The Truck

For the past nine months or so, I’ve been standing in the middle of a road. There was a truck coming; I knew it is coming. There were times when I saw the dust from its tires; I heard the sound of its rumble. It was coming and I could not stop it, could not step out of its path. I tried to prepare for it, tried to steel myself for the collision, to brace for the impact. A truck was coming. I just didn't know when.
The truck hit on Friday night, when Erin called and tearfully said, “Sarah, it’s the call.”

Natalie has died.

She was 53.

I was prepared for the shock of her death. I wasn’t prepared for the grief.

Father Figured

I don’t write about my dad as much as I should.

My dad is a hero of mine, and I say that without a sense of irony or exaggeration. He is entirely human (and thus, flawed) but, in my eyes, the sun rises and sets with him. I unabashedly love my father.

My dad moved out of the house when I was 8. The moment he sat me down to tell me he was leaving is one I will forever hold, not because I want to, but because it was such a benchmark. Likewise, I remember the day we loaded up the moving truck, I remember the smell of the cigars he smoked as we did the drive back and forth from his new house to what was now my mother’s house. I remember the day when I realized he wasn’t coming back home.

But the weekends spent at the farm with him were full of magic and adventure. He taught me to shoot, he converted an old chicken coop into a clubhouse for us, he helped me build the model rockets that we’d launch and chase across the fields. For my 15^th birthday, he bought me my first guitar.
I know that he has tried to be the best father he can be, and for me he has mostly succeeded. Much of what I know and love is because he taught me. Camping, canoeing, books, plants, the Redskins, guitar, music: the stuff of him in me. I carry that with pride.

It is difficult to be so geographically far from him. I moved in with my dad two weeks after I turned 17 and have called his house my home ever since. There were weekends when I’d choose to stay in and hang out with him instead of going out with my friends. His back porch is a sanctuary of sorts. He is my friend.

In a few weeks I’m meeting up with Dad in Virginia and then we are riding together to Canada, where we’ll camp for 8 days on a remote lake with other family members. I haven’t been on vacation with my dad since I was 16. I’m so looking forward to the time spent with him.

This Steady Scenery

I bought a whitewater kayak this past week.
An old one, which in kayaking terms, is 7 years.
How appropriate. 7 years ago is when I was told I wasn't “allowed” to paddle anymore.
I had just finished college and was packing to move to New Hampshire, to work in my friends' kayaking shop on Lake Winnipesaukee. I was to teach flatwater and whitewater paddling for the summer, and possibly extend the work into a permanent position. I'd had back problems for about two years at that point, and finally went to a doctor to get it checked out.
He told me he feared that the problems were structural and that paddling could prolong or even worsen the issues. He told me I shouldn't paddle anymore.
There went my future, my plans and part of my identity.
Since then I've only paddled a handful of times; I haven't attempted to roll a kayak and have stuck to mostly easy runs. Life kept moving while that love in me was left in that moment, as if an anchor had been set while the ship above kept trying to sail. Later I found out that paddling wouldn't cause any more structural damage, rather it would cause blinding, debilitating pain.

I've recently begun a rather aggressive chiropractic treatment for my back. It is a process; some days the pain is dramatically less, others it is just as bad as it has been. What gives me hope is that there are changes; that the pain isn't the maddening hum of years past. There are changes in the steady scenery of pain. Maybe this time I will get better.
But then again, maybe the pain stays.
I bought a boat because I don't care anymore.
If I am in pain, then I will stick to the small kayaking runs.
If I am in pain, I won't paddle much.
But I've let pain keep me from something that brings me life for far too long, and in this, the year of sweetness, I'm willing to try anything. I want to lift that anchor, bring it with me. No matter how little, how infrequent or how minor my paddling ends up being, I'm willing to try. I'm smart enough to know I should.

(Older posts about this: Here, Here, Here, Here)

The Thin String

Recently I’ve read a slew of books that have characters with a sense of place; they come from a culture rooted in some geographic area, a language spoken to their people and understood.

I don’t have that; I’m an American.

Which is to say I am a cultural mutt.

On one side I have relatives arriving in America in 1637. I have a straight line from there to membership in the DAR (should I want it), to a diary from my Civil War veteran ancestor, to census documents from 1890 on up to 2010. It is an easy shot. I am named after one of these ancestors. I know nothing about her.

Yet it is a shot with no identity. In America, we love to say what we are. We are Italian. We are Jewish. We are Cherokee and Mexican and Polish. I believe I am a mix of British, Dutch, Alsatian, Scotch, Irish, Swedish and Iroquois but nothing about me confirms that. My family has no traditions, no meals we share or prayers we say that have passed down from generation to generation like a loving quilt of identity and home. We don’t have those words that tie us to each other. Every holiday is a rudderless experience; they are new each year and thus wide open. Nothing has any sense of sacred.

We have one phrase from my Swedish grandmother. She is the only one of my relatives of any “pure” culture heritage, and thus the only one who has any. What I know in Swedish is a toast she taught my mother, a silly little bar song to celebrate all the pretty girls in the room. That’s it. 9 words. And the grandchildren, me included, are so attached to this, because it is something. It is a clue; it is our family’s secret language that ties us to what we wouldn’t otherwise know.

Maybe that is it: culture ties us to history, ties us to family and ties us to the sacred. That commonality tells us who we are by telling us where we came from; it serves as the string, collecting the beads of each life and each generation.

Long Have I Known A Glory In It All

Camping brings gusto to life.
I feel most at home in the woods, setting a camp, tending fire. To do lists fade to become the essentials, of food, of water, of warmth and light, of shelter and company. Abstraction abates. This weekend was time away, a few days spent an hour and 2200’ vertically from home.
I organized the trip, not because it was near my birthday (though it was), but because it seemed a good weekend to get away. I’m not big on self-promoting birthdays. I’m ok either having them be small or having others think of something. I believe it is a time for others to love on you should they want to, not a time for you to demand attention from them.
And so it was we found ourselves at the top of Max Patch on Saturday evening. The sky was mottled with hiccups of summer storms that divinely passed us by. Max Patch is a place where it seems as if the divine breathes; where earth and sky are more intimate with each other. The grass was tall and damp and we spent the afternoon barefoot. I feel that being barefoot like that allows some magic from the earth to seep up through me, some ancient affirmation to creep in and whisper.
Ian and Tammy had graciously brought an obscenely large bottle of champagne for a mountain top toast. I love giving toasts; I love public speaking so this should be no surprise. But I was bested.
My dear friends, who love me for reasons I don’t quite understand, gave toasts to me.
They told me they loved me, they affirmed me in ways I so needed but couldn’t express. I am still humbled and shocked by it. I know I am a liked person, but I often forget to realize that those I love also love me. It was the best gift I could have been given, that elusive present of light, life, love, community, sky, joy, grace, breath, food, touch and future, found in the damp grass atop a mountain.
Thank you thank you thank you, dear friends.

[My birthday was amazing—thank you for all the calls and notes and emails!!! And thanks to my dear roommate Katie for the volume 1 soundtrack to Glee and to my dad for my new fly rod and reel. Something very funny about re-spooling a fly reel while listening to the soundtrack to a sugary show about a high school glee club. Then I went out to Thirsty Monk for drinks with Katherine, Robin, Caroline, Tara and Margarita. What gracious and audacious and impressive ladies.]