them white and rented. The family traveled together, but Laura was my partner; where she went, I went. We explored London together, hopping on the underground as if the whole city was an amusement park--the tube its pastel-painted gondola or plastic-seated tram. We groaned through family photos, stealing dignity from ruins at Yorktown, Bruge, and the Valley of the Ancients with our silly faces. The last trip I took with her was such a long time ago, now. I think it may have been to Homagin. I feel like I am leaving her here, which is nonsensical. I will have a good time, and try to celebrate my birthday and the good things that have happened. But I will know that she is not with me when driving through the Costwolds, I find the seat next to me empty.

Fake Summer

2010-04-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

It is officially fake summer here. Fake summer is my favorite time of year. It is better than actual summer because it is unexpected, and seems portentous. It's like stolen french fries. For me, anyway. Significant life events always seem to come calling as soon as that balmy, rare spring/summer rolls in. This fake summer has been no different. But before I get into that, I'd like to include this. I wrote this in an online journal entry on March 10, 2004. I am including this because it is what I think of every time a string of eighty-some-degree days punctuate the tepid spring weather. It may seem silly, but the day I wrote this, I realized that I wanted to write.

March 10, 2004

This is our life. We are driving down Palm with the windows down and music blaring wearing our skirts, and the hot fake summer air is whipping our hair in our eyes, and we don't mind. We are crying in each others' arms because someone else's life conflicted with our dreams, bursting the bubbles we guarded in our hearts. It's those bubbles we're dreaming of when we are driving down those many streets, hot air whipping our hair in our eyes.

and they don't love you like i love you

We are listening to the lyrics of another song and it makes us cry but we hide our tears from each other, terrified of revealing our inherent weakness. There are seconds, there are days, and they are all once in a lifetime days and seconds and every time we blink we lose another once in a lifetime sight. We are looking at those things we have seen so many times before but we'll never see them the same way again. We are growing up. Second by second, day by day, until it's over.

and they don't love you like i love you

oh say say say

wait

We are wishing we could get those seconds and days back, because they held our dreams intact, before they were burst and the tears wouldn't stop. But they're gone gone behind us and today is a once in a lifetime day and this second is a once in a lifetime second. We will never get it back. And in 10 years, we won't remember this day or second, because in 10 years it'll be a once in a lifetime day and second. And we're hoping it'll be a good one.

In late August I will be moving to DC. On April 1st I was rejected from UVa's creative writing MFA program, and had a moment of crisis in which I declared to my mother that I was going to give up and live in a trailer and make bird houses for the rest of my life. Luckily, I then got a call from American University, and they're offering me a merit based fellowship, meaning that two years of graduate study will be covered by the university. So, rather than fulfilling my lifelong dream of bird-house-building, I think I'll go to American University to get an MFA in fiction writing, live in DC, and rejoin the world. Fake summer never fails to deliver. I am very excited, and nervous, and confident that this is the right thing. I am also sad, because I will be so sad to leave this place. Luckily, that won't happen until I've had my fill of humid Virginia summer, which I'm getting my first taste of right now.

It smells like summer here, which means that it smells like my childhood. The island is hot and wet, wild ramps and onions lining the ditches and turtles and rabbits emerging from their winter hideouts. The water around the island is still winter-cool, and the breeze sweeps cold, cold salt-smelling air across the land, a sensation akin to a sip from a sweating glass of lemonade on an afternoon in July. At night, when it is windy and hot like this, I walk out across the lawn and down the dock and dangle my bare feet above the water of Barn Creek. The stars here are bright and crowded, and I think of the comets and meteor showers when I was a child. My father would wake me in the middle of the night to go stand in a field with him, and we would watch, and then he would carry me home. A stolen time. Sometimes I woke with no memory of it. How strange it is to grow up, and how strange to remember your childhood as a kind of adult. The smell of Gwynn's Island in summer is like lawn clippings and wet pine and salt water and rotting leaves--it never changes. I am breathing deep and trying to remember all of this, every second, to sustain me in the time after I have left this place.

Lessons

2010-03-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

It is strange, but I think that in removing myself from a familiar place and familiar people and familiar life I had to relearn myself. Does that make sense? I think that when I was surrounded by people and places and school and job I had all of these things pressing me together; all of those things filled in all the space around me and held all the little pieces of me in place, like water in a glass, or a lake in its shorelines. And when all of those things were gone I felt myself spreading out all over the place--diffusing into the air that used to be taken up by "my life." It was frightening. Without people there to tell me things about myself or to interact with, and without a schedule to act as the daily outline to my existence, it got confusing for a little while. I had never lived by myself before, and especially not somewhere alien. In Santa Cruz I could have still seen friends or gone to Pergolesi or had a beer at the Poet, but here the only person I regularly saw was R.C. and half the time I didn't see him. I just heard him in the garage, picking up the trash, or heard the lawnmower in the mornings before I woke up. In the first months I was here, the sound of the garage door opening or his car rumbling up the drive was absurdly comforting.

For whatever reason I didn't try to fill up all the space again. I could have taken art classes or tried, really tried to meet people. But I didn't. I left the air open, and I'm glad of it now. Because it forced me to learn how to collect all the little pieces of myself on my own, without anyone pressing in about me. I think it was a necessary thing, since I had already felt diffuse upon arriving here. It was impossible not to. My big job, my most life-defining and longest lasting job had just been ended. I wasn't anyone's big sister anymore. My therapist used to have me list things I knew about myself so that I could collect all the pieces on weeks I was feeling particularly insubstantial, like smoke. My name is Carolyn and I like to make things with my hands, be it food or art or forts or messes. My name is Carolyn and I like to wear cotton. My name is Carolyn and my hands shake. My name is Carolyn and I'm lactose intolerant. On and on. But it wasn't quite enough to combat the uneasiness of no longer being able to say, My name is Carolyn and I am Laura's big sister. I could say it, but it wouldn't have been the same thing anymore.

So, in being here I have learned who Carolyn is. I don't have to make lists to remind myself. I can sit in the silence for hours, days, and not feel little pieces of myself floating off somewhere. I feel substantial. We spend so much time in the company of people who laugh at our jokes (hopefully) and remember things about our lives and share our sadnesses that I think we are prone to forgetting how to laugh at our own jokes, without anyone to laugh with us, or to remember things about our own lives, without anyone to ask us questions about our pasts, and to know our sadnesses, without anyone to say to us, How sad. Not that these aren't all wonderful things to have in friends, and I do miss my friends and their laughter and lives and sadnesses. But I think I will be a better friend to them for having missed them.

Counting

2010-03-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me, quite out of nowhere, that at some point, life permitting, my life will be thrown out of balance. In my mid forties I will suddenly wake up and realize that Laura has been dead for more years of my life than she has been alive. I am bothered by this. It unnerves me. Because right now, as I am about to turn twenty-four, Laura's effect on my life can still be accurately quantified. She has been present for all but five or so years of my life. It seems silly to get upset about something that is really only a measurement--a symptom of the much greater grief that is her loss. Once, about a year after that September, I called my parents' house and left a voicemail. I said, Hi parents, it's Carolyn. After I hung up the phone I realized something new. I realized that there was no longer any earthly reason for me to identify myself. They are my parents, and I am the daughter. No confusion. I catch myself sometimes, still about to differentiate myself from a person who doesn't exist. It is unfair, grief. You get a handle on it and you learn to live with a certain level of daily pain, but every once and a while something comes flying forth and shakes you. Reminds you that while you may have learned to live with the knowledge of a death, and no longer wake having forgotten, it is still wrong. It is still not the way things were supposed to be. Your life has been irreparably altered, and no amount of practice makes perfect.

Jonquil Days

2010-03-20T11:21:00.000-07:00

Around here, people refer to daffodils as jonquils, a term I had never heard until I moved here. Jonquils are coming up everywhere here; on the island there are whole yards and fields studded with the long green leaves and nodding yellow buds. The weather has been absurdly beautiful, and it is supposed to last. I've been spending several hours a day on my bicycle, visiting parts of the island I haven't ventured into since the fall. I think of the island as divided into two halves: Grimstead P.O. and Gwynn P.O. These post offices are ridiculously close to one another (probably about a mile) but somehow manage to stay open. Post offices are second only to churches in commonality in Mathews County. I like to think that there is some kind of Grimstead vs. Gwynn thing at work. The Grimstead P.O. shares its side of the island with the Seabreeze (the only island eatery), the ruined Islander motel, Island Sea Food, the Narrows Marina, the ruined Callis wharf, Roz's Island Market, and the only bridge to the mainland. For this reason I think of Grimstead as the 'town" side. The Gwynn side is less thickly populated and claims only the RV resort, the Baptist church, and the Gwynn's Island Museum (a wonder in of itself) as its commercial attraction. I think there may be a come-here/from-here dynamic at work as well.

Anyway, today I made a little jaunt past Grimstead P.O. into long unvisited territory, which was pleasant, despite being chased by several dogs. People are a lot less prone to wave on that side of the island, but that may just be evidence of my infrequent visits to it. The great event of the bike ride was my encounter with two awkward boys near the cemetery (about halfway between Gwynn and Grimstead). They were holding sticks (why do all the boys around here arm themselves?) and as I rode by on my way they one at a time chimed "Hi Bike Lady" and waved. Bike Lady? And on my way back past the cemetery, they were still there. This time they said in unison, "Bye Bike Lady." I smiled and waved, all the while wondering if perchance this is my island moniker. It may seem crazy, but I was sort of excited by this. I am Carolyn, resident of Gwynn's Island, known more commonly as.... Bike Lady.

All in all it has been an excellent week, and a first rate return from California. I am in love with this place. The smell off of the water and the sounds of the boats and the sight of a raised hand above the steering wheel: these things are things that I love. The effect that this island had on my childhood is only reenforced by my time here. I hope that every person should have the opportunity to live in a place that they irrationally, desperately adore--a place without which they would not be the person that they are. This evening I'm off to a documentary showing on the third floor of a brick building in downtown Mathews. My grandmother knows the place; in her youth it was a roller rink, and she says she remembers the wood floors that still run the length of this great long room. The room is still ringed with the hand holds of the roller rink, and as I sit there in the dark I think of my grandmother grabbing hold, young as I am now, laughing on wobbly legs.

Cloud Chaser

2010-03-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

Last week I returned to Virginia to find that spring has finally arrived. This morning I woke to the sound of the osprey cackling next door, and practically vaulted from the bed. I stood on my balcony watching as they wheeled around overhead, in a sky as blue and clear as summer. Daffodils are erupting from yards all over the island, though the most magnificent display probably belongs to my neighbors, the Callis'. In the afternoon great dark rain clouds come rolling across the water to drench the island. The ditches are full of green algae and the marshes that lay so undisturbed all winter are suddenly teeming with minnows. I open all the windows to fill the house with new air and sit on the porch in the late afternoon, watching the birds dance around each other in the trees.

This probably all sounds a little absurd, but after this winter I feel entitled to romanticize the heck out of spring. The islanders seem to feel similarly; they've all emerged suddenly to begin mowing their lawns and shining their landlocked fishing boats, though it will probably be a while before either of these things are truly necessary. The little boys who live on Gumthicket were out yesterday, all armed with spears made of driftwood, attempting to lance minnows in the marsh along the road. As I road by they all posed menacingly above the water, letting their spears fly into the brackish water with warrior cries. I visit the lanes left unvisited in the cold months, biking slowly so as to note any changes in this island I have come to know so well. Great swaths of little blue flowers and lime-green moss have erupted in the greening lawns on Gwynnsville, like rashes. The pines on the bayside of the island lean precariously, battered sideways by the high winds of February. The gnomes are gone, and the interior of the Gwynn post office is decorated for St. Patrick's Day.

My favorite thing about spring thusfar is that the maples glow. I have never seen this before. Their branches are tipped in little bursts of buds colored bright orange or red, and when the sun is low the light makes the trees look like they're on fire. At a distance, whole stands of forest will appear to be covered in a strange red blossoming. In a month I'd imagine these red buds will explode into clusters of bright green leaves. For now, I will enjoy this unexpected spring display.

California

2010-03-06T18:02:00.000-08:00

It is strange to be in California, so warm and green and peopled. My attachment to this place seems to have less to do with the place than with my parents, who are my only real people connections to Fremont at this point. Most of the people I knew here have left, or are now strangers. I have affection for some things: the sight of the creek I jumped every morning to get to school, or the incredibly small high schoolers running track, or the sound of the drum line practicing in the parking lot in the afternoon. I recognize this place, though with my eyes more so than my heart. It is different than Virginia in that way. I do not love this house; too much happened here between my childhood's end and now, if this is even adulthood. There are so many traffic lights and stop signs in this place, constant punctuation. Interruptions to my thoughts or my movements. Everyone is going somewhere, and they are on a schedule, and I can see why I had road rage by the time I left California, a condition that has now totally disappeared in my time in Virginia. I told my father, By the time you get stuck behind your fifth tractor you're not so upset by it anymore. The water smells strange, and my parents' house feels small, and full of things. People sound unnerving, their voices unfamiliar or the cadence of their speech alien. I know it sounds ridiculous to claim that I have become so acclimated to another place in so little time as seven months, but I think that more than anything I am unused to being so surrounded by anyone, and the voices of people I do not know surprise me. Everything is fast, and I realize that I have been living slowly.

I have already consumed Chinese food, Afghan food, and Vietnamese food, and am awaiting the incoming digestive crisis. All delicious, all familiar. The variety of everything is startling, and while I often find myself wishing for all these things while I am on my island, I am glad of their absence in some way. It helps to differentiate eras of my life, I think, these distinctions. I can't help but associate California with my before life. My life as I lived it and thought about it before Laura died. It is sad, but for me, California belongs to Laura now. Maybe that is why I left. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to make new memories here, so colored is this place. I did the right thing in leaving. I never know that more clearly than when I visit, necessary as it may be to visit my parents and my friends and acknowledge my life here before I left it. In my first entry I included a part of a poem that once spoke to me. I do not think I have ever understood as fully as I do now. I see this place, this Californian place, and I see it now more clearly than I ever had in living here. I see the town I grew up in, and the room I slept in, and the streets I walked. And, I think I see the person I was before this happened, and I begin to better understand myself, and who I want to be now, after.

My friend, a painter, blacks over his lines
and packets his pad:
"We never see a place," he says,
"Until we leave it behind." Yes,
and by then it has become someplace else.

-Nicholas Christopher, Crossing the Equator

Sick Day

2010-02-27T18:28:00.000-08:00

Okay, Virginia. As much fun as everything being frozen and gray and windy as hell is, I am done. I hereby declare my tolerance for winter exceeded. I get it. And I am high-tailing it to California for a week in hopes that my abandonment draws some of the shit weather west, and away from Gwynn's Island. Is a little verdancy so much to ask? I think not. This is what I have in mind:

I am sick, which is not as much fun as I remember. This is probably related to my lack of things to be shirked. With the magical free pass to shirk responsibilities rendered worthless, sickness isn't so great. There is also no one to make me soup. I made my own soup. But soup, like Coke and sandwiches and french fries, is best when it is someone else's. Even if that person can't cook at all. Colby once made me sick-soup. Chicken Noodle Soup with whole fresh cilantro leaves inexplicably floating in it. I still appreciated it, because I hadn't made it. And really, from the guy who brought us "Chunky Peanut Butter/Margarita Mix Chicken" that soup was really not so bad. I also lose all sense of taste when sick, so, you know. I hope I am well in time for my trip to DC, and then to California, because traveling is unpleasant enough while healthy. I am looking forward to ethnic foods, and coffee shops, and beer on tap. Also to seeing people. I should probably examine my priorities, shouldn't I? Sometimes I lay awake and fantasize about potstickers. There is one Chinese restaurant in the county, and it is in downtown Mathews next door to the Food Lion. It is called "Shun Xing" and it is the object of rampant speculation in the White family. For me, my fascination with the place stems from the fact that I have never seen anyone enter or exit the establishment. It is like Willy Wonka's Backwoods Chinese Chocolate Factory. I like to thing it is staffed entirely by Oompa Loompas. Either that, or that it is simply to front business to some sort of unseemly Mathews underbelly organization. I have met a person who claims to have been there, and to have ordered two different entrees and received two separate cartons containing exactly the same thing. If that doesn't sound like a front business I don't know what does. Either way, I don't want to eat there.

I suppose I really haven't talked much about downtown Mathews. When my grandparents were growing up, each in different parts of Mathews county (Mobjack and Port Haywood, respectively) Mathews courthouse was the happening place on Friday and Saturday nights. People from all over the county would catch rides with friends down to Main Street, where they would parade down the street back and forth, stopping into the soda fountain at Rexall's Drugstore or the nickelodeon in the old Halycon Building. The interesting thing about Mathews is that most of the buildings have survived, and though downtown Mathews is pretty much a ghost town on Friday and Saturday nights nowadays, the locals you run into at Rexall's Soda Fountain (newly reopened) or the Mathews Film Society at the Halycon building (newly reopened) are happy to tell you about the town's heyday. I would most like to visit Mathews in the 1930s, when my grandmother would hitch a ride with her school friend and they would head to the courthouse and join the hubbub. It is hard to imagine now, that a trip to such a little place could ever have been the social highlight of the day.

Long Face

2010-02-22T13:05:00.000-08:00

Lately I have found it difficult to say anything about myself. I have been trying to write things down, but I have been deleting more than survives. I have no idea what it means. I have been busy in life, meeting people and pursuing new things. Some kind of six month crisis, maybe. I miss my little sister. That usually seems too obvious to say. I have not been successful in capturing this loneliness that I feel in her absence in words. Joanna Newsom is better at that:

I wanted to say: why the long face?

Sparrow, perch, and play songs of long face

burro, buck, and bray songs of long face.

Sing: I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay

just to lift you long face.

And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave

your precious long face

and though our bones they make break and our souls separate,

- why the long face?

and though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil

- why the long face?

I do better with lists. I try sometimes, to cumulate. Things that Have Happened Since You Died. Or, Things You Would Have Liked. Or, Things that You Took With You. But I never get past the list titles. The hardest thing is that I can't actually make a list about her that includes anything new. I will never, for the rest of my life, say a new thing about Laura. That breaks my heart. I can say everything about what she was like, but nothing about what she is like. Today I was driving home from the grocery store and I remembered that her hair was that pale red color, and I spent a good five minutes thinking, Why? Why did she have red hair? The nonsensical nature of her hair color just gripped me. But I did not have any kind of answer. I then found myself eyeing my hair in the rear view mirror, thinking, Is my hair red? No, no, your hair isn't red. There are so few pictures of us together, really. Some, but they're usually pretty bad for one of us, if not both. We were never particularly photogenic. It's only since she died that I have really noticed how alike we looked, but it horrifies me, because I realize that I am noticing now because her appearance is static. We had long gotten to the point where we couldn't tell what each other looked like, we'd spent so much of our lives staring at each other. And now that she is dead, I can suddenly tell what she looks like again, and it's me. I hate that. She will look that way for the rest of my life.

I don't write like this in this arena because it always seems so self indulgent, or just needlessly sad. But I suppose I feel some obligation to be honest here, just because I have tried so hard to do just that ever since I started this thing. I hate that I don't have anything funny to say, so I'll finish with a weird observation from Gwynn's Island. There is a little house on the main road where an old man, it appears, lives alone. Sometime in December I noticed that on his front steps, these narrow concrete stairs to a door I don't think gets any use, there stood a gnome collection. Gnomes of all sizes, but all wearing green with red hats. I had never noticed them before, a pretty unlikely thing as at that point I'd already been on the island for months and habitually ride my bicycle right past this particular house. I took great joy, from there on, in slowing down to stare the man's gnome collection. A month ago, I finally decided to take a picture and drove out, camera in hand. I found that the collection had disappeared, leaving me baffled and disappointed. I wondered if I had imagined them. And then, this week, they have reappeared in the same gnome-y formation, all jauntily perched on the steps to his front door. Will they disappear again? There's no telling.

Ephemeral

2010-02-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

My grandfather is timeless. He is living one overlong day, never ending. He cannot remember what it is he has forgotten. Most days this means that he does not realize he should be sad, or frightened. Some days it means that he wanders around, anxious, as if he has forgotten something important—that there was something he needed to do but he just can’t think of it. He asks what day it is, not realizing that days of the week hold no real meaning anymore. We write the schedule on little scraps of paper, and pin them to the fridge. Trying to help, we think we should throw away the pages of schedules from days we have already lived, inadvertently erasing the past. He suddenly can’t figure out what I am doing here, or when I got here, or what month it is. Strange that he has forgotten so much, but remembers so much. He knows who I am, and the first time he rode in an airplane (age 9-12, working the service station, a plane landed in the field across the way. The pilot asked, Do you know where Agnes Colvin lives? Granddaddy said, Yes, and the pilot said, Get in.) He knows my sister is dead, and that I am his only living grandchild. He remembers the floor of his first job, and walking the stairs to get to it, not realizing elevators existed. He remembers being stationed on the beach in Florida, in a hotel, near the end of WWII. He knows the name of my grandmother’s other boyfriend, Norman, and remembers crying over it the same day he and she were named the co-valedictorians of their high school class. He remembers the workers telling him that this house wasn’t no house, mister, this was a cathedral. He can’t remember what he had for lunch, or what happened yesterday, or that I live here, and have for six months. It is different than when my great aunt, his sister, began to forget. By the end, when I last visited Margaret, she remembered the people but not their faces. She could attach no name to my face, and thought I was everyone she had ever known, all at once. I think, sometimes, that if I were him, I would write everything down, but then I must remember that he doesn’t remember that he should—that every moment of every day is a moment he will inevitably forget as soon as it is past. He is unmoored, and we can only try to anchor him in moments. It makes me resent the world for changing all around him; how dare it, when he cannot keep up? I wish that we could stop with him, and in some ways we have. We are three people, 85, 84, and 23, and improbably, maybe, we have made a family. We shared blood all these years but until we all found ourselves here, together, we did not know how well we knew each other. Sometimes they say things that I know that I have said before, thousands of miles away, and wonder if I was born with these words in my mouth. And I can't help but wonder, looking at my grandfather, if this too is in my blood.

Stones up Mountains

2010-01-29T22:14:00.001-08:00

I fear that it is complacency that keeps me from writing as much as it is anything else at this point. I threaten myself with media blackouts and various punishments to motivate myself to write, but in the end there is just me and myself and I am the only one who can make myself write anything worth saving, or writing at all. It is hard to describe what it is like. I feel like water against a drain stop, swirling and pressing and filling in every little bit of space just waiting for the stop to be pulled and to fall rushing forth into something new, something else, even if it is just a drain pipe. I have made progress yes, and I have written words and paragraphs and pages, yes, but none of it seems enough to make up for all the time I lost writing nothing. Reading nothing. Living almost nothing. It is amazing that humans may live entirely without life, and that is what Santa Cruz felt like, that last year before I evacuated. There was no drain; I was a huge unchanging stagnant pond with no hope of escape--no streams or rivers to lead me from myself.

I remember, my sophomore year, doing free writing exercises in an intermediate creative writing workshop. The professor said begin and I began and pages, pages, pages fell away from my fingertips like sand and I barely had to stop and think and wonder what to say. And the professor said stopped and I stopped but I didn't want to; I could have carried on forever, it seemed. I wrote recklessly and lushly, peppering phrases with adjectives and similes without concern. My time in the concentration taught me restraint, and I emerged spare, like my writing had been corseted. And from then on the laces grew tighter and tighter until there was nothing left to squeeze. No words to pick away or punctuation marks to delete. Just broad empty pages staring back at me, as if to say, Was this what you wanted? I crave proliferation. I crave abundance. To write ten pages in an hour and keep writing beyond that, unaware of page numbers. There should be so much to say, shouldn't there, after so long silent. It's like Susan Orlean said in the film Adaptation.

I want to know how it feels like to care about something passionately.

I think that what is hard for me is that I do know, or I did know, or I do know. I just want to remember how I knew, and what it was like, and who I was when everything seemed so essential and immediate, like burning your hand. All the energy you have focuses in on that one thing and it's happening and you cannot stop it from happening. Being passionately driven to create was like being in pain. An inescapable state of being. But you're in that state or you are not and there is no pathway and no door. You wake up and find yourself there with no way out or wake up and don't with no way in. I look at pictures of myself from my junior year in college, a time I fondly remember as some sort of a personal creative Renaissance, and catch myself scrutinizing the image as if the secret to all of this is somewhere on my own face. A, what did you know that I don't now remember? As I was reminded yesterday, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. While we're on that subject, wouldn't such a claim mean that living, in of itself, is an insane act? We know where it ends and yet we all keep trying, self-deluding our way into believing we're some sort of immortal. But this Sisyphean dilemma is not the topic at hand. Or is it? Hell. I just want to write something so good and so beloved that something explodes inside of me and I never stop writing again.

Miss Mary Quite Contrary

2010-01-26T22:29:00.001-08:00

Today I have been thinking about secret gardens. No, I am thinking about childhood, really. As a child I fiercely loved the 1993 film adaptation of The Secret Garden. It is an oddly mournful film, to be about children. It is also a very lonely film. While watching the scene from Mary’s dream, in which a toddler version of herself gets lost in the tropical plants in an enormous garden and is left by her mother, who later dies, I always cried. When I watch it today I feel old panic crawling up the back of my spine. The whole story has the feel of a ghost story, and Holland’s film shows it. The soundtrack, too, is unnerving. Mutations of Greensleaves weave and trill, overlaid often with the sounds of the howling wind on the moor or the resonant screams of Mary’s cousin, lost in the gothic labyrinth of Craven’s mansion.

How did I know to like such a lonely thing? Sometimes when I look back at my early tastes in film they only make sense retroactively, as if I knew somehow who I was going to be. Maybe I was that person already. The little girl who would rather rent Sea Prince and the Fire Child or Wild Swans weekly than Lion King, or Home Alone. I feel like if I could have the chance to speak with then-Carolyn I might understand more, better.

I bring up The Secret Garden because it evoked the same emotions in me as Virginia always did. A sense of antiquity and wonder, almost fearful. The forest here thrilled me in my childhood, the dark tangles of branches and blackberry vine menacing and magical. I would like so much to have retained more of myself over the years. I feel stirrings, now and again, more here than anywhere else. It’s maddening to think that all the drive and talent and knowledge you had as a child is still in there somewhere, all entombed in layers of experience, like dry skin. I remember trying to start secret gardens everywhere, digging up plants here and there and transplanting them there and here. Few took, but the satisfaction was in the secret, I suppose. I could spend a lifetime trying to recapture the intensity of youth. Maybe that is what genius is. Maybe that is the best life project anyone can really hope to pursue. Maybe we learn to layer life around ourselves because it is too hard to be a child, so quick to rage and to love. I suppose that is a seductive aspect of The Secret Garden: Craven is freed from the physical and emotional shackles of his life by the stubborn will of a child. It seems unfair that we should look to something so fragile and strange as children to redeem us. All this boils down to a wish I’d like to grant then-Carolyn. A garden, secret or not.

Waterfowl

2010-01-20T12:05:00.001-08:00

As a child I was enrolled in an amateur bird watching program at Coyote Hills regional park. Some of you may not know this. It's true. I was a "Birder." Our ranger guide went by the moniker "Dr. Quack" and claimed to have webbed toes. I can neither confirm nor deny that the man actually had webbed toes. He weekly led a small pack of misfit elementary school children through the hills, valleys, and saltwater marshes of Coyote Hills, identifying birds and teaching us nature-themed songs. My personal favorite:

It starts with an S

And it ends with a T.

It comes out of you

And it comes out of me.

I know what you're thinking,

But don't call it that!

Let's be scientific

And let's call it: SCAT!

I quit birders sometime in mid-late elementary school. I don't remember why exactly. I never became a "Hawk" which probably disappointed young, fiercely competitive me. For the record, being a Birder left weird, lasting effects. For example, I can still identify most California birdsong by ear, and can sometimes tell you if the bird is male or female. Some friends may have experienced this whilst walking through UCSC campus, when I would suddenly find the words, "Hark! A female Junco!" leaving my mouth. Useful, no. Oft embarrassing, yes. Although I never find myself singing the scat song anymore, I still love and appreciate the natural world and can't help but notice the feathered fowl that frequent it. Living here has enabled my Birder-dom to a new and frightening degree. There are so many birds here. With winter came a new influx of unfamiliar birds which apparently only arrive with cold weather. Why anyone would come here to escape the cold, I do not know. Birds are illogical.

Anyway, this is all a lead up to a really ridiculous bird. There have been bunches of these little diving ducks around lately, and they are really, really cute. They are black and white and striped with round little bodies and bottoms and big poofy heads and they whistle. They have never come close enough to the house for me to identify them, until this afternoon. I looked out the front window and noticed a small group of the little things in the shallow water and grabbed my binoculars, running outside barefoot to identify ducks. Yes, I got that excited. Binoculars revealed them to be even cuter than I had previously thought.

I came back inside and grabbed my Eastern Field Guide to Birds (yes, I own this book) and flipped through. After some back and forth (there are a lot of small black and white ducks, unexpectedly), I identified them as Bucephala albeola. Common name? Bufflehead. Bufflehead. This discovery led into what was probably as much as thirty minutes of me giggling ridiculously while imagining the process by which the bufflehead achieved its noble name. I like to imagine very serious, European naturalists with white powdered wigs in a large conference hall. A particularly distinguished gentleman stands and says, "I present, the bufflehead." They all clap earnestly, with gravitas. Honestly, it's like naming something the cutesy-bootsy-face. Just say the word to yourself. Bufflehead. Anyway. Over a decade later and I am still a complete nerd.

Happy Hour

2010-01-19T07:29:00.000-08:00

This week, with the end of the uncharacteristically long spell of cold (cold) weather came the beginning of something new and unexpected: contact. It's as if, by surviving one of the coldest winters on record for this little patch of dirt, I have gone through some kind of right of locals' passage. I now exist. Though I am still, without a doubt, a come-here, the from-heres have starting saying hello in a more substantial way than hesitantly waving from their cars.

It all began with what seemed like a perfectly innocent phone call one Saturday morning. My neighbor's wife called to ask me over for a drink that evening, so she and her husband could "get to know me a little better." I said yes, of course, friendly young woman that I am, but I did have some anxiety. It has been so long since I have really had to hold a conversation with anyone who I haven't known for years or am a blood relation of that I feared I may have forgotten how to do it. How does one small talk, again? At 5 PM I idly brushed my hair and ambled across the driveway to the neighbor's house, giggling slightly as I hopped the tiny fence separating our yards. Then, of course, I knocked on the wrong door (I have such problems with anything relating to doors--opening doors, unlocking doors, properly closing doors, locating doors, etc.). This resulted in a mild kerfuffel, but I was not to be undone. I had spent most of the afternoon mentally prepping small-talk-conversation-points; I was armed and ready.

What ensued was one of the strangest reintroductions to humanity I have experienced. I don't know if I am overreacting. It could be that after six months of near total isolation people just seem bizarre. But they were a little bizarre. The wife got extremely drunk by the time I made my exit, so much so that she had a great deal of trouble walking me to the door (a different door than either previous door, I might add). The husband seemed only interested in discussing the fine points of his local artwork collection, comprised mostly of wooden models of sandpipers and a tiny replica of a light house ("The frequency of this lighthouse light is an exact replica of the frequency of New Point Comfort light's light!). They had a cat the size of a small dog (Sinbad) who constantly licked my feet, probably because he sensed my shoes were brand new and the apples of my eye. At one point, tipsy wife explained to me the plans for the house once her husband died while he, the husband, stared adoringly at his tiny lighthouse. She says that they've been discussing it a lot lately. When I said I was a writer she asked, "Do you write mysteries or romance novels?" When I said, no, not really no, she stared at me like she didn't understand. "What else could she possibly write?" They were nice enough people, and surely gracious in having me, their much younger semi-unfriendly new neighbor, over for a drink. But, man. What an evening.

This was the first of my encounters this week, and by far the strangest. Since then I have met another neighbor from further up the road. She says that she knows some young people I might like, and I'm planning on making contact with one girl sometime this week. Talking to my neighbor I had to squelch the urge to grill her with what I think are very important questions about these so-called young people. Did they in any way support Sarah Palin during the last election or now? Do they have a confederate flag on or around their person or personal items? Would you describe them as progressive? Do they watch Fox News? I refrained from asking these questions, and am hopeful that I will not regret my restraint when I do meet one or any of these young Virginians. Who knows, maybe I will happen upon a random liberal enclave of young atheist Democrats in Mathews County. We can discuss gay marriage rights and the merits of independent cinema when I have them over for evening drinks.

Rock me mama like the wind and the rain.

2010-01-15T10:59:00.001-08:00

As the outdoor temperature has slowly warmed my mood has improved considerably. I think I was seriously missing the exercise I was used to getting from my bi-daily bike rides. As soon as the temperature hit 40 degrees I was out the door and on my rusty old bicycle, sailing off down Gumthicket to the post office. I had guests over the weekend, which probably helped my mood as much if not more than the weather. Jessica and Travis were lovely as usual. It is funny to think that we're probably living in places that foil each other perfectly: downtown Brooklyn in a many-person house vs. on an island in the Chesapeake Bay by oneself. Both are good, but certainly different.

Current irrational/impossible dream: an enormous Laurel houses reunion on the island. Old Crow Medicine Show plays on the front porch in the waning evening while we all drink whiskey and sangria and dance barefoot under paper lanterns in the lawn, fireflies flashing above the dingle. We eat fried chicken and spoon bread and butter beans and swim in Milford Haven all afternoon, emerging only to drink glass-bottled Cokes and sit in the rocking chairs, listening to Alex and Travis jam. We go running through the forest, vaulting patches of poison ivy and mosquito-pools, and tip toe, breath held, through the abandoned houses, gleaning non-treasure treasures from the dusty piles of left-items.

Sounds pretty good, right? My desire for it to be summer lately has been verging on the insane; I wake during the night having dreamt of the sound of osprey screeching only to realize they haven't come back yet, and the trees are empty. I bike around in 50 degree weather and try desperately to pretend it's summer, despite the tell-tale signs of winter everywhere. Ice and snow still linger in the ditches and the woods are bare and gray but I close my eyes and pretend.

It's funny how your habits change and intensify when you live alone, and spend almost no time in public. I do the dishes before I eat and turn off the lights in a certain sequence when I go up to bed every night. I don't bother closing bathroom doors and have taken to swinging over the staircase banister onto the downstairs couch, rather than walking down and around like a civilized human. Every morning I try to do one useful thing, like email a professor or pay a bill or clean my room; this enables me to do nothing for the rest of the day while justifying it by saying, Well this is my reward for ______. I barely wear makeup anymore, something people who know me well will think is a lie. It's true, world. I even go to the grocery store without my face on. This week I've stopped brushing my hair, which is getting long and shaggy. Brushing it seemed only to accentuate the fact that it is a hurrahs nest. So now I wander around looking like a fuzzy wavy poofball, a human thistle, makeup-less and wearing threadbare jeans. And can I say, for the record, that it is all amazing. It is amazing not to give a shit- to never look in a mirror or even wonder if what you're wearing matches at all. This is probably all helped by the fact that I don't walk past Cafe Pergolesi everyday, withering in the scrutinizing gaze of the hipster pack.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I love living here. I wouldn't want to forever, but being the stranger in a strange land, particularly one as strange as this, has its perks.

Personal Statement:

2010-01-13T21:12:00.000-08:00

I never intended to write. Words came trickling down my neck and arms out through my fingers, unbidden. It was the nearest thing to singing I could ever manage. My sister was a writer, too. She died on October 3rd, 2008. I wrote the eulogy. I didn’t write anything else for almost a year. Strange to have one’s life neatly cleaved into a before and after. Strange to have to try so hard at something that used to be so easy. There wasn’t much to be done about it; years like that are going to be hard no matter what you try or think or pretend. After that year was over I up and left Santa Cruz, where I had lived for five years. I moved to tidewater Virginia, where my father’s family has lived and died since the 17th century. I am writing again, about blood that is thicker than water. It isn’t easy, but sometimes I can feel it in my arms and fingers and I know I love it, and have to try, even when it’s hard. I want to return to school to learn how to do this thing I love again, after.

I may have always written, but I believe I learned to write as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. The fiction concentration was small and tightly knit; it taught me focus and drove me to improve. I learned how to pull the right words from the tangle. I liked that it was hard. I left with a clear idea of what it is that I write, and want to write. My work is inspired by my childhood’s summers, all spent on an island in the Chesapeake. The forest here hides abandoned houses, salt-worn and broken-windowed. The headstones of my ancestors grace the lawns of my tidewater neighbors. The past’s presence here is tangible, and I write with that in my mind. I write about families—about the ties that stay tied from one generation to the next, through love and turmoil and death. Blood that is thicker than water. I write about sisters, and the knots upon knots that bind them. I write about aging, a thing more apparent in the south than in California, where things tend to reek of newness. I write about death, and what it leaves behind. I am learning what it leaves behind. Life is a more ephemeral thing than I would have imagined. I write to remember and I write about places where memory exists tangibly, not just as photographs, tying people to one another or to a house or to a silly slab of dirt for lifetimes. I write about the true stories people tell until they aren’t anything like the truth anymore—until they are tongue-tangled myths, funny and sad. I write about, and for the sake of, remembrance.

Or I try to. Strange, to feel you have more words than ever jostling around inside of you, but to write so much less. It is how I felt before I went to school, before I knew how to write what I wanted, to tease words from the tangle. I know it could lead me all over the map. In Santa Cruz I studied film, wrote and produced a play, wrote screenplays, and directed short films. I found joy in all, as long as I could write. It all seemed to circle back around and make my fiction stronger. I pursued the same themes, no matter what the medium. I don’t care so much about professional goals now. I want, more, to write for its own sake—to do this thing I love. I crave a workshop and the community of peers it would provide. Deadlines and scribbled critiques and the one person who says, I don’t like this, breaking your heart and making you better. I want it to be hard. I want to write a novel about grief that isn’t stricken, a book about pain that doesn’t leave you hurt. There is a lot to sort through. Writing is different than it was before my sister died. I am still the same person but some days I wake up and it seems like the sun is rising and setting on the wrong side, painting everything in the wrong light. I want to be able to write about that, but I need help to learn.

That is what I ended up sending. I thought it was only fair to share, after the entry I wrote about writing the thing. Luckily, unluckily I managed to get myself to the point where I just didn't care anymore--where it all seemed unimportant. Repetition doesn't suit: another element in the mystery as to how I live here. It had been a long time since I'd attempted to write anything on a deadline, and it was hard, and it made me afraid of what I may not be able to do.

In other news, I am well. I say this because I think it is important to admit. In my life I have often had trouble owning wellness; I was better practiced at being not okay. To be well always seemed boring-more not okay than okay. For the first time in my life I feel proud to be able to say that I am feeling well, and maybe even some kind of happy. I want to hold it. I want to tell everyone I've ever known. Instead I go and watch a romantic comedy at the local cinema (45 minutes away, I'll have you know) and wish to rewrite it so it was actually romantic, or actually a comedy. I wish for the thrill of new love, but stand it. I am willing to wait. It's all so small, it seems. How to tell people what I have spent six months doing.

I have learned to be well by myself, when there is no one else there to pretend for or about.

Long Winter Hours

2010-01-06T18:34:00.000-08:00

The hours have been feeling long lately. Especially in the evening, between five and midnight. With all the windows closed against the cold and the absence of humming cicadas or the sounds of my family in the rooms below, in winter, is almost oppressively quiet. I've taken to building fires and maintaining them all day, if only to provide some sort of sound to live with. I have trouble focusing in winter. My mind wanders. A new sense of surreality has introduced itself into my little world. I have never been here in January before.

Last week a cold front arrived and hasn't left. 20-40 degrees for days, and sometimes colder at night. The pond and ditches are frozen solid. I woke one morning at sunrise to the gabbling sound of a flock of canadian geese outside. I looked out the window at the water and saw them, twenty or so, flapping there wings, panicked. A low tide during the night had left the haven out front so shallow that it had frozen hard, trapping them by their feet. The sun arrived to free them soon after, but for a moment there I felt responsible, somehow. Like I should take an ice pick and walk out across the water to free them. It is almost laughably depressing, some mornings, to look out at the frozen water and see one sad blue heron, standing statue-still on the ice. Too cold to bicycle; my ears freeze. I yearn for summer, for sunshine at eight in the evening and the buzzing undertone of the woods, the screeching racket of the osprey family next door. I daydream about the hot thunderstorm that caught me unawares while out on my bicycle in August, soaking me like a hot shower. I biked up and down Gumthicket Road laughing uproariously, inexplicably ecstatic to be there in the pounding rain. I suddenly understand why people here talk about spring so reverently.

The tips of the narcissus are just beginning to peak out of the frozen dirt in the yard, and I wish I could hurry them along. Build little fires beside them to warm them, to coax green from the earth. Every year, as a birthday gift, my grandfather plants 100 bulbs for my grandmother. He has done this for some years past, meaning that every spring now hundreds of spring flowers erupt from the soil all over the yard. I have never been here to see it. It sounds like something out of a film. But it is only January, and winter can be long here. I suddenly understand the groundhog fixation. It makes you wonder how people manage to live in places where winter outlasts everything else, where summer is only a bit warmer and the world is only a bit greener. My friend Flavia always said that that's why Iceland produces so many stellar musicians: when you are trapped indoors for the majority of the year you have to find something to throw yourself at. And you're likely depressed as well, which always makes for a better musician. I think I would rather live in a place that isn't frozen solid most of the year, and never learn to play an instrument.

Explosions off in the distance.

2009-12-31T17:55:00.000-08:00

Today a fog rolled in fast, filling the windows and world with an off-grey nothing. The house came unmoored and I was floating, anchored to no land at all. Or it felt like it. I am alone this new years eve, which is better probably. I always try on new years to do something, to recreate something I've absorbed from movies or television. All black dresses, champagne glasses, and a kiss at midnight. It has never really worked out that way. Last year was close, I guess. It always feels like adult-pretend-day, sort of. I should know by now that the significant life events rarely happen on national holidays.

I've been on a film-kick lately. New. I couldn't really stand to watch movies for a long while there. They end, and I could never stand it. Even the films I'd loved before. So I watched some films that I know I love. The Piano. I know I love(d?) that film. Still love it, I found. I can see why I went through that weird phase freshman year where I was watching at least a segment of it every day. For months. I can also see why I was a little unhinged freshman year, though probably not entirely because of that. It is a beautiful film, aching. Unapologetic. I remember suddenly why I wanted to make films, or help anyway. I think I don't think about that much because it reminds me of what my life could maybe look like now, and doesn't, and why. AFI seems like a distant, made-up memory now.

It is okay, though. Because that didn't happen right then, and other things did, and now I am here, learning how to be a balanced sort of lady. I don't make resolutions at midnight. It's a thing asking to be broken, I think. If you have to wait for a national holiday to decide something it probably means you are not apt to hold onto your decision. I guess I try to not make resolutions, period. I tend toward extremities, and resolutions can be a dangerous thing. I have learned this the hard way. Maybe a family trait.

Memory Books

2009-12-21T21:56:00.001-08:00

I am almost finished with a journal, the first I've ever consistently kept or filled. The first entry is dated December 15, 2005. The first sentence is, I want to write a story about disbelief, youth, and magic. After Laura died we read her journals, just to hear her, to visit her again. It didn't feel wrong. My father probably read everything she had written, every sad, crazy word. Laura could be terse, almost mute. But her writing, oh, when you read her writing it was like standing on your tiptoes to peer through a tiny, tiny crack in the curtains of an immense, impenetrable house. Her journals chronicled years of pain and isolation, of guilt and occasionally, every so often, beauty. My journal is several hundred pages long, double sided, and hand written in a varyingly precise script. Since October 3, 2008 I have written in it only four times. But I want to finish it, this chronicle of change.

I began writing in a journal after leaving Fremont for Santa Cruz, when I realized that I couldn't recall myself in high school. I could look at photographs and read essays and the occasional melodramatic livejournal entry, but I had no sense of recognition--of self. I couldn't remember what I thought about my life or myself or being sick. I could remember anger, how I felt about those who tried to take care of me. Nothing reflective. It was alienating, and alarming. Like I had lost years somehow; an era of internal life erased, or simply forgotten. And I told myself that if I was going to try and stay healthy, to try and hold onto some semblance of my newfound balance, I was going to have to try and not forget anything. So I started writing it all down. I rarely catalogued events, or even used the names of people I referred to. It serves only as a memory bank, a diagram of my mindscape between December 15, 2005 and now. It also serves as a flow chart, a grim account of Laura's descent into illness and my fraying mental state. This may all sound awfully awful, or boring, or just unappetizing. But I am so grateful to have it, to be able to revisit a time when she was alive. How little I wrote about her when she was well. How little I've written about her since her death.

I will need a new journal, and to think of that makes me somehow so hopeful. It is a sign, maybe, that time is moving along. And how I wonder what will fill it, what names I'll omit and events I'll neglect to include. What I will think of myself, how my handwriting will change. I hope that it will take account of happier things than the one that came before.

On Marriage

2009-12-15T11:48:00.000-08:00

I love to sing. I am not very good at it. I don't think it's so much that I am physically incapable, but that I just don't know how to sing versus warbling along with the lyrics of a song. Sometimes if I really forget what I am doing I find myself actually singing, usually when I am in the car or alone. And as soon as I realize it I forget how to do it. One of my secret dreams is to be a wonderful singer. It is probably never going to happen. I would also like to know how to play the piano. And how to make sculptures out of wood. And how to kick box. It's odd that if we don't begin things as children we often assume it is never going to happen. But then you always hear stories about people starting over completely and suddenly taking up mountain climbing or whatever at age fifty two. It'd probably be advantageous not to wait so long.

My grandmother has a bucket list. She'll be 85 next September. The things on her list are comparatively small when held up against the massive accomplishments she's managed during her life. Trip to Maine with the entire family. Set foot inside of the house of her Aunt and surrogate mother, Sissy. How strange to know that your time is limited. Limited by something that will happen in the immediate future, rather than this vast unimaginable finish line somewhere out there, beyond all of the other unimaginable signposts of your future. When I was a very little girl I asked Grandmother if she would come to my wedding. I guess that at that single-digit age marriage was the next signpost, or the next significant signpost. She told me that she did not know, because that was a long ways off. She brings it up every year. A few years ago she told me that she might just make it, but a lot of that was up to me. She also predicted Laura would be married first. I was a teenager at the time, drinking my first real glass of wine at a restaurant called, Trick Dog. I believed her.

I find it hard to imagine that she'll be at my wedding now. With no real intention of being married anytime soon, or even a significant other to pin the intention on, it makes me sad to think that in some way I have gotten in the way of a little girl's wishes. It makes me sad--not that I am not on the fast track to matrimony, but that at age six it was my grandmother's attendance I was concerned about.

Personal Statement

2009-12-12T17:23:00.000-08:00

I am trying to write my personal statement for my graduate school applications. It is supposed to be brief, and addressing all kinds of things: career goals, personal history, writing aspirations, writing proclivities etc. I have no idea how to go about writing this. I wrote a personal statement almost two years ago, when I last applied to graduate school (that time for film, as opposed to creative writing) and my statement was not very good. It was technically apt, and vaguely creative, but it was squishy and loose and reminded me of something I would have written in high school. It got me into AFI, so I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on it. But now I have even less of an idea how to write this. How do you write about writing? It seems ridiculous, particularly when they make it clear that your writing in the statement will be taken as an example of your writing ability. I am mailing a writing sample as an example of my writing ability, so this seems sort of implosive. I tried to start once already. I sat down and put on "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi and opened a bottle of Pinot. I sat and sat and finally pounded out one sentence.

I write about blood.

I am not sure this will work in a personal statement, let alone the first line of a personal statement. I know that it is true. I write about blood. Not gore, or innards type blood. Thicker than water type blood, and all that comes with that. But I am afraid there is no way to get that across without sounding like a product of the gothic imagination, or just heavy handed. It is even more true now that I am here, where my family has been since the 1600s. The headstones of relatives casually stud people's lawns. That, in of itself, is pretty heavy handed imagery, even if it is essentially the truth. They ask why you write, what motivates you. The only answer I really have: remembrance. I am tempted to write something completely off the wall, totally without the bells and whistles of a traditional personal statement. Maybe I will just do that. It is hard when I am afraid to state fact, visit reality.

My sister died in October of 2009 and I wrote the eulogy, and it was the last thing I wrote for a full year. I want to go to graduate school so that you can teach me how to write about something other than sisters. I want to go to graduate school so you will give me a deadline, so I can learn how to do this again. I just need to do something, you see, that feels like something normal people do. Normal people go to graduate school and go to class and have assignments and grow up, and I need you to accept me so that I can try to do those things, if only to prove that I still can. I can't give you a good personal statement because that requires an ability to write accurately and broadly about myself as a person, and you see, I think I have been a few too many people in the last two decades to know where to begin with that. I write so that I can remember who I was before this happened and that happened and you happened and this, again, happened.

Slack Tide

2009-12-05T11:03:00.000-08:00

It is snowing elsewhere today. Relatives called, excited, wanting to hear about the snow or share tales of their own snow but it is not snowing here. It is raining and rotten. "Cold and miserable" as my mother would say. I don't find it cold or miserable--like airports, rain-days please me. I used to mentally beg it to rain every Christmas because the disjunct between the sunny California day and the indoor tree covered in wintery ornaments aalways seemed depressing, and artificial. I hoped at least for gloomy stratus. This wish was only satisfied once in almost two decades of begging and hoping and wishing, but I distinctly remember it as the best Christmas ever. This year, having demanded that the whole family gather in Virginia for Christmas, I hope to be completely satisfied and have a snow-day. I am setting myself up for disappointment, aren't I?

I am glad to be home. California was alarming and good and strange. As soon as I landed in San Francisco I realized I had no sense of direction because the ocean was on the wrong side. It was like horizontal vertigo. Lateral-igo. My digestive system is still grappling with the immense amount of Chinese, Afghan, Indian, and Mexican food I managed to ingest. Never have I been so pleased to see an avocado tree, or well-behaved drivers on 680, or Miss Hannah Gelb. Santa Cruz seemed weirdly short, I think because I am used to being surrounded by tall Virginia pines. There is too much sky in California, which may seem a ridiculous complaint, but I have thought it since I was a child. Don't even get me started about the Southwest. I went to the Poet & the Patriot and reveled in Guinness and the sight of my favorite bartender (soon to be bar-owner), though my visit was brief because we have all become old people: "My my it's awfully loud in this establishment." We migrated to the Red where we continued being old people: "Man I'm tired. One drink and then to bed!" I am as guilty as the next person in this. It made me yearn for the days of yore, summer '07, when life was all play and almost no work, and the Laurel Houses were the haven of fantastic themed shindigs, spontaneous dance parties, and all the pesto and mashed potatoes you could possibly wish for.

It is different to think of that summer now than it was to mourn it in the year following it, when everyone paired off and grew up and went their separate ways. I now look at it as something that I can't have back, and wouldn't want to relive, knowing what would follow. There was so much that was going to happen, and I didn't know, couldn't know, and I envy and pity that gone-girl for that. I couldn't recreate that summer now--none of us could. We left and now find ourselves too strange and too different to ever go back. There is a moment every day when the tide is neither high nor low, neither coming nor going, and the water swirls around itself and smooths, still as glass stretching out in front of the house. It is called the slack tide. I think that that it was that summer was. A moment of slack tide, when we all found ourselves standing still at the edge of the precipice, and danced there for a while, trying so hard not to see what was coming. I wish I could have held us there, arms around that moment tight. But I could not, and did not, and everything that has happened has happened and all that is left are the photographs and the indelible stains in the carpet of a house none of us live in anymore.

Reverse Migration

2009-11-23T09:33:00.000-08:00

I am sitting in the Richmond Airport terminal waiting for my flight (years of influence by my father have resulted in my tendency to arrive absurdly early for any flight or movie). I'm downloading episodes of "This American Life" to listen to on my cross country flight while I knit myself a scarf. If I close my eyes maybe I'll be able to pretend I am sitting in my big comfy chair drinking cider and being delightful, rather than trapped in a hellish recycled air filled flying tube of 70s fabric and used-to-be-pretty-now-just-eerie flight attendants. It won't be that bad. I actually sort of love the whole hassle of cross country travel, as a person who secretly loves unpleasant/fascinating situations (family reunions, chats with people you haven't seen in five years and never cared about to begin with, standardized tests).

Air travel also gives me the chance to experience one of my top ten favorite locations: airports. Airports have the incredible ability to transform the people within them into manifestations of their best or worst characteristics. Everyone has seen that immense midwestern mother screaming at the check-in staff. Airports also force people from all walks of life into one place and unite them by giving them a common enemy: air travel and the people responsible for enabling or hindering your success at it (namely, the poor unsuspecting souls behind check-in desks, gates, and security checkpoints). It is as if everyone who works at the airport is suddenly the principal from The Breakfast Club, and we, intrepid travelers, are petulant teenagers who would normally have nothing to do with each other. Instead of Molly Ringwald, you have first-class passengers (businessmen/women and trophy wives in Juicy Couture jumpsuits). Instead of Judd Nelson's John Bender, you have the strong-men throwing back Budweiser at the Ruby Tuesday bar, silently filling with rage until the inevitably lead their fellow travelers into a mob-like-frenzy with the utterance of a single complaint: "Excuse me, ma'am, but do you even know when the plane is getting here?" Anthony Michael Hall: herds of Japanese tourists. Allie Sheedy: actual crazy people who seem to have appeared from nowhere (how did this person get through security?). Emilio Estevez: members of the armed forces. And last but by no means least, Principal Richard Vernon: that sassy southern beauty queen behind the desk, shattering dreams, alarming everyone, and inevitably uniting the people with her crackling, indecipherable announcements over the airport intercom.

Airports are havens for people watching. Nay, the mecca of people watching. It's as if people from everywhere have been plucked from their normal lives and deposited there with inane and seemingly impossible tasks to complete on various time scales. Stressed parents give up on their children, leaving them screaming in the middle of the disgusting carpet (I think I have played the child in this scene). Awkward tween girls shoot daggers at each other from across the terminal while simultaneously experiencing parent-embarrassment-induced panic attacks. People attempt to read each others magazines, eavesdrop shamelessly on phone conversations, and try desperately to pretend that they are not where they are.

I mean, really, what's not to love?

Huntin' Season

2009-11-15T22:29:00.001-08:00

There are earnest looking men in camouflage and bright orange hats driving around in pickup trucks full of hounds everywhere I look, which I assume means that it is hunting season. Hunting what, I do not know. What they do with what they have hunted, I do not know. Why they are so earnest looking, I do not know. I find their bright orange hats vaguely amusing. I find it hard to imagine that any of them could be mistaken for deer or what-not, as they all seem to be 30-50 and extremely tall and heavyset. How they can all be extremely tall and heavyset, I do not know. I imagine them crouched low in the leaves, meaty hands clutching guns, accidentally shooting one of their fellow hunters. Chagrined, one will exclaim, Well, you weren't wearing an orange hat! How was I to know that you are not a majestic stag?

I doubt they would share my amusement. And consider wearing more brightly colored clothing when I'm out walking. Woods-tromping may have to be postponed until the hunt is all hunted and the hunters all huntless. Whatever they were hunting. Deer I hope, because if it's pheasants or something the hats really seem extra ridiculous.

Woods-tromping may have to be postponed, alternatively, because Tropical Storm Ida has gone and turned the whole island into gooey salty marsh ground. I suppose it's all part of living in an area referred to as the Tidewater, but still, 5 feet high tide? Shame on you, Ida. The winds ripped all the bird feeders and bird houses down. The tide came crawling over the lowland and left, upon its retreat, great rambling lines of pine needles, trash, pine cones, and driftwood. I, of course, missed everything but the aftermath. Today the islanders emerged to pile the debris in their yards and set smoking, wet fires of brush. The ones that weren't out hunting, anyway.

The Splendid Quiet

2009-11-06T19:13:00.000-08:00

It was hard to be calm at first, in the silence. The quiet here at night can be all encompassing, almost unrelenting. Sitting on the porch it is possible to hear fish jump in the dark water, an owl's wings as he lands in the pines. It is that quiet. Before moving here I would have not believed myself to be a person intolerant to silence. But, growing up on a street within a block of a high school, elementary school, and junior high, I became used to the constancy of sound. Lunch time at the elementary school yielded a ceaseless din. The high school echoed with bells and announcements. Band practices, soccer practices, football practice, Vanguard practices on the weekend. A life set to the omnipresent thunder of the drum line. Santa Cruz was not much different. On campus, the all-hours cacophony of college students, drum circles, quad protests. Off campus, the orchestra of sorority girls vomiting beneath my window, the incoherent proclamations of yet another intoxicated homeless man, the blip blip of rookie police officers sounding off on Laurel Street. Ever present sound.

I should not have been surprised to find myself unnerved by prevailing silence, but I was. The near constancy of sound in my life up to this point seemed unimportant until its absence. There are times, in this house, when I will hear the rumbling off board motor of a fishing boat across the channel and run to the window, convinced a convoy of motorcycles has thundered up the drive. In the absence of sound wind can be unsettling, the creaking of a twenty year old seaside home settling, rocking, enough to drive me from bed. To hear myself breathe every breath, uncomfortable.

I have accustomed myself to living in silence. The sound of my feet on the hard wood floor no longer surprises me, the sound of the phone no longer makes me jump. I do not rise in the night to suspiciously stare out the window onto the driveway, convinced I heard pebbles crunching beneath the tires of an sinister assailant's van. I do not leave the TV on to comfort me. Now, I seek it. I walk barefoot down the salt-worn planks of the dock at night and sit, feet dangling above brackish water, listening to the softest lap of the tide against the marsh. I listen to the Canadian geese at Hole in the Wall, all cackling and ruffling and honking as they set to rest. I lie back on the boards and watch satellites and stars and clouds moving in. If I leave here having accomplished nothing that I can hold in my hands or describe to another human being I think I can still be content. I will know that I came here afraid to hear myself breathe and left content to live in the quiet.

Routine

2009-11-06T12:58:00.000-08:00

After a somewhat whirlwind Halloween weekend in Brooklyn I have returned to my beautiful corner of the country. When I stepped off the train at Penn Station I had a definite moment of "I have not seen this many people in the last 3 months combined." It was somewhat overwhelming, and a strange realization. I found Jessica and Travis well and lovely and much as I'd remembered them, though now relocated to Brooklyn, which seemed like a very grown up, hard-co Santa Cruz. A hella legit version of Santa Cruz, one might say. When I was in high school a boy a year or two ahead of me campaigned for student body president with the slogan: Rohit. Hella Legit. Ah, Fremont.

It is good and comforting to be back in my hermitude. One of the strangest parts of life on Gwynn's Island is that I can't just invite someone over every time I feel lonely or antsy. To the left is a map of where I live. It looks awfully small, though I still get the feeling that I haven't explored most of the land I live on. A good half of it is still forest-locked or water-locked, and I admittedly haven't suited up and gone tromping around the dingle and thickets yet. I live right around the tiny 5, by the way, on the mainland-facing side of the island. So, on my list of things to accomplish: tromping. I stick mostly to the bicycle and exploring the roads, as it is easier and less insect-ful. I've found that in living alone, staving off descent into chaos is most easily achieved by developing some kind of routine. My routine is very loose in nature, built around unpredictable things like the calmness of the water or more concrete things like what time Gilmore Girls is on ABC Family. Yes, I just admitted that. Right now I am indulging in one of the looser aspects of my routine: mid-afternoon sitting in bendy chair on indoor porch and drinking hot beverage (today, home-made apple cider from a vegetable stand in Gloucester). My grandparents arrived this morning to stay the weekend; Aunt Lynne, David, and Zoe arrive tomorrow. It no longer disrupts my routine to have people here, though I find it harder to write. All in all I would say that I am fairly content right now, and feeling somewhat forward-looking for the first time in a year or so. I registered for GREs on a whim and have been researching Creative Writing MFA programs, including the highly-touted one at the University of Virginia. Rather silly perhaps to apply to graduate school in a field I have had so much trouble with as of late. Maybe brilliant.

My big crumb coffee cake is ready to come out of the oven and I must get in a bike ride before the sun sets. More to follow.

Vacant Hands

2009-10-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

I cook all the time here, but I think it may be misplaced energy. Because, I am never actually that hungry. I think it is the desire to do something with my hands that drives me - drives me to cook, to smoke, to drink. To have something to hold and control. I should just buy mounds of clay and shape things of it, or wade into the muddy shallows in front of the house and scoop the black underbelly of the Chesapeake into my restless hands. If only writing were a more physical task. Writing by hand is too slow - my hands can't keep up with the words. If only writing were more like shaping things from clay, or chipping away at a marble square. Sometimes that is how it feels if I have a good writing hour, a good writing moment. Like the words were all there before I came across them and put them together, like I just had to discover them in the great piles of wrong words lying in my head. Just the few perfect beautiful words, all buried and waiting and lonely until I dig them out and string them together and they are right. I have not had a good writing day in three weeks. I have been away, or with people. It scares me that I can only seem to write when I am totally alone.

Today I went to see Where the Wild Things Are in Gloucester, and thought I saw it for what Spike Jonze intended it to be, despite the bored children that surrounded me in the dark theater, gently shushed by their confused parents. How wonderful to know exactly what you want to make and to be able to, critics, production companies, and children be damned. When I got home I went on a bike ride with my new camera and was disappointed by the light. Too dulled by wimpy clouds, too washed out. I biked to the empty Pickle house on Stingray Point to take a look around when the clouds opened up and I knew. I pedaled so hard I thought I'd faint. I knew I had to get there. Pounding down the broken-down dock camera in hand I held my breath, afraid that the clouds would close again. They did not close, and the gulls whipped over my head in the wind off the storm coming. It was like shaping something with my hands, like cutting onions. Like plucking the right words from a tangled mess, paring them out and shaving off the excess until it was just them. How lucky to live in a place that opens up in front of me, that begs to be chased.

Houses

2009-10-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

It is raining in DC, and I am thirteen floors up, on top of the Watergate. Strange to live so far off the ground. I think I could never get used to it. My grandparents love this apartment, and I love the roof. But still, strange to know you are floating up so far from anything. I like to imagine buildings as if they have suddenly turned transparent, to see all the furniture and rugs and people set up in little geometric shapes so far off the ground.

When I am sad in Virginia I go to the abandoned houses. There are several on the island, and many in the county. I think of them as left places. Many are so overrun that it is hard to imagine that they were ever anything but left houses. Some I have been in, others are inaccessible, too part of the forest now to have floors or doors. They are full of remnants. In one, a piano stands, keys uncovered, against the wall, a green hardshell suitcase on the floor beneath. Old light switches that do nothing, a rocking horse. Curtains, some ragged and dirty and some hanging brittle but preserved. A tinseled sprig of fabric holly and a small rocking chair with the hand woven wicker punched through. I like the air in left houses. It is still and quiet and full of dust, so that when you bust through the door into a left house it feels as if a long-held breath has just been let forth. When the roof on a left house goes the whole house will soon follow, birds nesting in the attic and the summer storms and salt air eating away at old heart pine. The old houses there stand longer than new houses would, their parts sturdier and construction sounder. They don't build houses to last anymore. They are built with obsolescence planned into their foundations, their frames.

The houses comfort me in their leftness. They stand still while the weather and time picks at them, smoothing away the details of their construction as an ocean does to driftwood. They remain though most if not all of the people who lived within them have died. I suppose that the left houses remind me that time does not stop for anyone. Though their time is coming to a close and the forest is coming home to claim its dirt I am a girl alive right now, and I am standing at the window a person used to open and shut and look out of, thinking about that person and who she might have been and how she might have lived and died and how it came to be that her piano was left there, with this window and this house and this dirt. I find a comfort in that I cannot explain, and when one of the left houses is finally burnt or pulled apart to make room for more houses which may some day be left, I grieve the loss, but know I am a being pulled along by the same time as the house and the person and the piano and the window and the dirt and the forest. And I can feel the ground solid beneath my feet.

1 year, 10 days

2009-10-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

Fall is proving to be more difficult than I expected. This time of year seems steeped in portent, and nostalgia; the combination is confusing. On the one hand it is beautiful, and I associate the fall with return to UCSC, pumpkin squatting, and general revelry. It makes me miss my friends as they were my friends two or three years ago. Good memories have turned bittersweet in light of what has happened. Fall is also Laura's time now, and probably will be from here on. I find myself in moments of anxious dizziness, fighting back the mounting panic I long associated with my sister. I find my moods changeable and unpredictable, and my focus shaky. I wonder if my memories differ from the memories of my friends. I have trouble reconciling the past with the present, navigating the transitions, accepting the way things are. Sometimes I am bitter. I wish I had not felt so isolated from them before Laura died, and after. I wish that things had turned out differently. But they didn't. It is strange that while I never think of Laura and think what-if? I often think of Sam or Maria in that very regard. This is made more difficult by the fact that I haven't made any new friends in Virginia, mostly because there don't seem to be any people my age in Mathews without spouses and children. The empty places aren't full, and while I will say that being farther away from all the people I used to have wonderful relationships with has helped cure me of some of my feelings of anger/abandonment, I still miss them. I wonder how things would be different had I been more open about my family life in the year before Laura died, but I have no answer for myself. I wonder how things would be different if I hadn't been too proud to ask for help, or to tell them how hurt I was, and am.

I find myself nervous about visiting California around Thanksgiving, anxious about the social aspect of it all. I find it strange that in the year following Laura's death navigating my relationships with the living was much more difficult for me than accepting or processing her suicide. I am afraid to go to California.

October

2009-10-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

A year ago today was a bad day, worse even than the one before, and it seems like a longer time since then than it has been. I feel so much older I can't stand it sometimes. My parents came to Virginia for the anniversary and it was not what you might expect- no crying, no little leftover family huddled together. A very different day than the day one year ago, when I went out to sushi with Kai and the police called my boyfriend to tell him to drive me to Fremont. He said, A 510 number, and I bristled. And he picked up, paused, and said, Yes sir, she's right here, and I knew what had happened. I had been expecting it for so long there was relief in it, and after the memorial service was all done and the family all gone I slept and slept, and found myself tired for months. And then I lived in a haze for months.

I am not the same person I was before everything started to go so wrong. I have spent a great deal of my time worrying what other people thought of me- caring more than I could really explain. And then, all at once, it didn't matter a whole lot anymore. Now sometimes I realize I am pretty boring, but it doesn't bother me how it would have two years ago, or three. I am content to be pretty boring, and find I no longer have the energy to put on much of a show. I miss my sister, but I don't, and that is hard to explain to anyone else. There is loneliness in that.

Yesterday I found a wild persimmon tree, and another, and wondered at never having noticed before. Not that I like persimmons, but I do like wild things, enough so that I can forget the bitter sliminess of the fruit and be excited about their existence. I will try to make pudding when I come back. I leave for Pennsylvania on Tuesday, a trip I am taking with my mother to visit her side of the family. I am a little anxious to leave Homagin for so long, afraid I will forget how to live here or forget how to be alone all the time, but okay. Maybe I am afraid of feeling like I did before I got here. I have to remind myself that this place will wait, that it almost never changes, and that the time I will be away is not so long at all.

Concrete Details

2009-09-27T08:43:00.000-07:00

I write in abstractions a lot of the time, and think that I need to document realities more. Abstractions are easy enough to recall, after all, but the minute detail of everyday life here tend to swim together in my head until I look back on the seven (?!) weeks I've been living in rural Virginia on an island by myself and it seems like one long, variably-weathered day. So, concrete details:

Granddaddy and Aunt Lynne arrived yesterday to spend the weekend. Aunt Lynne brings Granddaddy down every couple weeks. She likes to give Grandmother a break and likes to spend time with Granddaddy. Yesterday I experienced a burst of cooking energy and made the following: Beef-Ale Stew (one of my stand-by stew recipes, although I've started skipping on the buttermilk dumplings in lieu of biscuits), spoon bread, French green beans, and a cheddar crust apple pie. I wish I could show you delightful pictures of all of this food but I dropped my camera in salt water and sand (not the first time) and it has finally died after years of continual abuse. My parents will be bringing me a new one to destroy next week when they come to visit, and then I can start pretending that I am Deb of smitten kitchen (though with less beautiful photography/cooking skills/new infant). After dinner and dessert Aunt Lynne and I watched The Departed and both agreed that Matt Damon's character is definitely a closeted homosexual (re-watch the film and it will blow your mind). It then stormed aggressively all night, complete with thrashing trees and eerie wind howling.

The weather is always beautiful when I am the only one here. As soon as guests arrive it starts raining miserably, driving armies of fruit flies into the house. Hannah, Alex, Colby, and my entire family can attest to this.

I seem to have fully conquered my reading-block after a full year. Since I've been here I've been devouring books left and right, and it is pleasant. Completed reading: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, Sacred Clowns and Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman, Cavedweller by Dorothy Allison, Renegade by Richard Wolffe, The Spire by Richard North Patterson (awful), and The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (a reread, but a personal favorite). Currently I'm making my way through Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien. It all makes me want to write, which is shocking, and this want has actually turned into action, which is far more shocking.

I think that was all very concrete. Oh my! Uncle David and Zoe have just arrived to surprise us, and I must go join the general hubbub. I will write again soon, with details (and hopefully pictures) of my continued exploits.

Spoon Bread

1 cup cornmeal 1 tbsp salted butter

4 cups milk 1 tbsp salt

4 eggs, beaten

Cook meal and milk over medium heat until thickened and bubbling. Add eggs, salt, and butter and stir in. Pour into an oiled, flat baking dish. Bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes, until top brown and crispy.

New Things

2009-09-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

I left Santa Cruz because of the people. They made me feel crazier than I could ever feel by myself. I am someone who likes to start clean, burn bridges, and never look back. My father is the same way, I think. I have friends I don't want to lose, and more still that I already have. I feel pressure from the people I am still in touch with to mend relationships that I have long considered over. Is it strange that I feel more stifled speaking to people than I do by myself? It isn't always that way. Around my family I feel free to inhabit my own skin. They ask me hard questions; they aren't afraid of the answers. They aren't afraid of screaming or crying or pain. They are victims of the loss, and living it with me.

The other evening I was sitting on the porch with Granddaddy, watching the water. He said, "Why do you think Laura did what she did?" It didn't frighten me, or make me angry, or make me cry. I felt like I could breathe. I said, "Because she didn't think she had anything to look forward to." He nodded and smoked his pipe and we sat in silence, watching the fish jump.

I am incredibly happy, and incredibly sad. The experience of emotion, real hard emotion, has eluded me constantly in the past year. I felt numb, and faded, and so unlike myself I could hardly stand it. Maybe it is what I had to do to live, to function, to go to work and talk to customers, to be around my friends. Suddenly, here, I feel like I'm waking up, dust falling from me in sheets. It isn't always pleasant. But it makes me remember who I was before this happened, the hopes I had, the drive. It reminds me that I am alive apart from Laura, even when I feel as if half my body has been removed.

I write and sit on the porch and listen to Blind Willie Johnson. I can read again. I want to live in the South for the rest of my life, be it on that green river in Arkansas or here. Last night I made stew for dinner and smoked too many cigarettes and fought with Colby, and this morning I awoke to a clear blue sky and smooth water and was unspeakably glad to be here. My head is splitting open and stories are spilling out, obvious and good.

Rain-stuck

2009-09-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

I have been reading, which in its way is some kind of progress. Before coming here I had managed to finish only one book since October. I've managed two in full in my time here. Almost three. The rain has been keeping me inside, and I find it difficult. Colby left Wednesday morning after a trip I'd describe as hard, leaving me to re-familiarize myself with living in rural-nowhere-land alone. As he put it, he had to get back to the real world. His visit was the first time since Hannah and Alex left since I had spoken face to face with someone my own age.

Trapped inside by the weather with no real tasks or direction has given me moments of anxiety and doubt about my life here. Some days I feel as if I am here hiding out from reality, going out of my way to sever my ties to everything that was my life as of 2 months ago. Other days I feel that I am here to regain my bearings after a traumatic few years, seeking stability and the sense of momentum I felt before my life became too complicated to cope with. Some days I feel everything all at once and just want to go to sleep until I can wake up feeling sane. But I don't nap, so this never actually happens.

The sun just made its first appearance in three days, so I think I will go out on the bike while I still can, tide permitting. The bugs are already humming. I am making braised sausage and lentils for dinner and watching Two Lovers. I hope the weather turns around overnight so I can revisit summer a little bit before the fall really really sets in for good.

The Whole Catastrophe

2009-09-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

After being by myself so much, the arrival of the whole catastrophe was jarring. Aunt Lynne, Uncle David, Mom, Dad, Grandmother, Granddaddy, Zoe, Mihn... it was a full house. I find myself very tired now that almost everyone has left. I retreated to my room a great deal, which was tolerated. I enjoy everyone being here for the stories it stirs up--stories about the family, about my grandparents' childhoods, about the people they knew and the community feuds. We ate fried chicken, butter beans, fried shrimp, black eyes peas, mashed potatoes, biscuits, pot roast, chocolate pie, clams in white wine, crabmeat norfolk, and all kinds of other White family specialities. The day before my parents arrived it seemed like the house was buzzing. R.C. and his wife, Joyce, arrived to clean up the yard and mow the lawn and deadhead the flowers, and Golores spent 5 hours cleaning the house from top to bottom. It was strange to be here before everyone came, when there seemed to be this upstairs downstairs dynamic and everyone was in such a hurry to get the place in ship shape shape. I didn't really know what to do with myself except make coffee and try not to get underfoot.

Everyone seemed well enough--more emotional, perhaps, then in years past, but I'm realizing more and more that there was probably a wealth of drama constantly going on that I simply could not detect as a child or bother notice as a self-centered teenager. Everyone is happy that I am here, though concerned and maybe a little confused. I guess not all twenty-three year old Californians want to move to rural Virginia just as they're supposed to be striking out on there own in the great wide world.

I haven't seen the raccoon babies since Zoe arrived and am worried about them. I hope they are surviving, adorable little stripe-y softball creatures. Raccoons make sounds like branches creaking, and no one else seems to know what I am talking about when I say that. Maybe I haven't mentioned them before. The babies would come twice a day, morning and dusk, to steal figs from the fig trees in the yard. Grandmother told me to shoot them (she's very protective of her figs) and R.C. said, Put some food scraps out in the dingle. That'll keep the coons out of your figs. As soon as Zoe arrived she chased one of the babies into the water, where it swam around for a good hour before vanishing. The swan family appeared two days ago for the first time in a week and came right up to the yard. They were enormous, and intimidating, and very pretty. The seven swanlings are not very elegant. Their necks are rather woobly, as opposed to graceful. They look like snakes floating in big feathery boats. They wiggle their behinds when they eat.

People are beginning to recognize me on the island, which is comforting. I get a full raised-hand-wave, as opposed to the customary one-finger-who-the-fuck-are-you-wave. Colby is coming to visit. He'll arrive Saturday night. I am trying not to be too ridiculously excited, because it seems like it would be bad luck. I think I may be starting to catch some of the superstition floating around here. According to the grandparents superstition was a huge part of Mathews life when they were children. My personal favorite (of many) superstitions: on New Years day a woman cannot come to your house first. Apparently this was of such grave importance that my Great Grandmother Hudgins would invite a half dozen men over for breakfast at dawn on New Years Day, simply to ensure that no woman would arrived first. My Granddaddys mother would bribe a neighboring boy over at one past midnight with a gift for the exact same purpose. Now does that make any sense at all to you? You have to wonder what awful happening gave rise to this particular ritual in the first place. Black eyed peas, also, were a New Years must.

Weather

2009-08-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

There is actual weather in Virginia. I watch the Weather Channel every morning when I get up (particularly given the whereabouts of Hurricane Bill). It has been over 95 degrees for the past 3 days, far into the evening. I left Santa Cruz a month ago, and it's hard to believe.

I made the right decision to come here, though that doesn't always guarantee that it will be easy, or perfect. I still get nervous at night, although not nearly so much as in the first few days by myself. I have started meeting people on Gumthicket Road, my neighbors. They are almost exclusively over sixty. They have lived here, or in Mathews, for their entire lives. My last name gives me some legitimacy. The last name White is prevalent enough in the Tidewater to warrant a whole area called "White's Neck." Maybe that's why I feel so comfortable here. It speaks to my family, the stories of my family--stories I have heard for my entire life.

In the evening I sit on the indoor porch and watch the thunderstorms blow up out on the horizon, clouds darkening and piling and suddenly sweeping in. A week ago I found myself hiding in a closet on the ground floor, the lightning flashing every few seconds and the thunder shaking the house so hard I thought the lightning had hit the roof more than once. It turned out to have hit the neighbors, blowing their A/C unit. There is no weather like that in Santa Cruz. I thought I was over-reacting, a true come-here move, until R.C. told me that it was the worst lightning he'd seen in years. He claims he saw balls of lightning bouncing across the field across the street from his house, on Old Ferry. The storm sat on the house for an hour, but I felt somehow that I had survived a rite of passage in its wake. I'm making Haley's White Bean and Sausage Soup for dinner and waiting for the clouds blowing up in the distance to arrive.

Deliverance

2009-08-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

Now that I am truly by myself I realize how integrated I am used to being. It is so quiet here at night. I am not used to being able to hear every creak in the house, every swelling of the pine and popping of the metal roof. My favorite part of day is the late afternoon when the light hits the grass and trees and water just so and the swan family leaves their cove for the shallow water in front of the house. I sit on the porch with a gin and tonic and wave at kayakers and boats passing by. Midday tends to be lonely. The island empties out during the week--the campers all returned to what I imagine to be depressing inland suburbs. The campground is all RVs, and every RV has a wooden placard personalized for the family that occupy it--"The Readings from Richmond, VA!" Several Rebel flags grace rudimentary flagpoles at the campground, even during the week when the campers are empty, the beach desolate.

I'm still anonymous here, though I am definitely noticed. I am overdressed for this downtown, in my dresses and sunglasses and nice car. They are rude to me at the grocery store, and I eyeball the pubescent gay bagger and wonder if he'll leave Mathews someday. I make too much food for no one.

A barn owl landed in the lawn last night, about twenty feet from my seat on the porch, and bobbed its head from side to side at me. A pretty accurate representation of my reception here. I tried not to become convinced it was actually an alien. At night I stare out the multitude of black, blindless, ground level windows and try not to hear the creepy Banjo riff from Deliverance, which I have vowed not to watch while I'm here.

The fig trees in the yard overflow with fruit and a flock of crows gathers beneath, pecking at the fallen figs. Gulls dive for fish in Milford Haven and fishing boats leave Barn Creek equipped for the evening fishing hour. I try very hard not to feel bored or lonely, and yell out to a woman in a kayak passing by. She obliges me, and I realize I haven't spoken a single word today.

Navigation

2009-07-26T21:56:00.000-07:00

I left Santa Cruz at 11 AM on Monday, the 20th. I have been on the road for six full days, and I have seen all kinds of things I did not expect. I am surprised by my own surprise. This country is so varied and dramatic once you leave your familiar roads. We have been camping every other night, once in the desert, once in an aspen forest, and once by a slow moving river in the Ozarks. We wake at 6 AM and sit eating corn flakes, amazed that we are wherever we are and not wherever we were before we made this trip.We sleep in motels - Tomahawk, Holiday Inn - and tolerate the strangeness of the smell and the noise in exchange for showers and spotty wi-fi.

Nevada was hard and strange, like I remember. Rubble and near-ghost-towns punctuate vast expanses of sage and Joshua trees. We stayed in Tonopah, a town on the brink of memory, and ate steak and fries in a sea-themed restaurant. Old mines spring up between crumbling hotels and saloons; a plague cemetery (1901-1911) opens up onto the parking lot of the Clown Motel (bikers welcome).

Arizona is red, and rock. We stay in an aspen forest overnight and pass a buffalo herd grazing in a nearby meadow on our way to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. There we share a trail with mules and their leavings and watch chipmunks. Pinyon pines and sage, a man in Fredonia who still says the word "blackies."

Utah is red, and rock. We drive through Monument Valley and I flash back to the Western units in my film classes. Rock formations like hands line a dry riverbed and American Indian women sell turquoise from tables under makeshift shelters built of cracking planks and tree branches. It is hot, and it is vast.

Colorado is beautiful, all meadows and mountains and rivers. Everyone seems to own horses, and we see elk and antelope. Aspen and pine line the roadways and lakes and streams wind alongside us, beckoning Alex to fish. We stay at Mosca Lake and are eaten alive by tiny mosquitoes, and spend the morning jumping from the dunes at Great Sand Dunes National Park. My pockets fill with sand.

Oklahoma is flat and brownish-green. It is impossible to tell how far we've gone, because there are no landmarks. We pass through towns at 70 mph and they end in under a minute. The larger towns have downtowns of brick, but every shopfront is empty or closed and Walmart stands at the edges. There are no grocery stores, only fields of wheat.

Arkansas is green, green, green and swampy. Dead armadillos line the roadsides and signs denote various bayous just out of sight. We camp alongside the Big Piney Creek and swim in the dark, naked and thrilled as the headlights of other campers pass just over our heads. Kudzu coats the branches and my companions get poison oak. I kick a toad outside of the bathroom and bats wheel over the water at night. The long pool of the creek is stone-green and still; a spotted gar the length of my arm swims past our feet as we sit on a fallen tree. I say, I could live here, and know with certainty that the statement is true. Arkansas sits deep in me; the sound of cicadas rings in my chest and I know that I have made the right choice in leaving California, where the trees are too silent at night and the air does not coat you like rain. I realize that Laura will never see Arkansas. I realize I will likely spend the rest of my life mourning the innumerable things Laura will never see. My father is jealous, and I sense in him a wish like mine - to leave what is known in exchange for the feeling of newness, of aliveness.

Libraries

2009-07-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to write, trying to pack, trying to prepare. I have been in Santa Cruz for 5 years, arriving for college and staying for lack of better to do. That is a lot of time to accumulate. I did not expect it to be so difficult to decide what merits saving.

I opened a box in my closet that my mother sent over a few months ago. It was full of items she had thought would be useful, all having had belonged to Laura. I never opened the box or used any of its contents, mostly mixing bowls and tampons. I went through it two days ago, knowing I could probably just hand it back to her intact, but feeling I should do my part in the liquidation of my sister's belongings. After all, there is still the entire closet of her clothes at my parents' house in Fremont, still untouched. I was unperturbed until I came across a cheap clear plastic bag with white plastic handles emblazoned with Kaiser Permanente across the side. 10 months ago I watched my mother cut the waistband drawstring out of a pair of Laura's pajama pants and place them in that bag. I took the bag to her when I visited her in a ward in Palo Alto, with Colby. No strings allowed. I sat on her hospital bed behind a drawn curtain and looked at the motivational pastel drawings she'd been encouraged to draw while in the hospital. I can do anything.

I still find it hard to grasp what has happened.

People keep asking me if I am sad to leave. How to explain that compared to some sadnesses, this one seems too bearable. So I give away more than half of the books I still own, and the library diminishes. I shed things--paper clips, filler paper, spatulas, measuring cups, smelly markers, journals, earrings, skirts, plants, and am left wondering why I ever kept any of this. Tape, pencils, stickers, cardstock, wrapping paper, broaches, potting soil, rugs, couches, bowls, garlic presses. It makes me think of my grandmother, who gives away more every year, determined that whoever cleans out the house when she has passed has almost no work to do. She gives away things she has owned her entire life. Trying to prepare.

After the Agapanthus

2009-06-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

My friend, a painter, blacks over his lines
and packets his pad:
"We never see a place," he says,
"Until we leave it behind." Yes,
and by then it has become someplace else.

-Nicholas Christopher, Crossing the Equator

It has been the kind of year that divides your life into a distinct before and after. On October 3rd 2008 my sister broke her neck when she hit the water beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and died.

Before, after. Before I think I know who I am. After I am like a forest burnt to the ground.

There is a scene in the film adaptation of The Hours in which Virginia Woolf's niece asks what happens after death. Virginia Woolf says, We return to the place that we came from. I am not the one who died but I am going home. In a month I leave Santa Cruz, my parents, my friends, my boyfriend, and return to my grandparents' property on Gwynn's Island, Virginia. Before I leave, and after, I am going to attempt to write something, anything down for the first time in 8 months, 27 days and I am going to share it here. I will try not to delete everything as I go.