Maybe someday I'll remember the year I stayed put. I'll remember feeling content with daily baths and a routine that moved in lockstep toward the promise of a break. I'll think about that long, bitterly cold winter, but not remember the deep depression and questioning.
Divorcing myself from the idea that it was forever is was made it tolerable. The day I started drawing floorplans for a space I could call my own is the day I started feeling less trapped. It would be simple, remote, clean, and surrounded by a wild garden and quietude.
This week I woke up groggy-eyed from an atypical late night, and one tinged with Benadryl to stave off the throbbing of bed bug bites. I looked out our north window and thought I saw a pickup lodged in a grassy field. I didn't rub my eyes to bring the city into focus. I just blinked, and the illusion of 38th Street Minneapolis as a prairie and brought me peace.
Growing up on a farm, the concept of what work looks like leaves me doubting if my nonprofit career in the Robin-Hooding/unregulated-financial sector thus far classifies - and who I need it to be legitimate to. My family, mostly farmers, has stopped asking me what I do (unless my mom needs to cobble something together to tell a friend, in which case, she’ll sheepishly make me repeat some version of it again), likely because the explanation I always offer up has no scaffolding to cling to. Mostly in their eyes, I move a lot, don’t make much money, and never became the architect they expected.
Every time I’m home, I look at my father's hands and question my path a little further. I think of my gravel-calloused feet as a child. I recall my grandmother, whose career we’ve referred to as that of a “farmer’s wife” (maybe someday we’ll account for decades of this work in monetary terms) being most thankful at the age of 90 for “always being able to do my work.” By that she means being a chicken whisperer (and a whisperer to all farm animals), planting seeds in the garden and harvesting her rewards, hauling trash to my uncle’s farm to burn as she prods it with a stick, loving her children, then grandchildren, with deeds of service, etc. May we all be so lucky, and so grateful.
Tonight I went on a solo date to a bar that made Old Fashioneds with my favorite bourbon. I ate dilly tomato soup, wore my jumpsuit and platform sandals, tried to be mysterious and not scratch my bed bug bites. I read a story about a commune on a 30 acre patch in the mountains outside of Asheville, NC. It starred a disillusioned couple from California who sold their house before the market crashed and took their earnings into the off-grid community to do less harm and live off the excess of modern America: dumpster diving, roadkill, hunters interested in only the kill, not the meat.
They lasted several years before the wife left, allergic to mold, and went back to California, leaving him on his own to weather winter. He was unsure if he'd survive without her. What must it be like to feel threatened by the elements in 21st century American? I’ve shot guns and dead animals were a part of my childhood, but I can't imagine scraping the brains from a deer hit by a Ford pickup as my sustenance. And I guess that bothers me, too: that lack of imagination, or rather, my own weakness. But that’s not the point.
I want now to be the appropriate time to build a breathable nest. But, it’s not. And I need another bath. So for now, here's to staying put.