Alonesgiving 2021

-

August, 2021, South Haven, Michigan

I am on the back deck in Somewhere, Great Lakes America listening to thunder roll in off Lake Michigan, cicadas and katydids and crickets whir in the trees above me. A giant silver maple in the middle of the yard, young catalpa and sumac and a tree I have forgotten the name of. Hostas with giant white flowers, giant hostas;  rose of sharon gone wild, virginia creeper and locust trees and the hum of air conditioners,  mosquitoes and tiny black flies and silverfish in the bathroom. Air like soup.

November 20, 2021, Kentwood, Michigan

I am again in an airport hotel room 1,700 miles away from home, having delivered J. to his father for the week. Tomorrow I fly home again, and then repeat the whole thing in reverse next weekend. I want to write but lately I feel empty, a windblown field, the way the countryside drops away doe-brown as I drive from my mediocre airport hotel to the Lake, only oaks and beeches holding their leaves, the fields shorn.

November 27, 2021, Kentwood, Michigan

I have been in so many identical rooms. This actual room--king bed, minifridge, patterned carpet. Eight years this February, and over 100 trips. We have six left. Two years in a pandemic, two dozen COVID tests, then vaccines, then boosters, then what? I know the Cascade Meijers by heart, perhaps better than I knew the Westnedge Meijers in Kalamazoo. I know the drive to the park near the hotel, the trails that lead to a little marsh, train tracks behind a subdivision; the Lake park with 300 steps, the park along the Thornapple River near the dam. I know the drive to Saugatuck, to Holland, to Grand Haven, white pines, sand dunes. Sand everywhere. Dig deep enough, and it's all built on a dune. Jesus I'm tired. Boxed wine and cheese and bread and fruit and chocolate--a pauper's version of the dinners  I ate when I was in Italy over 20 years ago. I hope I can sleep. I hope we stay healthy and safe. I hope--

November 25, 2021, Portland, Oregon

In the past 8 years, I have celebrated Thanksgiving with other people thrice. Once, with R.'s family a month after we eloped but while I still lived in Michigan. The second, when my sister's son was born and I drove from my airBnB in Saugatuck to Mundelein. My father was still alive then. The third in 2019 when I again drove from Michigan to Chicagoland to see my mother's new house, my aunt K. and her family, adopt my mom a new kitten. My Aunt K. was alive then. In August I went to her funeral before picking J. up and flying home.

Every fucking thing is heartbreak.

Before I moved, I would often spend Thanksgiving with my dear friends C. and J. and their children in Kalamazoo, or alone walking through the woods. When I was divorced 14 years ago, I agreed to let J.'s father have all the holidays, since my family lived so far away. Last year, I spent the entire week in a little house nestled in the dunes near Lake Michigan. I hiked every day, ran, made myself paltry meals, drank cheap white wine. This year, vaxxed and boosted, I flew J. to Michigan last weekend, flew home and will repeat the same thing on Saturday. R. and D. are headed tomorrow to New Mexico to see R,.'s ailing mother; J and I tried to book tickets to go as well but flying out of Grand Rapids is almost impossible in a timely fashion. 

So today was the first Thanksgiving in Portland, though we didn't do anything, as what is there to celebrate but genocide and manifest destiny and white supremacy? So R. watched the football game, I ran 8 miles through quiet neighborhoods and up Mt. Tabor and spent the rest of the day crocheting and reading Crying in H Mart on my phone. Tomorrow I'll clean the house, leave instructions for the dog sitter, get a tattoo, and go to bed early so I can fly another 3,800 miles or so over 48 hours and bring my boy home. And yes, in three weeks I repeat this again, and then two weeks later.

As I was running today, listening to podcasts (Breaking Down Patriarchy and Mormon Stories are my go-to long run companions) through neighborhoods mostly empty of traffic, families out walking, a few runners, the sharp angle of a clear November morning--I was struck by how unusual it would be at this point to spend a holiday with family. Thanksgiving has always been fraught--as a child, it was spent with my mother's family who, aside from a few aunts and uncles and cousins, were cold and sarcastic, the food bland and room temperature, and then when I was married the first time at my ex's great grandparents (who are essentially the same age as my mother's older siblings) where few people spoke to me in the old house on Mansion Street in Marshall, Michigan where the upstairs was unheated and full of antiques and my ex's family, from whom he'd been estranged most of his twenties, ignored me and there was nothing to eat for a vegetarian. What I remember most is the long drive east to Marshall, from Kalamazoo: how the world was dun-colored, how I was still enamored then of small towns, of the romance of living in the country, how I thought it was my job to save a man.

I was a baby, not even 25.

Anyway. As I ran today I ran over ideas for a potential book project, contemplated the arc of the current manuscript, thought about the silences of Thanksgiving and Christmas (another holiday I have mostly spent alone), how I have become used to these silences (how I love both days, as I have been unmoored from the communal aspects of both for so long, how quiet they are, how roads are empty and trails are empty and I move through a sleeping world as I run or hike or walk the dog).

I don't know where this is going except I was thinking today about two poems that just came out in Diode, about how I feel old and how I am--like so many women in this culture--terrified of aging because it means my social capital will disappear, and how brief the window of feeling beautiful was (uh a few seconds in my thirties?)--and about the friend who I thought was my forever friend saying to me in college you have a star complex and that felt like such a failure on my part, how I hope she sees the poem I wrote about her and how I am afraid that I matter, have always mattered, so little to her (she ghosted me 8 years ago when I moved out here, but maybe she'd ghosted me far before that and I was just so desperate that I didn't notice?) how afraid I will have breast cancer or die in  a plane crash (four plane rides in the next week so that seems a plausible worry) how desperate I am to matter to someone, something. 

No matter what I do, it never seems like enough. I will always be that 9 year old girl who isn't living up to her potential (the comment on pretty much every report card from fourth grade on). Who cares about what you did on Thanksgiving 11 years ago? the voice repeats in my head. Who are you to think your small life matters? Fucking star complex.

Let's talk tomorrow, my boy texted today, maybe then one of us will have something interesting to say. 

I guess I mean to say, sometimes I can't help myself.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High Summer, Still

-
Image
 In so many ways I have built the life I have always wanted: I come home to a safe house, my child is content in his life, has a community (stayed out far past midnight at a park watching bats darn the sky near the river with friends); I sing, I am doing theater again, I run--though less than I did. Summer is starting its long, slow lean toward fall. We aren't to the hottest parts yet, but the lawns are all yellow and the light is pink at night and baby orb weavers have begun building webs everwhere. I walk down the stairs with a spider stick each morning, carefully unknotting one end of a web from one side of the stairwell, letting the little orange spider clamber into the rosemary. An  hour later, the web is back. Some are slung twenty, thirty feet above the street between the deodar and the yellow cedars.  In three weeks, R. and I head up the mountain to write. I love that week, our world just river nad tree and scree and words. In less than a week, I need to put down ...
Read more

Spring and All (redux)

-
I have been trying so hard to write, to think these days. I am so busy. My job doubled in January, quite literally. This is tech week, and then opening night for the opera and I just finished the penultimate chamber choir tour of the year.   It has been one of the most beautiful springs I've experienced in Portland--vacillating between warm and floral scented, and wet and chilly. It has been perfect.  I've dug another pond in the garden, I've gotten a 20 cubic yard chip drop that i've hauled up the 30 steps, 5 gallon bucket by 5 gallon bucket.  I can't sit still, I bake bread and make occasional dinners. R. is working two jobs, 7 days a week, and some nights when we finally fall into bed, it's the first time we've been still together. Two years ago, I was almost as busy--opera and choir and J. graduating from high school and publishing my third book, and then those disastrous months in late summer and fall, where the world fell apart. Then a year ago, I was ...
Read more

High Summer

-
 When J. was young, and I was still teaching, summer was languid--long hot days in our little Moorish apartment or in the house on Grosse Pointe, cicadas and humidity, trips the Lake, long hours we spent simply being with one another, hot and sticky, pointing the hose at the dogs, lying on the basement floor while tornado sirens wailed over the green skies. There were also those nights that J. would be at his father's where I would drink myself into a stupor, sit in my office or the little front porch or at the dining room table watching evening seep up from the reservoir woods, write poems or blog posts, so deeply sad and lonely but also free. Then, I often felt guilty for the few days or hours that J. would be gone and I would be young and free. I went on dates, or spent the night with various boyfriends, went to movies or played poker with H. and D. I knew none of that would be possible if I had J. all the time, but I wished for it desperately. Summer was a stretch where he was ...
Read more