Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 21

Hydrangea

The house in Michigan is nearly cleaned out. The basement, emptied, is being painted. White walls and a gray floor. It looks spacious and for the first time in my life it is a lovely space for laundry. No more creepiness while walking to the washer and dryer or carrying clothes up and down the stairs. Boxes of our winter clothes are stacked in one room, waiting for our move. I find it comforting to have things here organized.

Organization gives me the space to consider what we leave behind in homes when we leave and what we take with us. Here in Michigan, I have missed the deep tub of the Maryland house where I spent many hours bathing, reading, thinking. I would turn the hot water on with my toes when it became tepid and sit some more. There is no tub here for proper baths. This is a requirement of our next home. While I love the tub and many features of our Maryland home, there is only one object I regret leaving.

In our Maryland home, many beloved animal companions passed on: HD, Homer, Shelby, Liza. Each worthy of many stories. We never buried any of our animals in the garden of that home. We keep all of them, cremated, in decorative boxes. Boxes that are packed and ready to moved with us to our next home. While on many occasions, the beloved declared that she would live in that house until she died, the neighbors, the town mayor with the silent consent of the council, conspired to force us from our home. So while our memories will always be of Shelby and Homer cavorting in the back yard, they will come with us, in our minds, and in our boxes. We hold close what we do not want to lose. We refuse to let houses have more of us than they deserve. Only in retrospect do I understand the wisdom of these decisions.

Yet the house, the yard, retains one thing that I cannot move. One thing I must leave in Maryland. It fills me with regret. A hydrangea. A gift from a dear friend when I was accepted into the MFA at the University of Maryland. When it arrived, it was in a small pot. We planted it in the back yard where it grew and grew. There are many hydrangea in the yard, but this one always had the most flowers. In August, it would droop from the weight of its blooms. I love this plant. I means everything to me. A beacon of friendship, a promise of poetry with a central role in my life, an object of beauty that seems like it will bloom forever and thrive. This plant always thrived. Wet or dry, sunny or overcast, hot and humid, cool and chilly, this hydrangea thrived. If only we all could be like this plant: rooted, growing, blooming.

Leaving this hydrangea fills me with sadness. If I could, I would dig it up, bring it with me. Carry it with me like the other things we brought to Michigan: clothes, beloved books, a pile of stuff dog toys. I would like a living talisman to carry with me reminding me of friendship, love, poetry, but I had to leave it behind. This hydrangea is the one thing I regret leaving in Maryland. 

I hope that some other plant will grow and blossom in my life, though we will never bury our animals in the yard of a place we call home. Home is too fragile, too tentative, too subject to the vagaries of the world. Too many people lose their homes to bigots and bullies, to changes in the nation, to a rise of nationalism, to catastrophic climate events, to conditions beyond their control. Home is something we have for a moment, something we can lose in the blink of an eye. Still, I hope for a plant that says home. I hope for a space where I can re-remember, relearn, reencounter friendship, poetry, beauty, and love again.

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Home

As we enter the eighth month of our life in exile, I continue to think about home and its meanings. This morning, I took my grandmother from where she is living in the assisted living facility back to her home of more than fifty (maybe even sixty?) years. I did not want to. I worried about the experience she would have being back home. Frightening? Sad? Disorienting? Certainly, I felt all of those things being at our Maryland home and most people recognize me most days as compos mentis. My grandmother on the other hand struggles with a mind melting away.

She was a champ at the house. She seemed reassured that it was there, as she left it in late March. She touched many things in the house, particularly near where she would sit in the front room and on the dresser in her bedroom. We went through all of the rooms together. She pushed her walker. She selected a few things to bring back with her. Photographs, primarily. A few pieces of clothing. Lots of jewelry. I put things in baskets and carried them out to my car. Grandma was quiet. Taking everything in. After an hour or so at the house, I asked if she was ready to go. Everything was loaded into the car.

After I started the car, we both stared at the garage. Her house was locked up. The small items she wanted sat in the back of the car. I asked her, Well, how was it visiting the house? Sad, she said. I think that is the last time I will be in my home. I did not have anything to say in response. My grandmother, who is always cold, was wearing four sweaters and a knit sweater vest. She kept layering on clothes as we walked through the house. For a moment we both felt adrift, lost, without homes. We drove back to where she lives now. She said, Well, I guess I have to make this my home now.

Home seems like it is enduring. In popular portrayals, home is everlasting. A physical place but one made in one’s heart and mind. I have come to think, however, that home is fleeting. We may have physical spaces that shelter our bodies, but everywhere we live is not always home. Grandma and I both are sheltered, warm at night, covered when it rains, surrounded by people who care for us. On balance, these conditions should constitute home, but they do not necessarily. Home is more precarious. Particularly for queers, for people of color, for old people, for people society deems disposable, for people deemed okay to diminish, target for harassment, intimidation, bullying. Home for us is no entitlement. Home is not simple shelter, it is an alchemy of space, shelter, safety, and love. It is not easy to find, not easy to keep. It is something we are always yearning for, always making. Sometimes it eludes us. Sometimes we have nothing but resignation. Well, I guess I have to make this my home now.

What we used to call home before we were driven from our home by bigots and bullies.

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Family Portrait

One of the first pictures to hang on the wall in my grandma’s room in the assisted living facility was a photograph of her, my grandfather, and her three adult sons. In it, my father is about my age now, maybe a little older. The five of them are posed in front of a “library” which as I remember was one of the background selections at the Sears photo studio in the mall. I think that I remember the day they all went to get the photograph taken, though memory is so fallible. Maybe it was taken after I left for college. I do not know. I know that the three boys are all wearing wide ties and everyone is smiling, but the smiles are posed, one might even say a bit forced. Still the 8 X 10 photograph reflects a particular type of triumph: the grown children and their parents all together smiling. Snap.

When we were looking at houses in Michigan, we noticed a lot of posed family photos. Table side 5 X 7s; 8 X 10s or larger on the wall. Often an 11 X 17 hanging over the fireplace. Posed family happiness. Posed family testimonies: we gathered, we smiled, we must all love and cherish each other. Everyone dressed in their best clothes, a moment in the lifetime of a family captured and hung on the wall.

As a child, I remember hating these portraits. I wanted only action shots on my walls, not the artifice of posed portraits. This desire both a resistance to this type of photography but also a resistance to the ways that heterosexuality is modeled in these photographs. I never wanted the life of a heterosexual couple with children, posed above a fireplace. In fact, I do not have that life; the images on my walls are action shots or naked women.

Yet, in spite of rejecting these images as a reflection of myself, there is a sad story of a family photograph that indicates the complex contradictions of my feelings about these photos. There is a posed family photo of us when I was an early teenager. I do not remember when the photo was taken, but it was summer. I was wearing a white eyelet dress, my sisters both in dresses as well. We children all look gangly, bloated, adolescent or preadolescent and uncomfortable. My parents look tired and frazzled as though smiling for a few minutes while thinking about everything else that must be done; look deeply into their eyes and you can read how they hope this picture will be worth the trouble.

This photograph with its blue, marbled background hung on the wall in our den for years and years. Sitting on the blue couch, it was where one’s eyes gazed whenever checking the time. The 11 X 17 frame hung beneath the wall clock, a time face on top of a lacquered slice of oak. It always seemed to me like the juxtaposition of that photograph with the clock was a way to hold us all back in time, to a time that was not particularly happy, just a time when we were all together, bound by the conditions of our lives.

My grandmother’s photograph echoes another of her, my grandfather, and the boys when they were young. Even younger than we were in the photograph in the family room. The three boys almost look like they could be triplets. Their hair all cut the same, wearing matching clothes. Shot in the early 1950s, it seems to suggest the mythos of Leave It to Beaver. In light of this earlier photograph of my father’s family, the photograph that hangs in my grandmother’s room is even more triumphant. It speaks powerfully to once and then, to the persistence of family.

After my mother died, my father covered the photograph with wrapping paper covered in drawings of birds. Atop the frame he set two birds that came from a flower arrangement sent to the family after my sister’s death. I understand his actions. Every day he sat in front of the photograph. It must have been haunting after two people had died. Who wants those two specters staring at you every morning as you eat your oatmeal and watch the news?

Yet, when we moved in to the house, the wrapping paper seemed to taunt me. Every time I looked at it, I could imagine the photograph behind it. It seemed to carry so many disappointments. My mother and the disappointments in her life, her anger at all of the ways my life disappointed her, her devastation about Lara’s death, the absence of my other sister. We never were able to achieve the milestone of a triumphant family photograph with adult children, as my grandmother had Who wouldn’t want to cover that up with an artful rendering of birds?

Yet, it made me sad. Yesterday, when my father came over to pick up a few more boxes of things from the house, I took the frame with the photo and the wrapping paper down off the wall and sent it with him to his new home. I felt an extraodinarily sense of relief looking at the wall afterward. There is barely a mark that it was even there.

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Shell

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Wolf

Last week, Tibe and I were walking one morning when the beloved was out of town on a trip to find our next home. Suddenly, on the other side of the island, we saw a big dog. She looked like Tibe in size and stature, though perhaps a little smaller. At first I thought she might be a German Shepherd mix. With shorter hair and more muscular. Tibe spotting this other canine, barked and carried on in his way as if warning, do not come near me, do not come near my Julie. He barked and the other animal loped away into the trees, sauntering off into the underbrush until we could not see him any more.

When I told the beloved about the sighting on the telephone that morning, I said again, it looked like a stray dog. A large on, maybe a German Shepherd. She had no collar. The odd thing, however, is we have never seen a dog on the Island where we walk. A range of birds. Squirrels. Chipmunks. Beavers. Possums. No dogs. I did not think about much more until later that morning when it occurred to me like a bolt of lightning: it was a wolf.

When I was a child, there were no wolves in Michigan. They were hunted to near extinction and the loss of livable wild space also facilitated their demise. Since the early 1990s, however, Michigan wolves have returned so that they have now been observed in every county. So it seemed possible that I might have seen a wolf last week, but the common ones in the lower peninsula are the grey wolves. The are between fifty and eighty pounds and as the name suggests, grey. The animal I saw, was much bigger, at least a hundred pounds, and it was brown and golden. And muscular. That is why I did not think it was a domesticated dog. The muscles. Most domesticated dogs are a little chubby. This dog was all muscle. Lean. Strong. So it seemed possible that I saw a brown wolf or timber wolf. Possible, but somewhat unlikely, at least in the view of the women who work at the US Post Office where I chatted about the sighting while posting packages.

It seemed like we would never know what animal Tibe and I had seen. The idea of walking, running with the wolves, receded. Until this morning. Tibe and I were in the meadow on the island. The sun was coming up and shining sharply in my eyes. Tibe was sniffing and enjoying the morning walk. Then I looked over to Emma and the beloved walking near the river’s edge. About forty yards ahead of them near the river, I saw it. A grey wolf. Probably about seventy or eighty pounds. A grey coat with a healthy bit of white. She too was muscular. Stealthy. She watched Emma and the beloved. The beloved said she knew it was a wolf because all of a sudden there were no birds around them. It was silent, no morning nattering. The beloved and Emma stared at the wolf. The wolf stared back until Emma broke the spell and barked. Tibe joined in barking, worried what was happening to those wayward members of her pack. Then the wolf turned on her paws and sauntered off away from all of us. We imagine she was returning to her den. We wonder why we are just seeing her in all her majesty now after months of visiting the park, but we do not dwell on what we have missed. We imagine ourselves as feral, wild predators. Our pack stays together even faced with habitat loss. We are resilient; we are dangerous; we are strong. We are all enthralled by wolves.

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Cottonwood Seeds and Red Glitter

Two weeks ago, the cottonwood trees went to seed. Everywhere we went, small puffs of cotton carrying seeds floated in the air. It was almost like snow, but it was hot outside. The seed puffs would float into the car while driving and even into the dogs mouths while walking. I’ll be honest: it was magical.This week, the fluffy seeds have settled to the ground. They congregate together forming little cotton balls in some places and in other places they gather like big clots of cotton as though waiting to be spun. I have never seen such an effective method of dispersion. Everywhere the seeds floating with fluff. I could not identify a cottonwood tree prior to this bloom of cotton. Now I see them everywhere. I imagine how under the right circumstances they will be like the rabbits, grow everywhere. Flourish.

The cottonwood seeds remind me of red glitter. When I packed the boxes in Maryland to flee with Tibe, I dumped canister of red glitter in one of the boxes. I did not think to put tape on top of it for transportation. The glitter spilled out everywhere in that box. Then, when I unpacked it, red glitter on the floor near my desk, on the desk, on everything in the box where it was packed. For the first two months in Michigan, there was red glitter everywhere. It is pernicious. The vacuum cleaner could not clean it. Nothing seemed to clean it away. The red glitter was from a round of Valentine’s Day cards. I sprinkled some in each card. A dash of happiness and magic in every envelop. Every time I saw the bits of red glitter, I thought to myself, I should love those bits of glitter. They do represent happiness and magic. Yet, every time I saw them, they made me sad. They felt like little broken bits of happiness, scattered about randomly, like our life.

In January, I threw out the rest of the canister of glitter. If I could not banish its remnants, I would discard the source. Then I could never imagine missing it. I could not imagine happiness in my life again. I could not imagine wanting magic.

Now the glitter is mostly gone from the house and when I find a piece of it, it delights me. Like the cottonwood seeds floating through the air. I would not say that my life is filled with happiness and that I am able to imagine magic, but the possibility of happiness exists again. I can imagine wanting to imagine magic.

The cottonwood seeds have largely settled to the ground; their days of floating free ended. Soon seedlings will emerge, but the vast majority of the puffs will be used by birds and mice and other creatures to line beds, homes, and special spaces in the world. This may be the most magical part of all: how the world makes use of all things, good and bad. How next spring there will be two weeks of cotton floating through the air. How red glitter remains to be found where I am and wherever I will be. How we all return to what is good and right and honest no matter the circumstances. How we live. How we love. How we matter. 

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The House on the Corner

Emma gets to walk wherever she wishes. Her time at the end of the leash is hers to explore. At the end of the driveway, left or right, her choice. Same at the end of the block. She prefers to walk in a circle, never doubling back on where she has been. Still, I confess, there is one route, up Handley Street to Court, make a right, that I prefer. It is the house on the corner of Harry and Court. An old arts and crafts, with huge empty lots all around it. The owners are gardeners, even in the winter it was clear, the raised beds, the paths for weeding and walking. The owners are also collectors. Small statues, glass objects, wind chimes. All winter and into the spring every time Emma and I walked by the house, I just felt that surge of love. This is the kind of house I want to live in, I would think to myself. It was so clear that the owners are project people. On the porch, a chair to restore. In the yard, a new patch of land to till. It was clear that the owners are artists or at least artful. They love beauty as much as they love chaos. I wanted to live in that house. I wanted its occupants to be my friends. Even in the darkest hours when I wanted to retreat from all people, to live on forty acres and never speak to humans again, that house reminded me of a world where people could be kind and trusted and honest and caring.

When it was wintry out, we met the man who lives there with his four small dogs. They barked fiercely at Emma and nipped at her legs. We did not have a chance to talk, but the encounter made me love him even more. How those four small dogs loved him, how he loved them. It was all there in that moment. Two weeks ago, Emma and I were ambling by while he sat out on the porch, finishing an egg sandwich. He came out to talk, to pet Emma. He loved her immediately. Who wouldn’t? Especially if you live in a cool, funky, well cared for but slightly battered house? He told me his name but I have forgotten it. I have seen him two more times since. He always remembers ours. Julie and Emma he calls out. It is lovely to be hailed. To be seen.

The walkers at the park hail us as well, me and Tibe. Not by name, but they recognize us. They know us. Being seen, being known feels quite profound these days. An antidote to trauma and grief. We are going to shed the house near the bullies and the bigots. I am starting to imagine what it might look like to not be living on the lam. I know it includes a funky house with space for projects. I want to be like the person at the corner of Harry and Court, hailing people as friends, eating egg sandwiches, riding a bike around town. I want to be safe. I want to be free from threats against my person, against my dear sweet crazy dog. I want everyone to get exactly what they deserve. I want queer people to be valued; I want us to be safe in our clubs. I want us to not be pawns in public trauma. I want a sweet house on the corner where I can sit on the porch and imagine a better world.

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Home

For nearly seven months now, the beloved and I have maintained staunchly that home is where we are all gathered. By all, we mean the two of us, Emma, our beloved St. Bernard, Tibe, our outlaw pup, and Vita, the biting, beautiful kitty. Home is about the critters in our family, not the physical space that we own with the bank. Home is the spark among us, not the address where we receive mail. And to a large degree, our fierce commitment is true. Our home is not in the walls where I am sleeping tonight. The bed here feels lonely; the rooms absent the throbbing life we all feel when we are together.

What this space does have that I miss in Michigan is the physical reflection and constant external echo of my self. The space we call home is what we construct to reflect back to us constantly who we are, who we hope to be, what we dream, where we aspire. The physical objects around which we construct the thing we call home are not simply consumer outputs, they are selected and curated objects that evince, evoke, and expose who we are, who we want to be, who we wish to become. Away from these collective objects, from the space we call home, we spend the days flat, unable to see ourselves, to see a reflection of ourselves as who we are and of who we imagine becoming.

This is what I have been missing for the past months. The mirror. The reflection of self. I have some pieces in Michigan, but it is not enough to construct what I have here at this physical location. It is more than the amazingly soft yet firm mattress, more than the incredible sheets, the feather pillows. It is not a creature comfort, it is the collection of all of these things that describe to us, to me, who I am by association with the objects I hold close. Without the objects, I forget, even lose little pieces of myself.

Some of these objects are now packed up. Soon all will be and we will piece together another mosaic at another address that we will eventually call home and in the calling of home, we will call out to ourselves and our selves will respond: here. This. Home. We do not know where we will be, but for the first time in months, I can remember the objects that will surround us. I can see myself as I am, as I want to be. It is enough to imagine a new for the next few months. To bridge the chasm to our new home.

Tibe in Michigan waiting for my return.

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Separation

The day after Tibe bit the other dog, the other dog’s owner called me and threatened me. If I did not rehome Tibe or put him down, she would file a complaint with Animal Control, and they would put him down. I explained that I was going to do neither of the options she offered me; I said that I had a large dog with huge puppy energy and a dog aggression issue that could be solved through training. I said repeatedly, I was not at a point where I felt he needed to be rehomed or put down. The truth is, on that day, my conviction about training over rehoming (euthanizing him was never an option and I do not even understand a world in which people consider that an option for a dog who bit another dog) was more out of defiance over being told what to do.

I have always been defiant. I have always resisted authority. It may be one of my greatest character flaws. That particular day in October, I was galled that someone who did not know me at all could call me up on the telephone and threaten me with an impossible choice. It was even more galling that she used her “credentials” as an attorney (she works for the justice department) to try and add teeth to her threats. I was not going to be bullied by someone. I was not going to do what she suggested, to comply with her threats. The truth is, my reaction at that time was more about defiance than about love for Tibe.

Tibe was exhausting, the training was intense, and, at that moment, it was not paying any particular rewards. If Tibe had been a twelve pound chihuahua with good prospects of being adopted by someone else, I might have thought about rehoming him. He was not a twelve pound dog, however, and I was not going to do what someone else suggested. I’ve heard this described as defiant opposition disorder. I love how we make the personality traits of strong women into disorders; I love how we pathologize people who refuse to conform. All this to say, that day in October, my unequivocal commitment to Tibe was mainly my own defiance. My actual commitment to the dog was modest. It could have been undermined, chipped away. Some might even say, then I could have been talked into reason.

What turned me away? The zealotry of the opposition to Tibe. My own sense of defiance, my refusal to bow to bullies, a capacity developed over many years–this is not my first time at the bully rodeo–shaped my commitment to Tibe. If all of these people thought he was really bad, there must be something good about him. There must be something important in his life, something redeemable in his being. I did not and do not know what that is, but I know it must be honored and protected. Mainly, though, I will be honest, it was defiance in the face of bullies that strengthened me, that made me hew to our adoption commitment to Tibe.

Defiance only lasts so long, however. Today, when I was saying goodbye to Tibe for our longest separation since the eighteen days he was banished from the county, I realized that my commitment to Tibe is no longer defiance. Defiance is unsustainable for these many months. As I was leaving, I told the beloved, Do not let anything happen to him. I was gripped by a fear and a passion and a love that was so fierce, so powerful, so visceral, so intense, it took my breath away. I love this dog so much, I would do anything to protect him. The fifty-two hours I will spend separated from him feels like a lifetime. I will worry for him, miss him, and whisper to him the promises of my return. I would go to any length for his life, for his well-being, for his happiness. The depth of this emotion, of this commitment, is no longer defiance. Defiance is a fleeting high. Defiance ruled us on the drive from Maryland to Michigan. What we have now is much different. It is angry and tender. It is fearful and joyous. My commitment to Tibe today is not one of defiance as it was months ago, it is a commitment of love. It is a recognition of the life force that is a part of all of us. It is the spark of creation that lights our lives calling us to righteousness, to justice, and to love. By any means necessary. At any cost.

That threat many months ago ended one part of my life. I mourn the many losses from the actions of the bullies, but saying goodbye to Tibe today, I realized some of what I have gained. I’ll be back, Tibe, I’ll be back.

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Tibe’s New Friend

Riley is a nine-year-old boy who lives the next block over. He loves Emma. There is no other way to say it. I think if he could spend his whole summer vacation lying next to Emma petting her and rubbing her, he would be quite happy. Until today, he has mainly seen Emma out on walks with his mother. Which is to say, he has not been able to give her the full time and attention he would like. This afternoon, he was visiting our neighbors two doors down when I walked by with Emma. Without maternal supervision, he could really fawn over Emma.

There was a passel of children at the neighbor’s house. They have the secret summer weapon: a trampoline. Put any child in there for twenty minutes, they come out exhausted. Nap time and bed time become meaningful after time on the tramp. Riley ushered Emma around to all of the children who oohed and aahed or hid behind a parental unit depending on their personal reaction to a large dog. The children pet Emma, rubbed her belly, pulled her ears, and touched her mouth to feel the slobber. She was loved in the way of a small pony by a group of children.

When we returned home, Tibe smelled her jealously. Who are all of these people, he wondered? Why does she get all of the love? We went out to walk in the back yard. Seconds later, Riley was at the back fence. Who is this, he asked? As though I had been hiding another one hundred and thirty-five pound dog from him. He had brought a friend, a younger girl, Gabriella. They wanted to meet Tibe. I told them to meet us at the gate, and I would give them an introduction to Tibe. Tibe was thrilled. Two little hobbits to greet him! He wanted to jump and bark, but he is learning and so he sat as I instructed Riley to approach him calmly.

Riley approached as calmly as he could and Tibe maintained that sit for as long as he could, then the two really needed to fall into each other’s arms and shake and sniff and whither with excitement. Gabriella stayed back. Tibe showed off his obedience. Sit, down, then belly. Oh, belly, thrilled Riley because what is better than a really long belly rub on a summer’s eve? Even Gabriella got into the fun of it.

Riley asked if Tibe could roll over. I said he hadn’t learned that yet. Riley said, Well, I bet I could teach him this summer if you let me come over every day. I bet you could, I said. Maybe we will have to try.Then Riley asked, Why don’t I see Tibe walking? Well, I explained, Tibe only walks in the back yard. Why? Well, Tibe loves you two and me and Emma, but he isn’t a fan of other dogs. He barks at them and acts all crazy. Oh, said Riley, with great seriousness. He is like my Uncle Bob, he doesn’t like dogs either. Yes, he is like your uncle. Riley said, I like dogs. Yes, you do, I said. You love Tibe and I love Tibe and sometimes that is all that really matters. One person loving a dog. No matter what.

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