Firefly ghosts

I saw something today in this old photo of the house where I grew up.


Which memories are ours? Which flow from stories we have been told, family legend and myth, year after year until we can recite them by heart?

My home is a ghost.

Like a phantom limb, I recall my home, sometimes dream of it, haunted by the memory, the textures. It itches and burns that I can’t recall it fully; I wish I could remember how the house smelled, the specific color of the light that filtered through the dust on its windows. When I lived there, the windows wouldn’t have been immaculate. It was the 1960s and ‘70s, and my family wasn’t concerned with Martha Stewart cleanliness. An old farmhouse, I don’t know when it was built, or whether the windows I looked through were its first windows.

My house was sacrificed to expand the park next door. What was our driveway now leads to a soccer field. I remember being glad--if my house disappeared, at least no one else would get to live in it. My house was burned as a fire exercise (how routine and usual that word made it sound, almost boring!), and as an adult I can appreciate that: the death of my house helped firefighters learn how to save other homes. But in a more perfect world, I wish I could have stayed in that house, returned to it from college, and after. Perhaps I am clinging to childhood, grabbing hold of something that never was. We were renters, so we couldn’t affect the fate of that house. Only, at my mother’s request, before the orchestrated arson, the village relocated one year’s live Christmas tree to the east edge of the lot. Today, that evergreen is the only living thing left of my home. (The tree was probably 5 feet tall when it was our Christmas tree. Seeing it now, thirty feet tall, taller, always amazes me.) A marker, an homage to our house.

And that house marked me. The one time I had to have stitches as a kid was when I ran from the landing upstairs down sixteen steps (was it sixteen? Did I ever actually count?) and through the kitchen, dining, and living rooms, arms extended in front of me, to push open the glass storm door, which shattered around my body. Somehow, the only damage was a cut in my right underarm, only five stitches needed (but oh, how I recall screaming at the light in my face in the doctor’s office!). Perhaps because it involved fear and physical pain, that was my own glass-shard memory, not pulled from the family epics. I still have a scar under my arm, which I unconsciously touch sometimes, run fingers over the ghost-wound’s raised tissue, proving that the house really existed.

In many ways, maybe in every way, the childhood home of my generation is gone too. No one I knew locked their doors. We kids spent days at the pool in the park next door, only going home for meals, and rode the new bike path along West South College Street downtown for Steiff little bears or beaded necklaces, no helmets, no pads, bare feet against rubber pedals; once I caught my toe in the spokes and it bled like water. But, after my foot was bandaged up and had healed enough, I got back on my bike, maybe still barefoot, and went onward, breezing through the streets tourists now call quaint. Those streets, our streets, are quaint. For our quaintness, we are praised and objectified. For our quaintness, we sometimes stagnate in a utopian memory that we’re not sure ever existed. But quaint is too tiny to describe the potholes, the puddles I tromped through, quaint won’t sanitize the mud from our superficially idyllic town, full of unsavory shadows, quaint won’t scour those memories, those apparitions.

Everyone has visceral memories of childhood. But here, in my narrow, sentimental view of our little Whoville, those ghostly memories were captured like fireflies in a glass Deaf Smith peanut butter jar, holes can-opener punched in the lid, and somehow, for me, in the morning, those fireflies weren’t dead carcasses. Sleeping? Maybe.

So I moved back.

I recall the moment I decided to return to my home town. Visiting from Seattle, where I lived for seven years, I was sitting at the counter at the a local cafe, looking out at people passing on the sidewalk with my then boyfriend. Unprompted, he said, “I could live here.” For some reason, when he said that, I began to cry. At the time I thought they were happy tears, but now I know they were bittersweet--moving back home would be a complex, beautiful salve for me (are those the fireflies I see, and are they waking?) but a very painful compromise for him, a home that wouldn’t last. I remember thinking at the time, though, looking through the old glass of the cafe storefront, how exciting, how right it would be to honor my childhood, reconnect with home.

Now, a new, adult view of town pleases me. Now I sip wine and write novels at that cafe, which some good friends bought last year. Many things provide fuel, inspiration for creative work, for life, for renewal. And slowly I’ve come to understand that just because my actual house isn’t here anymore, my home merely expanded. The womb of home is larger, and includes all of my hometown. Not only the town itself, but its satisfying, imperfect myth. The firefly memory.

* * *
Last year, when my new husband and I bought a house three miles from town, I was thrilled to keep our telephone prefix, to still have a hometown mailing address. I love our new home. And I mean no disrespect, but when people ask me how’s the next town over, I’m quick to clarify that technically, we still live in my hometown.

Real estate. Real estate. Growing up, my family rented, so we had to vacate when the village expanded the park. Maybe that’s why, even with the allure of Seattle seducing me, I felt such a pull to come home. For decades now, I have periodically dreamed of that house at 318 West South College Street. (Don’t look for it, it isn’t there.) I have immortalized it in a novel.

Dreams about 318 West South College Street are as welcome to me as dreams of flying.

In my most recent dream, the house was still there. Untouched since my family moved out over 20 years ago, it was for sale. My husband and I went to look, we would buy it, clean it up, renovate. Reclaim. But if it were still there, could we actually afford to buy it now? Would it have been restored by someone else, some stranger, and sold at a crazy-high market value? And what is the market value of a ghost?

Everybody row

About a month ago, I got an email. Early in the morning. I read and re-read the subject. Was I dreaming? Did it really say:

“Tom Waits Announces Tour Dates!”

For a long time, I’ve had a recurring dream. This is my dream: Tom Waits is playing the small college town where I live, or sometimes it’s the town where I went to college. He wants to hang out with me and my friends, just sitting around talking in the alley, or a friend’s house. Sometimes, when everyone else in the dream is in college, and I’m almost 40, he notices me across the room as the mature one, a woman among college-aged girls, and he and I hang out. Sometimes he and I fall for each other.

I recall reading Tom Waits loves his record label because they don’t mind if he wants to go play a 300-seat auditorium in Lisbon.

I looked at the email. A couple years ago, I had signed up for an email list announcing Tom Waits tours, in case he were ever to play anywhere I could actually get to. When I subscribed to the mail list, I got a weird error message, so I assumed the list was defunct. Resigned to checking his record label website periodically to see if he was going anywhere besides Frankfurt, or Budapest, I dreamt of flying across the world to see him. I have often thought that cliché, but it’s true: if there’s one person I’d want to see perform before he expires, or I expire, it’s Tom Waits.

But...I read the email. Not only is he touring, he’s playing two dates within a 3 hours’ drive from my home. A choice of venues. In my mind, the Orphans tour is for us orphans out here in the “flyover” states. I’ve been struggling with writing my new novel, which is partially inspired by the clang und dram of Tom Waits’ syncopation, his bangs and textures. Metal and earth. Grit and rust. Sometimes a Tom Waits song feels like the only thing that gets me, slogging, through the day...misery’s the river of the world, everybody row...



I saw something today in this poster of Tom Waits, which a fan posted on The Eyeball Kid. Tom’s looking out at the orphans, maybe he’s weary, who can tell, he always looks like his odometer has turned over at least once, yeah, he’s racked up plenty of miles, but, notoriously unkeen of touring, he’s coming here anyway. For us. In my crazy rabid fan-tasy, he’s coming here to inspire me, to remind me I still got an oar, I still can row...

The best lilac ever

Last spring, my husband and I fell in love with a small house on the edge of a state park. The house is tiny, but very charming, and located on about an acre of green velvet...the land slopes down to an ancient rock wall, and a creek that feeds into a splendid gorge. We weren’t really looking for a house, but this place was too wonderful to ignore. So we sold our house in town and moved out to the country.

Our former house had few trees in the yard, but it did have one venerable white lilac. Someone told me it could be more than 50 years old. Sprawling and wide, the white lilac slouched unassuming in the back yard, visible from the dining room window. The white lilac, like me, had good and bad years while I lived in that house. But for the lilac, good years meant mounds of white popcorn-ish blooms, which I’d scramble to cut before they faded. Overflowing the kitchen table or my office desk, it was easy for me to be generous, give away blowsy bouquets, and save armfuls of fragrance from rotting on the tree. On our first wedding anniversary, a crazy April snowstorm fell on the white lilac blooms, and a mother robin, nursing a nest of eggs in the crook of the tree, looked quite unamused.

Before we turned over the old house, we dug up a spindle from the white lilac, a shoot that had snuck up near its base. My husband planted this lilac sprout at the new house, so we could remember a piece of our past. And thankfully, I have a lot of photos of the old white lilac.

So I’ve struggled with words to describe how I felt when I passed the old house recently and saw that the new owners had Cut. Down. The. White. Lilac. Tree. Words like angry, sad, sick to my stomach weren’t strong enough—I needed words like RAGEFUL, DEVASTATED, and I needed to capitalize them. I felt like throwing up, like purging all my insides. I couldn’t blog about it right way; I needed to calm down. I needed a cooler heart.

Because of various unpleasant details, routine in closing any real estate deal, I’d been fighting my urge to dislike the people who bought our house. What now seem like little things annoyed me, and I thought I’d gotten past it, no reason to hold onto anger, after all, I love our new house and life is good. I rarely feel like committing physical violence, but when I saw the lilac lying in loggish pieces on the lawn, the fireball in my gut urged me to reconsider my pacifism. As I think of it now, I still have to fight back a deep and visceral disgust.

Until now, I thought I was only a metaphorical tree-hugger. But this was the best lilac tree ever. How could someone kill it? Did they do it from ignorance; did they know what kind of tree it was? Or did they do it on purpose, in which case, how evil! I’ve thought up all kinds of clichés about it, the tree was too good for this world, the new owners don’t deserve that tree anyway, on and on. I don’t want to carry venom toward these people, but how can I ever forgive them?



I saw something today in this spindly baby lilac, this offspring. As I sift through the myriad feelings this felled tree brought up, I am beyond relieved that we took a piece of the august white lilac. That the spindle survived! It won’t bloom this year, but maybe next, or the year after.... Is what I see in this baby lilac something like hope?

White noise

White noise lulled me as I slept in New York City, and when I woke and looked out the window, its source surprised me.

A cement mixer, directly in front of the hotel. Though cylindrical, (and therefore not an officially sanctioned shape, according to my very patriotic high school American history teacher) it bore an American flag on its torso. The mixer extruded cement into some sieve or strainer, and it was unclear where the cement was actually going. Did it matter? Like a cigarette butt, isn’t it just better if it’s out of my car? Who cares if, after I toss it from my car, it turns up in the park, sodden in the grass, perhaps never to biodegrade? (Where is their patriotism? Don’t our parks matter? When I see people do this, I want to call the cops. Or better, Homeland Security.)

If America (in the form of this working vehicle) squeezes out the cement and it goes somewhere, anywhere, so it can fortify, build a better America, or at least a newer one, reinforcing the lack of grass everywhere, increasing the possibility of flooding elsewhere, it will be a stronger America, reinforced by this substance, stimulating some abstract notion of economy, employing some underpaid humans.

I saw something today in this patriotic cement mixer. The white noise helped me sleep in, comfortable in my vacation bed, as the mixer turned, moving, changing, extruding something for some concrete reason, I’m sure, and I slept, wondering whether I was being bitten by bed bugs (there’s an epidemic in the city, I’ve read, and my skin believed it was under attack, even though it wasn’t, because one never knows, they could be terrorist vermin!) All this on 23rd Street, in the city that, when wounded, inspired the rest of the country slap a little patriotism on our own vehicles in the form of the ubiquitous magnetic American flags. Someone is making a fortune off those. (I got a magnetic yellow ribbon a while ago, to demonstrate that we liberals care about the soldiers too, but it fell off. It’s probably languishing in the park with the cigarette butts.)

Melting

How much stuff does a person need?

I come from generations of consummate packrats. So the myriad cardboard boxes that followed me when I moved across the US to Seattle had historical context. When I moved back to Ohio, my boxes traipsed back too, cardboard tails between cardboard legs. Many of the same boxes. Those boxes haunted me for years. In quiet moments, they tugged at me; I should really sort those out, I’d think, organize them by topic, label, categorize, get some swankier boxes, see if I really want to keep all that...all that what? Who knew what was in those boxes; in my nightmares, the piles coalesced into a towering grey jumble of things I needed, treasures, placeholders--so I could remember every detail of the miles I’d traveled. A buffer from the terror of forgetting.

Finally, moving into a smaller house forced me to face the boxes, to peel away layers of myself, my history, things I thought I couldn’t live without. Boxes and bags of stuff were sold at yard sales, given to friends, donated to charity, left for trashpickers at the curb. (The cumulative feeling of all this letting go was heady exhilaration. What I had left were the really important things, and, dross gone, I saw those things more clearly. Like editing an overfull sentence down to a few perfect words. My only regret is a pair of well-worn cowboy boots some early bird swooped up for $10 one of the yard sales. But if I truly need cowboy boots again, I’ll find something better.)

Like frozen matter, stuff calcifies with the myth of memory, stuff collects felty dust, stuff dictates how we live. Why is it so hard to let go of stuff, even stuff that’s broken, spent, forgotten, rotten, moldy, stuff that triggers sad memories...stuff that should long ago have been given over to the cockroaches? Stuff threatens to suffocate, bury; stuff becomes an unbearable burden. When I walk through the hall, the precarious pile of my stuff, even in my phantom-limb memory, slides to the floor, slippery as dead fish.

I saw something today in this partially unfrozen waterfall near where I live. The spring melt allows the water to move, unobstructed by ice, flowing on to the next experience. New memories to remember, to move through, and let go. A good start.

Emerging

What will happen when I gather the embroidery floss and start the improvisation of face? Will the right face emerge? (Will it be a good face?)

Can I trust the process of emerging, and my memories, to sustain me as I create this monkey’s face? How can these stitches possibly hold enough love?

In the early 1990s, a friend told me the story of how her parents took away her toys too soon. She was maybe ten years old. She hadn’t been done with them. In particular, she pined for her sock monkey, floppy and enchanting, dependable...its disposal was one stretch of her stolen childhood she had never forgotten.

I decided to make her a new sock monkey.

Since then, I’ve made a lot of sock monkeys for adults. Using Red Heel socks I stitch by hand, and watch each monkey emerge. Lumpish and lovable. With each monkey, I have tried to echo something of the recipient’s aesthetic, or some piece of his or her life...each monkey means something specific.

Making monkeys for babies is more difficult. Not knowing the future person who will cling to that monkey, I can only presume the child will be, in some way, like its parents. But even if I have touched the mother’s full belly, there’s no crystalline detail to play with while creating the monkey’s face. For babies, I attempt a face that will amuse and delight: a curlicue of bliss, or humor, but most importantly, a friendly face.

I saw something today in this monkey’s blank, blind face. This monkey is for the baby of a friend I have not seen in several years. I think the child will need a lot of support and love, and I can only do that from afar. How can I convey this in cotton, thread, and stuffing? How can I pour into the small stitches all these complicated wishes?