Gwynn's Island Time

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.