Lakeside Christmas

Don't let the sunshine fool you.  It's 30 degrees, even colder at night.  Windy enough to knock you over if you're not careful.  But inside it's warm and cozy, cookies are baking, and family is gathered round.  I hope everyone is enjoying the shortest days of the year, and the holidays that come with them - if you celebrate.

Love to all.

A Long Way From Home

Not giving up on 30 Days Hath November.  Not, not, NOT giving up.  But now that my last exam before Thanksgiving break is over, and my brain can start oozing out of my ear canals a bit more, I feel like I can catch up.  Prepare yourselves, people.

* * *

There is a familiarity to my hometown that I feel is etched into my bones, even from hundreds of miles away.  My parents don't live there anymore, but I will still periodically drive through it, either for fun, or if I'm on my way to see my one remaining friend from my days there.  The shops change a bit, the roads might be repaved, but it's like running my hand up the same bannister to the same staircase that I've been climbing my entire life.  You anticipate the slightest groove or bump, but think nothing of it.

I know what the swings feel like in the playground outside the now closed elementary school where my two best friends and I used to go and swing under the light of the moon, late on weekday nights when we should have been asleep.

I know where the road dips and turns on the ramp up to the one lane bridge over the Erie canal that I had to cross to get into town or to get home.

I know how heavy the side door is to the Catholic church I attended for more than a decade.  And the faint smell of incense and candle smoke that fills the air inside is so familiar that it could make me cry if I let it.

The people in my hometown refuse to be reduced to some simplistic version of small-town folk that the world might want them to be.  Indeed, it took me years to stop reflexively criticizing or making fun of my hometown because of its arbitrarily small population size.  Small does not mean stupid.  Few does not mean powerless.  And I am forever grateful for the help and love that my neighbors, friends' parents, teachers, coworkers, bosses, and long lost friends surrounded me by while I was growing up there.  

They helped make me into the person I am today.


30 Days Hath November
Day 01: A place I'd like to travel.
Day 02: A favourite movie.
Day 03: Something I never leave the house without.
Day 04: A friend I adore.
Day 05: My hometown.

Writing Home

I have a journal.  The binding is coming apart at the bottom, and the attached silk bookmark is smudged with ink and tears.  The cover was once a soft, suede-like blue, that has now faded in the sun into a stained, grayish casing of a hodge-podge of memories, sketches, writings, and a piecemeal view of my thoughts and feelings from the last eleven years.  Yes, that's right: eleven years.  I obviously don't write in it very often, but when I do, I know there's a reason.  Obviously, it's been pulled out over the years during breakups and big life changes, but there are some entries that I look over that seem to have surfaced from the most mundane of life's circumstances.  Pages are scawled in harsh, black ink; entries full of profanities about an injustice I felt I had endured that in rereading, I actually have no idea what it was I was so upset about.  At the time, I'm sure I couldn't have imagined a day when I wouldn't remember what it was that had set me off.  And yet, here I am, six, seven, ten years later, writing in the same diary, beginning each entry with no preamble or real point.  I just write.  Much like I do on here.  So maybe this is cheating, but I wanted to share a writing sample I found tucked in the folds of my journal from late summer of 2009.  I helped run a pre-orientation program for Smith my junior and senior years, called Inward Bound.  It involved a lot of yoga, interpretative dance, writing workshops, circle time, and other mushy-gushy, feel-good, very, very SMITH kind of things that were all designed in an effort to "center" new students before they got tossed into the hell-hole of their first year.  Anyway.  We had a writing workshop, and a prompt, and we were instructed to write for fifteen minutes, using the following words:

August, passage, wire, winter, shadow, curtain, beginning, departure, against, scrub

Here's what I wrote:

She stands, motionless, at the pasture gate, watching the August sun set over the Montana ranch, the wire fences running for miles in all directions.  Her mother's approaching shadow stretches comically far across the dry, rain-starved grass as she comes to stand by her daughter's side.  "You won't be here to watch the winter storms this year," she says bluntly, trying to convey just how much she'll miss her only daughter.  "Though I suppose this departure is really a new beginning for you, you'll get to start on a whole new passage of your life!  And we'll see each other when you come home," she adds, as much for herself as for her daughter.  The young girl pushes herself roughly back from against the gate, the contented look on her face scrubbed away as quickly as a curtain closing in a room.  "Home?" she says.  "This isn't home."