extraction

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.” – The Rolling Stones

The first time I tried—in a big-picture-of-life kind of way—I was 15 years old. A few months earlier, my parents had completed a bitter yearlong divorce that brought to an end 22 years of rocky marriage, and I was adjusting to a new lifestyle that began the day my father, driving me home from his apartment across town, told me with a strained voice that I was old enough to choose which parent to live with but there wasn’t really a choice, because he didn’t think my mother would make it if I didn’t live with her. Perhaps 15 years later, as I cried over my frustration with her ever-worsening depression, which I believed started the same year as the divorce (though he tells me it started earlier), he bemoaned his role in creating the burden he felt I’d had to carry all these years, supporting my mother through her long-lasting post-divorce bleakness of heart. Despite participating in a lot during high school—from playing tennis to being an outdoor education leader to editing the school’s literary magazine to becoming student council president my senior year—my teenage years were far from carefree; I grew up quickly due to the heart break of having parents who only communicated with each other through me, and always in angry voices, with no censorship of their feelings toward each other. It felt as though I, too, had experienced a failed marriage—loving these people so dearly, often feeling deeply loved by them, but also resenting the hell out of them for their seeming inability to work it out, or even work on it.

          
In tenth grade, I began to get blinding migraines, not long after I began to fail a class. I had, since my first year at Westminster at age five, only ever gotten As. During high school I would eventually take nine AP classes and ace the rest of them. But AP chemistry—my first introduction to chemistry of any kind, as we were placed in the class based not on previous experience with the subject but on our success in physics the previous year—was not what I had the mental capacity for at that time in my life. I found predicting the color two liquids would turn when mixed together completely irrelevant to anything. When my teacher kindly gave me a C in the class despite multiple failed tests, my unfamiliarity with struggling in school compounded with the hard-to-ignore detail that all four of my grandparents were chemists (three with PhDs in the subject) to make me feel as small as small could be—until my grandmother told me that she’d received her first D her freshman year of college and thought it was wonderful that I was getting the (in her telling of it, inevitable) experience of flailing academically out of the way so early.

Perhaps it was that visit from my grandparents, who sat at the kitchen table perusing my chemistry textbook and assuring me of how much too advanced it was for anyone’s first learning of the subject, that inspired me to hope that I might find a way to exit the intense stress that my life had become. Sometime that winter of my sophomore year, I’d gone to a lightly attended presentation in the school auditorium about a semester-long program for high school juniors on a farm in Maine. The older sister of a friend had just come back from it, and after the presentation she told me about helping the farmers birth calves on a beautiful fall day with crisp air and New England colors all around. She glowed as she described it. I decided that day that the Maine Coast Semester on Chewonki Neck in Wiscasset, Maine, would be just my ticket.

But when I looked at the application, I fretted over the cost—one semester’s tuition there was the same as a full year at Westminster, which my dad sometimes had to borrow money from his father to cover, especially now that my brother was in college. So I didn’t tell my parents about the opportunity, and I would’ve let it go altogether, except my uncle happened to call the night before the application was due, and I happened to mention the opportunity, and he happened to insist that I worry about the cost later, if I got accepted, and that I go ahead now and apply. I remember hanging up the phone in our computer room and immediately starting to type. I don’t remember what the essay question was exactly, but I wrote a response that multiple teachers later told me made them excited to meet me when I arrived. I wrote about the drive into my favorite place on earth—the town in Rhode Island where my grandparents live and where I went every summer—and I captured minute details of scenery, smells and sounds, and emotions that apparently stuck in the teachers’ minds. I don’t remember how long I had to wait to find out if I was accepted, but I do remember how certain my parents were when I told them I got in that the cost would not be a problem. Just imagine how relieved they must have been as parents to be able to give this child a breather; they too felt it would be a well-earned break.

The semester I spent in Maine was affirming, nourishing, invigorating; it was life-altering. I learned skills I never expected to have—from milking cows to birthing lambs to spinning wool to chopping wood to coring trees to identifying the calls and songs of 75 types of birds. I experienced all sorts of newness—like four-foot-deep snow and sub-zero temperatures and layer upon layer of long underwear and the music of thawing snow run-off in the woods in April and the resulting forget-me-nots that covered the hillsides and canoeing from island to island on a five-day trip through Montsweag Bay and doing a solo in the woods and the regret of submerging myself in 45-degree water. I made close new friends—so close that they became committed to eliminating my migraines, and one day three of them did so by sitting on the floor of our cabin and massaging a terrible one right out of my skull while talking to me quietly. As well I bonded with nature in a new way—having always loved all aspects of the geography of the South and the northeastern ocean, now I knew of the sparkling blue diamonds that snow seems to be composed of when moonlight shines across a broad landscape of it; I knew the soft brush of hemlock needles against my skin; I knew of the time of day called the gloaming; and I knew the immense contentment of sitting quietly by a large, still bay—whether with my best friend or just my walk-man and an Indigo Girls tape.

At Chewonki I also fell in love with natural science—determining, after conducting a month-long research project in the woods, that forest ecology and natural history would be my focus in college. This decision, as well as my newfound love of New England in seasons other than just summer, propelled me a year later to apply only to colleges in the Northeast, and only to ones with environmental science programs. So much in my life since has cornered on my choice of a college and a major, but Chewonki altered the course of my life in another way that seems by far the most important.

Coming back from Chewonki was an adjustment, with only one of the friends I’d known since childhood (who attended the program alongside me) having any clue what I’d just been through. I had the summer to get used to the idea of returning to Westminster for my thirteenth year there, and by the fall, I looked forward to doing so—because extracting myself from the totally overwhelming life I was living wasn’t an escape, it was a reboot. I had learned how to reinvigorate myself.

Sometimes it can feel that life controls you, that you are locked into whatever you have. What I learned through the experience of identifying the need to do something new, and then doing it, and gaining from it along the way was that I do have enough control of my life to radically alter it when my body and spirit need to find a new approach to living in order to thrive. I reaffirmed that learning when I quit my job in Boston one random summer day seven years ago and moved to San Francisco with no job, just a whole lot of optimism. And I hope that I am reaffirming it again right now, having driven myself 1,000 miles away from a job that I love and am proud of and believe is unhealthily all-consuming in order to write a work of fiction that is about exactly these ideas of extraction and reinvigoration. But whether or not I succeed at writing this knowledge into a novel, I am so grateful that I have written it into the very veins of my skin.

from wacky to weird (New Mexico Highway 14)

Madrid, New Mexico is a far cry from the European city for which it must have been named. Just a cluster of 20 or so storefronts along Highway 14—better known in these parts as the Turquoise Trail Scenic Byway, which connects Albuquerque and Santa Fe via lush (for this state) wooded hillsides rising and dipping to reveal repeated vistas of mountain range beyond mountain range beyond mountain range—the New Mexican town looks, upon first entry from the south, like the ramshackle remains of lives long ago lived. The houses that precede the “downtown” seem strewn across the hillsides, rusted out cars and trucks and other detritus speckling the slopes around them as I am used to seeing only in the Southeast. The shops look a bit thrown together, built from whatever wood or glass was handy at the time, no architect’s or developer’s input considered. Once inside them, however, I sensed a wacky charm that makes this town a blessed respite from the suburban strip mall zone that Albuquerque seems to be. I found beautiful jewelry and a toked out, California- and Southwest-loving hippie silversmith inside one; in most of the others, identical old lady shop-keeps, with gray hair whisping around lined faces; turquoise dripping from necks, fingers, and wrists; and zany voices singing out to welcome us in. We had our best meal yet in New Mexico at the hippie’s neighbor’s restaurant, which is the first place I’ve found in this state with an ambiance just right for writing, so back I plan to come with my computer. We also enjoyed the company of the Mississippi-born waiter, who was so pleased to find that we’re from the South that he three times sat down beside us just to chat—the end revelation of which is that Madrid, NM is a boring town for a 23-year-old from anywhere to live in, even if he’s an artist and it’s a veritable colony of crazy artist types.

We left Madrid delighted, chipperly suspicious that we had found a place for me to source new characters for my writing and no longer set on making it to Santa Fe but instead eager to get to the next town up the Turquoise Trail—Cerrillos, home of the turquoise mine from which the rings my mother and I both bought in Madrid came. We had gotten the impression, from the repeated references that jewelry sellers in Madrid had made to this town, that Cerrillos too would be thronged with shoppers. But the only signs we saw of life in Cerrillos were parked cars and two horses stabled in the interior courtyard of one Main St. home. We saw no people as we drove from First St. to Second St. to Third St. at the backside of town; we felt spooked by the dirt roads, the falling-down storefronts, the faded signs. Cerrillos is a true ghost town—but with people clearly living it, because there were those parked cars, and there were artistic fences around the houses and a sparklingly new-looking Visitor Center. Why they would live there, in a place with literally nothing going on, we could not guess. But we didn’t stick around to find the quirky appeal this time; we left quickly, unnerved, ready to be anywhere in New Mexico other than this not quite deserted shell of a town.  

a home of one's own

It’s not a big house—the one I arrived at yesterday, where I will stay for the next month and write. It’s not big but it feels plentiful—with options and variety forgotten by this long-time one-bedroom-apartment-dweller. When you come through the front door, you find yourself standing in a large, open-ended living room, with dining room and kitchen spaces at one end. To the left there is a hallway off of which lie two bedrooms and a study, two bathrooms, and a deep open alcove that begs for an armchair and a large desert plant with which to bask under the skylight. There are, in fact, skylights everywhere, giving the home an airy feel; and it turns out that there are also nooks scattered throughout. Off the living room, tucked between the laundry room and kitchen, there is a room just big enough for two chairs and a tv beside a shelf of cookbooks. Behind the back wall of the living room, there proves to be on one side a breakfast nook, drenched in daylight from the pebble-filled back “yard” (hello, arid climate), and on the other an open stairwell, into which light pours from above, beckoning you up the carpeted steps. Here perches the one second-floor room of the house, with white walls and windows on every side, so that I can write in the warm glow of a winter sun and facing clay-tile rooftops, adobe facades, the evergreen branches of pines amidst the increasingly barren boughs of one set of deciduous trees side by side with the lush, yellow-leaved tops of others—and above and beyond all this stretches the broad, undulating rock wall that is Sandia Crest.

I came to Albuquerque to work on my writing, to create a space and time outside of my daily life in which to focus deeply on my creativity. Less than 24 hours into my stay, I can already see that I’m going to also be treated to something else soul-essential while I’m here. I’m going to remember what it is like to live in a house, with hallways and outdoor spaces and options for my habitation of it. This room I will use for writing—and maybe morning stretches in the sun. In the living room I will nestle into the comfy couch or armchairs and read books and New Yorkers, catch up on tv, perhaps write as well. If I yearn for more sun during those activities, I will sit in the breakfast nook, by the large sliding glass doors that let in so much light. I might write in the study at the front of the house, maybe even atop the guest room sofa. If I yearn for more comfort, I will go to my bedroom, with its downy-soft bed—and which has a hallway inside it! When I want to feel a sense of movement I will walk up and down the two hallways. It’s a silly thing to have missed immensely but I’ve been craving a hallway for six years now—the whole time I’ve been living alone. It’s probably the same craving that made me antsy to drive here—to just get in the car and go. It’s a little do to with momentum, a little to do with transition, a little to do with having options. It’s a lot to do with a sense of freedom—with having enough space to be all parts of me.

heavily laden

Heavily laden with fruit
the persimmon tree demonstrates an
awkward sort of resilience:

leaf-less, gawky, it would look life-less,
or life-losing, bedecked in so many balls that its
branches give the impression of over-burden.
Yet the unexpectedly glowing orange skin of the tasteless fruits
defies the season to brighten the street.

Heavily laden with fruit
the persimmon tree demonstrates an
awkward sort of resilience,
its spring-like color antithetical,
its cargo both weighing down the tree and enlivening it.

jungle gym

Maybe now I understand how the jungle gym feels
when small feet batter its limbs:
the child's heels dig into the metal with security;
his feet lift from the structure, and return to it, joyful:
he may be bruising my thighs as he kicks off from them, arms encircling my neck,
to feel the rise of a wave from safety,
but I feel no violence enacted upon me.
Bouncing here, shoulder-deep in the sea,
I feel only the trusting tug of his fingers on my hair,
the warm kiss of his tiny lips as he clings to me
between ecstatic rounds of freedom.

hiking in December

The slopes are vibrant with the green of new grass; the streambeds fill musically with water. The red-brown of a hawk looks like rich color against the gray of a deceased tree trunk. Beneath a wintry sky soft with clouds, coyotes stalk the hillsides. A patch of budding daffodils stops me in my tracks; after all, it is December. I, silently composing poetry, find myself smiling. I look up, and the silhouettes of three deer against the yellowing western sky give me delighted pause. This is California in December—wild and living.

I hike alone and smiling. From this vantage point, I can see that I have regained the balance it takes to really live.

in the mood for love

My mom has often worried aloud that it is my parents’ divorce (or, as I might put it, their twenty-two-year-long bad marriage) that lies at the heart of me almost always being single. I’ve tried to assure her that that isn’t so; that I never concluded that marriage was something to avoid. Yet the older I get, and the longer I remain perpetually single, the more I recognize the role my parents played in shaping my thinking about romantic partnership.

I remember seeing my parents kiss once, and only once. That night my dad brought my mother flowers—a large bouquet, probably of roses—and gave them to her in the kitchen. I don’t recall the ensuing kiss lasting very long; but afterward, I think they were smiling. I couldn’t tell you if there were other romantic moments in their marriage; if so, I wasn’t privy to them. There were certainly plenty of fine days, when we enjoyed pleasant family time together along the pine-needled paths of a mountainside or beneath the dark sky of a summer night. But something I never witnessed—had no model for, no real understanding of—was the two of them making decisions together, operating as a unit together. I think of them more in their individual happy places, introducing me each to their own true loves. My mother spent so many hours of my childhood kicking and pulling pottery into beautiful forms, gardening, painting, cooking. My father would entertain us in his study, connecting our Apple IIe to the tv so we could play Frogger and PacMan at his feet while he solved equations on yellow sheets of lined paper; letting us shoot marbles around him in the living room while he paced across the carpet, considering questions of theoretical physics; taking us into the woods of north Georgia and showing us trilia and may apples and the footprints of muskrats. Their passions converged only in nature and Bob Dylan. Their backgrounds—strikingly similar, both with foreign-born Jewish mothers who shed their religion in the light of anti-Semitism and, after coming to the United States, became chemists, and married chemists, and decided in the 1950s to send their children to Unitarian Sunday school to help them fit in; their strikingly similar backgrounds were the thing, I think, that must have drawn them together when they met as PhD students at the same university.

But those commonalities never seemed to suffice in terms of marriage, despite my parents clearly feeling both love and intellectual respect for each other. If I learned one thing from their marriage, it’s that all the love and respect in the world amounts to squat if you can’t actively show it in a productive way; if you can’t change yourself to meet the mutual needs of the two people in love; if you don’t want to change yourself to be half of a dyad committed in love. And because they didn’t seem to want that unification of their two worlds, and because the marriage they did have was so painful for us all, I ended up believing in individualism and independence so much that perhaps, despite all kinds of pining away for certain guys, I never formed a true desire for a relationship at a young age. What I wanted from dating as a teenager and in my early twenties was not the building of a world together—that was so far from my understanding of how life works; all I wanted was to love and be loved. The terror my mother felt about being able to support herself after her divorce had left me fully committed, at age fifteen, to making sure that I could always take care of myself; expecting someone else to do that was not part of any life equation in my mind. When I did fall in love with someone toward the end of college, I think that commitment to thriving on my own may have prevented the magical-seeming development between us from landing where it seemed all along to be heading; may have prevented me from fully letting him in. Being able to identify what doesn’t work isn’t the same as understanding how to pull off the thing that would; I think I was both scared of love and oblivious to how to do it. Though I value immensely my ability to know what I need to be happy all on my own, perhaps in strengthening a part of me up to achieve that I also built walls that kept me from seeing something that so many other people take for granted. It is only in my thirties that I have decided I might not just not mind but also would actually like and truly want to share my world, my heart, my choices with someone else. Having had no model of a strong marriage until my adult years, when my brother and certain friends undertook relationships that I admire, I’ve only recently begun to be able to think of being part of a pair as a good thing without eliciting in myself feelings of guilt.

Having concluded that I would like to get married, that I actively hope to meet someone for whom I am happy to give up some of my independence, is a big step for this girl writing to you right now. It’s a big deal for me to be feeling as I have been this past week. It’s not about the particular person whose visit stimulated these emotions; rather, it’s about me seeing my own comfort in both being playful and sweet with him. It’s about an awakening. After all these years on my own, the prospect that I could one day delight in sharing my world with another now leaves me absolutely, positively in the mood for love.