Close What No Longer Opens.

My grandparents had a solid birch front door, four feet wide.  Heavy and dense.  I had to push it open with both outstretched hands, even as an adult.  Once open, black walnuts, well cooked bacon, butter, always butter and the faint hint of citrus from the small orange tree my grandmother nursed all winter long filled you. And as for my grandparents,  they weren't the type to be waiting at the door.  I wouldn't ever call either of them comforting, but their house was comfortable.  Very comfortable.  Yule logs lit all day long on Christmas, greyed winter light felt warm from the wall of windows in the Great Room and the grandfather clock my grandmother's parents brought from Amsterdam shook the entire house with each changing hour.  But that door, the front door stands sunwhite in memory as where all their world began.  And where the outside stayed.

A front door is essential.  Fundamental.  Grounding.  And obviously, an opening.  But that birch door doesn't rest heavy as a memory as much as an established belief in how doors should be, a statement that influences how you enter into the next space.  From an architectural perspective, it's a first impression you keep coming back to day after day.  Perhaps it's not surprising that my home's front door (photo above) caught my eye as a smaller version of my grandparent's, solid and substantial.  One I knew I wanted to enter, everyday.

While  I was married, our house had (and I think still has) a fantastic front door.  It seems only fitting that my grandfather, who once owned a lumber company and my once husband, a logger, would have very solid wood doors.  No peek holes or windows, just a wall of wood. I remember the first time I entered my to-be husband's home and the door felt familiar, trust worthy.  Some women look and see how men treat their mothers.  Me, I'm an architect's daughter.  I check a man's front door.

I've learned to check more than a door when trying to read a man, but let's just say a man's house says a lot about what a man doesn't say.  So does how they talk about their jobs.  Late one night, I asked Greg, my husband, about logging, not so much why he did it but what he discovered over the years of working in the woods.  What surprised him were the scents of wood.  How as soon as you would saw through the middle of a tree amazing odors would bloom--citrus, toffee and even bubble gum.  The heart of each tree has a unique smell he'd say. Each holds its own unique scent.  I believe him.

During September of 2008, after being married for just four months, I started getting up with Greg and having coffee with him before he went off to work.  It was usually around five.  I would sit on the couch while Greg went in and out that front door loading up his truck.  The scent of saw dust would fill the air.  Greg would load his bags with water bottles taped with duct tape, worn leather boots, a granola bar, a sandwich, maybe, but always a thermos of hot coffee and last to be passed through was the chainsaw, freshly sharpened from the night before.

But on a specific day, September 18 at five in the morning, I sat on the couch and talked about painting the living room, how I was going to bake a quiche and cut up chunks of butter.  That fall, Greg had his dream job.  And I had mine.   I was a wife, adjuncting at the U and working at a cooking school.  He was only a short drive away which is unheard of in logger lingo from our house and was working really long hours and sweating out weight in the heat.  We kissed good bye.  The door closed.  I turned to get another cup of coffee.  And the door opened and Greg peered in and said, I love you Emily, smiling. And closed the door again.

What shut that day was more than just a door behind a man on his way to work.   That day in the hot afternoon sun, Greg would cut a tree that would barber chair, a tree that is rotten inside and kicks back, falls directly on the faller.  Another synonym for barber chair is a widow maker.  And in one swoop, C6 and C7 broke in Greg's neck, but what stayed were the millimeters, sheer threads in his body held strong between the difference in Greg being able to walk and even months later ski.  The neurosurgeon told me, "it was just millimeters Emily, just tiny strands of a difference between losing his life or worse, living an unlife of being bound to a unworkable body."  He was lucky.  We were lucky.  Or so we thought.

So much more than just Greg's neck broke that day.  And so much opened.  What opened for me was carrying the weight of that tree, the immeasurable weight of fear.  I let it consume me and then it crushed me.  And not as fast as that tree fell, but more like a slow steady fall, it split us.  Sure, it's easy to blame an accident on destroying a marriage, but it's not the accident as much as what you carry from being a witness, a participate in trying to make sense of it.  Thinking you can, make sense of it.
And this really is the terrible beauty in losing what you most wanted, you break into tiny pieces, dust really.  And in the dust of your own self, you have to sweep up the parts you know you have to let go of.  The parts you know that participated in destruction.  And find the others pieces to keep growing.

It's taken me years to admit this. I had it easy, I could blame something else other than some of the parts of my own self.  You won't find a lot about this in the late night web searches on dot.coms for surviving the metallic loneliness of divorce aka, dealing with you own weaknesses.  Believe me, I've read them all.  Sure, you can find how to deal with shame, guilt and anger, but how to deal with the weight of your own fear is different.  You think if you shut it up that it might lighten.  It just sits there until it resurfaces and then you face it head on.

And usually you face it, when you least expect it.

This past May, I had the fortunate opportunity to travel to Portugal with a very good friend, Jaime, who was also turning 40.  We are born just four days apart and we wanted to ring in our birthday together.  I wrote about it here http://emsmiddlewest.blogspot.com/2014/06/seeing-near-far.html in greater detail, but what I didn't write about then, was what I had to face.

On the eve of my birthday, Jaime and I were in Lagos and had found a fun bar to toast in 40th birthday eve and given that we wanted to spend the day clear eyed, we went to bed just past midnight.  We went to sleep and I passed out easily and Jaime, who wears an eye mask and ear plugs ( Yes, I snore at times, poor Jaime) went to sleep consciously.

I awoke around five and heard voices, muffled really and couldn't make out either the words, the language, but heard sounds coming from what I thought was the roof, where we had a patio attached to our room.  I peered over to see Jaime, who in her own single bed was fast asleep.  I waited.  I heard ruffled footsteps above. I waited some more.  I couldn't seem to make out where or what was going on, but all I knew was my heart, raced. I was awake.

I heard a body slamming against the door and in an instant I grabbed Jaime's hand, which had been outstretched from the side of her bed and I said the two words, I don't ever like to admit or say, to anyone,

I'm scared.

Jaime woke and squeezed my hand back.
I leaned towards her and said, "Jaime, I think someone's trying to break into our room," I waited to see if she was fully awake.  She squeezed my hand again.

We heard the sounds above, the rumblings, the heavy footsteps.

Jaime said, "Emily, that's not someone coming in, that's someone trying to close a door."

And it went silent.  Jaime kept holding my hand.

We stayed in that moment and then there was the same sound again, but I heard the door, differently.
Jaime was right, the door was being shut, tight.

We let go of our hands and talked for a bit, laughed for a moment and like some old pattern I have held onto, I immediately felt awkward, embarrassed.  But then something shifted, in that moment, I felt something in me leave.  I hadn't thought that the sounds could be the sound of a door closing, the sound of leaving.  In that dark of morning, I realized I had been afraid to let go of my fear.  Keeping my fear, let me keep something of what I had felt was lost.  If I let it go, if I really let go of my fear, what would open?

And what's opening is me.  Sure, I'd love to tell you I have moved away from fear, but quite the contrary.  I'm accepting that it will be there.  Even across the Atlantic on a tiny spit of land, in a room of tile and white, you can find what you think you've hidden.  It might even just wake you up.  And trust me, you will open it, if you dare, and what will bloom might be as unique as the scent of a tree and as familiar as your grandparent's own home.  You will know it in your body that you have to let go of what no longer is open, to you.  You will feel fear, but know it is not all of you.  And in this knowing you will find that you are responsible for what you fear.  And it's your responsibility to those you love, those you keep near, to know when to let go, and close what no longer keeps you whole.


Red Buffalo in your Bedroom

The tartan print shirt in wool, unfolded

but fallen on your bedroom floor 

in October, is full of pine smoke 

and sweat, a scent you can name 

through a locked door.  You outline

the perfect arch of jaw in sleep,

hold the weight of hand folded 

into hand, your own five leaves left 

which is the going rate for loss.  

The price to hold a season 

long past bloom, the shade 

of years rooted in red and black.

Alone, your own eyelashes move 

over pillow, a prairie drifted by snow.

Each lash lifts the fall of a tree

in a wood abandoned and left 

for grass, wind and absence. 

You return to the the print of the shirt 

a still life of man in winter.  When men 

cut trees and returned home

full as wet wool, kept a fire lit.

And your bed, once an island 

of two, forests a new green 

you keep, open.

Mind the Gap.

As a child, I viewed the enjoyment of a summer by how many days straight I'd wear my bathing suit.  It was easy. I lived right on Lake Michigan, the shore was a short walk down a hill, through a cherry orchard next to a wooded walk of cedars and birch to a sandy path that led to a crumbled concrete dock.  I would walk there everyday. I don't recall needing anything besides my one piece striped suit, an ill-fitting snorkel and mask, a right handed garden glove and a mesh bag once for onions repurposed for collecting crawfish.  I had a system, a plan for my summer days.

I wasn't a fair weathered swimmer, I'd swim regardless of the wind or cold.  But I preferred calm days to collect crawfish. I liked to use my brother's windsurfing board to swim out to weed bedded rocks and dive deep with my garden gloved hand and unearth the blued crustaceans, hiding in the cold darkness.  Diving, unearthing and collecting.  And when I was finished, I would put the crawfish in a coffee can with cold water, a few holes in the side, a dash of Old Bay seasoning and steam the tiny lobsters until they turned bright pink over a fire on the beach.  I only remember one crawfish whose claws were big enough to crack open and eat.  Mostly, I just ate the tails.

Because of how I spent my summers, I didn't need camp.  Summer camp was home.  Every June through August without ever getting in a car, I explored my world, mostly underwater, with great curiosity.  When I did finally go to camp, I didn't like the obligated games, whistles to bark you out of the water and nights spent under the anxiety of wonderment if the kid who stared at you during vespers might sit next to you while you ate a burnt hotdog.  I preferred the hours alone along the shores entertaining myself without the need of a watch or even another person.  To have the quiet of that lake all on my own and the sun was enough.  More than enough.

But what drew me to the water wasn't the crawfish or even the adventure of collecting them, but the suspension of the water, the gap between the surface and the sand, the ability to feel wholly placed, but completely free.  Experimenting with holding my breath and seeing how long I could keep my body at rest, made me feel alive, calm and my mind still.  Completely still.  It wasn't a draw to risk or scare myself to ride some edge in order to lose my ability to breath as much as it was knowing I could keep my body alive and my mind calm.

I've tried to seek this suspension, this calm in other activities in my life.  I can sense this skiing when I think about the mass of frozen water under me and staying just on top of the surface.  Pushing a body out of its head is to feel as much animal as human and the ability to do so is to love the gap between.  No better sense of this was this summer at 3:30 in the morning up Grand Targhee with nothing but shooting stars, wind, my head lamp and the outline of mountains as I ran into the night. It felt like I was running deeper into some belly of water in that dark hour.  Again, not driven by fear or risk but the absence of both, just lightness in being able to move my body and keep my mind still.

Over the past three years of my life, I have struggled with finding any remote sense of feeling placed or calm.  My mind has been manic.  And the gap between my body and mind has felt vast and at times unnavigable.  The stress of divorce and the days of loneliness which taste metallic in the cold of morning have felt like being marooned to some island I didn't know existed, and certainly had no interest in even visiting.  I laugh only to myself that I live on Defoe Street named after Daniel Defoe as if I am lost like Robinson Crusoe on the Island of Despair.  Odysseus himself was marooned for five years before he set sail.  Needless to say, I know how to sail, but I am no epic hero and it's hard to find a boat to set free upon and to leave Missoula.  Yet.

But what has been even odder is that stress surfaces in the oddest of places.  Sure, we often think stress is something we feel emotionally or mentally, but when it starts to surface physically do you take notice.  The usual wrinkles, grey hair and dark circles are some of the hallmark traits of dis-ease, but strangely enough for me was the fact that my teeth started to move.  Yup, my teeth.  No it wasn't from grinding in the night, but rather the stress of holding my jaw in a way that my front teeth started to separate from each other.  As if some dental plate tectonics began and my teeth set sail.

At first, I thought the gap made me look French.  I thought I should accept it.  I had gone to my dentist and asked about the noticeable space and he didn't think anything of it, said, "that's really odd." I went for a second opinion.  My new dentist within minutes of our first visit asked if I had been under a lot of stress in the past year, "I'd say…a bit", in trying to not seem histrionic.  And so I began exploring the idea of filing in the gap.

And this summer, we began the process.  I was nervous about the idea of doing something out of vanity.  Isn't going through grief learning how to accept what you cannot change?  Why go through the expense and deny myself a trip home to the lake to feel weightless and free in order to have aligned teeth?  Was I just turning into one of those typical 40 something women who start fighting age and disappointment? Despite these questions, I went for it. I decided to fill in the gap.

The process isn't simple and even includes the fact that your original teeth are ground down and appear as something you'd only see in a horror movie.  At one point in this said process, I had to go to the bathroom. As I slowly took off the paper bib, the dental hygienist said, "Please DO NOT look at yourself in the mirror." Which as you might suspect is more of a dare than a request.

And I did.  How could I not.  As I fumbled with my numb face, I leaned into the bathroom that smelled of aloe and disinfectant to see myself as if I was cast in a horror film, tiny shards of teeth and me attempting to smile.  More pike than person, I pulled back.  But I'd like to think that reflection of my heckled self is part of this process.   Parts of yourself as ugly are just as much part of yourself as polished.

Thankfully, the process was successful and I dare say I smile with great ease these days.  Even confidence.  Which is not something I have felt in a really long time.  But it's surfacing, slowly.  When I think back to my early summers in Michigan, I think of swimming and then I think of confidence in knowing what I wanted to do, everyday and just doing it.  Sure, I was a child, but what I am reminded of is that I didn't ever think it was odd to collect crawfish nor did I even doubt my desire to seek that edge between the cold of the bottom or the surfaced sun.  I just practiced.  Everyday.  I just practiced the suspension between.  And it's what I am trying to apply today as I navigate this space of self, what I thought I would be doing and what I actually am.  Sure, it might seem like a surfaced fix to begin with my smile, but it's a start.  And I'd even like to say it's a beginning to an end.  And isn't that worth smiling about?

Here's a poem honoring summer and bridging the gap of the past to honest present.

Oprah Cannot Teach You

to numb your tongue on pink wine

and never tells you about lying

to your body or how to forget

about the man still in love

with someone’s mother.  No article

on how to stand and brush dyed hair

after leaving a party, lying again

about a stomach ache so you can go

home alone to stop talking. 

Oprah can list books

to read, change your life in 20

minutes, which is another word

for lunch break, adult time out.

You know the gold in your hair

you hold onto is summer, youth

as ten speed sexy, boys in jean shorts pedaling

without a watch in the dark

to your parents.  Walking home then

you hid the scent of whiskey

on your naked skin.

Oprah doesn’t interview

the women you’ve become.  The closet

of time clock cardigans, one more bride’s maid dress

to sell on eBay   This coming holiday,

you’ll make the reservation for a table of seven.

And give a toast that everyone says they’ll remember.

Seeing Near & Far.

My first pair of glasses were called Cinderella Gumdrops.  I was three when I picked out my first frames and I'm pretty sure in the world of Disney, Cinderella neither wore glasses nor did she have a panache for gumdrops that I can Google.  Yet what's important to note is that even at that young of age, I was a sucker for an evocative title--I was drawn to metaphors.

I'm also certain that had I been born at a different era, I would have been eaten alive before even reaching age three due to my +9 prescription.  Basically, plus nine means I'm farsighted, really far sighted.  I’ve often preferred the Greek term, hyperopic, or even the British, long sighted, along with the more metaphorical term, soothsayer to define my lack of sight.  But no matter how you say it, I cannot read an illuminated clock at night and I memorize hallways by touch so I can find a bathroom in the dark. 

How my family first caught on was ironically during Sunday Disney night.  We had two channels growing up, PBS consistently and ABC, erratically, but thankfully Disney would usually seem to be just clear enough.  We'd all gather, all five of us, with a bowl of popcorn and squeeze in on our couch.  And I would slowly inch my way up to the television to get at least five inches away from the screen.  I can recall my mother asking me, "What are you doing up there, Emily?" to which I replied, "seeing less fuzz."

When I got my glasses they rested heavily on my face, but then I could join the gang on the couch.  Other than Disney night, our family rarely watched television, not because we only had two channels, but because when you live at the end of Old Mission peninsula in Northern Michigan adventure was right out your door.  Hard to compete with Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood of Make -Believe when you could explore cherry orchards, climb trees, swim in the lake and listen to peepers at the pond.

So it comes as no surprise that I have spent the last four decades of my life exploring both near and far.  And I adjust with my eyesight. I’ve learned to take out my contacts with frozen hands to wait out a snowstorm in a tent, scale the bow of a sailboat in the pitch dark and haul and anchor completely by touch and even lost one contact in Tasmania and bushwalked out with “one eye.”  But what might come as a surprise for those who didn’t know me in my early years is that I even wear glasses.  Actually, don’t be surprise; I’ve even dated people who have never seen me in glasses.  Sure, I’d love to say by 40 I am so confident that I don’t care that my glasses enlarge my eyes to be equal size to my ears.  I mean, embrace it right, isn’t that part of turning older.  You just don't care?  Truth is, I don’t feel pretty in my glasses. Never have.

So when I met the non-fiction writer and avid traveler, Jaime Stathis, she confessed to have a -10.5 prescription, I thought I hadn’t just met a new friend as much as an other self.  Jaime, who I call Soph, (actually we both refer to each other as Soph for reasons I will explain another time) was headed on her way out of Missoula to finish her memoir in a cabin in Taos, New Mexico.  And me, I was new to just leaving my house.  At that time I was freshly divorce and beginning what Soph lovingly calls, “the years I spent fighting the revolution.”

We didn’t have a lot of time together in Missoula, but where we became close was on the page.  What started couldn’t just be claimed as pen paling.  No, we wrote to each other everyday.  That’s right, Every. Day.  Everyday for the past two years.  In the world of instant texting and phone calls, we like to write.  Sure, we send photos and quick notes and have good convoys on the phone, but it’s through what each of us love the most did we become so close.

Besides our love of words, we also share the same birthday month.  Technically, we were born just four days apart on the same year, May 13^th and May 17^th 1974, so that meant this past May, we turned 40.  I don’t recall whose idea it was to celebrate big (but Soph would know, she’s far better at facts than I am) but this is what we did know: we wanted to turn 40 travelling.

Soph was going to take the whole month of May to travel and said I should pick the destination for the two weeks I had to join her.  I wanted to travel in Europe since I had spent six years of my 20s living there, but wanted to explore someplace I hadn’t been before.  I narrowed it down to Croatia, Turkey and Portugal.  Soph said any worked for her, she’s great like that, always open to adventure, so I selected Portugal.

The pragmatic reasons in selecting Portugal were based on fantastic food, good beaches and the quote I found while researching all three potential destinations that read, “Portugal is like going to Europe 30 years ago.”  I wanted slow Europe.  And the metaphorical or poetic reason was Sagres, a small sleepy coastal village once referred to as the End of the World.  I wanted to stand out on the rocky cliffs and turn 40 in just wind, water and horizon.  I wanted to walk out onto a tiny peninsula similar to the spit of land I grew up on and walk to the watery edge and celebrate the fact that 40 well, isn’t really the end…of the world.

And that’s what we did.  Early on the 17^th  we waited for a local bus to head west after a few days spent in the coastal town of Lagos.  We headed as far west as the continental Europe reaches to be dropped off on the side of the road.  While we were waiting at the bus station, Soph ran to grab cups of coffee (travel note: Portugal has the hottest coffee known to man.  Seriously, even the Nescafe) and two fried codfish balls. Yup, Bolinhos de Bacalhau or dried salted cod with potatoes and fresh herbs and then breaded and fried.  It was the best kind of birthday cake.  Soph knows me so well.

Now despite all these similarities between us, Soph and I are very different.  She’s the only child and has been living in NYC for the past 8 months cooking and taking care of her grandmother. I'm the youngest of three and teach the good people of Missoula how to make pasta and other culinary treats.  She can make a best friend at a bus stop.  Me, I wait for someone to even smile first.  The title of her memoir, BOOK OF LIES: A TRUE STORY is all about the art of learning how to tell the truth.  My collection of poems is called A Vague Prairie.   I also teach poetry, otherwise known as the art and craft of sometimes making things up for the sake of a poem.  Soph likes to tell the facts hard and straight.

But put us together on a tiny spit of land at the End of the World and we’re laughing, no we’re making the best of it.  When the only thing we can find is a pizzaria, we claim, “We love pizza!” When we were caught in a rainstorm walking home from the beach, we shout, “we love walking!” And when the wind brought over 11 foot swells keeping even the hardiest of surfers at bay, we claimed, “we love the elements.”

 

So when we rode our rented bikes in Sagres into the wind to see Henry the Navigator’s giant compass where he taught the likes of Magellan and Sir Francis Drake the craft and determination of sailing beyond the rocky coastline and temperamental wind currents, we walked straight to the edge of the cliffs and never once thought about jumping.  Giving our Thelma and Louise-esque adventure a different kind of ending, a different view into the future.

You see, both Jaime and I are divorced, 40 and without kids.  And sure, we are both incredibly lucky to be able to go to Portugal for our birthdays, but here’s the thing: we chose it.  Sometimes we've chosen well and sometimes poorly.  But through our friendship, we've learned to lean not in or on each other, but rather be a witness to each other's process in making choices.  Just like we choose to write to each other everyday.  And sure it sounds glamorous to spend weeks on a beach, but really it’s just a choice. The real challenge isn’t the choosing as it is being grateful for what results your choices bring.

And really, I can tell you that if you go to the end of the world, you will find the horizon, the sun and the salted wind and you will hopefully find the silence in your heart as well.  But what I didn’t think I would find at the edge, was love.  Not to bring Disney back, but sadly, I didn't find a surfer nor a sailor on those shores to either whisk me away or keep me there.  And no, Jaime Stathis and I are not lesbians or lovers, just really good friends.  I like to think we're just different versions of ourselves, just like our own eyesight, different strengths and weakness in our prescriptions.  What we both saw from that viewpoint was something neither of us could have expected by going to the edge, alone.  What we found in that sleepy surf town walking on the saged soaked cliffs was love in the form of grace, which for me is just a word for gratitude in action.

Sure, I probably didn’t have to go the Sagres to find it, but thankfully Jaime/Soph was game.  Thankfully, the loneliness of these past years spent "fighting the revolution" in myself was something I could finally let go of and give to the sea.  For now.  For now, my gratitude is for a friend who shows up for me everyday.  Sure, we both hope for relationships of our own and have the opportunity to rewrite our hearts and maybe even have a family.  We'll see what we choose.  But for now, now we give each other the strength to see our choices and process the possible implications of those choices both individual and collective, with a bit more clarity.  We try our best, from both near and far. 

Here's a new poem, dedicated to Soph, of course.

Volta do Mar (A Turn in the Sea)

A sparrow I only see as crow cuts the horizon. 

Here, the winds set west or is it east 

at the end of the world, another way 

of saying window, eye lash or lower 

lip that cups the hand that pulls 

the sails tight in Palladian light.

I cannot hold all of the light that enters

a day, but I can sail a wooden skiff

which translates as merely hours of reading

waves.  Even still, I could not read

you, could not navigate the worlds

I would have to travel to the end

to only find another ledge.

When my body decided to end,

I took it to Sagres and let it rise

in the morning, to walk into

saged rock,  past ruins of compass

and stone and head straight to the edge

to wait and say, not today, not my birthday.

Everybody Loses the Thing That Made Them.

I moved out West for a nameless meadow.  I fondly refer to this photo of said nameless place as The Goat Meadow Ranch.  Technically, this field lies above the Ashland, Oregon valley, slightly south of Grizzly Peak with views of Mount Shasta on a bluebird day in any season.  It's a place of expansive beauty: brutal winters, thick young willows in the wetlands of spring, Steinbeck summers of silence except a screen door shutting and golden tipped autumns.  And while first seeing this view on a late winter's day, I thought if the light of February in a cold meadow could move me West, then I knew I was heading in the right direction.  Poetically, I moved West so I could write this meadow a name.  But what I told myself was that I moved because I wanted to be in the wintered mountains to ski.  But probably more realistically, I moved West like the many others before me in middle America for something even more elusive and nameless; I moved in search of hope.

I spent hours living on the ranch where this meadow resides just staring at it.  I rarely looked for deer or other prolific critters coming through the thick as much as I watched the sun fall as if learning about the moods of light--shifting tones of early morning blues long before dawn and sitting on the porch in pitch blue ink for an entire night while a late summer thunderstorm lit up the backdrop of larch, x-rayed an entire forest in black and white.  Light was my species of interest that I wanted to learn to identify.  And no matter the season, this meadow would bring every shade and hue.  So vulnerable, so open and so exposed.

Somehow regardless of the season and drastic changes, the meadow would be able to return to what it simply is, a nameless field.  In the depths of winter, the meadow was covered beyond layers of white, but deep beneath was a shade of green.  And maybe that's why I love winter so much.  When the view out your window becomes a canvas of a monochromatic hue, you cannot imagine color or life lies beneath.  You cannot grasp that your current view which is no longer an expansive meadow, but a city orchard of sorts could ever blossom.  Again.  When not even five leaves are left on your neighborhood winter Maple tree, the simple thought of a ripe plum is foreign.  Sure, you can close your eyes and get close, but what you cannot imagine is how like the meadow, the earth can hold such a variety of light and be so capable of so much change.

This February my mind misses the focus on light that I once had while examining the Goat Ranch.  Recently, my mind has been stuck on fixing what cannot be fixed or learning how to accept what is unacceptable. I seem to have lost hope.  The one aspect that first brought me West has felt lost.  Frankly, hope seems like another season and not a direction or color I seem to be able to locate.  I feel at times stuck in some ice cave of white in my mind.

Thankfully, I spend every hour when it is light (and I'm not working) on my skis. But when I return from the mountains and the freedom of frozen water underfoot, I find myself still staring out my window and overwhelmed by the silence.  I see only one color.  My house, a cave of sorts, has been where I go to hide more than hibernate.  So when I find myself in a deep state of reflection removed from the meadow that once soothed me, blinded by the white and my lack of hope, I like do to simple things.  Currently, I really like to shovel.

I cannot begin to tell you the odd joy of shoveling.  The fact I set my alarm earlier to rise, bundle in layers over my pajamas, to be in the quiet of the morning alone in so much cold.  The rhythmic sound of my body breathing, the odd joy in seeing self-created drifts and the pause I take to look up and see the change in light in the sky and slow sounds of other feet on snow in my neighborhood.  The different shades of dawn coming to life.

We are currently in the worst snow storm in thirty years in the valley and I have dug out my driveway twice in the last 24 hours.  Today, the snow has drifted above my waist, the winds are over 35 miles per hour, our local ski hill was even shut.  But the odd thing about today in this storm is I haven't felt stuck.  Not once with googles on and winds piercing my cheeks coming strong out of Hellgate Canyon straight down my street.  And not even once do I feel annoyed.  Somehow in my odd Sisyphian way, I look up to the North Hills and I smile. And then I keep shoveling.

Shoveling your driveway is far less poetic than staring at a meadow.  But what I can tell you is the same principles apply.  A view is simply a view, but how you choose to see it, what color you cast on the scene is truly your choice in the lightness of being.  This is the hard part.  The hard part is knowing which shade.  We too often choose to see only what we've lost.  Which is not light, but only the absence.  But what's even harder, no one can do it for you.  You have to pick up the shovel in yourself and slowly dig out of the drifts.  Trust me, I've snowed myself in on even the sunniest of days.  And you do this full knowing more snow will come, the winds might increase or shift direction and above all, you are tired.  You are so tired.  But you know being stuck and blinded by the walls of white, isn't living.  Being shut away in a cave of yourself is an unlife of sorts.  So you dig yourself out not because anyone will see you, nor tell you how wonderful you are or even "like" a version on Facebook.  You do this simply for yourself.  And you do this for the one thing you came West to find, the hope in your own spirit.  And you know there are no photos of this.  No light can capture what lies within you.

Better yet than my own view, here are the words from one of my favorite hope seekers, Hushpuppy, from the film, Beasts of a Southern Wild, "Sometimes you can break something so bad, that it can't get put back together….Everybody loses the thing that made them.  It's even how it's suppose to be in nature.  The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don't run."  Or maybe, they don't run, they just keep shoveling to find the light.


The Psalms of Ice

The water of Lake Superior freezes to cave
the coast line,  sheets of pinnacled waves
touch granite greyed to white in layers
of water turned glass.  Walking in
these caves, no fear of bats, darkness
or even lack of air, your breath grows
another layer that lights the walls, frozen fire
burns in a land of wind.  You've heard stories
of men who've survived years alone
to fable their hearts in a hole, burrowed
in the earth away from the echo of clocks
and birds, to fill up their own shadow.
The allegory of cold is a body hollowed
by hunger.  But this is not your story.
In these frozen caves, you walk on water
to go deeper into the white you carry,
suspended on the shear faith in ice
and light, so you can winter your past.

No Rosetta Stone for the Language of Home.

"To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” ~ Pema Chödrön

My final oral Spanish exam in college was spent mostly in the bathroom.  Technically, I kept my partner and professor waiting because I was dry heaving.  Contrary to popular belief, I don't talk well under pressure.  And yes, I can now say some of my favorite conversations have been with people who neither of us shared a common language--gestures, shouting single words, lots of hand movement, barely using grammar and always our faces for inflection.  But it's our faces, our consoling nods, even tears and of course the infectious state of laughter--is the sort language I don't shy away from learning.  It's when I feel I have to have the exact words, I freeze.

I passed that Spanish exam thanks to the young Barcalonian professor with a good sense of humor.  My partner was a pre-med student riding her grades with a focused hunger.  She had no interest in the subjunctive.  She merely wanted the exam to be perfect.  Why she selected me for her partner still baffles me, perhaps because I kept quiet while all the other pre-somethings shouted to be first.  Maybe because my homework was perfect.  I just never spoke.

Years later while sitting on a bus headed to the remote mountains in southern Poland did I realize why I once had a fear of a foreign language.  I really just like to listen.  I like time to take in the inflections, the slurs of z's of Polish, the nasal of French, the sing song to Italian--words in rhythm.  Frankly, it's poetry of people with their mouths open when you cannot know every word.  It's notes hanging in the air.  It's song when you finally learn enough to speak back.

Once while sitting next to a nun on a train, which could have been any train at any time of the day or night in Poland, I heard this word through the walls of another cabin being said with force.  I had only been in Poland a few short days and spent my first weekend exploring a small walled city.  It was dusk.  I had just been to Sandomierz, which is a city I say with fondness both in sound and knowing of its beauty.  But that night with all of us quiet in the cabin which is common practice when sharing a car with a holy person, I learned a new word.

At the beginning of learning Polish, I would just mouth the words or try to, when you are dealing with a language whose basic expression for sorry is prezprasham, it takes awhile.  But that word I heard through the walls was not sorry nor was it sandwich, it bellowed out into the silence with anger.  I thought part of the word was night, nods, so I tried mouthing it silently at first and then tried putting sound to it.  As soon as I said it out loud, the nun, looking straight up at me--eyes wide and and cold--did three hail marys and went back to her rosary beads.  I later learned the word was neither an expression for night or shoot.  Let's say the word involves the act of having sex with one's mother.

I would later hear that word being shouted at an airport in Amsterdam by a man who didn't have the right paperwork to travel to the US for Christmas, heard that word in alleys from men who sat there all day and only talked to dogs and silence and later would I find myself yelling it at a ticket taker on a bus when he claimed I was using the wrong ticket, a man who was using physical force with me to pay him 100 zloty.  But before that moment, I struggled with Polish.

I had come to Poland with the hope of getting a Fulbright to work on translations of Polish poetry.  Thought I might need to learn Polish first to do this.  I had a tutor who spoke perfect English, German and Russian and for two years I took lessons twice a week, only took public transportation and listened to Polish music in the mornings before teaching.  I thought I was a shoe-in for the scholarship.  Needless to say, the Fulbright was granted that year I applied to another University of Michigan grad whose name was Margozha, a Polish American who spoke perfect Polish.

A few days before I rode that bus where I was harassed by a ticket taker, I found out that I didn't get the scholarship and felt really depressed and sank into a state of sadness similar to the kind of sadness I had that morning of my oral exam for Spanish, frozen fear.  Textbooks claim people have flight or fight when faced with adversity.  Me, I just freeze.  I sink in a quiet space of total immersion in a state of hopelessness which is perhaps why  I am so fond of the Poles.  Polish, as you might imagine, have many expressions for ones soul being lost, ones sense of hope being grayed by an impossible future.
Yet what I also adore is the spirit that lies within these states of fielded grief.  Some bright poppy that rises from under the tank tracks dirt.  Hope in Polish is just as powerful as the word soul.

And maybe that's what happened that day, the day I was on a bus and punched my ticket after visiting my Polish tutor for the last time.  I was moved by hope.  I clutched my bag of grammar books and wondered if I would ever use them again and what was I going to do with my dream of translating, looking at the bus window of spring awakening, when suddenly, I was pushed.  Now being pushed isn't odd or startling in Poland, it's actually the norm in large crowds, but the bus had been empty.  This man already snarling pushed me again and told me I had the wrong ticket.  Shouting he told me to pay money in cash, now.  I didn't even budge.  I looked at my ticket and then up to his face and said, this is the right ticket, I'm not going to pay you.  He pushed again.  Shouted closer in my face, telling me I needed to pay.  And maybe this is when my instincts kicked in, when that fight arose.  But I didn't use physical force.  In perfect Polish, I said, go fuck yourself and your mother and stop yelling, stop pushing me.  Stop thinking because I am foreign it doesn't mean t don't understand rude.  He backed off.

I got off the bus shaking.  As I walked back to my apartment, I started to laugh.  Maybe out of relief or as a release, but mostly because I had done what I would never have been asked to do in a university setting, no poem would ask of me to shout back to a man with angry hands, no language tape would teach me to tell someone to fuck off with such clarity.  Such perfect pitch.

And maybe that's why this fall I felt lost the way I felt so lost when I first went to Poland.  I just didn't know the language, I don't speak home.  I felt I would return every day from work to a country whose language I didn't speak.  You cannot buy a Rosetta Stone for the language of home.  But I am learning.  The kick of the furnace in the cold morning, my footsteps on the newly laid wood floor and my view out my bathroom window after I ride my bike in the dark and how I can outline my leaf filled yard, slowly by visual memory as I look out from my shower in the dark.  This new country, my home I know has a language.  I keep telling myself, it's like Polish--a language people never expect someone to learn let alone become fluent.  Why take on something so difficult.  But I remind myself that this language of house is made up of words and it will take time to put into sentences.  Grout, molding and joist are to name a few.  A few I now put into sentences.

Now, I don't travel much unless it's to Home Depot or Lowe's.  But I think of it like a town in this new country, where I need to bring the right guide book along, make sure I have some idea of what I am looking for before I go, maybe I take a tour of say, light fixtures since I now know how to re-wire and install lights.

I remind myself that learning a new language like anything that is worth doing well, takes more time than you could ever imagine dedicating yourself giving.  Giving not because you expect something in return or a scholarship or award, because learning it is the act of being present.  The way learning another language helps you feel close to people so unlike you in history, but so close in spirit.  To try and get close enough.  Present enough to learn a new song, a swear word which might be just the right word at the right time.  Like in the crawl space with spiders and dust, I found myself, as might have imagined, cursing in Polish.  Cursing and smiling all at the same time to the silence of this new land,
this new nest.

My House is Built on Words

October arrives to Montana without the stark color changes and shift in winds as it does in Michigan.  But it comes.  Arrives with a crisp chill in the morning, wet rains that flirt with snow in the late evening and the scent of leaves (even though they aren't the hardwoods of my home) still smell the same.  And my favorite part, biking to work and seeing the peaks dusted white overnight.  October is such a full word, the shape of your mouth saying it--O c t o b e r--is so open like all the o's the word holds.  Open to so much change, so much shifting.

A curious fact about October is that more poems have been written during this month than any other.  Not too surprising since it is the month of shorter days and dramatic sun breaks away from the grey brings great relief.  Maybe since poetry has a way of slowing our thoughts down as does this month when we turn to our beds for longer hours of refuge, cook soups made of squash and drink tea to warm the chill do we have time to reflect.  More time for quiet.

I have a lot of quiet in my home.  Sometimes too much.  I hadn't noticed all this silence during the first few months of painting, grouting and yes I am proud to say even electrical installing of lights.  Bed was the only option after exhaustion.  Sleep a mere respite and then silence filled me.  I hadn't noticed the echo from all the absence of sound until I had to close my windows.  It can be an odd hum, silence, and a great welcome to the other sounds too often overlooked, the clock in another room, the shift of your weight in a chair and even the sound of your feet walking in socks on a wood floor and then the echo of trains passing behind muffled glass.

At night,  silence is the loudest and the least welcome.  I have been filling my days with new activities such as cyclo cross, starting a 30-day yoga challenge and taking a break from house projects.  Trying to fill my days with new sounds in order to find a new sense of myself in this familiar town.  But I must admit, it just feels like noise.  I really adore it all, especially the cyclo cross which exhausts me and asks more of my body than any other activity I have yet to try, but then I come home and hear the shift in sound to my refrigerator, my borrowed cat yawns and it is just the metal of my mailbox opening in hopes of word from afar and then closing that feels a bit empty.  A train calls out and leaves as if reminding me, I don't have to stay.

And so even now in the newly painted walls of my own home, the deed somewhere with my full name rests signed in black pen, I still return to what has comforted me when all I owned was a backpack and a quick smile, I return to words.  Words borrowed, written, asked out loud to all this silence and sometimes even begged in the darkness.  Words I don't know I look up, words that I banned myself  to use I say sometimes when I want to throw up on a hill during cyclo cross.  I try to spit those words out and other words I dare risk to use I whisper to the late night glow of my alarm clock.  I practice. I practice with words because I cannot seem to stop feeling.  And I have a pretty good guess that the feelings aren't going anywhere fast.  Maybe they'll just change to different ones.   I am just going to work at finding better words instead of "better" feelings.  No matter how much work I fill my days with or how hard I sweat and spit out my past, I know if I keep working, I can find new words.  For words are the soft touch to a worried head the cool wash cloth at rest on a collapsed heart.

I wish I could tell you my first word was something monumental, like illuminate or even turtle, it was hot.  One syllable and not even very visual.  Once I dated a man who told me his first word was hedgehog, to which I replied, pretty good, but that's no porcupine.  And so a poem comes from all this silence in hopes to find a new way to look at what lies ahead and what rests.  And what I hope to write.


The Porcupine

We walked out into the night
walked along the road without lights,
summer still on our skin, wind in oaks
caught the dim hum of stars.

Maybe I knew our bodies
were fading into autumn by the scent
no longer sweet in late evening, just earth
cold as night dew.

We held hands and didn't speak.
Gravel under our flip-flopped feet,
our hearts somewhere ahead
of us in October.  Fallen.

Out walked a porcupine
straight down the center of the road
long claws, heading straight,
grunting with each step.

We stopped, hands squeezed, breath
held and stood back to let the rodent
pass.  Squinting to find light, grey glow
of needles at rest, passed.

I tucked my hands in my pocket,
a warm breeze came up and I looked
to the east, not doubting the sun would come
again.  And loss is just a word
for what no longer comforts.

(The) Potential (of No)

Over two months ago, I bought a house.  Within the first ten minutes of holding the keys in my hand, I ripped up the shag carpeting whose musky scent of stale lives lingered for days long after I swept up the particle board.  I pulled up nails, tacks and ripped out trim and that was just in the entry way.  For the first two weeks of home ownership, I slept at my apartment and would drive boxes of my belongings over early in the morning, unpack, scrub, clean, disinfect and then return to my apartment to shower and get ready for work.  I did this everyday for two weeks.  I lived in some kind of episode of Ground Hog day--a continual state of repetition.  And yet each morning, I would wake excited like I was in some kind of new relationship.  And I was.  The summer of 2013 will be the love affair with Defoe.  628 Defoe to be exact.  My new potential home.

What I can honestly tell you is that I never dreamed of owning my own home.  As I said to my father, an architect and confidant, "My ego isn't driven to buy a house, it just doesn't need that kind of ownership." But really in my mind or rather my heart, I didn't want to consider the idea of buying a home, alone.  Homes were places for families, married people or for investments.  The only thing I had remotely of any value was a small budding sense of integrity and I certainly didn't need a home for that to grow.

The decision to buy a house was not made quickly or impulsively.  Thankfully, our economy has tanked to the point that most people cannot buy homes like a new tent for a trip.  Thankfully, I took time to come to this decision and most importantly, I didn't tell anyone I was even considering it.  You see the power with potential doesn't just lie in saying what you are going to do, the power in potential is also finding out what you aren't going to accept.

Let me explain.  This past January I found myself wanting to be single and wanting to leave Missoula.  I had been here for over five years and it had been hard--my husband broke his neck two months after we had married, we lost a good friend in an avalanche and then divorce.  Needless to say, Missoula has been a brutally humbling time in my life.  I felt like I was ready to seek the potential of another phase, to create another view of myself.  To leave this valley behind me.

And so I decided to take an adventure every month under the guise of getting out, exploring towns I had always wanted to visit or re-visit and most importantly connecting with friends I missed--and only in my mind was I keenly searching for a new home.  This route I took for five months included Bozeman, Santa Fe, Bend and with hints of Seattle and San Francisco.  Now the concept of moving someplace new is a lot more comforting to me than staying put.  I would go so far as to say, I am really good at seeking the solace in potential.  Since we are being honest, I would admit I have a lot more experience in only thinking about the future than I do in committing to the present. I am a pro at reinvention.

Every new town I would visit, I would immediately visualize my potential new life--riding my bike to an office at a college under the sun of Santa Fe, skiing volcanos in Oregon, drinking cups of coffee in Seattle with a great new haircut, going out to dinner with all my new hip friends in San Francisco and the easiest to imagine was hanging out in Bend with my bestie sipping tea and talking, finally again in the same town.  But these were all just dreams, potential dreams.

And when the airplane would land back in Missoula and I would gather my bag, text my mom that I had made it and call to the friend I had just left that I missed them, I would find myself in a valleyed shadow of Missoula.  Hearing I-90 again as I stood outside the air port terminal, I would look up at the hills and ask myself Home? Here? As if in that brief moment when you are not in time or place thanks to modern travel, when your soul hasn't caught up with you, you just have your ego to ask.  Which I'm pretty confident isn't the right person for important questions.

Not too long after my trip to Bend for my 39th birthday I was riding my bike to work, missing my friend Emmy and all the ease of being together, was when I asked myself what is it that I am really searching for? What am I wanting from a potential new place? Maybe I should just move back to Michigan to family where I can be Emily Walter only and only that again.  And sure enough, it finally occurred to me while pedaling to the rhythm of a three syllable word.  I wanted security.  I just wanted to feel placed with a purpose.  The potential security of what I thought a marriage would hold, a home shared and of course a future based on a commitment.  And given that I am not married anymore, I simply said, so what if I did this for myself.  What if, I gave security to me.

Now don't get me wrong, I have heard of ceremonies where people marry themselves, but I wasn't about to be that literal. Remember, I am a poet behind all this prose.  And the idea of seeking security in a new place was something I learned in my twenties from all my travels.  I knew I didn't want to start again in a new town when I already had a good job, I pedaled under Missoula sun to a new office, hell, I even had a great new haircut.  So I basically decided to do what most Americans do with abstract desires such as love, security and safety--they buy it.  And so I bought house.  I bought security.  Or so I thought.    

It's really too soon to know exactly what I have done, but this is what I know today. I decided to take all that wanting to be something else, somewhere else and to just be, here.  I decided to say no to potential.  I decided to believe that saying no to someplace else, could be a yes.  A yes to myself.  And to be here, here in the reality of old windows, asbestos in the attic, particle board under shag carpeting and the still lingered scent of lives lived past, is ugly.  The scent of it all can be down right overwhelming and no pun intended, a potential disaster.

But for one of the first times in my life, I can say, I am not dreaming of what could be or could be different.  I am not focused on the asbestos.  I am simply putting on work clothes, painting trim, grateful for the videos off of You Tube on grouting windows and starting with what is here.  And here's what the particle board has become.  Here's my new sense of potential materialized.  Here's my home.

I look forward to writing poems here.  I look forward to committing to what I have been wanting to be ever since I can recall the concept of wanting, which is to be a poet. To be present enough to what I can create here and not to dream of someplace else, the potential of someplace better.  Life is not elsewhere.  But maybe, just maybe I can accept life is good, here.