This Actually Happened

The Postal Service only released one album, a decade ago this year. There is no progression---no growing with or apart from the artist, no moment they went mainstream. It's weird to be old enough now to do things purely for nostalgia's sake. But, I have a feeling that's why most of us were there. That album was a sound marked with a date-stamp, a frozen snapshot of something we once loved.

Before Ben Gibbard started the second song he spoke into the microphone: "this actually happened."   The song was about a dream he had, and maybe that's what he was referring to.

Or, maybe “this” meant sixteen: a kind of affirmation to everything that had unfolded ten years ago, including the  minute, somewhere in there, where I put a burned cd into the slot of my car stereo, the words Give Up written with sharpie. That time is so far gone that it has been reduced to a few choice scenes and heavy emotions that feel too ungrounded to have actually occurred. But these songs are a relic---existential proof---of the summer I sat on the end of a dock in an Oregon town with the first boy I ever truly wanted and a bottle of raspberry Smirnoff that tasted nothing like the sugar syrup smell. Each time I hear a song from that album (usually now on a cafe playlist of muzak) a few disjointed scenes are unearthed and they are, inevitably, of summer.

There's something about this season that makes the people and places linger in our memories with all the shadowy contract of a sun high over-head. They become inky outlines in our mind, of short-lived loves and seasonal friendships that occupy a disproportionate share of my memory.

Over the balcony, a thousand heads glowed below me, and I wondered what they remembered. I couldn't see their mouths, but I could hear them singing along to the final words of the final song, “everything will change”---like a mantra said over and over. It was a message to each of us, ten years back, feeling as if the afternoon was forever. We didn't know then about the way things fade. Or that the summers would become flickers inside us, and the music would keep them alight.

To Whom Do You Give Your Joy?

For two years after college I was a restaurant hostess. And every night, at ten o clock, I would walk down the delivery hall, swipe my punch card, put on a pair of sweat pants over my tights and few minutes later fall into a bus seat for a ride over the bridge and into my north side neighborhood. A smile of acknowledgment to the bus driver was the last sputtering of any niceness I had left---god help any poor soul who asked for change or stranger who wanted to chat while sharing the seat. Nope. Nu-huh. I was done---fresh out of politeness or civility (and genuine care?  I ran out of that a few hours ago.) More than once I feared coming into contact with a disguised sorceress on public transportation who would "see that there was no love in my heart" and hex me into a Beauty and the Beast situation.

At the end of days like that I didn't even recognize myself. I'm a total bleeding-heart type and usually unfailingly pleasant, to a fault. If I learned anything from those soulless nights it's that emotional energy is limited. Despite our best efforts, it's possible to get to a point where there isn't anything left to give. I think back to times when I've cried myself out: heaving sobs eventually subsiding into a wave of calm. Or, when a breathless announcement falls into its own kind of script: "yes, I'm just so excited!"

A few months ago, I misread a line in some self-helpy thing that left a question that's stuck with me. Who do you give your joy?

I think most of us have a mental speed-dial list of people we turn to in a crisis. It's a small handful of people who understand our worries and validate our fears and even in our most hysterical moments respond with "oh yeah, that's totally reasonable." I trust these friends  in the deepest way possible. I give them the parts of myself that I'm not proud of and that only show up with my heart-of-darkness at 10pm on Trimet.

But, the list of those who receive my for joy is different. I give a little of it, all over (and sadly, perhaps the least of it to those who take my tearful phone calls.) I so value my relationships with emotional intimacy---the rare moments when I can truly turn in off and just let it all out---that I forget about the good stuff. I give the most of my joy to those in that "middle area" of friendship, relationships full of love and admiration but also the secret desire to keep myself together to keep them around.

This is compounded by the fact that many of those we are closest to in our hearts are actually a few thousand miles away. It's easy to lose sight of the daily lightness, because we need them so much for the weight of things unresolved in our hearts and we only have so much phone time during a lunch break.

All of this is to say, I want to allocate myself differently---to share the easy joy of newspaper articles and nailpolish colors and to make more calls beginning with "remember that time . . ." and ending in a giggle fit. I want to be better at giving the best of me to those who love all of me, regardless.

A Red Thread

When I fall in love with a man, I fall in love with the place connected to his heart by one red thread, anchored with a map pin. And being there in that city, or usually that small town (a place which no one has heard of---so, he says he’s from the nearby city that other people can at least associate with a state, but is really forty-five minutes down the expressway) is the end for me. Or rather, the real beginning. On your first visit you hear it---the way that people say their A's as “ah” and will you run up to the Rosauers? (The name of the corner market has altogether replace the generic descriptor of “grocery store”) The neighbors close their blinds beginning with the heat of the day and ending with a fan facing backward out the window. He barely notices, because this is his home, but you begin to make sense of him. For months after, you'll catch a glimpse of it---when he opens a beer bottle with a lighter or is stubborn about the definition of coleslaw.

And then on the first hot night of summer he’s seventeen again, driving down River Road. The windows are down and you have nowhere to go and he reaches for the volume when Float On comes across the radio.

When We Think About Change

For the most part we experience the world as consistent. Even change follows a certain kind of pattern. Difference comes, and then it repeats itself: tempering in a cycle of time.

But, what happened when Darwin looked a little closer at a finch’s beak? Or when Galileo watched the tides rise, curiously out of touch with expectation? Philosophers call moments like that a “paradigm shift," because it wasn’t just about the beak for Darwin. Suddenly, it was about everything. He saw turtles and trumpet vines and all sorts of creatures---and he wondered how they had come to be there. The birds called, same they ever did. What changed was how Darwin saw them.

The half-way point of my daily walk is marked by a tree, less than a story tall. I thought it was a pussy willow. All through the winter the branches were bare, save for the tiny buds covered in fuzz that glowed in the winter sun.

When spring started up with sixty-degree days, I waited for the street to change. I looked for cherry blossoms and tulip trees, but all of New England stayed quiet. Perhaps it would just become green, I thought, without any heralded arrival. I even began to ask people in town: “does anything bloom around here?” They all assured me and advised I be patient. But I didn't know this season in Massachusetts. So I held onto the sneaking feeling that spring had already come for us and there was no reason to wait.

Then one day, on my walk to town, I realized that the pussy willow . . . well, wasn't.The buds cracked open to reveal a clutch of long pink petals.  It had become a magnolia overnight.  Over the week, a hundred blossoms broke the shells that had held them for winter.

By now, the petals have fallen and are beginning to rust. But I am living in the everything after.

Lilacs and The Things We Lose.

After everyone left town following my mother’s funeral, one of the things left behind was a mix cd that held all of her favorite songs. It's maybe the truest part of her that I have left, since she never wrote anything or found a way to say, "this is who I was." It's a different kind of hurt, as I've grown older, to lose a person---not just the figure of my mother.  I wish I knew how she was funny or how she was sad; if there were things she lost that she never stopped missing. Mother’s day comes every year when the lilacs are blooming. They were her favorite spring flower. My childhood friends would bring her bunches of them on the days my mother drove us to school. Wrapped in wet paper towels, the lilac's woody stems would be nestled into the cup holder. She planted a lilac tree out in our back garden too, in the corner, at the meeting of the fence lines. In May, the Oregon rain would cling to the clusters of clover shaped flowers. The leaves folding, the branches bent under the wealth of it.

The second song on her cd is "Our House" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. "I'll light the fire," it begins, "you put the flowers in the vase, that you bought yesterday." Most of the verses are about simple blessings like that, about rest and light and illuminated windows. But, it's the last line that gets me every time: "life use to be so hard / now everything is easy because of you."

Those words help me understand the life that I remember with her and the home my parents made together. They both wanted to build a place better than the one they'd known. So, they painted the walls white and covered them with wainscoting. No unkind words were ever spoken. She turned on the table lamps to keep out the dark and set lilacs on the dining room table. And on the first warm day of Spring, she would open the French doors, put on her reeboks and windex the windows. From the living room, she'd play that song onto the patio. Even the neighbors could hear it coming from our house.

Be Boundless.

In college I took an art class and the first thing we did was tape off a square in the center of the paper. This was the space where we would draw the vase sitting on a stool in front of the classroom. We drew on a bright white sheet with a rough matte surface, textured like an eggshell. I began at the center, of course, and carefully created a scale small enough to contain everything in front of me.  To my delight, the finished product floated smack-dab in the middle of the paper. Nothing even neared the edge.

Despite my tangled mess of hair, things of the wild variety don’t come easily for me. My creativity comes from working with boundaries—like the finite rectangle in a frame of film. I no longer feel the need to stay inside the lines, but I like limits and indelible endings. They make the space seem full.

I guess “seem” is the imperative word there, since for the most part it’s only an illusion. Boundaries have a way of creating things, because they hint at what’s beyond them.

I once saw a Pollock in a museum; it took up the better part of a wall. The painting wasn’t framed, so you could see the sides of canvas and the staples that stretched it across. The color ran clear off the edges and I imagined onto the floor. The paint I could see felt like merely a piece—a swatch of some colossal and untamed outpouring.

We learn early on how to give just enough—to burn, but just a little, and be done. It’s smart to save a part of yourself, because what if this only gets harder?

But, there is no restraint in the month of May, no tenuous half-ways or kind-ofs. Every inch of the cherry trees is impossibly pink. The blossoms quiver with their unbearable lightness.  After months of cold, the doors fly open again and a hive’s worth of bees begin buzzing. Ask them how much to give of your heart! They’ll answer the way that you’re fearing.

It sounds like paint hitting a canvas. Give everything. Give everything. Give everything.

Upon Seeing Emily Dickinson’s House, My First Day in Amherst.

I imagine Emily in the window, her white dress fading a little.  She is protected by the walls of her familiar room. She is dwelling in the possible, as she put it.  The floors are washed with a sunlight that doesn’t let on to the deceiving cold of spring’s first days or the searing heat of summer. There is comfort in this unknowing place, there in hope in hesitation.

And, then I image her descending the stairs, and walking out onto the lawn. I see her steps shaking dew from the morning grass, and the goose bumps rising-up on her ankles.  In that moment, we are both staring back at the house, where she imagined this place so differently.

Emily Dickinson is survived by more than one-thousand poems and a collection of pressed flowers in a vault at Harvard. It felt important for me to see her home, as I was now alone in Amherst too. I, like her, know the feathered thing- the gentle joy of a chosen uncertainty.  The real magic of this fickle world is in the nearly-real, the perhaps, the "could be".

Snow Fall(ing)

I can count the number of times I’ve seen snow on two gloved hands. It happens in Portland maybe once a year. When it does---or might and, usually, doesn’t---it’s the talk of the town. Schoolteachers make announcements to their classrooms and snow becomes the only topic of polite chatter in the grocery store checkout. “Looks like it’s going to snow, huh?” The day before its arrival we all watch the sky, every one of us an amateur meteorologist. The cloud cover holds the moisture, but too much won’t let in the cold.

Snow isn’t a unique kind of weather in Oregon. It’s just the rarest form of rain. On the way to “snow” are “the in-betweens,” softer circles of slush hitting the windshields on cars headed home. As kids, we’d sit at the windows, hoping against hope for a snow day. “Will it stick?” The flakes fell and dissolved on contact.

The real snow only ever came at night. Eerie golden spotlights lit the bare tree branches, the snowflakes swirling around streetlamps like gnats in the summer. The mornings were nothing short of magic, but it all melted by noon.

My first snow in New England was something different altogether. I was walking to the bus in mid-November when the sky was blue and a few stubborn leaves still clung to the elm trees. Out of nowhere came the tiniest flurries, the flakes not so much falling as suspended. All around me they were appearing and disappearing, like dust shook out from a rug.

The snow was unlike anything I’d ever seen---unexpected but completely certain. It felt like something was only beginning. It felt like falling in love.

A World of One

My bed is in front of a window. I should move it, really. Old apartments get drafty. But I like the sound of the cars on the interstate because their wooshing wakes me up. It’s a gentle way to begin the day. Nobody honks in rural New England. When I rolled over this morning, the other side of the street was barely visible. It was the densest fog I’d ever seen and the sight filled me with a sense of urgency. Marine layers burn off quickly when the sun comes out, or at least they do at home. So, I threw my coat on over my pajamas, tucking my plaid pant legs into the top of my Hunters. I grabbed my camera and walked outside.

The neighborhood was absolutely silent. In the center of the park, I looked at the tree line. Closest to me, the trees were made of deliberate lines. But, the middle-distance figures turned into figments. Farther on they were just vague silhouettes, more indefinite until they stopped existing all together. It was like rubbing away a smudge.

When I walked back into the house, I stood in the doorway of my bedroom. I stared out the window and then down at my bed. Half of the covers were rumpled and slept in. The other half were still perfectly straight. I crossed the wood floor to fold over the sheets and pulled up the corner of my comforter.

All this time, I thought it was habit. Or, I thought maybe it was loneliness. Some nights it felt like a symbolic act---half filled heart, half filled bed, defined by absence. But I felt full standing out in the fog, clutching my camera and completely alone. There was a surrounding presence in the dampening air. A weight, like the undisturbed covers.

I wake up to the same span of sheets that I always have. My hands rest on the edge of the mattress. All that exists is the world within reach. The rest simply fades into white.

Beginning to End

I left Portland thinking that I was on the verge of becoming the person I wanted to be. My big dream had become a reality: I’d been accepted to graduate school. I was about to become scholar, a creative, a put-together person who listens to their voicemail. But now, here I was, putting on mascara at three o’clock in the afternoon. My first (and only) social interaction of the day would be with the clerk at the corner market. I’ve gotten to know the houses that sit between mine and the market. I walk there almost everyday for something, maybe green beans or licorice. Mostly I just need the air. The gardens have changed gradually since I moved in, but on this day the change was emphatic. The first frost had come the night before. And everywhere everything was dying. In front of the church, the snapdragons had been pulled out by their roots. The grass was wilted over and clinging limply to the curb.

Inside the store, Paul Simon’s Slip Sliding Away was on the radio. It was a song I'd heard a thousand times, but for the first time the words really shook me. Autumn---the celebrated season of New England---was giving way to the season I’d been warned about. All of it had gradually slipped away. Not just the season, even, but parts of myself, too. I hadn’t touched my camera in months. Somewhere I'd stopped being the girl chasing her dreams and had become the girl crying in a grocery store aisle while staring at a bottle of cabernet.

I needed to see something or someone flourishing, so, I set out to visit a friend who had also started a new life here recently. Nichole is an apprentice in the flower and herb gardens at Stone Barns, a non-profit farm and education center just outside of New York City.

In the hoop-houses it was every season. Microgreens pushed up through the soil in rows. Sungold tomatoes were ripe on the vine. But outside, it was just like what I'd seen in New England. The peonies were crumpled like burned paper. Even the globe amaranth---defiant in fuchsia and Shiap pink---were being cut that day.

“How do you do it?” I asked her. I knew that Nichole helped to plant the terraces last spring. She’d put her knees on the ground and drawn her finger across the earth, placing a row of seeds in the part she made before folding the dirt back over again. With her care, the seeds had sprouted and become something beautiful. And now all of that was dying.

She replied with graceful acceptance. “It’s hard. But I like seeing something come full circle”.  I knew she was right---I’ve seen the Lion King. But, I kept thinking about the churchyard snapdragons, disappearing in a compost pile somewhere. Sure, they were returning to the earth from where the came, but they had once been exuberant. The change felt harsh and unfair.

Then Nichole took me to the drying room.  Rows of soybeans were hung up in bunches. Statice and cockscomb were pinned to the rafters and the globe amaranth was being tied for drying. There were wooden bins full of gourds and screen drawers filled with herbs. Most of them would become something else, used in teas or tinctures. Some would be saved for seeds.  Nichole picked up a clipping of rosemary and ran her fingers along the stem. With one quick pull the leaves were stripped. “Full circle.” She said.  And I finally knew what she meant.

She had followed these flowers from start to finish---and here we were at the start again. I guess circles are comforting that way. The further you are from where you began, the closer you are to the next beginning.

An Indefinite Season

[gallery link="file"] I've done a round-table introduction just about every week since I moved across the country. After my name, I say where I’m from. It’s the natural next step in these kinds of “tell us a bit about yourself” prompts.  I’m Sam and I’m from Portland.

In some ways, being able to claim this city makes me sound cooler than I really am — I mean, my bike has brakes. Still, there is some truth to what people think. I do like flannel and farmers markets, indie bands, good coffee and bad beer.  And the collective feelings of the city are mine too. There is a comforting familiarity in gray days, and a sadness when they go on for too long. There is sense of searching, for both purpose and simplicity.

Portland is a word that I took with me.  It has been a way to explain, without saying much, what I love and look for in life. But recently, for the first time since I left, I was asked to talk about who I am now. I fumbled for a few short sentences that in the end didn’t say much at all. How could I define myself in fifty words without the one word that mattered? I could only begin with advice from Hemingway: “Start with the first true simple declarative sentence.”

Fall is here. Everywhere the trees are metaphors for change. I feel like a spectator of this season, no different than the leaf-peepers idling up the shoulder on the interstate. I don’t know how far we are into this process or how it will end — whether it will come quickly or be wicked away, gust by gust.

I don’t know what it means yet to claim this place. I catch glimpses maybe — of the New England thing — in katydids and the peeling paint on the front stoop. But I can’t read the sky here. I’m constantly caught without a coat or sweating in my boot-socks.

At home, I knew when the roses bloomed a few weeks early.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the trees, and about the way we describe them. Trees are green. Trees have leaves. But in October, they defy their definition. They’re aflame with orange and red. Soon they will be bare. Each day they are less recognizable, less “tree” in the way we define it.

To describe myself, I’m left with words like “once was” and “not quite,” words that hint at incompleteness.  They mean that I’m losing, or gaining something – what exactly, I’m not sure yet.  Perhaps it is my sense of place; I’ve lost belonging and gained becoming.