(Author’s Image)
Right now, or actually about two minutes ago which is kind of right now, I was standing at the screen door of my house watching a thunderstorm forming overhead and the wind hurtling garbage cans toward the bay. It’s my favorite kind of weather: storms over water. It captures something. Maybe it’s the calmness of the water interrupted by the wildness of the storm, but I think that’s pretty much a representation of many people and how they think and feel. I am one of those people.
I grew up near a bay, not this bay which is in southern New Jersey, but a bay in Staten Island, New York called Raritan Bay. I still live part-time in Staten Island, in an apartment, part-time in New Jersey in a small house, and occasionally in New Paltz, New York on my son’s sofa. I went to college in New Paltz, and my three kids spent the earliest part of their lives there.
When I retire, I am going to get a small house somewhere in the mountainy woods of upstate New York, a couple of rescue dogs, the necessary cats, and a big, comfy hammock. I want to read lots and be on social media sparingly and around actual humans even more sparingly. Don’t get me wrong: I like you humans, but I prefer to read about you guys rather than be together in the same room. I find being around people simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting, so I limit that aspect of my life.
I want to say I garden. But I also want to be truthful here. I have these aspirations of flowers and herbs and a whole English manor type of yard. I have lots of pots in my small yard, bags of organic potting soil and loads of seed packets. Oh, I have such big dreams; my yard is imagined to be an impressionist painter’s dream. I go outside around mid-May with seedlings and fully harvested vision.
Then it gets hot.
There are bugs.
I go outside after rain when I am told the soil is “ripe for planting” and wet things cling to my flesh. They are green and small, and sometimes they curl or seem partially alive. They could be leaves. Or insects. I don’t last long after that. I am very much an armchair gardener, and there are parts of my little yard that I imagine to be blooming with delphinium, phlox, three kinds of organic basil and roses. Lots and lots of roses. There are so many bare patches, but I view those as potential.
I write, also. I wrote two young adult novels, both published by Flux. I was too shy back then to promote my books. That was then; this is now. It wasn’t just shyness. My life was pretty much a mess when the books came out. I was living a big, supposedly happy life that was getting more and more holes in it by the minute. I was afraid all the time. The big house, the suburban dream, the smiling Christmas card pictures didn’t talk much about the emotional abuse, the lies, or the hidden cruelties. But I do talk about all that stuff now, in a smaller, quieter life that has fewer holes and a lot more happiness.
I used to worry about hurting people by telling the truth. I think a lot of us do. Anne Lamott covers this with her quote, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” No one bothered to worry about any of us when they were doing hurtful things.
My personal belief is that a lot of hurtful things are done with an expectation of secrecy: there is a miasma of shame around being hurt, around being abused, so we don’t talk about what was done to us too often. I no longer feel any shame: I feel emboldened after I write about an experience where I was hurt. It’s not only cathartic, but it also says, “Here, look, this thing happened to me, and I survived.” It’s shared then. People write to you. They often say, “Hey, that happened to me, too.” It’s out there and once the secrecy is broken, there is a certain freedom that is born where silence and shame once lingered.
But so serious. Here is a picture of me when I challenged myself to go to the West Coast to visit friends, to travel alone through the airport and to board the plane and talk to strangers. I’ve never been further west than parts of Pennsylvania, and I am more at home on the subway than in a forest, but I did it. I went out west where there was lots of coffee, weed and rain, and I went to an actual farm. Maybe “farm” is a point of reference. They didn’t think it was a farm. It had draft animals, a barn, and rows of corn, so to me, that was a definite farm.
And I milked a goat. Once. Not fully, but I tried.
And that’s about it for now. Recently, I reduced my workload to part time teaching, so I will have more time to write.
Let’s hope the blank screen doesn’t become like my imaginary garden, and I get some stuff out there rather than walking around with imagined stories and novels that have fully bloomed only inside my head.