sunday scribblings: town & country

Until recently, I've never lived in a town with a population fewer than 100,000. Chattanooga, Green Bay, Columbus, the Twin Cities. I was used to the comfort of large communities--the ease with which to find exactly what you were looking for (yarn, camera accessories, vegetarian alternatives are among some of the few I immediately miss). I never thought I'd live somewhere so small.

Our move from Chattanooga to the Midwest was surprising enough. We lived in Green Bay for my high school years, and though I miss some of the people there, I do not miss the city itself. It was like a lopsided suburb--so much infested with chains and the community in what struck me as a racist uproar, wanting English to become its official language. And the obsession with the Packers.


When I met K, I knew he enjoyed growing up in a small town just outside of Green Bay. I didn't know what it was like to live in a community without a post office, where farm and cows stretch for miles. I could imagine what it might be like to mail order so much of what you wanted, unless you felt like a long Sunday drive, and it wasn't entirely appealing. I needed buildings to crane up at, unique markets, a bevy of people moving about on the sidewalks.

I suppose that's what makes this place a compromise. We live on a corner just a dozen blocks from the Mississippi, maybe nine blocks from downtown, and in the winter, we need to act quickly with the clearing of our sidewalks or the footprints from traffic will lead us to long hours scraping away at ice. I can walk to my favorite places: the library, the post office, the organic market, the florist, the framing gallery, our regular pub, several sandwich and coffee shops, the bookstore, the baker, the theatre (I can keep going, but I will stop at that). Our population is just over 16,000, which marks this as the smallest town in which I've ever lived, and K protests: "This is a CITY." Technically, yes, but I can't help but call it a small town. I'm not used to planting corn in my summer garden. I'm used to containers on my porch, miniature eggplant and green peppers for my salads.


When Emily and I went to the poetry reading on Thursday, we touched briefly on the idea of duality: there is a part of us that is thrilled with the house with the fenced in yard, the dogs romping about, the future husband to cook with, to curl up in our multiple bedroomed houses with our bookcases and dining rooms and dens and this picture of domesticity that has room for gardens and bikes and a two car garage. There is another part of us that has a fantasy: pack it all up, just the essentials (books, some clothing, a futon, and a laptop) and have a tiny one bedroom apartment in Uptown Minneapolis, go to coffeeshops, write poetry on napkins, shop used bookstores long after the sun has gone down, buy tiny pieces of expensive local art for the crowded bathroom walls. We admitted this little fantasy self, the kind of life we could smoothly fit into, could see ourselves doing, would be impossible with our fiances. We'd have to be that single girl with many adventures ahead of us. For me, this is because K hates the city, would not move to the Twin Cities even if I begged for long periods of time, which saddens me because I always wanted to stay in the city.

But I find myself falling in love with here. This small town, with its own paintings for our moderately sized (and still very quirky) bathrooms, may do the trick. It feels a little more lonely here, but next year, I'll have a job six minutes from this building we are learning to call home.

And (thankfully) the city is only an hour away.

sunday scribblings: masks

Before I begin, something proud: K and I collaborated to learn how to change the header. The one you see above was the backup, but the original just below worked out eventually, after many HTML adjustments. The photographs of both are ones I've taken, and I created the image in Photoshop. I'm beginning to become more technologically savvy then I ever expected. :)


I have always found it interesting to explore the many different selves we have. I teach my students presentation skills during our small speech unit in January. We discuss tone--how I speak to them so differently than I speak to, say, my fiance at home. I ask them, "Do you use the same vocabulary with me as you do with your friends?" Heads wag, certainly not.

I know that I am a different person now, then when I was a teenager. At that time in my life, I raged against my family, particularly my mother. I was angry and we fought, and I'm coming to terms with the reasons why we had to clash so much in that house with no walls.

And I came out of it knowing I was an impatient person. Knowing that I had been a sweet child with a sweet disposition and that my mother never stopped reminding me of that fact. You were good when you were little, but...


Today, K and I spent our afternoon clearing out the front garden. Last year, I edged away from showy flowers, concentrating on the practical vegetable garden I cultivated, which had some moderate success. We pulled out the old growth from last year, the remnants of the previous owners piling on the front lawn.

I am different this cusp of summer. I am relearning patience. K asked me about my stack of Oprah magazines on the coffee table. This isn't you, could have easily been his thought. You used to scoff at these things. I said, "I know it can be flaky, but I'm trying to figure things out. I'm trying to find balance and not do it in harmful ways."

I'm trying to dredge out all of that excess, the person who said yes too many times and became overloaded, the person who felt perfectionist and procrastinator collide within her mind, the person that never got enough sleep and worried constantly. Cleansing and clearing is key now; it's the pulling up of old weeds to make room for showy blossoms.


Our town is known for its hanging baskets. Famously depicted in artwork about town, these baskets cost so much to make. I'm trying my own variation, and this morning, when I peeked in, I noticed little bits of green in the grey earth. We live in a town where everything is snow-covered, dismal, and grey so much of the year. Green masking covering the earth now, blossoms and swaths of color across the landscape. We are finding ourselves amidst the bits of loam, pulling away debris, dead leaves and rubbish. Small purple flowering weeds, dandelions, climbing vines. All beautiful but pulled away for what was planted there.

We added to the earth today: a rose bush, dahlia bulbs, and three peony bulbs, a little old, but full of hope. We have a bag of tulip bulbs and plans to consider the sidewalk in front of our house. Landscaping.


It is an act of masking we are doing to this house, gradually. This late winter, we tore down dark wallpaper and put up paint, a chair rail. This house has had many owners; it was built in 1890. At one point, it was low income housing owned by the city. This is the rumor in the crumbling pages we received from the city after a dispute over boundaries. We were quiet, didn't even know we had a lawyer, no fees, and it was over with a quick signature.

The folks before us had four children. We have four pets, but we cannot imagine what it would be like to pack four kids in here. Four kids, a cat and a dog. This was a different home, became a different place entirely to them. Different rooms meant different things. Certainly their dining room did not double as the library, and their master bedroom and second bedroom were switched. Their sandbox became my vegetable garden.

We are putting the mask on of ourselves. We are making this our own, taking charge, placing ownership on the surfaces.


When we bought the house, we planned to plant a tree to symbolically represent our new growth here in the hallows of our first house. We chose a dogwood, symbol of my childhood, and I was afraid of it withering and dying. Three others we planted as little twig-sized growths found ways to die, yanked up by puppies or trampled by recycling bins. But the dogwood remains, leaves sprouting, and now comes up to my shoulders in height. This little sliver in the mailbox will be a full blown tree one day, a piece of ourselves left behind in the soil.

It is with patience that I garden with K. We are kind to one another. We help each other, point out small wonders, help the push and pull of weeds and earth, hand each other leather gloves and ask questions of preference. We are compromising as we create this home, and he is participating, which is something not all male partners tend to do, I know. He has an opinion on everything (the opposite of the spectrum from my father) and brings a willingness to figure out how we can bring together two pieces of ourselves, how this can be ours.

We wear different masks when we are in different places, and that is okay. We need to be a little more guarded in the workplace, professional and responsible. We need to let our guard down with our dearest friends, need to be honest with our partners as we whisper in the dark, need to be playful with our children.

And I'm finding ways to allow myself to become me, to find that balance (which seems to be such a keyword for me right now), to find ways to relax and come to completion. I am finding ways to bask in the small pleasures, rather than waiting for happiness to come to me. I cannot imagine living any other way now, but it took some pretty notice-me-now upsetting things to happen in order to get to this place. That makes sense though; sometimes it's life changing events that allow you to take it all in, to gain perspective. I've long admired those who can face tragedy and sorrowful events and keep that chin up. And now, I'm becoming one of those people. I think.


For more Sunday scribblers on the topic of masks, click here.

Sunday Scribblings: Second chances.

It's rejection that fuels my own fire. Yesterday, I got my first rejection notice in the mail for a series of poems I submitted back in December. I knew I would not be accepted to this publication; I was shooting too high, I think, with this set of poems. But I needed to get myself motivated and get it out again--to submit as I had done a decade before. So much of my career has left me stagnant, forgetting who I had once been, forgetting what I found most important to me. Before I was rejected, though, I had already sent those poems out again, knowing the letter would come soon, knowing it was OK to move on.

I remember my first real pang at rejection in a relationship. He broke up with me on the phone, halfway across the country, saying we were too young to do this to ourselves. I was so angry with him, so angry that he cited his mother in our breaking up, and that was when I first submitted to magazines. A short story, something about a swimmer at a meet, was accepted in a nothing anthology, but to me, then, it was something, and I was light footed all day. What a thrill, to have something in the wide world.

I think about second chances and I think about how K and I have always warned the other: if you cheat, this is over. I know we mean it when we say it, an edge to our voices, a lack of tolerance when it comes to this mistake. This is something I would not do to him, something I respect him too much for, something that would devestate me. I worry sometimes, though, but I know that I can ultimately trust him, which is the only way we can maintain any kind of relationship. He is my light, my beacon.

I told my students we will have been together eight years this summer. They are shocked and ask, "Have you ever broken up?" The truth is: no, we haven't. I know some folks who have broken up and have gotten back together, generally with disasterous results. There are a lucky few who can make it through some of those hardships, but it seems more often then not, the relationship is strained.

Do I believe in second chances? Yes. But I hope it's never something I have to truly mull over.