Rebecca Brewster Stevenson's Blog: Small Hours, page 4

Maddie and the Hoffer Award

[image error]So, maybe you’ve heard it said that writing a book is like giving birth, and publishing it is like sending one’s child out into the world.

I have said that, and so have scores of others (although this one disagrees and makes some excellent points while she’s at it). The comparison works less for the degree of love and/or difficulty (parenting is fundamentally more in both regards) than it is the sense of personal investment, I think. To write something well is to labor over it in thought and deed for what is likely a Very Long Time. To make a story believable is to have drawn, again and again, from one’s personal understanding and experience. And although the result is not necessarily memoir, autobiography, or even that personal experience (I can, off the top of my head, point to perhaps three moments in Healing Maddie Brees that actually reside in my living memory), the finished book is naturally an extension of its author.

Not quite one’s heart walking around outside one’s body–as they say of children–but close.

And so, like parenting, having a novel out in the world requires a thick skin and the educated understanding that one’s book is not for everyone. Not everyone likes literary fiction, for example. Some read less for thought-provocation and more for entertainment, distraction, relief. Some people don’t like description, can’t work with metaphor, like their tales neatly told.

And this is Fine. The world needs all kinds of books. And all kinds of readers.

I don’t expect everyone who reads her to like Maddie. I don’t expect everyone I see to have read her. I never want to be the author that people duck and run from because they haven’t read or don’t like my book.

Most of the time I am not thinking about Maddie these days anyway. This is due, in part, to the satisfaction of having finished with the book: it’s done. The ideas that compelled me and overtook my brain are quieted now, perhaps like so much labor pain. And it’s due, in part, to work on a different project, a new book that will be finished soon and out in the world shortly thereafter and that necessarily occupies much of the mental space that used to belong to Maddie (details soon).

Still, it is lovely when people mention her to me, ask me how she’s faring in the world, express interest in or appreciation of the book. That is very kind. I love the novel and am exceedingly proud of her. And I still have great hope that more people will discover all she has to offer.

Recently Maddie has had some rather excellent attention: the novel was considered for the prestigious Eric Hoffer Award, a top literary prize for small, academic, and independent presses.

My publisher nominated the book; being new (still) to the world of publishing, I have little to no idea about prizes until my publishers teach me–which they do. So in early May I learned that not only had Healing Maddie Brees been nominated for the Hoffer Award, but that she was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, an award within the Hoffer prize that honors the most thought-provoking books.

Then came Friday’s news. The final awards were out, and my Maddie had done very well, indeed. The book was a finalist for both the Grand Prize and the Montaigne Medal, and she earned an honorable mention in the fiction category for the Grand Prize.

Oh. My.

Here’s what they had to say about the book:

This tale of physical and spiritual healing unfolds as a combination of current struggle and meaningful back story. The novel relates the tough process of recovery from cancer, misbelief in God, disbelief in God, alienation in marriage, and doubt. Perhaps the biggest battle faced by Maddie Brees is the need to be healed from a perverse self-centeredness. The superb writing conveys present and past with compelling images, beautiful words, and a lovely and relentless pace, even while skillfully confronting questions that belong in a theology class. The result is a story of wonderful characters who act so human in overcoming the pitfalls of life, love, and belief without the blatant miracle.

Friends.

I have duly formed a thick skin. I know that not everyone will like my book. And from time to frequent time, I am struck anew with insecurity: maybe the book isn’t as good as I hoped, as I thought. Maybe what I have for this book is that blanketing mother-love that sees beauties no one else can see. And would anything be wrong with that?

No. The creator loves what she creates. It is enough to do one’s best.

But when, from time to time, I discover someone who sees and understands Maddie, who appreciates the struggle and beauty I tried so hard and for so long to tuck into those pages, well.

I think it’s fair to say that it’s similar to–though not quite the same–as witnessing one’s grown child thriving out there in the world.

(That’s my girl!)

And I’m grateful.

 

 

 

 

Opening Like Hands

From the Willow Room in the Prince Conference Center at Calvin College, one can see willow trees.

They stand at some distance from the building, at least one hundred yards away, and during the lecture on self-editing a manuscript, I watched these trees. They were huge. Their branches were many. And all of these branches–those fine, pliable, long willow branches moving in the wind–were yellow: the beginnings of leaves.

My mother says that willows are the first to get their leaves in the spring and, in the fall, are the last ones to lose them.

***

Heading home from Michigan on Saturday, we drove through West Virginia and saw that spring had come to the woods.

The trees themselves were still empty. The mountains all around us were like heads with crew-cuts, I said: their trees stood straight and bare as sticks, as bare as close-cropped hair. Between them we could see the forest floor exposed, like so much scalp.

But spring is a todder: it starts knee-high. The green creeps along the forest floor, appearing first in shrubs and bushes.

At home, we had that stage weeks ago, and then the trees sprouted the pinks and incandescences of seed and flower. Over the four days we were gone, I expected this would change. Once it starts, it seems to me– and no matter how many times winter comes banging back into the room– the green of spring is unstoppable: It will come. It is coming. It’s here.

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***

I don’t like change, and I see this fact as flaw. It’s an evolutionary disaster, really: failure to adapt.

But it isn’t that I don’t adapt. It’s that, when I see the need coming, I simply don’t want to.

***

At home now, from the breakfast room window, I watch again the way the young maple leaves open like so many hands. The beech trees that line the trail, that retreat into the woods, hold their furled parchment leaves close all winter–and then suddenly they shed them. Beech trees stand naked for a breath, for a day, and then they are bursting with green.

Walking the dog, I stop to pull a new-greened branch toward me and gently touch one leaf. It is thin and pale or deeply green. And it is fabric-soft, like wet paper, like infant skin, like a fine layer of tissue torn from the roof of your mouth.

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***

I have watched many springs make their entrance. I am never tired of it. When the seeds and flowers and green start to come, it’s like I can’t tear my eyes away. I’m distracted by the green everywhere along the side of the road, compelled by the growing green outside my bedroom window.

When my daughter-in-law and I departed for our four-day trip, I regretted that I would miss some of the approach of green.

***

There is the change that blind-sides and devastates, the change that means grief. No one wants that kind of change–and while we have known that type before, this is not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the kind of change that means growth and life and that still and nonetheless, I so often do not want. We have had much of that kind of change around here lately with yet more to come, and all of it has been very good.

***

I wonder if I watch the oncoming green because I’m hoping for something new in it, something I’ve never noticed before. On Monday I discovered that the newborn leaves of the pin-oak are pink and even a pale magenta– only on their edges, and only when they are very, very new.

But I like what is familiar in it, too, of course. The maple leaves, as I said, opening like hands, and then the wind comes along and moves them, and I stand there watching them longer than is reasonable because it is just so beautiful.

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Space

Weekdays, I can count on three emails in my inbox. One is the New York Times Daily Briefing, which, on good days, I read with care. The second is from theSkimm, also a daily news summary and which again, on good days, I read with care.

And the third is from Merriam-Webster: their Word-of-the-Day. They give me the word itself in the subject line, but I have to open the email to find out what it means. Every day it’s a small contest for me: Do I know this word, or must I read the email to find out? It’s a win-win.

Recent words I have already known: “abide,” “sensibility,” “delegate,” “grandiose.” Recent words I haven’t: “thimblerig,” “vanward,” “manticore,” “yegg,” and “hachure.”

Thursday’s word was “veld,” and I knew it instantly, but opened the email anyway because the word made me happy.

And then I saw I was wrong. I do know the word “veld,” but I had confused it with something else.

***

All of this is done from my phone, usually standing at the kitchen counter where I have left it overnight. These three emails, as I have said, are always in my inbox on weekdays, but invariably there are others, and more accumulate over the course of the day.

I typically read these three and the most pressing others immediately, but the rest have the tendency to languish, as I hate dealing with email on my phone.

Instead, I use it for other things, like texting and browsing Instagram, looking up recipes, listening to sermons and podcasts, getting directions, looking at Facebook, and, occasionally, talking with people.

I am busy with my phone a lot.

***

My error with “veld” was the vowel. I read it and thought it was “vald,” which is German for forest–and that should have made me realize my error immediately, because Merriam-Webster’s words of the day are English words, and the English word for “forest” is, well, “forest.”

But it’s indicative of my problem with words that I immediately thought it was “vald,” because words are such delightful and heady things for me. I think my brain stands ready on the instant to be taken with a word, and this is what happened on Thursday morning as I (this time) sat in the sunshine on our front steps eating my granola and checking my email. I think, subconsciously, I wanted the word to be “vald.”

***

Recently a friend told me about an article she’d read about phone addiction. Apparently, people go to therapy for phone addiction. They go to rehab.

I found this unsettling. And then understandable. After all, we have been warned. I am sure you’ve noticed it yourself, and then there are articles galore (this recent one on rehab among them) about our walking, heads bent to our phones; our waiting, heads bent to our phones; our eating in restaurants with–you know–heads bent to our phones.

There is much of excellent value on the phone, right? Recipes and news updates are only some of the many worthwhile resources at our fingertips. And in many ways, social media are among the best of these. When seeing a friend at the gym, I love being able to ask about her recent trip to the beach–something I enjoyed tangentially through her posts to Instagram. I love my friends’ adorable dog (or cat) pictures, their children’s grins or artwork, even a shot of that amazing meal they ate last night.

But a ten-second plunge into the world of Instagram (or Twitter or Facebook) can find me surfacing twenty minutes later, completely unaware I’d been under for so long–and completely unaware, during that plunge, of the world immediately around me.

***

I think I wanted the Merriam-Webster Word-of-the-Day to be “vald” because I’ve known it first-hand. For three breath-taking months before we had children, Bill and I lived in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Our village was perched on the side of some foothills: smooth, mounding land maintained by grazing cows.

Above these pastures, between our village and the snow-covered mountains in the distance, stood the “vald.” Occasionally we would go walking here, following paths through the pastureland and then into the woods.

[image error]Me and my beloved Swiss neighbor and friend Susanne, heading into the vald.

The air is different inside. Snow-covered or roofed and shot through with green, the trees stand very tall and close together. One has a sense of the forest’s vastness: any direction looks very much like another, and its ceiling– the green boughs of trees– is both vaulting and enclosed. I found it beautiful for its silence, for the impression of being hidden and secret. One can have the sense of being submerged there. One can plunge into it, if you will.

Several fairy tales take place in the vald, remember? Children get lost in it. It is beautiful and also, often, very dark.

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***

I decided to put a new app on my phone to help me track how much I use it. The app, interestingly, is called “Space,” and it started with a brief questionnaire to determine what kind of phone-user I am (fighting boredom? getting side-tracked? plumbing rabbit-holes?) and then offered me a time limit.

I think it’s first suggestion was about two hours. It offered me two+ hours and 50 unlocks daily–both of which seemed too much to me. So I dialed it down. My goal is an hour max on the phone and unlocking it, over the course of the day, no more than 30 times.

Now the app will occasionally and briefly let me know how long I’ve been on it and how many times I’ve unlocked it already in a day. This is annoying when I’ve unlocked it 20 times because of an extended family-text conversation (“I had to,” I want to tell it). And it’s frustrating that minutes accumulate both during a 40-minute conversation with my parents and a ten-minute indulgence on Facebook. But it’s good to know when I’m just unlocking it to peruse Instagram–which I know I could conceivably and thoughtlessly do for a Long Time.

***

Thursday’s Merriam-Webster Word-of-the-Day was “veld,” which is an English word but which comes from Afrikaans, which comes from Dutch, which is related to German (so–maybe–my confusion?). And, interestingly, it also names a type of landscape–but it is one that is, perhaps, the direct opposite of a “vald.”

The veld is open grassland with the occasional shrub or tree, and it pertains specifically to such landscapes as found in southern Africa. But it may also be used freely of similar landscapes in other parts of Africa. I have found, for example, that it can and has been used of Kenya. The veld is a grassland, a prairie.  A savannah, if you will.

***

I would like to think that using my phone connects me with others. And it does (see the aforementioned notes about friends’ photos on Instagram– and there are those occasional and delightful Facebook conversations that can include input from multiple circles of my life).

But there is a dark interior world, I find, when it comes to my phone use. One that, on the surface, looks like it’s about other people and connecting with them, but that ultimately isn’t. What is it, I wonder, about this near-interaction that gets me turned in on myself, that has me thinking about me in comparison with others, that finds me (sometimes) less genuinely loving and more critical than I otherwise might be–than I want to be?

I would like to think that my phone is a gateway to life outside myself. Often it is. And often enough, it’s the opposite.

***

Once, when our children were ten, eight, and six, we spent some time in the Kenyan veld. It was the tail-end of a trip to Nairobi. My husband had started a music festival for a non-profit in a slum near the city, and he wanted to take our children there to see what we were supporting: the excellent work of the Kenyan woman who started it and the people who worked there and were served by it.

This trip to a developing nation didn’t come at what felt like a good time to me. I had just finished an exhausting first year back to teaching, and we were at the airport at six the next morning. At that time, no one from our church had taken such young children there, and I had been warned it might be dangerous. And fatigue played its tricks on me: despite our capable and experienced leadership, I was very anxious about safety.

But it was an amazing trip. Our children played with and enjoyed the children at Beacon of Hope, and I was befriended and taught to weave by women who worked there. It was an eye-opening experience for all of us, a chance to know and understand how different others’ lives can be–and also how much the same.

[image error]An eight-year-old Everett with some new-found friends in Kware, Nairobi

 

This was two years before we had Facebook accounts. The first iPhone had only been released the year before. Instagram didn’t exist yet. And we spent the entire sixteen days with our heads up, our eyes and ears open, alive to the experiences immediately around us.

It didn’t fully register with me until we were on the Masai Mara that a safari was the planned rest and debriefing at the end of our trip–and that a safari had always been, since I was maybe sixteen, on my proverbial bucket list.

***

The easiest course, obviously, is to rid myself of the distraction. I should lose the phone.

But it isn’t the phone’s fault, and neither is it the fault of the friend on Instagram. The fault lies with me, not in what I see but in the way I see it, in what I think about and how I think about it, in what fills my mind, my imagination, my heart– regardless of the phone and long after the phone is turned off, put away, abandoned to the kitchen counter for the night.

***

The sky above the lodge was dark as we made our way up the hill. We were still waking up, pulling on extra layers and rubbing our eyes. Behind us our white tents glowed dimly among trees and low-growing plants, while ahead of us shone the lodge, surrounded with more cultivated vegetation. The whole resort was sculpted lawn, shining pool, manicured gardens. During the day and tucked in our tents at night, we felt like we were in the jungle. We lay awake fearing and a little bit hoping that we would hear the lions.

The touring trucks came for us just before daybreak, when the animals on the savannah would likely be feeding. We boarded them but didn’t sit down, holding on instead to the open framework of the trucks, already leaning into the cool Kenyan morning air.

We were there for only three nights, and this was our practice, early morning and evening, five times over the course of that stay.

How many times is enough? We never tired of it: driving away from the lodge in the near-dark, eyes wide and watching. We were looking for herds of elephants and zebra, for the mythical, long-necked giraffes. We wanted to see wildebeests in the wild and the graceful Thompson gazelles, the spotted cheetah all a blur as she chased her prey. We hoped for lions lolling along the dirt road, for a glimpse of a rhino–even if this only came from a distance.

But first we had to drive away from the lodge and the jungle of green that surrounded it. We had to go into the veld.

 

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Missing Everett

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Everett has been away from us now for five months, one week and four days.

I didn’t know the exact count until preparing to write that first sentence: I haven’t been marking the calendar with an x every day; I haven’t been keeping a countdown.

Which isn’t to say I don’t miss him, that we don’t miss him. Every once in a while, one of us will just say so: “I miss Everett.” A short, honest utterance that is as apropos at a family birthday celebration as it is in an otherwise silent car while waiting at a traffic light. Everett’s absence from among us, while neither unhappy nor unsettling, is also not welcome. Things are not as we prefer them.

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He has been serving with YWAM, first in Hawaii and, for the last several months, in the Caribbean–mostly in Haiti. It’s the travel portion of his gap year, a grace of time between high school and college. This was the program he chose: one that allowed him to do some sailing, that gave him a chance to travel and serve others, that fostered his love for Jesus.

Meanwhile, we go about the business of missing him, which on the surface doesn’t look much different from when he is home. We are doing basically the same things–just without Everett.

Of the (now) six of us, Everett is the quiet Stevenson, the one most likely to come or go without announcing it, to be engaged in what he wants to do without bothering anyone else.

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In light of that, we have pretended from time to time that he’s still home–which is pleasant for about ten seconds. He could just be downstairs, we tell ourselves, or on his way home from work.

And we jump when he calls. The other night Emma was talking with him, and suddenly she cried out in a pained-but-still-happy sort of way and said, “Everett, I just remembered that thing you do when you want to get a sip of my drink!”

Immediately I saw it, too: Everett leaning toward her glass or drinking straw, pursing his lips, making a silly sound. He does it often enough, but I hadn’t thought of it in months because that joke of a gesture belongs to him.

We were sitting on the living room sofa when he called. I was waiting for my turn to talk with him, and when Emma recalled aloud that simple gesture, my heart just sort of bottomed out from missing him, missing all the things that make him Everett, his inimitable, adorable, silly and deeply thoughtful self.

We have a space in our lives shaped like Everett. No one else can fill that.

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***

I think there are two basic types of mothers. The first type watches eagerly for her children to achieve. She wants them to grow up, move on and out, find their way in the world.

The other kind rejoices in the achievements, but does so with a wary eye. She is keenly aware of what these developments mean: that her child will grow up all too soon; the baby she has loved will be gone. Her child’s childhood will be over, and she doesn’t want that. Not really.

Each type has strengths: impulses and practices that nurture children. And, I suppose, each has its weaknesses.

Confession (if you haven’t guessed it already): I fall firmly–for better or worse–into the latter type.

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***

I follow an Instagram account that celebrates the glories of early motherhood. In truth, I follow it because I like how its owner decorates her home, but I enjoy the pictures of her several children and the busy-ness that I remember so well.

But there was a picture not long ago that, it would seem, I will never forget– less for the image than the text beneath it. The picture was, of course, Instagram-worthy: outdoors on a bright summer day and a clothesline, draped in bedding, in the foreground. The sun filled the sheets; the sheets gapped and gave on to the focal point: a galvanized tub sitting in the grass, and in it, happily playing, a chubby and apparently naked baby.

It was a beautiful image. A scene of domestic contentment, of cleanliness achieved in exceptional simplicity.

And the text beneath it, in the voice of the Instragammer herself: “My mother told me that I will never be this happy again.”

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Is that true? Is that springtime of life, when one’s children are very small, the happiest time? When you know they are safe in their beds at night, their stomachs full of good things and their minds with pleasant dreams?

When nothing goes truly wrong for them and–if it does–you can make it all go away?

***

Everett went off to school in the second grade, age seven-and-a-half. I had homeschooled him and his siblings before that. His world was his house and his backyard, the neighbor children and cul-de-sac, errands with mom and playdates with friends and the climbing structures on the mulch-lined playgrounds of our church.

His siblings took to school without hesitation, but this was not true for Everett. He struggled mightily for a month with a level of distress we didn’t quite know how to handle. The fact that I was teaching at his school was of no comfort: we were in separate buildings, and his building felt huge. The children in the hallways overwhelmed him; the noise and even the smells of this unfamiliar place were too much.

There came a day when he was able to articulate his problem. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his classroom, his teachers, his new friends. It was that he wasn’t sure I knew where he was. With trips to the gym, the art and music rooms, with excursions to the playground, how could he be sure we could find each other at the end of the day?

As if I would leave school without him. As if I wouldn’t notice, pulling out of the parking lot, that he wasn’t in the car.

As if, were he to go missing, his father and I wouldn’t move heaven and earth to find and bring him home.

So I printed out a copy of his class schedule, and I hung it above my desk, and I showed it to him. See, I told him. Now I will always know where you are.

It helped.

***

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In my most recent conversation with Everett, he told me about a weekend trip he had just returned from. They hiked to a remote region of Haiti, to a community of people who live without electricity or running water. Everett and his friends slept on benches or in their hammocks, and the nights were frigid. The days were spent getting to know the people who lived there and helping with a building project. And then they hiked home again.

Everett said it was his favorite part of his time in Haiti.

***

To say that I don’t miss my children’s childhoods would be a lie. For many reasons, their childhoods were a difficult time, but that hasn’t stopped me, far more than once, from wishing it all back again.

I think I remember mostly in photographs. I see images in my mind of them doing this or that. If I give myself a minute, I can conjure a voice or a recollected phrasing. There are the things Bill and I repeat to one another, something he or she said that have become part of our lexicon, even part of our way of articulating the world.

But was I happiest then, when they were young? Could the world–and life–be at its best for me when, for them, the world was sometimes overlarge and frightening?

Or am I happier now–for all I miss their littleness–when one of them is happily married, another showing such strength of character on soccer field, in school chorus, and among her peers in the hallways of her high school?

And when one of them ventures to Haiti and spends months of his young life there, who says that it is difficult but never complains, who sees and comes to love and appreciate  lives so different from his own?

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***

Everett comes home in sixteen days and about one anda half hours. Among others, I will be waiting for him at the airport.

I think he will be able to find me easily enough.

 

 

Contingencies

Lately I am thinking of contingency.

Standing in her office, my editor recently reminded me that writing is a job just as ditch-digging is. The ditch must be dug. Must not also the writing be written?

She is right, of course. The ditch-digger goes to work and digs her ditch; so must the writer go to work and write her pages.

But, I think (my mind swelling with contingencies), must the ditch be dug in all weathers? And are not the graduation of a son/the marriage of another/the departure for six months of the former all grounds for writing’s suspension? What writing wants–I tell myself, I tell her (who is herself a writer and also not present during this rationalization)–what writing wants is level emotional space in which to write. One wants peace and quiet and non-upheaval, all of which (lately) have been difficult to come by.

***

My parents were here for over a week. They came, along with a beloved aunt, for Thanksgiving, and so for a time we were back to our usual number (+1) in this sweet little house.

We went for walks, we played games, we ate great food, we talked. And around the edges my father removed and stored all our window-screens for the winter. He replaced light switches and repaired a broken lamp and rescued two computer chargers that had been almost too thoroughly chewed by a certain rabbit (I’m not naming names). My mother finished my mending (languishing since time out of mind at the foot of my bed) and did all the laundry and cleaned up the kitchen most days before I could get to it myself.

I did not do any writing, and I do not feel bad about that in the least. Neither–if she knew–would my editor.

***

Yesterday’s loneliness was contingent on all of this. Emma had gone back to school, Bill was away, and our beloved guests had gone home. The dog, two cats, and offending rabbit, while present, offered little comfort.

I might have gotten some writing done. Indeed, my days’ contents are contingent on the demands of my work–except that yesterday my car needed repair.

And so for a while yesterday morning, my well-being was entirely contingent on the sanity and tow-truck-driving skill of a boy-man named Seth with a ZZ Top beard on his chin and a three-year-old son at home; and our comfort throughout the thirty minute drive depended on our ability to make decent conversation or for me, on the other hand, to stare out the window or immerse myself in my phone.

***

Everything hinges on everything else. Or, better said, everything hinges on something.

Refrigerator space is contingent on our finishing the leftovers.

A flushing toilet is contingent on good plumbing.

My happiness is contingent on the well-being of a very specific group of others–including my parents, who yesterday and again today are traveling north; and my husband, who yesterday was traveling south; my daughter, who is mere miles away at school; my daughter-in-law, who is gift and delight; and my sons, one of whom is currently residing on a island in the Pacific.

***

Seth earned his commercial driver’s license because another job fell through and he needed work. Currently, he has a class B license, which allows him to drive vehicles weighing 26,001 pounds or heavier. As we pulled onto the highway, we watched the rear wheels of a tractor trailer smoke, stutter, and come to a stop. He explained that the brakes had locked up, and for a time our conversation was of brakes and how they operate, and I told him that I have a real fear of rear-ending someone, so I always keep a gap between me and the car in front of mine.

He said that a tractor-trailer traveling at full speed requires the length of two football fields and then some to come to a complete stop.

This is true, of course, contingent on the weight of whatever it is the tractor-trailer is hauling.

***

So much can change so fast.

***

My mood is often contingent on what I have to do or what I can get done or some strange ratio between the two.

Yesterday my mood was contingent on the departure of my guests, the sudden quiet of my house, and the marks–everywhere–of my parents having been here: the newspaper my dad brought home from McDonald’s. My mother’s Sudoku book. The light coming through all the windows brighter, because my father had removed all the screens.

When they are here, everything I do seems more efficient, because they are so willing to do the difficult or menial things. They leave and the house looks basically the same, but in fact it is much improved.

***

Yesterday I sat at my kitchen table and noticed, for the first time this fall, pale sunlight irradiating the finest limbs of the maple trees that line my backyard–a beauty contingent on the cold and the leaves having fallen, contingent on the earth’s continued jaunt around the sun.

The last time these trees were bare–sometime in March, I think–we were still five people living in this house. But this change doesn’t make me sad as I once feared it would–and that is contingent on wisdom, for which I am grateful.

***

My parents left at 8 a.m., only minutes before Emma left for school, and it wasn’t until some time after they’d left that I realized I’d forgotten to wish them a Happy Anniversary. Yesterday was their 52nd.

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We make our own decisions, live our own lives, but yesterday I was thinking that so much of my life is contingent on my parents’ commitment to God and to each other, which for them is, in a way, one and the same thing.

They practice what they’ve always told me: that you’ll find only One consistent in a world of contingencies–and that even this One sometimes only seems consistent because you yourself insist on believing he is.

I think sometimes we want him to leave us a note or send a visitation, but he has other ways. He doesn’t always tell us that he Is so much as he spreads scarred hands wide each morning and brings the sun up.

The sunrise contingent on his goodness, and all goodness contingent on him.

 

Maddie and Motherhood

Healing Maddie Brees and I are headed to another book club tonight. I am very much looking forward to it.

It’s tricky, though: when invited, I always tell my host that I recognize the liability. Having an author present for her book’s discussion can decidedly hamper dialogue and limit expression: how many attendees will be willing to say what they’re really thinking with the author sitting right there?

Of course, I am more than willing to hear criticism. Releasing a book into the world requires lots of things, and a thick skin is definitely among them.

***

One of the first book clubs I attended for this novel was also among the best. They were a large group of intelligent and educated women, most of whom were empty-nesters. We had a long and very rich conversation, and people were not at all unwilling to express annoyance with characters or frustration with ideas.

But I was taken aback by one critique: one woman said–and others agreed–that there wasn’t much in the book about Maddie as a mother. They wanted to hear more about that, they said.

***

That was the day she’d imagined she was knitting–though she had never actually learned how. But she had imagined that she could, and that as she sat, her knitting needles clicked in her hands, binding together the softest yarn into a ribbon and then a square, and then an oblong sheet that grew so long it fell to her feet. Still she knitted, calmly, efficiently, so that the blanket (for this is what it was) pooled onto the ground and then, by the force of her knitting, began to move away from her and toward her son where he sat in the sandbox or walked toward the swing. This great blanket of her affection followed him over the playground, flowing up the ladder behind him and then piling around him as he sat on the platform at the top. It followed him down the slide, too, and she could see in her mind’s eye the way that it surrounded his torso and flowed over his legs that, once again, he used to brace his body against gravity. Such was her love for this child, and such was the way that she willed it to cover him. 

***

The fact of Maddie’s motherhood is in fact central to the novel. She and her husband Frank have three sons, and her cancer diagnosis–occurring very early in the book–keenly shadows her thoughts, feelings, and fears as a mother.

As one might expect it would.

***

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***

I’ve thought often about that remark at that book club. At the time, I didn’t defend the novel against it, although immediately my mind ran through multiple instances wherein Maddie’s love and fear for her children are in view.

It’s a trick of my attending book clubs not to be defensive, to let the book speak for herself (or remain silent, if necessary), to let the liability of welcoming the book’s author not be such a liability.

I am not an expert on many things, but I am an expert on this book. There is never need to let that authority cow the expression of others.

***

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***

Yes, the truth is that Maddie-as-mother is a very important part of this novel, and over the course of the book it’s a concept I return to again and again. Maddie’s motherhood is, in fact, vital to the overarching themes of the work as a whole.

And of the few autobiographical elements of the book, Maddie’s motherhood experience is perhaps most closely linked with mine.

Being a mother has been and remains one of the most important experiences of my life, and I contend that, of the myriad experiences this life has to offer a person, motherhood is likely one of the most powerful.

One can see this, for instance, in how intensely personal it is, how every comment can so readily be received as a critique. The “Oh, I see your baby sucks his thumb!” becomes a commentary on the mother-as-enabler, as addiction-engenderer, as potential destroyer-of-her-child’s yet-to-emerge teeth.

Every comment, every tantrum, every failure to sleep through the night is fodder for assessment as to how well one loves her child.

And every mother feels inadequate, because every mother sees–if only in glimpses–how gloriously separate her child is, how unlike any other, how inconceivably precious are the toes, the fingers, the thoughts, the phrases, the efforts, the successes, the failures, the being of the one she mothers.

***

Mothers should know. A mother should know her child’s face, she thought. She knew that Garrett’s left ear was just the slightest bit bent at the top, that Jacob’s whorl of hair was just to the right of the center back of his head. And Eli had his father’s nose: straight and, even at this young age, elegantly shaped. It was like a little ski-jump, Maddie always thought: dramatically steep with just the slightest inverted angle at the end. He would be handsome when he grew up.

***

Kerri is mother to twins who are going on three. The other day on my walk, I stopped to chat with her where she sat on her deck in the afternoon sun. The twins were in their beds: naptime.

We talked about them at pre-school, and Kerri marveled aloud to me about Eli’s predilection for holding open the lid on the classroom garbage can so that his classmates can throw away their trash.

“How does he know to do that?” she wondered. And we were silent for a moment, taking this in. Here was an untaught behavior, a glimpse into a nature uniquely Eli. What might it signify? A pleasure in being helpful, a blooming compassion? A fascination with hinges, an interest in seeing things properly put away, a love for his teacher? An ambition to someday drive the garbage truck?

“What does it mean?”

I stood with my dog on the other side of her fence and pondered it with her, I with my years and years of parenting experience, with two out of three of them– by all accounts– full-grown. What could I say?

I told her what I thought, which is to say that I told her she was doing the right thing. I told her it is her privilege and perhaps her unique responsibility as a mother to pay attention to these things, to notice.

I have a collection beyond counting of the things I have noticed and know about my children–things that might no longer interest them, things they have moved on from, things that once defined them and really no longer do so.

But I have collected and I keep them; and this, to me, is part of what it means to be their mother.

***

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***

The women at that book club had wanted more from me about Maddie as a mother and, as I’ve said, I’ve given that request a lot of thought. Had they missed what is there in the book about Maddie and motherhood? Certainly other themes and plot elements speak far more loudly in the book, I see that.

Is it that they are empty-nesters, and so are missing the difficult and excellent work that means having children at home?

***

I am not displeased with the way I wrote Maddie-as-mother. In fact, I feel quite the opposite. I didn’t say this to the women that night, but this is how I saw it when writing the book, and this is how I see it now:

Motherhood is one of the most powerful experiences this life has to offer. Raising it in ordinary conversation can evoke all kinds of reactions, from those who wish they were mothers to those who never want to be mothers to those who had a bad mother.

And raising it in a book is equally if not more powerful for the distilled nature of a novel. That Maddie was a mother is incredibly important to the book–but it is a bell I had to ring lightly because of the reverberations it evokes.

In short, writing too much about Maddie-as-mother actually might have been unkind. I couldn’t say too much about it, because motherhood is too dear to me. This book–and any good work of fiction, I’ll warrant–is not about the author. Any and all of the personal emotional investment the author puts into it is actually none of the reader’s business, and, if there, would necessarily tarnish the reader’s experience.

The experience is the story. The means is the writing. The book is the gift.

How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?

—  A. Dillard, The Writing Life

***

These days, every day, I drive Emma to school. She is a junior in high school now, nearly as old as she’s going to get before she moves on from home.

Every day she gets out of the car, tells me she loves me, closes the door behind her, and never looks back.

But as I pull away, I always look for her blond head moving in the crowd, and I say yet another prayer over her lovely self, and I send the blanket after her, covering her, keeping her all through the day.

 

Home

The subject line of the email: “Stony Brook House.” The text was limited. Just a note from my dad, how pleased my parents were to come across the floor plan of the house my grandparents built in 1960.

I think they lived there for a little more than a decade. By the time I was six, they had sold it. They had their apartment in the city and the house where my parents live now, the one we return to every summer, the one “Out East,” we say, at the almost very end of Long Island.

But some of my earliest memories are from the Stony Brook House, and although the image in the email was merely a floor plan, just a map drawn up in pencil, I recognized each room immediately.

I was alone in my house when I saw it, but I think I gasped aloud. I looked down at a two-dimension drawing on the flat screen of my cell phone, but what I saw somehow was the full house, upright, entire. Room for room, closet, bathroom, window. The yard, the front porch, the smell of the boxwood out front, and the way the sunlight came into the rooms.

***

Lisa grew up just outside of D.C. Her house was a split level with columns across the front on a lot marked with grand old trees. She moved there with her family when she was two and called that house home through her college years. Now in her early forties, she and her siblings last year completed a difficult if not-uncommon task: they helped their aging parents sort through a lifetime of things, gather up what they needed, and move closer to family.

The house quickly sold to some people from Boston. They bought it without seeing it first-hand, via website and an obliging realtor. It fetched an excellent price.

Recently, Lisa told me she’d had news of her childhood home: it’s gone. They razed it. Not just the house, but the entire property: the trees and all the grass. So it wasn’t the house the buyers were after, apparently. It was the lot.

That is, of course, their prerogative.

But just yesterday, Lisa mentioned it to me again in passing. Just a quick comment that opened a view onto loss. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. And she has a full life here in North Carolina: a lovely home of her own, a thriving marriage, three beautiful children. But the empty lot reported by her sister is nonetheless on her mind. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. “I’m still sad.”

***

My sister and her husband have a large old house in the country in western Massachusetts. It’s set back from the road; you have to know where to look, when passing, to see one ivory peak under the roof and a window next to the chimney.

It was built in 1922 and is quietly grand: warm wood floors; glass doorknobs; built-in bookcases and a broad staircase, with landing, that descends into a generous center hall.

It has a second staircase that goes to what might have been servants’ quarters, but if the house ever enjoyed that kind of exalted service, it’s long lost to memory. My sister and her husband bought the house nearly ten years ago from a widow who had lived there alone for a long time.

But one afternoon, not long after they moved in, my sister found herself with smiling and unexpected guests in the driveway. It was a woman with her grown daughter, and the woman explained that she had grown up in that house, perhaps forty years before.

Together they walked through the rooms, the woman recalling to her daughter and my sister how her family had lived in those spaces. This had been her brother’s room; here they had done their homework. Her mother had the sewing machine in this room, and they would talk together while they did their school work and she sewed. And on Christmas mornings, she and her siblings stood like this on the staircase, waiting for their parents to call them into the living room, with the fireplace blazing to warm the room, to the Christmas tree and the presents.

***

The news this morning is of fires continuing to rage in California. With no rain in sight and a persistent dry heat, the fires have progressed, at times, to consume the length of three football fields in a minute.

The path of these fires is indiscriminate. Houses, streets, wineries, strip-malls– they eat through everything, and their wake is charred shells of places, barely recognizable rubbish. One can identify remains because of where they are, not what.

The damage from a hurricane is different: belongings disappear completely or are found the length of a football field away. In its rage, a hurricane trashes things, hurls them, twists rain gutter and rebar alike.

We have had too much of this kind of thing lately. And the news is of the loss of life and property, of businesses undone. Of the incalculable costs and where to turn for recompense or justice. Of fear and failed infrastructure and climate change, of when and where this will happen again.

***

Of course in all instances like these, the loss of life is the most terrible of the losses.

But in my privileged and safe distance (this time) from disaster, I find myself caught on the loss of homes. Be it trailer, apartment, or warm wood floors and columns out front, a home is a shelter from the elements. The place to come in from the wind and rain, a filter for light and weather.

At its best, a home is also a filter for everything outside. It’s a space where one can be still and can be oneself unmolested, where one can comfortably consider what it means to be alive in the world even while enjoying a little distance from it.

I know that not everyone has a home, and that not every home is safe.

But a home should always be someplace safe. And it should never be snatched indiscriminately from the landscape.

***

Waiting at the traffic light, Emma and I saw them emerge from the house: the boy, maybe seven; his sister, five. Both with their heads down, their sandy brown hair drifting at their ears, the napes of their necks. He descended first, and she followed with their mother, and each of the children wore backpacks.

The steps to their house are concrete and slathered in leaves. Their window blind was closed crookedly, and a bluebird house sat askew on the tree next to their front walk.

They live in one of those charming old neighborhoods that has recently been rediscovered in Durham, and as we drove away I wondered if those children knew that. I thought of their backpacks and their mother, of the school-day awaiting them both. Of the bluebird house and the window-blind and maybe the lunches inside their backpacks.

I am glad to think that the up-and-coming-ness of their neighborhood– for now, anyway– probably makes no difference to them at all.

***

We have an empty bedroom in our house. Will won’t be coming back to it, as he got married in July. And Everett is gone for six months, on the travel portion of his gap year.

The boys shared that room for fourteen years, and it looks pretty much the way it did when they slept there every night, except that, for now anyway, there are no clothes lying–clean or dirty–on the floor.

Many times as I walk past that room, I think how glad I am of where they are now, that they have left us and are on their own doing brave, interesting, meaningful things.

But more often, I think of a single afternoon –which may have happened just as I recall it, or it may be an amalgam of many:

It is late spring or early fall. Their sister is upstairs sleeping. They are eight and six, or seven and five, and the Legos are spilled around them on the floor. The sun is shining through the windows and they are playing in it.

All they know is the Legos and perhaps Star Wars and, in a peripheral and obvious way, each other. They don’t know the sunlight, they don’t know the carpet or the bunk-beds, the desk or the dresser, because these things are just as they should be.

And their mother is nearby somewhere. Upstairs, probably. It doesn’t matter. They don’t know that she is standing there, just for a quick minute, to watch her sons playing in the sunlight on the floor.

 

 

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Marking Time

Thursday, 21 September, 3:30 PM

The post was on Instagram: a gorgeous seaside photograph, the image drenched in sunset. A lone figure stood looking at the ocean, her back to the camera. The caption: “Goodbye, summer.”

This was a month ago, maybe more. That time when college students return to campus, but nearly a month before my daughter returned to high school.

Still, the Starbucks was selling pumpkin spice again.

And in the grocery store that same week, one-fourth of the magazine facings in the check-out line advertised autumn: soup, pumpkins, the “perfect fall decor.”

All of it felt too soon to me. Just a tad on the early side.

***

But that was weeks ago, before Tuesday, when a chance encounter with a wreath on sale (just a short detour from my errand to the cat food) found me bringing home both the wreath and a pair of somewhat autumnal pillows.

“I’m going to decorate for fall,” I told Everett, to which he responded that fall didn’t begin until Thursday.

Which is today. I had already wished Bill a Happy First Day of Fall when I googled the equinox and learned that, this year, fall begins on the 22nd, which is tomorrow.

And which is fine. Today I have cleaned the bathrooms and sorted laundry and had a lovely visit with my daughter-in-law. Between these things, research, writing, and the gym, the decorating will have to wait until tomorrow.

***

When I was teaching, I was annually annoyed by the school calendar’s eclipsing summer. It was hot as blazes out, the locusts’ song filling the air. But that return to school felt like fall nonetheless.

When I was growing up, my next-door neighbor had grown children of her own. She was past the days of packing lunches and waving children to their bus stop. She didn’t work outside her home. But she still felt the encroachment of the school year. I’ll never forget her saying it: “The shadows always seem longer on the first day the school buses come.”

Back in my classroom in mid-August, prepping for my students’ arrival, I saw the trees outside standing listless in the heat and reminded myself that it was still summer. Just because I had to be in the school building all day didn’t mean that summer had ended. Summer wasn’t actually over until the latter part of September, academic calendars notwithstanding.

I told my children we would pack our bathing suits and towels in the car and go directly to the pool after school. We would be driving right past it, anyway. Why not change our clothes there and go for a swim and enjoy what was left of a summer day before it was time to head home for dinner?

This was my hope and plan every year, especially in our earliest years at school together, before soccer practice and games began dictating our plans for us. Which was fine.

Recently Emma reminded me that we did it once: we managed to go straight from school to pool, and I was glad to hear it. She told me this just a few days ago, and despite the time lapse, despite having forgotten it myself, I still felt a little triumphant: we had managed once to eke some summer out of the school year. Well done, us.

***

“The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer’s ending, a sad, monotonous song. ‘Summer is over and gone,’ they sang. ‘Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying.'” – E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

***

That little gem of a novel– one of my all-time favorites– tracks life on a farm, and in so doing, tracks the seasons. It has to. An agrarian culture necessarily lives with an eye on the sky and a finger on the pulse of these greater changes, the shift from winter to spring, summer to fall.

But most of us in my neck of the woods don’t match their everyday actions to the changes in season. Unless, of course, there’s a hurricane.

***

The difference between today and tomorrow, between all the days since March 20th of this year and now, has everything to do with the earth’s revolution around the sun and its knack of leaning in a perpetual tilt. These factors combined mean that tomorrow at 4:02 EST, the sun will pass directly over the celestial equator.

Our days have been growing shorter since the summer solstice on June 21st. Tomorrow the days will only continue to grow shorter. But for the day, the amount of sunlight in the northern and southern hemispheres will be exactly the same.

And if I am able to get my research and writing done, I will pull my fall decorations off their shelf in our storage room and place them strategically around the house.

***

I like fall.

But there is something about summer, isn’t there? I think that, more than the holidays, more, even, than the birthdays of my family, summer works for me like the hinge of the year. I mark many things by the before and after of summer, the “this” summer and “last.”

I remember thinking in middle school about those phrases. “This summer” meant now, but during the first few weeks of school, at the very least, it also meant the summer that had only just recently been with us. I  remember wondering when it was, exactly, that we went from “this summer,” (as in: “this summer we went to Disney World”) to “last” (as in, “last summer, we went to the beach”).

What do we use to mark that shift? It’s a vague happening at best, or maybe it depends more on weather: you know to use “last” instead of “this” when it’s time to wear a jacket?

Or maybe we can just hang it on the equinox. Maybe we inadvertently do. Maybe today I say, “My son got married this summer,” and tomorrow I’ll say, “We traveled to British Columbia for Will’s wedding last summer.”

I’ll let you know.

***

Friday, 22 September, 7:39 AM

And now it is autumn, or maybe it will be at 4:02 PM EST when the sun drifts over that celestial equator. Strange to think we can mark time via a movement that isn’t a movement at all (the sun doesn’t move, right?), and that the line in question is invisible, is, in fact, nonexistent.

Far more to the point, in my world, anyway, is what will happen five days from now: Everett’s departure for six months, the travel portion of his gap year between high school and college. This shift will have far greater currency with some of us than the fall decor I may pull out today, or the cheerful autumn wreath on any door, or the earth’s steady revolution around the sun.

(They grow up so fast. Has it come to this already? I am eager and excited and so ready on his behalf, but if anyone had asked, I would have had his childhood last twice as long. Except that would be so selfish.)

***

And now it is 8:08 AM and time for a fresh cup of coffee and to make Emma’s lunch, to start the laundry I didn’t finish yesterday, to see my neighbor walk her son up the hill to the elementary school.

Today, fall is newborn and Everett and I will check his packing list and go shopping for shoes.

In five days we will take him to the airport, and before we know it (right?) he will come home again, and in no time at all, all of this will be a very long time ago.

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Birthday! A Different Way to Party

All week, we are celebrating the 1st Birthday of Healing Maddie Brees by offering the book for only $0.99! It’s an incredible deal, and you can find links to all your favorite e-book retailers here.

I know, I know. I should have told you sooner– and I have posted about it on all the social media things. But life is ever busy, and I’m not terribly good at all the social media things, as my publisher will tell you, and as I have mentioned here before….

Still, I love birthdays. At our house, we celebrate birthdays for the better part of a week, and sometimes people manage to squeeze very nearly a month out of it. Which is completely worthwhile. There’s not a soul living in my house that doesn’t deserve a full month of celebration.

Nonetheless, Maddie’s $0.99 deal only lasts for a week, and that week ends today. So here’s a thought: close that deal for yourself or a friend today, and spend the rest of Maddie’s birthday month reading her.

Reading. It’s a different way to party, and a great one!

 

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Saying Goodbye

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which gives value to survival.”  C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

[image error]We’ve lived in Durham, North Carolina now for 23 years. I find this hard to believe; I find it difficult to believe that I’m old enough to have lived anywhere as an adult for anything like 23 years, but there it is.

I love living in Durham for many reasons. Here are some. But this post isn’t about the Bull City, as much as I love it. It’s about one of Durham’s upsides and just now, one of its downsides. It’s about friends and saying goodbye.

With universities in each of the towns (Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh) that make up this region called The Triangle, our population swells during the academic year. We are an incubator of sorts: students come for undergrad and graduate work; we connect with some and love them; and then, so often, they leave.

Nick and Jenny were different. They met as undergrads at Duke, and when they married after college, they settled here. She is a native Durhamite with family nearby, and Nick’s family isn’t so far away. I had known Jenny peripherally for a while through mutual friends; we met Nick when we ran into them at a Duke football game once. I enjoyed their wedding photos on Facebook.

Then came that Sunday morning when, new bride and freshly minted graduate, she approached me after church. She told me that they had decided to attend our church, which meant that our lives might now overlap in regular ways. There was nothing for it but to become friends. Which we so gladly did.

But Durham is an incubator. Sometimes people move here from Pittsburgh to attend grad school at Duke and are still here 23 years later. And sometimes people move here to start a life and then realize, five years in, that they have to go, that life and work are beckoning elsewhere, that obedience to God can be making a life outside of San Francisco. And that’s when you realize that five years is not enough time.

***

At times like these, I’m grateful for how memories surface. The incidents, conversations and episodes that, once the stuff of everyday, newly assert themselves.

Nick running the Disney Marathon (fast) without even beginning to think of training for it.

Jenny taking a thirteen-year-old Emma Christmas shopping, just because she wanted to spend time with my daughter.

Nick diving headlong into a lake and then horrifying me with the photos of his split forehead on Facebook.

Lunches and long walks with Jenny, talking about work and family and rearing children and whether there is a right way for any of it.

Emma and I, post soccer game on a Saturday morning, sidelined on a busy road with a flat tire. We couldn’t change it ourselves and Bill and the boys were unavailable–but there was Nick, in moments, it seemed. And in moments we were on our way again.

Their first wedding anniversary was our 23rd. We perched on tall chairs in the window seat of one of Durham’s finest restaurants and talked, among other things, about how difficult it can be to be married.

Dinner at their house. Dinner at ours. They introduced us to Settlers of Catan. We introduced them to Julia Child’s braised lamb. We stopped to see them unannounced; they stopped to see us, too. Once we had a difficult conversation involving some tears and some confessions of sorts. I love friendships that can go to the bone.

I love how Nick can’t be made to care whether his shorts are the “right” length, but will commit himself to loving and enjoying a group of middle school boys throughout the most trying three years of their lives.

And how he has loved my sons: by mentoring Everett, by helping Will find and buy (and make some repairs to) his car.

I love how Jenny thinks about things, how she turned her magnificent gifts of intelligence and compassion to serving refugees in Durham and to the women of our church. And how she entrusted herself to me in some difficult times–like that day when she was feeling awful. We sat under an umbrella at the pool and tried not to think about how overdue she was, and then, mercifully, baby Stone arrived the very next day.

And how, when Amazon decided without notice or fanfare to release my novel a full month early, they brought me an orchid to celebrate.

So many memories, and this one, from late June:

After dinner, Emma and Jenny and I in rocking chairs on their porch. Baby Ford is sleeping in his seat next to us, and Stone is playing: first on the porch with us and then out on the lawn, where Bill and Nick and Will are playing with Stone’s basketball hoop. The hoop is a tiny thing, its rim only a few feet off the ground, and the guys are playing horse, inventing new and near-impossible ways to get the ball into the hoop. It’s growing dark and the crickets are singing, summer is still ahead of us, and we are all talking and laughing, unaware of our sweet assumption: that life will carry on very nearly like this well into the foreseeable future.

***

Nick left a week and a half ago, driving his family’s belongings across the country. Today Jenny and the little boys leave, with assurances that they’ll all be back in town at Thanksgiving.

Last night, Jenny hosted a handful of us for a last visit, and I learned of another value we share: neither of us likes to say goodbye.

In truth, I’m not completely sure why Jenny doesn’t like it. And I respect that, despite her distaste, she addresses it anyway. Jenny is one to see the value in things, even things she doesn’t prefer.

And she’s right, of course. They are right: It’s good to say a proper farewell, good to acknowledge the official change. Maybe saying goodbye better makes space for navigating the changes that lie ahead. I don’t know.

But I know why I don’t like to say goodbye. I don’t like the pressure it puts on things, the heavy weight of the sadness. It’s all I can do, when finally saying goodbye, to not hold on too tight and to not say exactly what I’m feeling: Don’t go. Please don’t go. Just don’t.

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