Magdalen Dale

Strawberry Moon

2009-04-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

The moon has the ability to both surprise and settle me, startle and calm. As it did last Sunday when the sky blinked clear of spring time clouds to bare stars again and a thin bright “waxing crescent smile” or that same sliver of moon against a dimming autumn dusk that forced dad and I to quit work for the day and walk up from the fields together while night settled in before dinner. But as I write this now I am thinking especially of one night, of the full strawberry moon of last June.

Its waxing days were my waning days in Chicago, spent packing up my apartment, saying goodbye to friends, tying up loose ends. At the end of the day Davi (my housemate and best friend) and I would walk east through the circles of streetlights, stopping to buy 40s at the corner store under the el tracks, passing the park where children played late into the night while their fathers chatted nearby, and ending at a five block stretch of beach front deserted after a busy afternoon, the sand dented with footsteps, the smell of bbqs still lingering in the air. I remember these ritual walks down the beach always in half-light—absent of the car headlights and store signs shining a few blocks away, yet lit enough to see where water met sand, to watch Davi’s face as she talked, to feel safe. Sometimes we would also see the moon, hanging out above the water, above its own reflection stretched out and rippling. Yet this Chicago moon was one-dimensional: full, crescent, or half had the same affect—pleasing my eye, but not aiding it to see more, to dissuade the dark.

My mom comes down and we load up the farm truck with everything I own. We are on the road by noon, and then after a long day of driving, we pull up our driveway at dusk. The first night I sleep in my old bed in my old bedroom in my parent’s house and the next morning, my brother and my dad take time out from their work on the farm to help mom and I unload the truck, carrying cardboard boxes and milkcrates of my stuff into little house just up the driveway from my parent’s house, my grandma dale’s old house. They stack my things in the living/dining room and then head back out to the fields. Tomorrow I will join them, but today I am inside all day, cleaning and unpacking; I just want to be settled. I have been thinking about this day for so long—imagining my dishes in my grandma’s cupboard, my books on her shelves, my bed along the window in the upstairs loft. At five I drive to Washburn to train in at StageNorth, where I’ve picked up a part-time bartending gig to supplement the income I’ll make working on the farm. Before heading home I stop to buy groceries. At the store, I am overwhelmed thinking of my empty fridge and pantry, so I decide to just focus on breakfast, putting bagels and cream cheese and a bunch of bananas in my basket. I will have to wait for milk and coffee I decide, as I have also been fantasizing about my a trip up Nevers Rd to buy milk from Tetzers, the dairy where my family has bought their milk since I can remember, and then on the way back to the highway pulling in to buy coffee and chat with Harry, my friend Kate’s dad who runs a coffee-roasting business. I love catching up with Harry over a cup of coffee or bottle of beer, but today I know I don’t have the time or energy, also I promised myself that I would get a run in. It is dusk when I pull up the driveway. I’m tired and worried I’ll be running in the dark, but I dart inside anyway. Drop groceries on the counter. Change into running shorts and shoes and head out the door. Even if it’s a just a short one, I think. I’m training for a long distance run at the end of August. In Chicago I had been running five to seven miles every other day, but with the commotion of packing and moving it’s been almost a week since I’ve gotten a good one in. I head down the driveway and turn left—choosing hills over flats, in order to wear myself out quicker, thinking I’ll have to cut it short as I loose the last bit of daylight. Bending past Frizell’s driveway, and then the first small hill bordered by Tom Galazen’s almost ripe strawberry patches on either side, flat again and then dipping down after the drive into Johnson’s apple orchard. Up to Chelsea’s driveway and then a sharp left onto the rough patch of pavement that connects Valley Rd to County J in its steep ascent to the top of the hill. My legs burning, my heart racing, I tell myself, “If I can make it even half way up, I can turn around.” And then as I come out on J, I am reenergized by the round orange glow of a huge full moon creeping up from behind the pines that line the road. Only on this day, at this time, at this spot, does this exist like this, I think. I keep going so I can keep watching it—climbing as I climb. I must have caught a glimpse of the growing moon in the nights before this one, yet wasn’t expecting this. I no longer need to rush my run. Tonight, real darkness won’t come.

poem post-city

2008-12-21T10:55:00.000-08:00

11/26/08

I’ve spent a week waking up in other people’s apartments,
sleeping under their blankets,
between their sheets,
with the muffled lights and noises from the street shining in
through the window. It’s a kind of intimacy.

In New York everywhere there is talent, a beautiful face,

possibility.

Out of nowhere, he writes to me:
Bayfield was mentioned in the redeye.
Is that my nephew in my profile pic?
Will I be coming down to Chicago at all? (read: Am I still interested?)
He might be up north for Christmas.

I reply:
i'm in nyc right now--catching up with oberlin peeps when they have time for me in the midst of their busy nyc lives, realizing i really am living in a different world from them, a different pace, but it is still nice to visit.... to sleep in while they get up to go to work, to eat my breakfast on fire escapes and watch the pigeons and people rushing around. in a few minutes i'll leave anne's key under the mat and walk/train to the bronx to visit ellie at the cuny campus where she is
teaching art history.

His is as fleeting as the faces at the airport,
seen only in the length of a layover,
attractive at first glance,
and because I’ll likely never know the rest.

Like poetry,

I can love the city, in small doses.

Driving home I look out at the open road and the open sky,
the leaveless tress and a horizon unboxed by buildings,
and I think that is also the difference—
not as much to create upon, but so much more space to fill,
or choose to leave uncluttered.

Decemeber 1

2008-12-03T16:16:00.000-08:00

I finished working on the farm half way through November, spent a week playing in the city, and came home for Thanksgiving. I told myself through all of this, “I’ll get it done in December.” So this morning, December 1st, I woke up, showered and dressed, ate breakfast, and left. I staked out a table at the coffee shop in town, opened up my laptop, bought a cup of coffee, and sat down to work. I spent the morning getting other business out of the way—replying to emails and cleaning up an interview. Laura sat with me while I ate lunch and encouraged me to start swimming again, said she would even give me lessons if I go while she is lifeguarding. After she left, I did too. I stopped by the post office and the grocery store quick, before moving my “office” to the library. I requested a couple books through interloan and then found a spot at a table and opened up my laptop again. I logged in to facebook quick and updated my status: Magdalen is working on her thesis, lol—an inside joke to Cory, who says since I have decided to write my thesis about our friendship it isn’t procrastinating when I take time to write a note on her wall. Then I logged into gmail and did a search for “cory” which brought up a page of email threads. “1-20 of hundreds” it said. I clicked “next” and “next” and “next” until I got to the end (a page that said “554-574 of 574”) and then I opened #574, an email from Cory to me written on March 24, 2005. There had been emails before this one, to my hotmail account in high school, and then to my college account, but I think most of those are lost now, and really those were less significant anyway, less confessional, and more just saying ‘what’s up?’ and holding on to a friendship we weren’t totally sure still existed. But gmail documents our renaissance—raw and lengthy emails back and forth leading up to and during and after my break-up with my college girlfriend and Cory’s divorce from her husband. I begin to wade through the email threads. Copying and pasting the best ones (which are most of them) into a word document to be printed and marked up later: research. A little before five, I quit for the day and send Cory an email:

hey chica.

oh man... i just spent five hours copying and pasting our email convos
from gmail into a word doc so i can print it out. i made it through
82 email threads out of 574 (575 after i send this one :) and i have
76 pages of text in the word doc. i should just send that in as my
thesis!! :) i wish. ha. right now i am navigating the years of cory
working three fulltime jobs and waiting for stupidface to tell her he
loves her and magdalen flying around to play rugby, getting smashed
every night and miraculously making her way home (usually) while
swooning over sarahs (plural). bleh. so glad that's not our life
anymore! also about 50 pages into all this pasting a little alert
pops up in word that states: "There are too many spelling or
grammatical errors in "coragdalen emails" to continue displaying them.
To check the spelling and grammar of this document, choose Spelling
and Grammar from the Tools Menu." haha.. i thought that was too
funny. i had to write it down word for word so i could share it with
you.

alright. it's dark out. this work day is over. time to go home and
cook some dinner. i love my new job! and you!

-m

Then I shut my laptop, put on my coat, say goodbye to the librarian and get in my car to drive home. The sky is dark now, and winding through the cemetery I smile at the sliver of moon shining just above the trees. From my driveway, I can see it even better—the moon and two planets, the three brightest points in the sky, all in a tight triangle together. I put the car into park and pull paper and pen from my bag to draw a quick sketch. After parking in the garage, I grab my stuff and jog up to my house. I call mom to let her know that she and dad are still welcome to come up for dinner and that it will be ready around 7. I change into sweatpants, put music on, start the rice cooker, and begin to chop chicken and veggies for stir fry. I have just finished cooking and setting the table and am opening a bottle of wine when I see them walking up the path bundled in jackets and hats and boots. After we have dished up and sat down to eat, dad asks me, “how was your day?” I tell them about my December goals and treating today like a workday, about the coffee shop and potential swimming lessons, the library, and sorting through Cory emails. I take a long tangent to bring them up to date on how I am approaching my thesis now—just focusing on my friendship with Cory, the first chapter already written, and the following chapters documented in emails over the past three years, and my journal from this summer. “This summer was hard,” I tell them. “We were both so excited for me to move home, but then we were in such different places and not connecting, but I feel like on her last trip up here we started clicking again, and it feels so nice to have that in my life again.” I am crying as I am telling them this and also about how we have always seen our friendship as being controlled by something bigger, something in the sky, and then dad tears up too and asks if I saw the moon tonight. He tells me it’s maybe once in a hundred years that we’ll have a sky like that, with the three brightest points all in alignment.

Dear Thesis Advisor

2008-06-04T13:01:00.000-07:00

So last Friday, after emailing you to say I would be sending you a draft of my thesis in the next few days, I gathered together my journals and printed out pages with jotted notes, read them and arranged them in the best order possible around my laptop, and then double-clicked open the daunting word doc titled “home all put together” in the “thesis” folder on my desktop. I took a deep breath, read a paragraph, changed a word, erased a sentence, started another sentence to replace it, and then bit my lip to contain the panic that I felt rising up from my gut. I knew I could sit there for hours—that I had sat there for hours—feeling awful and not making any progress. So instead I opened a new word doc and started typing with the single desire of pinpointing the truth of this exact moment. I wrote: I think I need to start over. There are stories and images and metaphors that I like and can still use, but they need to be grounded in something new, in the present.

When we met in February you told me not to wait to start writing. I didn’t mean to wait. I put it on every to-do list I have made over the past five months, all in caps and with a box around it: THESIS. Sure, I rearranged a bit, found ways to incorporate some older pieces, added notes in the margin of where I wanted to do research and write more, but mostly it made me crazy to pay it much attention, so I didn’t.

There is the normal craziness that comes with deadlines, with big projects, with potential publication, and striving for perfection, but the subject matter and timing of this project carries additional anxiety for me. I want to write about home, about my family and the farm, about my friends and the community I grew up in, the country, but also town, and the island, and the rez. And as I’ve started writing about home, I’ve realized I also want to be home; I need to be home. The initial plan was to move home for the summer: Jon, my oldest brother, was planning on moving back home for Seattle that summer so I could see him. Silas, my brother’s Chris’s first born son, would be turning a year old. Expenses would be minimal, so I could work on the farm part-time and then spend the rest of the time writing my thesis. Then it grew into a year: Jon wouldn’t be moving until the fall now. I realized it had been eight years since I had spent a fall season at home, since I had been there for the end of harvest, for applefest, and thanksgiving, and the first snowfall. I was also probably pushing it to think I could finish my thesis by the end of the summer.

Up until a year ago, I never thought I would be able to live at home again. At most, I could spend summers up there, I had thought, but never would I be able to make it my home again. I was drunk on the city—everything at my fingertips, something to do every night of the week, always new people to meet, diversity, gays. But once I started remembering home, started thinking about being there again, really being there and not just stopping through, the appeal of the city began to fade. Like booze, I didn’t want to give the city up completely; I just didn’t think I could have it everyday anymore. It blows my mind to think back on my thought process of this past year and how quickly I turned my head around. The contrast is illustrated in my journals. The first Christmas home from college I wrote: I’ve been trying to get a hold of Krystle, but don’t have a number to reach her at, and then tonight I ran into her sister at the movies and she tells me that Krystle left this morning to go back to school. I’m so frustrated. She was one of the people I wanted to see most, even just to see her face, but really to sit down with her and talk and really know how everything’s going, to take away the distance. I’m sad about not seeing her now, but also upset because I don’t know when I’ll see her again, which is what I’m really feeling right now, not just about Krystle but about everything. Being away at school and now being home again, I have come to two conclusions: 1) I love my family so much. I think they are the greatest ever and I value my relationships with my parents and my brothers and my friends here with all my heart. 2) Bayfield is in the past (and maybe? –probably not- in the distant future), but for now I’m done with it. I feel I have taken advantage of all it has to offer, but after seeing just splices of the larger world through traveling and friends and school I know I’ve moved way past it. Both conclusions are great in themselves, but put together create this wistful feeling: that maybe never again will I live in the same place as my family.

For whatever reason, I stopped writing in this specific journal sometime during my first year of college. It has sat on my shelf for years now with half the pages still blank, until this past winter when I was looking for something to journal in and I pulled it down, flipped it over and started writing from the back—working my way towards the middle, working my way home, to meet the scrawl of entries that took me away from home seven years ago. This past February I wrote: I’ve been saying I want to move home for a year to work on my thesis, and spend time with Silas before he isn’t a baby anymore, and live with Jon when he gets there, and have a real autumn, but the more I think and dream about it, the more I am beginning to believe this move home could be for good. Especially if I can manage to incorporate Oberlin-esq “winter terms” every year and spend some time traveling in the late months of winter when northern Wisconsin is virtually unbearable. There are so many books I want to read, movies I want to see, places I want to travel too, people I want to visit, and the only way I can do all this is by getting out of the city, simplifying my life and cutting down on my expenses (i.e. paying less rent). But really it’s way bigger than that. I want to be home. I want to share food, walks, space, talks, books, movies, card games. I want the “commune” of my family—ridiculous that this is almost revolutionary in our culture. I remember Cory ending a ranting email saying, “ you know, in most cultures outside of western civilization, people really don't ever live alone” and thinking at the time it was so funny how she was making this grand statement, but now thinking she totally has a point. I thought I could create this community with my friends in the city, but we all have different lives and different priorities and I can’t expect them to stay here for me. They aren’t who I should commune with. I can always visit them and be re-energized by these visits, but it is too much to have it all the time. We need our space alone. It is better when these magical times together are contained within a week or weekend, when all of our energy can be focused on each other. I want the every day to be with my family.

So it’s not that I haven’t been writing it’s just that all of the writing I have been doing is in this vein of journal-entry-dreaming about the future. Some of the dreaming is more specific—thoughts on the artist retreat I want to open on the farm, or the rural magnet high school I want to create. I have a list of the countries I want to visit on my winter terms and a growing list of books and movies and projects I will get to when I have more time to read and watch and work for myself.

I have tried to go back to some of the pieces I started about home and expand on them, fill them with details about my life there. When we met last summer you asked me to describe the chores on the farm as Debra Marquart does in her essays, but I honestly don’t know them like she does, didn’t do them or don’t remember. I tell people I am moving back to the farm and they ask me how many acres we have and I don’t know the answer to that either. The truth is I didn’t love living there. It was isolated. I was lonely. I had a lot of passion and not a lot to pour it in to. I definitely didn’t put it in to the farm. I put it in to sports and more often than not was disappointed by coaches, I put it in to being different—dying my hair pink and sewing my own clothes with my best friend, I put it in to crushing on a college girl that worked on our farm in the summers, and I put it into “getting out.” I spent hours online looking at different college’s websites. I spent the first half of my senior year of high school as an exchange student in Australia. The second half I spent taking college classes a couple towns over. Then I went to college. Then Chicago.

I went to this hippie school in Ohio. I loved it. Everyone was gay and read a lot. They also thought it was fantastic that I grew up on a blueberry farm. “That must have been so great,” they would tell me and I would try and tell them how it really was. I hated how they romanticized it. They had no idea what it was really like to live on farm. Their flowery tone took away everything that made it real. And then always the next question: “Is it organic?” We aren’t and for good reason and yet I felt judged by these city kids with their Whole Foods education. I wanted to defend my family and our farm. I knew we were responsible, that it just wasn’t feasible to never spray ever and still expect to have a crop come August, but I didn’t actually know the specifics. I could hear my dad’s ranting in my head and I knew he was right, but I could only remember the emotion behind his arguments, not the details.

It wasn’t just the farm that I found myself struggling to defend in my time away from home. I went to high school in Bayfield, a tiny picturesque little tourist town on the shores of Lake Superior. Half the kids in my class bussed in from Red Cliff, the Indian reservation the next town over, a few ferried over from Madeline Island. The abstracted reality of farm-life is nothing compared to the way the life of Indians and Islanders is so often romanticized. I was in the same building with the same class of forty kids for Kindergarten through graduation. I had friends in town, in Red Cliff, and on the island. I knew these places well, but I also never felt like they were mine. I wasn’t comfortable hanging out in these places without the company of a friend who was from there. So now when I’m away from home and there is discussion about Indians or Islands, I want to join in, I feel like I have something to say, but I my white girl from the country status will often times hold me back from claiming authority. I’m torn between feeling connected because of where I grew up and yet not wanting to be this person I’m complaining about that puts forth an image or judgment on something they can’t fully understand.

I do know though that the longer I am away the more I want to know. I want to know the names of trees and birds. I want to grow my own food and cook it and can it and turn it into jam. I want to buy milk and coffee and meat from my neighbors. I want to chop wood and build fires. I want to fish and hunt. I want to run on the back roads and through the woods. I want to get lost and then find my way again. I want to learn to swim better and kayak better and hit a softball better. I want to go to powwows with Andrea and watch Animikiikwe as she learns to dance like her mother.

I’ve tried to bring some of these bits of home into my life in Chicago. I bought a hummingbird feeder. (They never came to drink from it. I think I missed their migration.) My roommate and I tried to make homemade mayo. (It didn’t work.) But we have been growing little plants in our windowsill. And a mourning dove has been coming to visit me lately while I sit and read on the porch. The first day he just chilled in the tree, then last week he came up on the porch rail, today he flew up in my path as I was running. “What does it mean?” I asked Cory, one of my best friends from home and the one who influenced me to start paying attention to the animals in my life more. She emailed me back: Doves are related to pigeons. Early navigators took pigeons to sea in hopes that, if they became lost the pigeon would show them the way to land. The pigeon assists us in finding the stability of home that has been lost. No matter where pigeon ends up or how it gets there, it knows the way home. They do not get lost because they are in tune with the natural ways of earth, and are always aware of their goals. They use all their senses equally and navigate their lives in a balanced way. If Pigeon comes to you, it is asking you to keep your sights and sensitivities clearly set on where you want to be, and start moving. Even if you don't know exactly how to get there, by following your inner guidance you can find your way.

The dove is just one of many teachers. Going home I am fortunate to have teachers all around me to teach me how to claim home. There is so much I can learn just by working alongside my family and friends. I gave this thesis a working title a long time ago: “Roots and Wings: Lessons from Home.” At that time I thought I would be writing about the lessons I had already learned, but now I am realizing I am just getting started. I also had only thought of roots and wings as a metaphor, referencing a quote that hangs on the wall of my parent’s house: “There are two things you should give your children: the first is roots, the second is wings.” I was going to write about how central to my life it has been that they lived by this motto—providing me with both a home I could always return to and the encouragement to leave and make a life away from this home. But that is only the introduction to this story. The rest of the story lies in the lessons I have yet to learn, the lessons about and from the roots and wings that will surround me on my return home.

This is my truth as I know it at this exact moment—sitting in my apartment in Chicago with pieces of my life already packed into boxes, counting down the days until my mom rolls into town with our big silver farm truck to take me home. The rest of it will be written up north in between morning coffee with dad and days spent working on the farm, between snapping beans with mom and kicking a soccer ball in the yard with my nephew. It will draw on memories from the past and it will lay the foundations for my future, but it will be always be written in the present tense of learning.

Long Distance Breakfast Date

2008-04-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

Winters are hard. But this past winter I was determined to not let it get me down, to not forget about all the things worth waking up for. I created a morning routine of appreciating the little things--waking up, putting on music, taking a long shower, brewing coffee, cooking breakfast. And when I sat down at the table to eat, when I warmed my hands on my coffeecup and stared out the window, instead of missing my friends and feeling lonely, I tried to imagine each of them in their own houses or apartments following a similar routine--of waking, and drinking, and eating, and thinking, and appreciating.

In order to remember this routine and also to share it with my friends and thank them for helping me through the winter, even from far away, I made these cards and CDs and mailed them to them. It was so nice to have a project to work on, but the best part of doing it was getting the responses back from my friends. Just goes to show that giving really is better than receiving.

from Cory:
"This morning I put on your CD and for some reason that Gideon song made me start bawling which I think might be a somewhat normal reaction to that song though. So then I had to pull myself together while waiting for the celebrate-being-alive song to come on, which I danced to and sang out loud - even the bah bah bah buh BAH bahs and do do do do dA dahs TWICE. Then I felt alot better.
p.s. I was totally dancing with you this morning, btw. :) I love you!"

from Leslie:

"Hey dude! After I talked to you yesterday I went to my P.O. Box and checked my mail and i GOT THE BEST THING EVER! I loved the card! So sweet! You made it! You took the photos! It was so awesome! I hung it on the fridge where it'll be for a long time. And I do remember the photo. That was at the end of the year, I think Sophmore or junior year and we were all out there on North Quad fucking around, I think Kay was there and some other people. We had a blanket on the ground and it was warm and nice but I think we were a little sad to be leaving in a little while."

from Annalisa:
"this morning
i woke up
went for a run
stretched
took a shower
and had brekfast (cappuccino) while i was reading the paper and listening to the cd you sent to me.
thank you so much.
you really made my week warmer
i am so so happy and lucky to have you
you are so special and something stable deep inside of me.
love you"

six word memoirs

2008-03-15T22:06:00.000-07:00

davi and i wrote our memoirs over breakfast this morning.
this is mine:
"and she has dimples!" said grandma

Valentine's Day

2008-02-15T11:59:00.000-08:00

Ships

2008-01-29T12:03:00.000-08:00

My sophomore year of college I had to write a play for my Introduction to Creative Writing class. It was titled “Ships” and explored that middle ground between friendships and relationships, that crush/attraction/fascination that seems to embody most high school and early college romances. The characters were named Alex, Sam, Nic, Morgan, Jody, and Taylor and I made a note that “they can be played as either gender, or preferably as neither gender and just as.” Most of the scenes were snip bits from the melodrama of shifting and unbalanced affections amongst the characters. The dialogue could have been (and much of it was) copied word for word from the melodrama of my life at that point, none of which feels very relevant to my life at this point now. But there is a quieter scene between Nic and Sam that I return to throughout the play and that I found myself connecting with as I returned to it today.

* * *

(Lights down on stage right and up on Nic stage left. S/he is lying on his/her back on a blanket, looking up at the sky. Sam enters.)

SAM: Are you going to share some of that pillow?

(Nic moves over, they lay down together, both heads on one pillow, on top of one blanket, but still managing to only brush limbs.)

SAM: Do you know any constellations?

NIC: Yeah. A few. My dad and I used to stand outside together in our yard when the stars were bright and he would point out different ones. I can always pick out Orion. See those three bright stars in a line? That’s his belt. And then the line of fainter stars coming off the side? That’s a sword. Wait never mind, I think it’s supposed to be a knife ‘cause he’s a hunter. And he’s supposed to be holding a bow and arrow, but I can only ever pick out the bright star that makes the tip of the arrow.

SAM: Hot damn, I see it. I wonder who came up with that. Like couldn’t you just connect those dots any which way and draw a dog or a naked lady or something?

NIC: Once when I was little I was looking at the stars with my Dad and we were lying down in the grass and I had just gotten Oscar then and she was laying on my stomach purring up a storm. I found three kind of faint lines of stars on the horizon and named them after her whiskers.

SAM: Can you still find them?

NIC: I always look for it, but I’ve never been able to find it again. Sometimes I think I might see it, but I don’t have any one to verify it.

* * *

(Lights back up on stage left—Sam and Nic in similar pose from before looking at the sky.)

SAM: Nic! I just saw a shooting star! I’ve never seen a shooting star.

NIC: Are you sure it wasn’t a satellite?

SAM: No. I’ve seen a satellite before.

NIC: Well, I don’t know. I thought everyone had seen a shooting star before too.

SAM: I can’t believe I just saw a shooting star.

NIC: Did you make a wish?

SAM: No. Should I?

NIC: I’m not really convinced it makes any difference.

SAM: I just saw another one! Did you see it?

NIC: No, but I bet there’ll be more. It’s probably the beginning of a meteor shower or something

SAM: If the stars all start falling at once. Do everyone’s wishes all come true at the same time?

NIC: Like I said, I don’t really believe in it to begin with.

* * *

(Lights up on stage left. Back to Sam and Nic.)

SAM: The stars were never really that good growing up. The smog only allowed the very brightest to shine through. You were lucky if you could see the moon. But you didn’t need moonlight. The streetlamps seemed to illuminate the whole world. It’s funny. I always thought that everything seemed so big in the city, with so many buildings and cars and people and that when I came to college out here in the country it would feel so small. And it does feel small during the day. I mean, I can walk three blocks and cover the whole down town. But at night, lying here like this, I look up and it is so huge—bigger than I could ever have imagined while I was in the city.

* * *

(Stage left. Sam and Nic.)

NIC: Sometimes it’s comforting to feel so small, so insignificant. You know? Like you can fuck up and everything is still going to continue and the sky is still going to be there with its dots of light. And you can look up at the three stars that make Orion’s belt and be like “I know you. You are so fuckin’ far away—farther than I can even comprehend, and I know you.” I spent a semester in Australia and even there I could find Orion in the sky. It was upside-down, because I was in the southern hemisphere, but even upside-down or backwards, I could still step outside at night and see him.

* * *

(Lights switch to stage left, Sam and Nic.)

SAM: What’s that light, near the horizon? It’s moving but it’s just sort of shifting around in its own little area. It can’t be a star.

NIC: I think it must be the light at the top of sailboat. They probably just dropped anchor out there to sleep and the waves are rocking the boat, so the light is rocking too.

SAM: Yeah, I can kind of make out a shape under it.

NIC: We should probably go to sleep to.

SAM: I’ve never slept on a dock before. I’m afraid I’ll roll off.

NIC: You’ll be fine.

dancing with cory

2007-11-07T13:41:00.000-08:00

Though our families live just one town away from each other on Wisconsin’s northern peninsula, I met you in Mexico. For a week in the spring of our sophomore year we lived together with a dozen other high school students and two chaperones in three pale pink stucco beach houses on the coast of the Yucatan peninsula.

At night on the beach everyone drank shots from a passed around bottle and sang Sublime songs pieced together from our collective memory. Levanta, levanta, tienes que gritar, levanta, levanta, tienes que bailar. I watched as you danced with one of the boys from your high school. You were trying to swing dance. He swung you to one side, then the other, between his legs, and then up… You flipped over his head and landed on your back in the sand. The alcohol cushioned your fall and brought you back laughing.

On our way back to the beach house that night, you threw your arm across my shoulders. We held each other up as we stumbled through the driftwood. Our arms curled around each other easily, like we had done this before, like our friendship had grown over years and not hours. There were three of us assigned to a room with just one double bed. The other girl had already gone to bed. I helped you get under the covers on the open side of the bed before unrolling my sleeping bag onto the floor. A few hours later I woke and found you curled at my feet so I moved into the spot on the bed you had vacated. In the morning I discovered you had moved as well and were curled again, this time at the foot of the bed, like a cat.

In the pictures from

Mexico

you are wearing a black hat, glittery pink sunglasses, a pink and red bikini top, and navy surf shorts with big prints of white hibiscus flowers. I dress to mesh, not to match, you would later explain to me. With mid-calf black sox and a camera dangling around your neck, one might confuse you with the middle-aged dad variety of American tourist. Except that you are gorgeous: Greek olive skin stretched over a petite and just curvy enough frame, dark eyes, a huge smile that flashes two rows of perfect teeth. No matter how hard you try, you can’t escape being pretty.

Your family moved to Washburn from Massachusetts when you were twelve. You managed to make it through junior high fairly unnoticed, but then in high school, you were asked out by a cute boy in your art class—Luke Wallburg—the cute boy, notorious as such not only in Washburn but at my high school in Bayfield as well. Although people still didn’t know you, you were suddenly “known”—as Luke Wallburg’s girlfriend, or eventually as Luke Wallburg’s ex-girlfriend. The association made it impossible for you to keep friends. You would think a boy was your friend and then he leaned in to kiss you. You would think a girl was your friend and then she got mad that the boy had leaned in to kiss you and not her.

The pictures are from my camera, so I am in fewer of them. My face appears in group shots. My hair is brown, chin length and half-pulled back. I’m wearing a blue or white T-shirt, green khaki shorts, and running shoes. I haven’t learned yet that I look best in pictures when someone makes me laugh. I keep my lips together and force my left cheek to dimple in a self-conscious half-smile.

The trip was led by Washburn’s Spanish teacher so most of the kids were from your high school. Before the trip I only knew the other outsiders: a girl from Mellen was my older brother’s ex-girlfriend, and the Spanish teacher’s son met us at the beach. He had been in my class at Bayfield but was spending the year abroad in Mexico.

It was refreshing to be around new people. I had spent most of my life three miles outside of town, on my parent’s blueberry farm. Most of the kids in my high school class had also been in my kindergarten class. For fifteen years the same half a dozen girls had cycled and swapped friendships. Opportunities for finding new friends were few and far between, and by high school most of my friendships with these girls were weighed down with the hurts of past fights that had been swallowed in order to avoid being more alone than I already was. I spent many nights alone in my room, reading or drawing or writing bad poetry about being lonely.

I don’t remember much from our conversations in Mexico. I know that you were annoyed with Luke. You had broken up a couple months before, but had both signed up to go on the trip at the beginning of the school year when you were still together. I know that I spent a lot of time in Mexico thinking about my friend Lindsay. She had told me she was gay in the week before I left, but I don’t know if I said anything to you about her then. Mostly, I just remember being around you—sitting together in the van, climbing Mayan ruins, picking out which color hammocks to purchase in the market, walking up from the beach in the dark to steal limes from the kitchen, or stopping to pee in the sand on the walk back to the group. I don’t remember ever asking you to come with me, or you asking me, I just remember that you were there and it was better.

As the plane took off in

Mexico

we all sang John Denver. I’m leaving on a jet plane; don’t know when I’ll be back again. We flew into Minneapolis, and then drove another four hours north to return to small towns on the big lake. I had made friends on vacation before, but you were the first friend to come back home with me. We would talk to each other on the phone in the evenings, complaining to each other about all the dramas of high school, saying we wished we went to the same school, but knowing it was better this way, to have someone to escape to.

Sometimes on the weekends, you slept over at my place, but usually I would get my mom or dad to drive me over to yours. We would walk the quarter-mile along the highway from your house into town. We would go to Ryan’s house, drink vodka and orange juice out of plastic cups and distractedly push our pinkie fingers into the cigarette burns of the couch cushions while the boys played punk covers of old classics. I don't mind you coming here, and wasting all my time, time. He had a girlfriend, but you were sure Ryan sang that one for you. On the walk home we would sing, usually Ani. I think I’m going for a walk now. I feel a little unsteady. We stumbled over lyrics and tripped in the grass and laughed and criss-crossed our arms across our backs to hold each other up or at least fall down together.

Back at your house, you would push art supplies and books off of the couch in your room so I could sleep on the pull-out hide-a-bed. We would stay up until three in the morning spilling our secrets to each other, telling each other the things we hadn’t told anyone else yet, the things we didn’t even have the courage to say to each other in the light. You were my confessional.

“Cory, I think I’m gay,” I said to the dark one night.

“Magdalen, I think I’m crazy,” you replied and I realized I was yours too.

We had other confessionals. I still have the red notebook of bad poetry that traces my evolving infatuation with Lindsay and mess of thoughts about her and myself that led up to my 3 a.m. conclusion. You carried black sketchbooks around and filled pages with colorful colored pencil drawings of girls whose heads were too large to be in proportion with their bodies. No matter what fell out of our mouths during those late night talks in the dark, we were always able to put things in a way that made them better. It was better that I was gay because then we would never fight over boys. It was better that you were crazy because not crazy people are boring.

I got my driver’s license in the summer and you got yours along with your parent’s old maroon blazer in the fall. If 3 a.m. conversations were our confessional, then that car was our church, a mixed tape of Ani, the Violent Femmes, Van Morrison, and Cake covering “I Will Survive” made up our hymnal, and a blasting stereo in harmony with cool air rushing through open windows formed our choir. Together we rediscovered the roads I had ridden over my whole life—the curving highway from Bayfield to Washburn, the straighter shot from Washburn to Ashland, and the country roads that crisscrossed through the fields and farms inland from town. Behind the wheel, choosing which direction to go, we no longer just rode over the roads, we owned them.

One night, walking on the college campus in Ashland, before I had one to claim as my own, we heard live music coming from the student union. We entered with the intention to just listen, but when we realized no one was dancing we took it upon ourselves to get things started. Between every song we hollered a request for “I Will Survive” and though they said they had already played it they eventually conceded. We made it our last song, and as we were leaving we passed two girls from your high school watching in the doorway. They asked us if it was cool. We told them we were just leaving.

I boycotted my junior prom and instead called you to hang out. At eleven with nothing else to do, we decided to drive into town and watch coronation. We strutted in paying half price and wearing baggy jeans and hooded sweatshirts. We sat on the floor and watched as the prom king and queen danced together. When other couples started getting up to dance, you grabbed my hand with a devious grin. Putting two feet down to every beat, we club danced in between the swaying couples, and didn’t let up until the chaperones came by and kicked us out, saying we’d only paid to watch. We ran back to the car, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. We spent the rest of the night, like every other night, driving the country roads, with the windows down and the stereo up.

A year after Mexico, we planned a trip to Seattle. My oldest brother had been living out west for a couple years and he had invited me to come stay with him. We convinced our parents to let us go by telling them we needed to start looking at colleges. In the weeks leading up to the trip, it was all we could talk about, how great it would be to have a whole week together, and not in Wisconsin. The first picture in the roll of Seattle pictures is of you and me standing in your driveway and smiling for the camera. My hair is bleached pink and pulled back into a tight ponytail. The tips of your long dark hair are dyed purple. We are both wearing baggy pants that we have sewed ourselves. My arm is around your waist and your hand is gripping my shoulder. We are grinning, wide excited giddy grins. In the background you can see my mom looking over at us from the other side of the car. She is grinning too.

I have lots of good memories from Seattle—finding our way around the city, attempting to a cook dinner of chicken and rice-a-roni and cream puffs in a pan for my brother in his tiny studio apartment kitchen, discovering the big concrete troll under the bridge and taking pictures of you picking it’s nose, and then laying in the grass at gasworks park and looking up at the clouds. But after a few days together, tension replaced excitement. On our way back from the store I walked too fast and you walked too slow. In the evening, I wanted to watch a movie and you wanted to go to bed. Touring the university’s campus, I said I couldn’t wait to go to college; you said no one smiled at you when you walked by and that you would hate to go to school here. I felt like all your actions and remarks were purposefully contrary to mine. As quickly as we had fallen in sync in Mexico, we had fallen out of it in Seattle.

We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of my brother’s apartment, between the couch and the TV, and on the last night you cried. I had never seen you cry before. When I asked you why you were crying you told me I would never understand because my family was perfect. In that one sentence, you declared that you had me figured out (my life was perfect) and that I would never be able figure you out (because yours was not). It was true I loved my family and that I didn’t know why you were upset. I didn’t know how to reply. I didn’t know how to make it better.

After we got back from Seattle, we still hung out, just not as often. You had gotten a job waiting tables and worked most nights. I would stop in to say hi on my way to Ashland to visit Lindsay. Once in the summer we took a carton of chocolate milk and a box of goldfish crackers to the lake for a picnic. We sat on a towel and threw crackers into the water. We joked that we were setting them free. Eventually, I left for college three states away and you fell in love with a man twice your age.

In the spring of my first year of college you called to tell me you had gotten engaged. You asked me to be an usher at the wedding in September. I apologized, saying I had class, and soccer practice, and it’s a fourteen-hour drive.

“You could wear a suit,” you pleaded.

I told you I couldn’t, but I still wrote down the date in my planner and kept it in the back of my mind during the beginning of soccer practice when I got the season schedule, which included a weekend break surrounding the date of your wedding, during class registration and the realization that I wouldn’t have any classes on Fridays, and during a conversation with my girlfriend suggesting we go on a date the next weekend, since I wouldn’t have practice.

“Where would we go?”

“Wisconsin.”

“You’re joking, right?"

It was weird to see you as a bride. I wasn’t sure if you saw me while you gripped your dad’s arm and made your way up the aisle. I didn’t want to look at you because I could already feel the tears stretching at the edge of my eyes and I knew you’d make them tip. Later you told me you that had seen me, and your smile went from this (a tight, bracing, holy-shit-I’m-getting-married smile) to this (a relaxed, excited, you’re-here! smile like only you could wear it).

At the reception I watched you dance with your new husband and every other guy in the room. Finally I cut in.

“This dance is for Mexico, and Jr. Prom, and Ani Concerts, and the Violent Femmes…”

“And the Reggae concert you crashed your car at as we were leaving!” you laughed. The song changed and Hip Hop filled the room.

“I don’t know how to dance to this,” you said. I wasn’t sure I knew how either, but I couldn’t stop.

Driving Home

2007-09-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

The northern tip of Wisconsin juts out onto Lake Superior. I grew up on this peninsula, over a hill and down a valley from the lake, outside of the town of Bayfield, in the house my dad built, on the blueberry farm my parent’s started.

It isn’t easy to get home. The closest airport is in Duluth, MN, a two hour drive west of Bayfield, or I can get a cheaper non-stop ticket to Minneapolis and lengthen the drive to four hours. Driving up from Chicago, where I live now, takes nine hours. From Oberlin, where I went to college, it’s fourteen. Because of all the travel involved to get there, it never really makes sense to go home for just a weekend, yet I’ve done it, five falls ago for my friend Cory’s wedding, two springs ago to see my friend Andrea’s baby, and just last April to be with my family after my Grandma Dale died.

The last twenty-five minutes of the drive is always the same regardless of whether I am coming northwest from Minneapolis and Duluth, northeast from Ohio and Michigan, or straight north from Chicago. I turn north onto Hwy 13 as it intersects with Hwy 2 just a couple miles west of Ashland. The two-lane highway curves with the shore of Lake Superior. As I approach Washburn I pass the dairy where we buy our milk and the farmhouse Kate’s dad bought and runs his coffee-roasting business out of. Then I pass Engoe Rd, where Cory used to own property with her ex-husband. Just before the speed limit drops and the highway curves into Washburn, I pass the big white house Cory’s family lived in while we were in high school and follow the ditch we would stumble through on drunk walks home from town, arms holding each other up as we shouted Ani Difranco lyrics out to the empty road, and when one of us tripped, we would fall down together and look up at the same stars.

Houses and roads-leading-to-houses dissipate as I follow thirteen out of Washburn. The upward slope toward Bayfield is drawn out and gradual. It never seems as if I am driving up hill, but before I know it I am driving along sandstone bluffs and between breaks in the tree line, I get glimpses of the lake shining up at me from down below. A couple miles before town, I veer left onto Hatchery Rd. It is only a slight left turn off of the highway, so I am maintaining a pretty good speed as I bounce over the dips in the country road and pull up to the four-way stop where Hatchery intersects with County C. There aren’t any other cars, as usual, and I roll through the stop sign and head up the hill, past the Town Hall, where my parents go to vote and I remember going for 4H meetings with my brothers, past the big red dump-trucks at C&W trucking that are contracted out to plow the roads in the winter, and then instead of following C as it curves up the hill and then down into Bayfield, I go straight onto a smaller road, Valley Rd, my road.

I know every house, every family, every farm on this road—some better than others. Chelsea’s house, Craig and Sharon’s orchard, Todd Bonney’s place, Galazen’s strawberry fields, and then at the bottom of the hill, just before my driveway is, Tom and Roxanne’s blue and white house. They own most of the forest that surrounds their property and runs behind ours. They don’t have any kids of their own, although when I was a kid and lacking playmates, I always wished they did. There is a trail through the tall grass that borders our gardens, a shortcut from our front door to theirs. In the books I read growing up, it seemed that childhood friends usually lived near each other and could meet on a path between their houses. But as much as I hoped for it, I never found a friend on the path between our gardens.

Finally I am at my own driveway, the entry of Highland Valley Farm. We sell raspberries and blueberries and honey, all of which are represented on a big hand-painted sign at the end of the driveway. I pull around the sign and continue up the driveway, past the road down to the berry fields, past the newest building where we sort and pack fruit and have a little shop, past the garage where we store tractors and things that can be attached to tractors—mulchers, sprayers, and trailers—along with bikes and canoes and basketballs.

Next to this big garage there is another smaller garage that was built at the same time that our house was built. This garage is mostly filled with honey extracting equipment. In the fall, when my dad is extracting, he will build a fire in the little wood stove to keep the honey soft. The extraction room will be hot, not like our dusty driveway in July, or our wood stove in December, but the sticky honey heat of October that I remember smelling in my dad’s coat for weeks after.

It is night by the time I pull up the drive-way for the first time in a long time. I remember as a kid, when my parents were driving and I was sleeping in the back, I would wake up when we pulled off of the highway and started over the dips on Hatchery Rd. I would lie in the back and try to match the movement of the car with each familiar stretch of road. I knew I was home when I could feel the gravel crunch under the tires as we turned up our driveway.

It is always a long drive, a long trip, and there is no better feeling then the car finally coming to a stop in the driveway. I get out of the car and breathe, remembering the smells. I take a short detour on my walk to the house and walk out into the open yard, where I look up and remember the feeling of stars, of being surrounded by trees, of quiet.

I walk inside and remember the sound of the screen door slamming back into the house. I take off my shoes and set my bags down at the foot of the stairs. Mom and Dad have gotten up from their recliners and turned off the T.V. Hugs are exchanged and plans are set to cook breakfast and catch up in the morning. Soon they will go off to bed and I will walk through the house, running my hand along the walls, along the tables, the counters, and in the summer, along the cold metal of the cast iron wood stoves in the kitchen and dining room. I will run my hands along the chop block in the middle of the kitchen, along the lines that have been cut into the wood as my dad cut up pork and venison to be wrapped in white wax paper and stored in the freezer. I will run my hands along the kitchen sink, looking out the same window that my mom looks out everyday, reading the quotes she has written on little slips of paper and taped to the sill. I will run my hand along the cork board on the back of the door that leads down to the basement. I will take in the pictures that my mom has pinned up, studying both the familiar pictures and the new ones. I will walk into the bathroom and sit down to pee. It will seem surreal that I am home again.

I will walk back into the moon-lit living room and fall back into one of the big leather chairs that my parent’s bought after I left for school. Eventually, I will brush my teeth and bring my stuff upstairs. I will walk into the bedroom that was mine when Chris still lived at home. Now it’s my mom’s sewing room. She has hung up pictures of my brothers and me as kids that she has had Dad scan and print from our computer. Piles of fabric and half-done projects are on the bed and table. I will turn the light out in this room and cross the hall to the guest room, the room that each of us kids got to ourselves while we were in high school. A few of my books are still on the shelf, but everything else has been packed into boxes and pushed under the bed. The furniture is the same, a bed and matching desk pushed against the far wall, where the ceiling is too low to stand under, and two old dressers along the same wall as the door. There is one little window that looks out over my mom’s flower garden and across the driveway to the yard. I will look out of this window and think, I have always been able to come home to the same windows, the same house, the same view, the same yard, the same drive home.

a beautiful campaign

2007-07-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

(an Italian Sonnet)

“I think you are a beautiful campaign,”
he said to us, this boy from Italy,
as we explained how we had come to be—
an Italian, German, and American,
three girls who’d met as students on exchange
and under an Australian sun had schemed
to trade goodbye for the next lazy season,
our plan traced eagerly into the sand.

We fashioned a collective map of homes
and homes away from homes with open doors
connected by a path to be explored.
First marks on where we’d soon return alone:
a city, small for Germany, near Koln,
a farm on shores of Lake Superior,
a white Stucco in Brecsia, (north of Florence).
Then Lisbon, Canada, Sicily, Rome...

Land circled. Money saved, to execute.
We named our first adventure with a date
and talked of it so often it became
a mantra: Summer 2002.
That summer we would meet in Bonn and prove
the smallness of the world by conquering
Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Italia
(at least the north), and Salzburg too.

He said campaign and we assumed he meant
“a company,” or group, not like the sort
of military term once used in France,
translated “open country”: Armies spent
the winter in the comfort of their quarters
and in the summer took to the campagne.

mapping minneapolis

2007-07-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

I’d wanted a good map of the cities for awhile. “The Cities” are the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Growing up, my family would make weekend trips down to the cities from our farm in rural northern Wisconsin. We would usually stay with the Beyer’s. Bill was my dad’s best friend from college. His family lived in a little stucco house on a fairly quiet street in St. Paul, just a few blocks away from the Lutheran Seminary my dad had entered after college and subsequently dropped out of. This is the piece of the cities I know best—the soft blues and cream of their combined living room and dining room, the little wooden bench that my mom and I would share pulled up to one end of dining room table, the bread and cheese and wine at every meal, the little staircase leading down to the basement a multi-purpose guest room slash t.v. room slash office slash library with bookshelves living every wall and big red cushions that could fold into couches or be pulled to create beds on the floor.

I can also remember the apartment where my older brother Chris and his wife Honey lived for three years, furnished with a lot of the same furniture they have now, but cramped into two bedrooms. I vaguely remember the two other apartments he lived in with friends before he and Honey got together and the dorm room he had at the U where I got high for the first time.

When we drive in the cities, there are bits of familiarity—the water tower near Beyer’s that marks St. Anthony park, the neighborhood my parent’s lived in when they were first married, and where my mom’s parent’s had lived when returned from eighteen years of missionary work in Papua New Guinea, the white pillow of the metro dome breaking up the skyline, the two towers of square apartment buildings with squares of primary colors where it seems there should be windows, another architectural experiment filled with poor people, I remember being told, the flashing pink sign for the Gay 90s that marked the existence of gay people, even though I later learned it wasn’t actually that gay.

More recently, I have traveled up to the cites from Chicago with my girlfriend Sarah. Her parents live thirty miles west of the cities, where farmland blends into suburbia. We drive into the city to meet up with her sister or friends from high school. We mainly hang out in uptown. From the dreadlocks and tattoos and mismatched clothes sported by the people on the street and filling the bars, I imagine it’s the Greenwich Village of the cites, although I’ve never actually been to Greenwich, just seen it described in books and movies.

Just two months ago, Cory, my best friend from high school, moved to Minneapolis. We talk on the phone and she tells me of the coffee shops she frequents and the bike ride she has started to take every night to the lake to sit and write and think.

The cities exist in my head only in pieces. A house, an apartment, a storefront, a story from my Grandma Dale that she would walk everyday from the hospital where she was in nursing school to the lake to swim. But I don’t know where the hospital is and I don’t know in what direction she had to walk to get to the lake. Unlike Bayfield, surrounded by Lake Superior, and Chicago, pushed up against Lake Michigan, the Twin Cities don’t have one huge body of water to rest against. Instead there is a river that snakes through the cites and over a dozen small lakes scattered through out.

Last Friday I rode up to the cities with Sarah in her beat up little teal green car. I told her, if we cut over into Minnesota at LaCrosse instead of taking the interstate, we can drive up along the river. Our little detour made the trip almost two hours longer, but it was one I would take again. There was something about following the flow of water instead of the flow of traffic that felt right. Even though I knew I couldn’t trust the river to run in a straight direction, I knew that this river cut through the cities, and following it would take us there.

A day later, after getting drinks with Sarah’s oldest sister Vic, sleeping in at her parent’s house, and then coming back into town to buy a bike map and split a pizza, Sarah dropped me off at the airport. I flew back to Chicago, leaving Sarah and her car behind. Ever since we had started dating, just over a year ago, I had known that Sarah would be moving back. She had done her undergrad in Chicago and then stayed on an extra year when she was invited into a MBA program. She had been counting the days until she could leave the big city for her smaller one before we had even met.

I took the map out this morning. I laid it on the floor. I stared at it, attempting to commit it to memory, starting with the blue line of the river and blobs of the lakes. I took out my address book. I wrote down the address for Beyer’s and the Chris and Honey’s old address. I texted Cory and asked her what her address was. I wrote down other places I wanted to look up: Bryant Lake Bowl, Northwestern Hospital, Luther Seminary. Then I went online to Google maps. I typed in an address or business name and it would bring up the map, a green arrow marking where two families sat around the table and passed a bowl of pasta, where Chris and I played darts on the porch and drank Apricot Ale, where Cory and I lay on navy blue sheets and dreamed about our futures, where Sarah and I kissed on the New Year, where Grandma Dale learned to check for a pulse, where my Dad had given up on the church. One by one I committed each intersection to memory and then returned to the map on the floor with a brown marker, drawing an X and a name.

I imagine Cory’s bike ride to the lake. I imagine Grandma’s walk to the same lake. I note that uptown is actually south of downtown. Everything makes more sense. I’m eager to make more Xs by digging up the old addresses of apartments and houses where my family has lived. I’m curious about the future, the Xs for homes that have yet to be discovered.

a muddy practice

2007-06-01T08:24:00.000-07:00

It’s a rainy spring morning, so the field at the high school is wet and muddy, but with their first game just a couple weeks away, I make them practice in the mud anyway. They start out whining, avoiding the puddles and holding the ball with just the tip of their fingers and a disgusted look on their face. Then Isamar fakes a pass and Giselle falls for it and slips in the mud as she tries to chase after her. Isamar laughs as she touches it down past the orange cones that mark the try line and Giselle, no longer worried about getting dirty, is up quick and tackling Isamar to the ground even though the play is over. It spreads quickly now, with the muddiest girls eager to make a good tackle on the cleanest girls, the sort of tackle that dents the ground and forces mud into the space between fabric and skin, hair and scalp, shoes and sox. Soon, all brown, they are no longer distinguishable by the colors they wear. Only the natural shape of their faces and bodies separates them into individuals.

I have organized them into four teams of five, and marked out a small grid with cones, ten paces by fifteen paces. The teams are lined up along the side lines. When I say go, one team runs around the far right cone and another team runs around the far left cone. They meet in the middle. First there is a tackle, the fastest defender wrapping her arms around the legs of the ball carrier and bringing her and the ball to the ground. Then a ruck, where the opposing teams push against one another until the stronger team is able to step over the ball. Once the ruck has moved over the ball, another player picks it up and runs with it until she is brought to the ground and another ruck forms.

The girls work harder than usual, diving for tackles and throwing their bodies into rucks. When they have the ball in their hands they spin and juke and stretch their bodies to touch it down across the try line. They whisper strategy to one another as they wait their turn on the sideline: “Joana you take it in first, and Christina be ready to ruck. Then I’ll try to dish it out to Pearl.” And they yell in support as they run through the drill: “Joana! Give me ball! Help! Who’s rucking?! Ball out!” The teams converge in a ruck, a shoulder fitting into the cup of an opposing hip, fingers grabbing jerseys and shorts, cleats digging and clinging to mud and grass and roots, and then once the ball is passed out of the ruck everyone breaks apart and sprints to the next break-down, where they will converge again. Tight and solid and pushing together in one unit and then running and cutting and exploding apart, together, apart, they pulse.

It isn’t always an easy thing to teach, getting dirty, but it is the only way to teach rugby. The hardest worker on the field is usually the one with the dirtiest jersey. When I teach tackling to new players, I am constantly telling them that the easiest way to bring someone down is to throw yourself on the ground with them. The more seasoned players have already learned this, and then there are some girls who never need to be taught, who have no problem jumping right in and getting dirty. I was one of these girls.

Growing up, I don’t remember ever halting my play because I was afraid of getting dirty—flipping the rocks that create the border of my mom’s garden, pinching the soft wet body of earthworms, pulling them up from the soil and feeling the tickle of them wriggling in my hand, or constructing sandcastles in the sandbox with Chris. I remember summer nights when we would be in the sand box for hours, adding a roof-top skate board ramp (Chris) or a clover-leafed moat (me) to our designs. Our shoes and sox would come off and be set on one of the thick rail ties that served as a border for our 5’x5’ beach. Without an ocean tide, we would haul pails of water to test our moats and rivers, watch the water wind through the trenches and then disappear as it seeped into the sand, leaving the mini-banks smoother and a shade darker than the rest of the sand.

After the sun had set and the cool sand and breeze brought out goose-bumps on my arms, I would sit on the rails and rub my hands together, knocking the little grains of rock back into their box. I would rub my hands over my arms and legs and poke a finger between my toes, step out of the sandbox onto tip toes, grab my shoes and sox, and dart up across the sharp mulch path to the front of our house. I would rinse my feet and hands off under the cold sharp sting of the outdoor tap, leave wet toe prints in the entry way and kitchen as I walk back to the bathroom to clean feet and hands again, this time with warm water and soap.

I don’t think anyone can know how good it feels to be clean unless they’ve been really dirty. The shower after a camping trip, or a day of work in the garden, is a completely different one from the wake up and get ready shower in the morning. It is a wind-down shower, a long comprehensive shower that requires you to really scrub at every patch of skin to rinse away the dirt and sweat. The stream of water is felt underneath your skin as well, slowing down and soothing the pulse of your muscles to a hum, a quiet song of the activity of the day, a lullaby.

Practice is over. The girls got in trouble last week for tracking the mud from their cleats into the school, so I’ve brought them plastic bags to put their muddy shoes and clothes in.

“Ahh… Thanks Coach!” Diana says with a glint in her eye as hugs me from behind and is sure to wipe her muddy hands along the clean gray sleeve of my coat. I watch as the rest of the girls catch Diana’s glint. Then I am sprinting to my car as the mob of brown muddy bodies chase after me, hands out stretched. I am running away because I am in my work clothes and can’t get muddy. Coming from practice, I will already be late to work, with no time to change or shower. As I run away, I imagine turning around and chasing Diana down. I imagine dropping my hips just as I approach her, bringing my shoulder up into her hip, my hands grabbing behind her knees, lifting her up for a split second and then letting gravity pull us back down, the thud on the ground, the spray of mud, the perfect tackle, the perfect response. I imagine playing until I am as muddy as the rest of them. I imagine going home and stripping the wet dirty layers off, turning the shower on, feeling the hot water hit my body, watching the mud slide off my skin and slip down the drain. I am clean, calm, content.

thanksgiving

2006-11-24T12:27:00.000-08:00

From: Magdalen
To: Mom and Dad, Jon
Date: Nov 24, 2006 2:20 PM
Subject: thanksgiving

hi family.

i hope you had a good thanksgiving. i thought of you often.

yesterday morning i woke up and drove davi to the airport. her family was all meeting up in boston to spend the holiday at her sister's house. i stopped at the grocery store on the way home to pick up some last minute items. i've started going to this grocery store that's a little bit farther north of my apartment. the neighborhood it's in is one of the most diverse in the city and this store has imported food from all over to accommodate everyone. they even have a pretty good selection of georgian wine. :) it was fun to walk through the store and see the range of people there and their purchases--they were old and young, single, or pieces of a family, polish, mexican, black, chinese, african... one day when i was there, i rounded a corner and came upon this older hispanic guy who had pulled a bag of dried mushrooms off the shelf in the chinese food section and was looking at the bag quizzically. he turned to me and asked if i knew how to cook with them. i think that single image is the best snapshot of what i love about that store (and my neighborhood)--a young white woman and a older mexican man standing in the grocery aisle guessing at how to cook dried chinese mushrooms.

when i got back to the apartment jody had the turkey sitting out on the counter and was peeling apples for apple pie. we cooked at a good pace all morning/afternoon, snacking on bread and cheese and sipping mimosas. we decided we were a good pair for cooking thanksgiving dinner. we managed to keep just about the same jobs that we had in our families. i put the pies together, stirred the orange glaze for yams, cleaned the living room, stuffed celery and mostly focused on entertaining. jody directed the cooking--stuffing, seasoning, cooking and carving the turkey and most of the fixings.

most of our other friends were out of town, but i had sent an email out earlier in the week to all of the people we know, inviting them over if they didn't have a home. two girls, kelly and mika, who had just moved to chicago a few months ago and had been out to a couple north shore practices at the end of the season, emailed me back and said they would love to come. so it was just four of us. we ate a lot. and drank more wine. and played monopoly. (i won.) kelly and mika left and jody and i were in the middle of cleaning up when our friends rosie and sandy stopped by (mom and dad--you met them in milwaukee). they had had thanksgiving at rosie's aunts house and were on their way back home. they brought a us flan (a mexican dessert) and sandy promptly helped herself to a plate of our leftovers. she told us she had been looking forward to it all day. they always have thanksgiving with rosie's family because sandy's family doesn't approve of their relationship, but in rosie's family they always only serve mexican food. rosie told us that one year after her and her cousins had begged for turkey, they were served cut up turkey with mexican seasonings.

it was about 11pm when they left. i thought about calling, but wasn't sure if you would still be up or not. i imagined there may be a card game going on... or an empty house again with dad asleep on the couch. anyway, i hope you enjoyed your day. i missed you. and can't wait to be with you all over christmas.

love,
magdalen

aiguardent: a journey into human solitude...

2006-08-21T08:52:00.000-07:00

Tuesday: I pushed the stroller around aimlessly for awhile. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through my contact list looking for someone other than Sarah to call. It had only been a few hours since she left and I thought I should be able to hold out longer than that. I called Davi and hung up when she didn’t answer. I put my phone back in my pocket, walked a block, pulled it out again, and called Sarah. It was one of those awkward conversations where you can’t really hear each other and it doesn’t really matter anyway because neither of you really have anything new to say ‘cause you just saw them and you’re mostly just missing them because you know it’s going to be a week before you see them again. We had hung up before I reached the end of the block. I pushed the stroller down Granville to the park by the lake. I unbuckled Keira and set her down to play. She had no interest in the play ground and instead insisted on climbing down the rocks to the beach. At first she was shy of the water—letting the waves hit her toes and then running back up to the dry sand. I would stand with the water lapping at my ankles, kicking sprinkles back at her. Eventually she waded out to me, and fell over, and loved it. Pretty soon she was squatting and hitting the water with her arms as hard as she could and shrieking every time she splashed herself and entertaining the cute old couple that had climbed down the rocks with their folding chairs and sun umbrella and were sitting pretending to read the newspaper.

Saturday: I woke up at 5am, hungry, because I had fallen asleep without eating dinner the night before. I pulled on a sweatshirt and poured a bowl of cereal and watched an episode of Queer as Folk. I liked the song that played during the credits, after Justin ties Brian’s bracelet back around his wrist and walks away, so I went online and bought it. And then bought some other songs and uploaded some songs and made a melancholy mix. I lay back down and sort of slept but mostly just kind of stared out the window and wallowed. I finished my book. Around 2pm I finally got out of bed and did the dishes and cooked some potatoes and eggs for potato salad and cleaned up the scraps of fabric coating the floors. I shoved all my dirty clothes and towels and sheets in my duffel bag and put on my work-out clothes and walked to the laundromat. After putting everything into wash I went for a 26-minute run. I ran out to the lake and then along the break wall, down to Hollywood beach, and around to the path and back. I tried to do intervals, picking a tree or pole to sprint to and then falling back into a jog, but mostly I felt weak, and worried about going to Milwaukee next week and not being ready. I changed my clothes to the dryer and ran to the gym. I felt weak there too. At one point though this guy caught my eye and told me I was really dedicated, which made me feel better. It's funny how compliments can make you feel good even when they come from random people that probably don't even really know what they are talking about. Like this dude doesn't know me or what I do or that dragging myself out of bed twice a week to do forty minutes of shoulder strengthening exercises isn't even close to dedication when you measure it up to all the gym workouts that Pam and Farrah have been doing in order to prepare for the world cup in a couple weeks. I jogged to the laundromat and picked up my clothes, went home and showered and got dressed. Then Rosie and Sandy picked me up and took me out to dinner at this Thai place in Lincoln Park. Then we went and got coffee at Bourgeois Pig and I heard their whole how they met (thirteen years ago!) story. Then we went to this play that I had gotten them tickets for at the Goodman. It was called Aiguardent and it was part of the Latino theatre festival. It was really weird. It was a one woman show and there was hardly any talking, just some mumbling in Spanish that you couldn't really hear. It started with her lighting a cigarette and for awhile the only light you could see was the flame of her match and then the lights slowly came up and she was sitting in a dining room chair (slumped a little bit like teenagers sit, or how you sit when you are tired or feel defeated) and there were wheels on the bottom of the chair. She started slowly moving and spinning, but she was only moving her feet and by her expression and posture it almost seemed as if the room was moving instead of her. Then she spins up to this dining room table that also has wheels and she starts moving with the table. It all felt very reminiscent of how I felt this morning as I stared out the window and willed myself out of bed, kind of depressed, but almost relishing in it. There was a wine jug on the table and she kept wanting to grab it, but then stopping herself. It seemed like it had to be about more than just controlling an addiction to wine though. It was like she kept trying to keep her thoughts off of the wine, but also enjoyed the game of resistance she was playing with herself. Eventually she begins to drink the wine and then she is pouring bottles and bottles of it down her throat and on the table and on the floor. Six big jugs of wine she pours out all over herself and onto the stage. After it's gone she looks out and hits the table with her arms, like Keira in the lake, and the water splashes everywhere, and you can see each little droplet in the stage lighting. Then she does it again and again and again. Then she is on the floor "swimming" through the wine and under the table and flicking the liquid out into the audience each time she kicks her feet.

Sunday: I’m sitting in the box office of the Goodman and a woman calls asking about the play going on tonight.

“Aiguardent?” I ask.

“Yeah that one. Can you tell me what it’s about?”

This is actually the first time someone has asked me this and I fumble. “Well, it’s a one-woman show, and uh… there’s a lot of dance…”

“Have you seen it?” she asks.

“Yeah. But it’s kind of hard to say what it’s actually about.”

“And you liked it?”

“Yeah. I did."

new books make everything better

2006-06-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

scene of me yesterday: i'm sitting outside of visionary eye care professionals at clark and foster. i kind of want to cry. i had an appointment for 5:30pm. i biked down and filled out the new patient form. when i brought it up to the front desk, i handed them my insurance card as well and asked if they accepted blue cross. he played around on his computer and told me i wasn't in their system. i asked how much an appointment would be and he told me $100 if the doctor had to dilate my eyes, and more if he wanted to see me again. i asked if that would be necessary. he answered with a blank stare, (slash didn't). i told him i just wanted to buy contacts. i don't even need him to look at me. i'm sure i sounded dramatic, and it's not this dude's fault, but what the f? i hate dealing with this sort of stuff, (p.s.). clearly, because the contacts i have in right now i should have thrown out a couple months ago. anyway, i cancel my appointment and walk outside and i'm frustrated with the whole impossible medical/insurance bullshit system and even more frustrated with myself for always being such a baby about dealing with this stuff. fortunately my favorite bookstore is across the street. i figure as long as i'm down here with the afternoon free now, i may as well stop in, and ultimately spend money i don't have to spend. which i do. i have three books in my hand after wandering the store, but i talk myself down to two: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and A Field Guide to Gay and Lesbian Chicago by Robert McDonald and Kathie Bergquist. the one that gets put back is The Rivals by Johnette Howard. all three of these books have been on the constantly growing list in my head. my friend marian told me about bechdel's graphic memoir over breakfast one morning last spring. marian and i have some stuff in common with bechdel: we're homos, we went to oberlin, we're creative (marian makes pretty postcards and is entering a master's program in book and paper arts at columbia college in the fall, i'm hoping to get into a master's program at northwestern for creative nonfiction writing). i was pretty excited to find it yesterday. it took me awhile to track it down because i was looking too hard--it wasn't in the mix of other comicesq books, it actually had it's own table and a sign with a picture of ms. bechdel herself, to let us know she was stopping by to say hi and sign books in a couple weeks. the field guide i read about in the reader last week. i think the woman author of it actually works in the bookstore i was wandering around in. she may have actually checked me out. it seemed like a book i should own, loving the gays and exploring this city as much as i do. a small part of me is against guide books though. i worry that the great places they describe will suck once they are populated by people following a guide book to their entrance. and i'd kind of like to discover them on my own. anyway, i caved. the rivals has been on my list since it came out. i try to read everything on women and sports, especially with a queer edge, as research for my own project/future and because i can't get enough of it. but i also need to branch out, hence the decision to postpone my purchase.

i bike home and decide to do laundry so my day can still feel somewhat productive. mostly, i'm just excited to sit down on the curb and start reading fun home while i wait to move my clothes to the dryer. my girlfriend meets me at the laundromat with the same look of frustration that painted my face earlier. she has spent the whole day working on a finance assignment. she expected to be done hours ago, and instead feels she still has hours to go. i tell her it's okay because i have a new pretty book to distract me. which is the truth. she is sitting over my laptop at the kitchen table. i am propped up in my bed, the next room over. i have twenty pages left when she finally decides to quit. she tells me she wanted to take a break a while ago, that she was staring at me waiting for me to look up and tell her to take a break, but i was absorbed in my book. i shrug and smile. 'i would have looked up if you said something,' i say. 'i know,' she replies.

you to oberlin

2006-05-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

i poured myself a cup of coffee this morning and it tasted good and i was bored so i poured myself another and then i felt like i was on adderall. i only did it once. in college. leslie and i split a pill during midterms. it did not make me more productive. but i did feel like i could fix the world. and i would sit in class and fill my page with notes on how. and then i got to soccer practice and i had thought it had worn off, but instead i did a warm-up lap and i thought my heart was going to fly out of my chest and i didn't feel so confident anymore. in fact i felt really weak. and i knew i wouldn't do it again.

i'm not used to being so caffeinated. i was working at the window and it was slow. i started writing on a will call envelope the phrases that were running through my head. i'd list them now, but they really wouldn't make a lot of sense out of context. i think i've got my head turned around though. it usually takes about a day, which davi has told me amazes her.

the first thing i wrote on the envelope was something i told davi almost exactly two years ago. i had forgotten actually. but it was something that davi held onto and she reminded me of it when she had come to visit me in chicago six months later and now it's something i hold onto as well. after finals that year she had ridden home with me to wisconsin. and then we drove down to minneapolis. she had a flight to new york early the next morning. and in the fall she would have another flight to italy, where she would spend the semester. my brother was driving her to the airport. i slept while she showered and dressed and packed and then before she left she came over to me and nudged me awake. she had tears in her eyes.
"so, i'm leaving. i won't see you again."
"oh davi." i replied. "we have the rest of our lives to be together."

this sentiment is intertwined with another moment that i reference often. i was seventeen and living in austraila as an exchange student. i had ridden with my host mom to drop off my friend arwen. i would be flying half way around the world in the next couple days, home. arwen was crying which made me cry. i didn't know when i would see her again. if ever. i got back in the car and my host mom, who i hadn't really been that close with, said one of the smartest things i'd ever heard. the exact words are lost, though i've been trying to get them back since. but the gist of it was that it was best to have our friends spread out, that to have them all in one place would be suffocating, and we wouldn't be able to look forward to travelling and seeing them again.

yet i've seriously thought about how many people could live in my little one-bedroom apartment. i could share my bed that takes over a corner of the living room with another person. and someone else could crash on the couch. we could get bunkbeds for the bedroom and in the summer we could put two people out on the futon mattress on the sunporch. the already cheap rent of $650 could be split seven ways. we'd each pay less than $100/month and therefore all could work less and drink more. utopia. but whenever i've detailed this plan to any of my friends they've rolled their eyes and shook their head, anticipating the drama that would ensue with seven people living on top of each other, let alone that the majority would likely be lesbians. as much as i remind myself that it would not be best, that it's better to be spread out, i hold onto this little fantasy.

just as i was holding onto this fantasy of taking you "home" with me. "home" because it's not bayfield. "home" because it's one of four spots on the map. one of four lakes. twenty miles south of erie. i want them to see you. to see what i see when i see you. to put a face to stories. i want you to see them. to see what i see when i see them. to a put a face to stories. i want to connect that third line. me to them. me to you. you to them.

but, it doesn't need to happen all in one weekend. and it's probably better if it doesn't. if it's drawn out and not rushed. i think i need to tell myself this, more than i need to tell you. that it will mean more if i can trust that there is plenty of time yet for connecting that third line.

rugby

2006-05-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

April and I needed rugby. We didn’t keep the team going so that Davi and Jenny and Buster would have rugby at Oberlin, we kept the team going so that we would have rugby at Oberlin. If there was someone else to do it, we would have gladly let them. It was in the last couple weeks of my freshman year at Oberlin when I walked into that rugby meeting. I wasn’t sure of my role on the team yet, having only played a season, but I knew I wanted to at least voice my passion for this sport and this team and its existence. In electing officers, and namely a president, I was going to vote for the person that would build the program back up, get us the numbers to play a full game without having to borrow players from the other team, make sure we had cars lined up to travel, and jerseys and balls packed, that there would be more than five people at practice and that when we were at practice we would do something more than gossip and toss the ball in a circle. I was quiet for the first part of the meeting, listening to the discussions among the upperclassmen about who was going abroad next year and who had too many other commitments, a couple people threw out names of people that weren’t at the meeting, “Maybe Chris would come back. What’s Flinch up to next year? Is he graduating?” April and I shot worried glances back and forth to each other. The lack of commitment in the current season had been frustrating, but I couldn’t stand the idea of no rugby at all.

“We just need to recruit more—update the website, put flyers up in the fall. April and I will be here during preseason/orientation week. We can try to get the freshman before Frisbee gets to them.”

Everyone in the room nodded at my suggestion, looking a little more hopeful. I fed off that hope, and fell into a motivating speech listing what we already had and what would be easy to acquire, the same sort of speech I had made time and again when my high school soccer team was lacking numbers, a coach, a playing field, a bus to our away game, or varsity status, the same sort of speech I made to my friend Krystle when she started sobbing in the locker room because our basketball coach wouldn’t get off her ass, that he expected too much from her, that everyone did, that when she got home from school her mom would leave her with all nine little brothers and sisters and she didn’t have any space for herself or room to breathe or time to get school done, that she couldn’t carry all that weight, that when our basketball coach yelled at her to ‘get the lead out and hustle’ how she wished she could, the same sort of speech I gave multiple other friends over frustrations that manifested themselves in sport but represented so much more. I sat and listened as it all came pouring out, emotion sparked by a coach, a teammate, or a high jump bar and then quickly running into family and school and the deep inhalations of trying to get a grip. Then I would begin to pick up the pieces, admit that it’s not all going to be fixed but throw out ideas that might make it better, second their opinions on why our coach is a douch-bag and our point guard needs stop dribbling to the corner, hug, wipe tears, be there.

I didn’t intend for the speech to be an election speech. I wasn’t trying to be president. I’d been playing wing for a season. I had just started to get a handle on what everyone in the backline is supposed to be doing. I was clueless about the pack. They were that mess of people that smushed their bodies together and drove over the ball, so that we could get it out and run with it. I was also only going to be a sophomore and I had varsity soccer in the fall. The other committed upcoming sophomores were voted in as treasurer and match secretary, and then Sarah Cole nominated April and I for president. April could head things in the fall while I was playing soccer, and then I could take over in the spring when April would be occupied with varsity softball. We had no choice but to accept.

We started in right away. I made a new flashy rugby website as my final project in my computer science class. I wanted to have an opening page that would stream some sort of ode to rugby across it. I requested April’s help in composing it. A couple of nights later, my roommate and I were up chatting after going to bed, when April burst into the room clearing her voice and reciting from a crumpled sheet of paper:

“Rugby? Isn’t that like football, they ask. Yeah, but without the pads, I respond. Before any other game I wonder if I’ll win. Before a rugby game I wonder if I’ll survive. But with each successive tackle I am able to forget the paper that was due four days ago, the fight with my ex-girlfriend, and the bloodstain on my shorts from my overflowing keeper. I laugh through my mouth guard and let all the bullshit slip away because I can say ‘Saturday’s a rugby day!’”

April found a book on rugby rules and drills and we put more time into studying it than we did studying in any of our classes. Another night she ran into my dorm room at two in the morning with a rugby ball and pulled me out into the hall. “When you played basketball, could you make a behind the back pass? Can you do it with the rugby ball? Do you think that would be obstruction?” We practiced our behind the back rugby passes in the hall for a little while and then moved out to the grass in front of the dorm, yelling at a friend walking past and asking if she would come run at us while we ran our play.

My roommate developed a hand signal to indicate when she was annoyed with us for just talking about rugby, which was becoming a pretty frequent trend. “Talking rugby” included, among other things, reminiscing about past games and practices, dreaming up rosters, plays, and drills for future games and practices, drooling over new balls, uniforms and ruck-pads, and listing the people we knew that would make good rugby players and strategizing how we would get them to join the team.

We arrived on campus two weeks before the fall semester began my sophomore year. I had preseason training for soccer and April was working as a dorm R.A. We taped signs in every stall in every women’s bathroom and on the tampon dispensers too that read “bleed more than once a month, play women’s rugby” and had the website address printed on little tear off strips at the bottom. We had a ton of freshman trying out for the soccer team that year. At the first meeting, we went around the circle making introductions. When it was my turn I said, “My name is Magdalen. I’m a sophomore, from Wisconsin. I play rugby. You should too. In the spring. (Or if you get cut, I thought.) Soccer players make great rugby players.” My coach shot me a look from across the room. She had tolerated me playing rugby. I think she knew that if she made me choose, I wouldn’t be playing for her anymore. But she wasn’t too keen on the rest of the team dump tackling, rucking, and mauling for their off-season work outs. More than the risk of injury, I think she feared the risk that players wouldn’t come back to soccer. I didn’t care. Soccer would always exist. Soccer didn’t need to fight. Soccer had fresh jerseys, different colors for here and away, clean and folded and laid out in front of our lockers on game days. Soccer had a coach bus parked outside of the gym half an hour before the scheduled departure, stocked with bagels and water and granola bars and movies playing on mini TVs above the seats. Soccer had game stats posted online and when you scored a goal everyone knew it and congratulated you in the cafeteria lines at dinner. With soccer, I didn’t need to worry about anything but myself. Everything else was taken care of. It was out of my hands.

It was also out of my hands when I sat on the bench knowing I could contribute so much more if given the chance, when my teammates told me the same, when I stayed after practice to practice my cross and finish and the only coach that stayed after with me was my best friend on the team who had all the technical skills I lacked, seeing as she had been playing since she was five and I hadn’t started playing until my sophomore year in high school. Just as it was out of my hands when I got a new track coach my senior year of high school and he refused to put me in any running events so that we could leave the meet as soon as field events were over and he could still get the pay bonus for coaching without having to miss any prime time television, or when my high school wouldn’t let my soccer coach give out a MVP award at the athletic banquet because soccer wasn’t a varsity sport, even when he said he would buy the plaque himself.

I’m not usually a crier. If I get hurt I play through it or come out. I always hated the girls that cried on the bus after losing basketball games in high school. I didn’t really see it as the end of the world. We lost every game. Did they really think we were going to win? Or that crying now would make anything better? Get over it. But in my junior year at Oberlin, after the last game of the season, I lost it. It was a frustrating game to begin with. We were capable of winning, but didn’t. We were all off of our game and playing harder, but not smarter, to make up for it. All of the seniors were sad because it was their last college game ever and it wasn’t how they wanted to end the season. In the back of my head I knew it was my last game as well. I had been frustrated all season and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. We would do sprints at the end of each soccer practice and I would rock them because I was so annoyed with everything and then I would pick up my bag and walk to the very north end of the athletic fields where the rugby team practiced and I would watch from the sidelines, cheering when there was a good play and instructing when there was confusion. After practice I would join the circle of ruggers and we’d all sing: “Rugby women are the biggest and the best, ‘cause we never need a break and we never take a rest, and we set a better ruck, and we give a better fuck, and when it comes to rugby we never get enough. Out on the pitches, out in the scrum, rugby women will make you come. We’ll build mauls, kick balls, score on you, and when it comes to tries, we’ll take two, three, four, sixty-nine.” On game days I would get back from soccer and find the rugby girls drunk and sprawled in my yard, handing me their beers so I could catch up, and filling me in on their game and the social that was held after where both teams got together and drank and sang. Even though I hadn’t decided yet that I wasn’t going to play soccer after my junior year, I knew. I came out of that last game biting through my lip, trying to keep it together. My coach brought me aside, thinking I was crying because she had taken me out, or because we lost, or because I had messed up a penalty kick. I just shook my head as she searched for an answer to my sobs. She had never seen me like this. But I didn’t even have it sorted out for myself then. I just knew that soccer wasn’t right for me anymore. It was like moving on from a relationship that you know isn’t working, but you still have so many memories and attachments to. On the bus my best friend, the same one that had stayed after to coach me so many times, held my hand and tried to cheer me up by making jokes. Every time I looked up at her, I just cried harder, hers was the face I was leaving. But I knew she would be fine. I needed rugby. And rugby needed me.

It’s definitely easier to have things be “out of my hands.” Easier to not be the one in charge, not be responsible. But I get bored when things are easy. I don’t see the point. I want it to be raw, messy, real. And that’s rugby too: no pads, no time-outs, no fouls, continuous play. There are rules. You can’t tackle above the shoulders. Passes must be backwards. You can only tackle the person with the ball. You can’t play the ball on the ground. Once a ruck is formed you must drive over the ball in order for it to be playable. There is an order, but the theory of the game is simple. You hold the ball in your hands and run forward in an attempt to place it over the line. You can stiff arm. You can pass. You can kick it ahead. To defend, you tackle. Unlike soccer and basketball that have so many rules about where and how you make contact, in rugby you can never be too aggressive. The players that excel at rugby are the ones that go out full tilt. You can’t hold anything back. You’re going to come off the field muddy and bruised and bleeding. And weightless.

grandma dale

2006-04-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

     When my dad told my grandma that I was a lesbian, she paused and then said she had always wondered about her Aunt Anna. I’ve only seen Aunt Anna in a small black and white photo, framed in a thick gold oval and resting on Grandma’s bookshelf. Her hair is short and gray and permed. She has a short string of pearls and pursed lips. She doesn’t have the soft roundness or smile to her face of an Aunt who comforts with candies and kindness; her cheekbones cut sharply, her stare is direct and firm. I think she was a schoolteacher, never married, a reader, she owned a canoe. When I picture Grandma as a girl trotting down the block to visit her Aunt Anna, she looks a lot like me running up the driveway or taking the shortcut (that was actually longer) through the woods, stretching my steps to take the stairs up her porch two at a time, knocking on the door and walking in before she had answered, kicking off my shoes, lifting the cookie jar lid more out of habit than hunger, plopping down in the easy chair and surveying the room: the full bookshelf (my books—a series of Raggedy Ann and Andy adventures and later the American Girl books—were on the bottom shelf), flowers freshly cut and centered on the table, empty vases along the top of her cabinet, birds outside her glass doors at the feeder and on the deck where seeds had spilled. We would sit and chat. I would tell her all the ways in which my brother’s had been mean to me, probably exaggerating to get more sympathy. As I sat in her lap and she read aloud, I would poke at the veins that protruded on the top of her hand, trace them and push them together under her skin. Her knuckles were thick with arthritis. She would pause in her reading to comment on how ugly they were, saying that’s what happens when you get old. I look down at my own hands now, squeeze tightly at my wrist until my veins fill and pop a little, imagine her loose pale skin over wiry veins and knotted joints. Those hands: bizarrely strong in the places they are flawed, like scars, thicker and tougher where there was once hardly any protection at all.

     When Grandma was a girl she wanted to be a schoolteacher like her Aunt Anna. It was the depression and her dad was drunk and then gone. It was her and her sister and her brother and her mom. She did what she needed to do to keep going, found refuge in the bookcases that walled her aunt’s cramped apartment, saved the money she made working at the local movie theatre and babysitting in a bank account that she had opened herself. She was going to be a schoolteacher like Anna. She would wall her apartment in books like Anna. She would get out, get away from her mom and sister that pretended as if things hadn’t changed, that bought new clothes and dainty shoes that were too small. She couldn’t leave them completely like her dad had. She was still subject to their pleas, they were still her family, but she knew she was better. She was like Anna. She finished high school and went to collect the money she had been saving, dreaming of college and escape; instead she found that the account was empty. That was when she learned how her mother and sister had been able to keep pretending. It was needed to get by, her mother responded nonchalantly when confronted. It was used for the family. How else could they do it with their father gone? What does she need school for anyway? A husband is what you need. And you won’t get a husband looking like that, that’s for sure. I’m just looking out for you. I am your mother remember.
     Grandma signed up for nursing school. It didn’t cost anything, as long as she committed to work. She didn’t particularly like taking care of people, but she was good at it, practiced at it, she’d done it most of her life, and it was the closest she could get to independence. She left home and lived in the dorms, practiced sticking needles in oranges, worked as an aid, changed sheets and bed pans, and handed out little paper cups of pills. Every morning she would get up early to swim. In the summer some of the other girls would come down with her to the river, they would all pile in a cab and split the fare. In the fall and spring the other girls complained the water was too cold, and Grandma would get up earlier and walk. In the winter she went to the Y. She liked swimming she told me. She laughed when she described her suit, one piece and rubber.
     She married too and raised four kids. My dad was the third. She kept nursing, picking up night shifts and putting away the money she earned. Checking it weekly to make sure it was still all there. She put all four of her kids through college, starting with Judy, the eldest and only girl, who became a schoolteacher. When dad was a kid they moved a lot. Grandpa would get a new job or lose the one he had and they would up and leave, always in the middle of the year and always to the protests of Grandma and the kids. After one particularly bad period when they moved four times in three years, Grandma finally said no, that he could leave but that they were not leaving with him.
     I never met my Grandpa Dale. He died of a heart attack, soon after my parents wedding. After the kids had grown and Grandpa had passed, my Grandma started traveling. She went to Europe and Australia. She gardened, she read, she owned a camper van. When my parents bought the farm and built their house, she had hers built just up the driveway, tucked away in the woods. She woke up early and did her stretching exercises, made coffee, and visited with my dad before he started his day working between the blueberry rows. Sometimes, I would wake up early and run up the driveway and join them. This is how I know her: in a house walled with books, alone but not lonely.
     It has been this way for as long as I can remember—a constant. The garden has fewer and fewer annuals each year, the cookie jar is more often filled with cookies bought at the store, conversation becomes more disjointed, but she is still always there in her house with her books and her vases and her birds and her strong knobby hands gripping her coffee cup. I pick a book up off of her coffee table and ask her how it is. She wrinkles her nose with slight disgust, oh that’s just something Judy sent me, it’s okay, and she goes on to tell me about how much she really likes reading biographies and how she read this great biography on Truman, and what a good president he was, what a good person really, down to earth and honest. We talk about this book every time I visit.
     This is the memory I keep anyway, because really I know that she has since had to move out of her house into assisted living and then into the nursing home. Her house is still there, just up the driveway from my parents, and the cookie jar, but they are empty now. In her room at the nursing home, the framed picture of Aunt Anna is propped on her dresser, next to a vase of fresh flowers. She is ready to die. She has been ready for awhile. She is content to live each day and go when she is supposed to. I am surprised, and not, with each day that she keeps on living. When I go to visit her and the confused look on her face doesn’t match the confident look I remember, I worry she’s not even really there anymore, that she doesn’t know who I am, or what’s going on at all, but then she squeezes my hand, those same firm fingers gripping my own, and she smiles. She asks me how I am. Her face is blank as I respond, telling her about Chicago and work and rugby. I know there is nowhere for her to store new information any more. It won’t be kept straight. She won’t remember. But then so clearly, so confidently she looks at me, and tells me I’ve done well, I’m doing well, I will do well. I don’t remember the exact tense and really it seems as if all three tenses were used and implied at once, that I’ve got it together, always have and always will, that she is confident in that, that I have that strength, that she continues to pass it on to me as she presses my palm in her own.

short

2006-04-16T11:18:00.000-07:00

i've made it a habit to not write when i'm feeling good.
(at least about why.)
because the words will always fall short.
because it's not about describing the moment anymore, but living it.
i don't even want to talk when it's good.
i want to breathe really deep
take it all in when my eyes are open
recreate it in my head when they blink close--

to savor that content slow slip of lashes meeting
in sync with the soft sigh present in conscious breathing.

art

2006-03-31T15:05:00.000-08:00

We drove up Monday night. The drive was familiar—Chicago to Oberlin, seen through the windshield of Kari’s red mustang with the busted heating flow that demands feet to be wrapped in a fleece blanket when riding passenger side or roast when driving. When we got there, it was exactly as I expected it to be—undone. I had imagined coming in at the point of break-down and taking control, reminding them that the goal was not perfection anymore, but completion, as I had done so many other times when one or the other had come to me throwing pens and crumpling papers. But this time the goal of perfection would not be dismissed and they were trading in sleep and showers and food and sanity in hopes to obtain it. Leila’s craziness was comfortable…familiar. Davi was a zombie—typing or sweeping, slowed by exhaustion but never pausing and never taking my suggestions for quick fixes even though she told me everything was better now that I was there. While Kari settled in measuring and hanging pictures on the wall, at ease in their insistence for perfection because she couldn’t imagine doing it any other way, I had to stop myself from contributing, knowing my rushed and imperfect efforts to finish and go to sleep would just leave Davi and Leila with more things to stress over and fix.

Kari and I decided we would stay and help until Black River opened and we could go get breakfast. I had hoped to take Davi. To see if maybe she would be a person again, if I could get her out of the studio and get her to eat. But she said there was too much to do, that she couldn’t leave. And then I didn’t even really want to go myself, but it seemed like we had to because we had purposely waited this long. We had gone for a walk a couple hours earlier to see the Ilan billboard at sunrise like Davi had said was best and check the Black River hours on the door. It was so nice to walk out of that timeless den of distress and mess to see the half-light of morning and unmarked snow on the sidewalks. And Ilan really does look best in the sunrise—so good.

At breakfast I wanted to cry. I was so tired and so cold. I think I was probably rude to the waitress. I couldn’t help it. Kari was perky and trying to make me laugh. I wanted to cry. She wanted me to talk to her about what was wrong. I told her I hated seeing Davi not take care of herself. And I was also thinking something about her… about being together or not together and wanting to be or not wanting to be… or something different all together. In that state everything seems so clear and so blurry. Like I all these pieces made sense and no sense. I wanted to talk, but not to her. I wanted to write. So I could go back later and see if any of it was right. More than that I wanted to sleep. I wanted to be warm. I ordered peppermint tea and washed down as much of breakfast as I could, kept pushing it past the lump in my throat, trying to swallow that too. We drove back to Davi’s house and pulled all the shades down in her room, put on as many layers as possible and still I felt like I would never get warm again. I was too cold and cracked-out to even think of refusing the spoon Kari offered.

I woke up feeling so much better. We went out to eat again. Sesame chicken. And then we met up with Morgan to go watch West African Dance Class. We all had different peeps that we were there to watch—Diana, Genevieve, Davi. I just liked being there in general. We all walked out of Warner together. The three couples and the dancers were dancing and imitating the other girls in their class and laughing and being so beautiful and Davi was smiling and it was my Davi again and it was so good to see her laughing and being a person again. And Morgan and Diana are so beautiful—individually and together—so beautiful. I can remember everyone’s laugh right now. Diana’s deep and Gen’s with that weird hiccup thing and Morgan’s awkward and the way each sets off the other. So good. I walked with Davi back to Fisher, via Diana’s apartment for a fishbowl. We found Hope’s bike outside of Firelands and it sparked Davi’s enthusiasm. I rode it back to Fischer while she galloped along side. We walked in, and I wasn’t sure if that much more had actually been done, or it was just being able to leave and come back that changed the way we saw it, but for the first time is felt manageable, like this might actually get done.

Three hours passed quickly. We ran back to Davi’s house to shower and dress, stopped by the Feve to find her family and friends and drink a beer, and then headed over for the opening. There were so many people there I hadn’t even thought about seeing, plus all the others I had been looking forward to seeing for weeks. Rian and Davi were talking and I included myself in the circle. Rian gave me a big hug, her son hanging off her hip completing the hug with a silly grin on his face. We talked about rugby and the film project. I offered my help at any point. She said she wanted to interview me, maybe she could even make a trip to Chicago. I was grinning so hard the whole time. I told her if she thought Oberlin rugby beautiful and the culture crazy, to just wait until she got to Nashville. We parted without good-bye, but I’ll see you at NashBash.

After a few beers I walked up to Melsen and told him I really wanted to see his work too. That Davi talked about it a lot and I always really liked the stuff he did in the silkscreen class we took together. He smiled shyly, said I could find most of his work online at melsencarlsen.com. We talked more and he asked what I was up to these days. There was an awkwardness in the question. Instead of answering the question, I acknowledged the awkwardness, said it should be awkward, we weren’t really friends before, friends of friends, but I never really knew him, but all the same, it’s never too late to start. Then I said I was living in Chicago, and asked what his post-Oberlin plans were. He said that Reese was looking at grad school and he would follow her. Well him, he’s transitioning, Melsen said. I told him I was glad they were still together and happy. I felt like we should have hugged then, but we didn’t.

At one point I was talking to someone and I looked up at the map on the wall. There were two people standing on the ladder. They wanted to draw the great lakes onto the map to locate their places and they had Davi’s map book opened to my page in order to get it right. It made me happy.

Later in the evening, I walked past Leila’s piece. Her and Davi and Marisol were all sitting inside with their feet in the pool. I wanted to be a part of it, but I didn’t want to intrude. I pretended I didn’t notice that they were all there when Marisol shouted at me to join them. In some ways, it meant the most that she was the one that asked, that she felt like I should be included in that almost sacred circle. All of this beauty that wasn’t mine, but I still felt so connected to—that I couldn’t claim ownership of and would never dare too, yet still was so affected by in that deep way you are only affected when you are intimately involved. Davi and Leila stood up in the water and were holding each other’s faces in their hands and their words were drowned out by the crowd, like music in a movie when the words are secondary anyways. Leila’s mom was taking pictures from outside the pool. I asked for the camera and walked around them clicking. In a movie the camera would circle them so that they are the only clear image and everything outside of them is circling and blurring and the music gets louder and is on point. It’s when you cry because it is so damn beautiful: That connection. The hands gripping faces. The intense intermittent hugs. The expressive faces. The tears that are held up by grinning cheeks. You cry because before that moment in the movie, you have seen them struggle, you have watched them hurt and want and need, you have seen those pieces of beauty, you want them to be okay, to be happy, they deserve it, they are worthy of it. You kind of want to be that person that makes them okay/happy/worthy. You would do a good job of it. But since you aren’t in the movie, you are glad when they find it somewhere. It makes you cry.

After a few hours, the crowd dwindled. I was drunk. Davi went home to sleep with Hope. I passed Kari on the phone in the stairs on my way to the bathroom. I asked who she was talking too even though I knew it was Zoe. Her reply was rude. I didn’t matter what her reply was. We were both drunk and didn’t feel like being nice anymore. I left with Leila and Morgan and Micah and Linda. We went to the Feve. The rest of the evening was blurry. I think Micah bought all my drinks, like a good big brother. At one point Morgan and I went downstairs to say hi to Diana as she closed the downstairs. Morgan helped her push tables back and put chairs up. I requested Rhino shots and we got whipped cream all over our faces, except Diana who had this expert way of drinking them cleanly. I left the Feve with Leila and Jolie and went to a party above the hardware store. Kari was there. They were playing Quarters. It wasn’t our crowd. Lelia danced on our laps to entertain us. We left and went back to their place and ate some cold take-out from the cartons. After Jolie went to bed, I remember Leila sitting on the chair in her living room and me sitting on the floor with my head on her lap, or near it. I don’t remember what we talked about, but it seemed important. I went home and crawled into Gen’s huge bed. I don’t remember if Kari woke up. I think I may have ignored her if she did. She had sent a txt earlier in the evening asking if I was mad. I didn’t really care. I didn’t respond. For tonight, I just wanted my people.

I woke up in the morning and showered and dressed. I walked over to the gym and walked past Jane’s door. She saw me and called out to me like I hoped she would. I sat down in her office and we had the best chat about my new life plan to be a rugby coach. She was so helpful and formal and goofy and for once it was just the right balance of it all. She gave me good websites to check out, said that she believed rugby had a chance, said that I was on the right path, that I needed to just stay involved and keep coaching as much as I could, that I should have other things to fall back on, that she would keep her ears open for rugby now and pass on anything she hears. She gave me a little NCAA women’s championship pin as I was leaving. She said she wanted to give me something. She said I could put it on a bag or on my bulletin board and look at it and gain motivation from it. Oh Jane.

Then I went back to Fisher and had my own time in the space. I walked around and read everything. I read the comics that Davi had framed. I assumed they were all ones I had read before and was happy for new ones. She is really so good. She knows how to pull out the right bit from a story that makes it funny/touching/etc. I want more. I took the book of maps off of the podium and curled up in her “bed” with it. I loved it. Each map tells a story. I wanted to know more. I hadn’t looked that closely at Kari’s before. She had included Bayfield on her map as one of four important places. She drew the farm and listed all the different varieties of raspberries and blueberries, something I’m not even sure about myself. Our maps are so good together, perfect really, cause in many ways they were formed together. How can she give that all up? How can she not see it? And for what? There’s no Philly on her map. No NYC. What does she see in her? It’s so empty. Yet she chose that over me.

I climbed down out of the loft and walked around the corner to the rugby pictures. I guess you could say I walked over to what I chose over her. I had only glanced at the statements while we were hanging them up and now I went through and read every one. They were beautiful. I was crying. It was the first thing that had actually made the tears tip. The sentiment that hung above all others was that you couldn’t explain rugby, and that when you are talking to other rugby players you don’t need to you, that explaining it somehow takes away from what it is. I wondered whether this book idea is a good one, but I still believe we can find the words, even if we never find them completely adequate.

I walked over to Leila’s installation and walked around inside, taking notice of all the tiny details. I wish I had time to listen to the ninety minutes of audio that piece them all together, but I resigned myself to knowing that they did. Davi’s class began to arrive and walk around. They gathered to talk. Leila and I stayed outside the group and had our own conversation. When they were ready to begin crits, Johnny looked at Leila and asked if she was going to join them, and then he looked at me and asked me as well. Again it felt good to know that I was included, almost without question.

At one point in the discussion, Melsen asked about how it was to have real family and chosen family in one room mingling together. Leila and Davi acknowledged that there were some awkward moments, like at the opening when Ellie yelled something about getting high and then was introduced to Leila’s father, but that’s also what it’s about. This is their family portrait. It’s one family—not easy, not smooth, but real—past and present and ever evolving and blurring.

I thought a lot about where I fall in this family. Of course there are friendships and bonds to the other Oberlin kids there and almost a matronly relationship to my little ruggers, but I am glad it doesn’t stop there. Leila’s older brother buys my drinks and I shove Davi’s little sister’s shoulder instead of saying hello because it means the same. Leila’s mom gives me a hug when I extend my hand and says she has never met me yet she feels like she knows me. Interesting how before we all know each other (and since many of us will probably never really completely know each other) we live in the stories that the person that connects us tells. This thing, this art, this show, that’s not even mine, but kind of is--I wanted all my people to see it, to be reminded of how we are all connected. (and affected.)

jon

2006-03-29T21:38:00.000-08:00

(that's him on the right... i'm in the middle.)

You know that thing, those things, you hold on to. One moment in time… maybe you don’t even remember the exact place or time or the person… but usually you remember the person and one sentence. And maybe not even the exact words, but the essence. And because you have remembered it again and again it has been revised and given another angle of meaning each time it is remembered.

This is what I remember: I was in Seattle. It was January-term, my sophomore of college. I was twenty—such a frustrating age, so close to finally being an adult. I was living with my brother for the month. He had a one bedroom apartment and he was hesitant for me to come to stay with him, but also encouraging. He is twelve years older than me. He left for college when I was six years old. I date my earliest memories by whether he is in them. Little kids see everything one sided. They understand the roles of those that are there to comfort them, but they don’t understand what it means to the comforter to be able to comfort. Children are completely genuine in their roles. They don’t realize they are benefiting anyone by needing, they only know to need. They aren’t pretending. They really can’t reach the door knob. Or tie their shoes. Or defend themselves against big brothers. But bigger brothers can do these things. And in doing so, they can move from needing to be needed. I slept on a futon that I rolled up and stored in the closet during the day. I worked at a community center three days a week—batiking pillows cases with the kids and painting the walls of a reading room blue. I did my own batiking the rest of the week. Jon had set up a “studio” for me on the porch. Half of it was roofed so I could be out even on the warmer rainy days, with the escaping drops hissing in the hot wax. For the Christmas before he had made me a set of frames for stretching the fabric. They could all be screwed together to make one huge frame. Or used individually for smaller pieces. During that month I stretched and waxed and dyed and waxed and dyed and ironed four large squares of fabric. Jon thought it was a good start. I was able to really experiment with the materials, he told me, suggesting that none of these squares were yet art. He is always the most critical of my work. I promised to make him something for his apartment in thanks for the frame, but it didn’t happen that month. We drank a lot. And smoked a little. We sat on his porch and it was the first time I had spent that much time with him since I was six. Since I could remember. We talked about our family and about the roles we each play. He likes to tease me about being the baby. About needing. About getting my way. In agreement, I told him I thought I was probably a brat when I was a kid. I remember having a friend over and thinking she was getting too much attention, so I spun in circles with my play purse loaded with wood blocks. I spun my circles closer and closer to her until the blocks hit her and she cried. And then I was scolded and she was comforted and it all back-fired. That’s all I remember but I’m sure I was a brat. Jon said he remembers that I was always reading. That I brought a bag of books with me everywhere. Even before I could read the words. I would just look at them. And no one could tell me that I wasn’t actually reading. He remembered the day I was born. He said I was smiling. He said that everyone else was smiling. He looked at me and said that our family got better the day I was born.