Happy New Year

Crammed up against Christmas and unfortunately mired in the coldest, darkest time of the year, I've never been able to reconcile January 1st as a holiday, much less the start of a New Year.  It’s cold, bleak, and unwelcoming, not a stellar time to be thinking about a new exercise regime, changes to bad habits, or really anything other than hibernating.  That’s why I’ve always taken heart in the natural way my year seems to transition at the end of June into the beginning of July.

The start of my New Year celebration begins with the Summer Solstice.  The pagan in me finds this day enchanted.  The longest day of the year, lush and green, smelling of fresh cut hay and ripe strawberries, such a contrast to the stark landscape of January.  It’s the perfect day to be outside from dawn until dusk doing something that is good for your soul. This year the Strawberry Moon was coming full and I watched it rise over the Oahe Dam in the middle of the South Dakota grasslands as the sky radiated magenta beneath the thunderheads.  You can see to forever there, which is a beautiful thing when you are considering all of the possibilities life has to offer.  

The next leg of my new year happens on my birthday, almost a week later, on June 27. I consider birthdays each person’s personal New Year.  This year my transitioning held the additional boon of my son’s first birthday on June 25.  Starting with the Irish blessing of a buttered nose for luck (don’t ask, I don’t know where it came from), you get to take stock of everything the year before has been for you and use your special birthday wish (yes, these do come true, you know) to give a bit of magic and weight to your heart’s desires for the next one.  

My 35th year was far and away the most challenging of my life.  I got my birthday wish from my 34th year- a baby!  Sterling was ardently longed for, and perhaps it was that birthday candle dream that made him a reality. I spent all of 34 trying to get pregnant and then being pregnant.  That year passed in a quiet hum, flushed and pink with anticipation, dreams, and extra baby blood.  On my 35th birthday, I brought my son home from the hospital, sore and exhausted but proud and in awe of this new life.  I have no idea what my birthday wish was as I sat at the table with him beside me, snuggled in and sleeping away his newness. I had everything, so perhaps I wished for nothing at all.

The next day I had to bring Sterling back to the hospital. He was jaundice and tongue tied, not able to nurse.  I was battered and bruised and my milk wouldn’t come in, but I was so swollen that I winced at a touch.  I got a phone call while I was at the hospital that only I had the data needed for some report for school, needed ASAP, so I sat on my hospital bed and cried as I tried to pump and type.  And so the challenges of being a new, working mother began.   How would I balance trying to be exceptional at both my job and being a mother, because I was willing to accept nothing less of myself. I was back to work by August, taking really less than five true, full weeks of leave.  I did my best to give 100% of myself to my work and to Sterling (I know the math on that doesn’t work out) while not forgetting my husband, my family, and the other people and responsibilities around me.  I had to remember to pay the bills and feed the cats and horses and smile appropriately when people asked if they could talk to me about their problems.  I had to be level headed and fair even when I had had no sleep or was an hour overdue to pump.

And then I noticed things around me starting to change.  My husband was never home, and when he was home in body, he wasn’t present.  He refused to touch me and rarely talked to me.  He blamed me, saying that I was off-putting, that I was too stressed to be enjoyable.  Did he not see that I was stressed because I was trying to work to make sure we could survive and pay our bills?  That I was working so he could live his dream of running a music shop when really all I wanted was to be able to stay home and be a mom?  Did he not see that I was stressed because I was doing the lion’s share of taking care of our child because he was never there?  In reality, he was using this rationale as an excuse to be having an affair with his 24 year old shop girl.  It was easy to villainize me when his own conscience was so tainted.

I spent the entire fall in denial, praying that he wouldn’t do something like that with a brand new baby at home.  It felt like winter came very early.  In the darkest hours of the coldest days, right after the REAL new year, we confronted reality.  How appropriate a setting for my life to fall apart.  I spent the early months of 2013 watching as the dreams I had for my life and my family sluiced away like sheets of freezing rain.  Friends I needed turned a deaf ear. I fretted away every calorie I was able to take in, causing people to wonder if I was sick or had an eating disorder as I dipped below 110 pounds.  I doubted everything about myself. I had made no New Year’s resolutions, but this was decidedly NOT what I had predicted for 2013.  

As winter slowly began to melt away, I resigned myself to the fact that my marriage was truly, irrevocably over.  But spring is a time of new beginnings, much more so than January.  Once I was able to share what was happening in my world, the people in my inner circle showed me an enormous amount of care and support.  They reached out and tried to take care of me, even though I am terrible at letting that happen.   An old friend became a new source of happiness, reminding me that I have worth, that I am desirable, that I am lovable.  And that was terrifying.  I was encouraged to apply for a job that I considered well beyond my reach, but to my surprise, I was a finalist.  I was content with not getting the position, until my world tilted again and I waited, my breath and future uncertain, to see what would come of my mentor and friend vacating the top spot at Profile. Spring became a time of flux and wondering.  While great things were afoot, I was unmoored and uncertain about everything.  

In the final days of the school year, in the final days of spring, the final days of my 35th year, I began to think that life as I had hoped wasn’t over, and even more to the point, that it could be better than I had ever wished, birthday candle or no.  Hope springs eternal.  I was appointed to Profile’s corner office, which meant the loss of a dear friend from the roll, but an amazing opportunity for me.  My task is ahead of me, and I know what to do. I spent the Solstice in South Dakota, the place where my soul feels most at peace, in the comfort and belonging of a very special person.  My questions about myself and our potential relationship were answered.  Which brings me to now, past the change of seasons, past my birthday, into July.  

When you are in education, July 1 marks the New Year.  The books have been closed on the previous quarter and year, honor rolls are posted, and the time comes to start thinking about September (or late August for us).  For me, this year that means a new job with new responsibilities.  It means proving myself.  But is also means opportunity abounds.  July 1 also marked the start of a new challenge for myself, running (well, sort of), which is so far out of my comfort zone as to be laughable.  But you know, it feels great, especially in the company of an amazing cheerleader and coach.  It is my effort to open up, take risks, and not shy away from things that I can’t automatically do well.  It also means letting someone new(ish) in to my life in a non-work related way, which, believe it or not, hasn’t happened in years.  I have to let go believe that I can be valued as a friend, not just as a leader or problem solver.  

So here I sit on July 4th, Independence Day, the final stretch of my New Year celebration.  My beautiful, amazing son is sleeping through the raucous bangs and crashes of the fireworks all around us.  My legs remind me of the effort I have put in and itch for more. As dusk settles over the grasslands of South Dakota, two hours after ours, I will get a good night phone call from my cowboy, wishing me sweet dreams for the night and my future.  I look forward to Monday when I return to school refreshed after the long weekend, ready to get down to the task of making Profile even more amazing than it already is. And I realize how beautiful it is to be excited about life, love, friendships, work.  I am independent, strong, and capable of not only doing hard work, but of being valued and loved.  What a great way to start the New Year.  Cheers and blessings to all.  

Fireworks over Pierre/Fort Pierre, South Dakota

Country Confession

I have to come clean.  I’ve been keeping this a secret for a long time now, and in order to be true to myself, you know, all that “walk the walk, talk the talk” stuff I’ve been preaching forever, I have a confession: I think I like country music.  Maybe more than a little.  It kinda gives me this warm feeling inside that I haven’t felt before.  OK, I am active country music listener.  

I know some of you have been wondering for a while.  I mean, there have been some hints and clues, right?  Maybe it was my predilection for boots and jeans, or that I ride horses and can drive a tractor, or perhaps the not so subtle big-ass Dodge 1500 Big Horn truck? Or have you been digging a little deeper and recognized the South Dakota grasslands in my Facebook cover photo, or read the longing in my poetry, or saw my blush when they kid behind the register called me ma’am with just a hint of a drawl?  Or did I out myself when I forget to change the radio from WPKQ back to NHPR?  Whatever...now it’s out there and I can’t take it back.  

I first got the inkling that I might be a country music listener three years ago.  I came to it late in life, you see.  When most people are first starting to experiment with music,  I was completely shut off from it.  Even though I was surrounded by country music growing up,  I can hear my mother saying, “Not in this family you don’t.”   You see, it’s not that country music isn’t accepted where I’m from; it’s just that my people don’t accept it.  The country station, which happens to be the one that always comes in, was completely bypassed with a quick scan through.   Instead I was given a healthy diet of Vietnam protest songs and Motown with a smattering of Blues and Soul, coupled with my own generation’s moody cynicism packaged haphazardly in Seattle Grunge and European techno.  It was all about the irony, the disaffected malaise and angst of many young people with purple hair and extensive black wardrobes.  Country was just so, well, country.  

But how could I hide that I was a country girl!  My dad was educated but blue collar and my mom stayed home. My best days were spent playing in the barn, and my best friend was my horse.  Any weekend from Memorial Day to Columbus Day could find us at a horse show, where the experience really wasn’t complete until one of us got dumped into the manure pile.   We had dogs and trucks and we all knew how to muck stalls, throw hay, and use power tools.  But man, don’t let any of my friends at school know all that.  All of those kids who rode on the circuit or I sat with in the bleachers at the Fair- a nod in the hall will do, thanks.  They understood: vo-ag kids don’t talk to the weirdo theatre chicks.  And they certainly don’t share music.  

So there I stayed in the closet until a fateful day in June of 2010 when I drove from Denver to Rapid City and the only stations to come in in my rental car were country.  And for some reason, as I crossed state and county lines, the Muses felt I needed to hear “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” about ten times. After nearly choking on my expensive iced coffee the first time, then really listening and laughing every time thereafter, I started to hum along.  Just a dip of the musical toe, you see.  

But then I arrived at my destination, just west of Pierre, SD. Country music heartland.  And these people didn't just listen to country, you see, they lived it.  Land stretched forever under skies ripe for fireflies and thunderstorms, casting a golden glow over round bales and countless head of cattle.  Pickups abounded, farm trucks and dualies, big jacked up toys. I swear, there is not one foreign car in the whole damned state.  It’s like they are illegal.  You have never heard a country song about a Prius, but at least twenty-five percent feature as a central character a pickup, tractor, or combine.  And the people...”Yes, ma’am” is not sass talk.  It’s real.  They are truly being polite.  Even the little boys in their boots and cowboy hats. Women may be expected to help castrate bull calves and feed twenty sweaty ranchers, but they are still treated like ladies.  And hats get tipped, or at least a finger to the brim and a nod.  They have high school rodeo teams with national champions and everyone stands for The Pledge and sings along to the National Anthem.   They go to church on Sundays and real men believe in the power of Jesus and their mamas.  Just like in the songs.  It would be like going to Seattle and realizing everyone does wear flannel all the time and they really are pissed off and disaffected, and totally like, whatever, dude about everything.  This was a much kinder, gentler reality.  

So I started out experimenting.  You know, a little here, a little there.  Maybe only in NPR wasn't coming in.  But then I found myself actively seeking out the stations, yearning for twangy guitars and songs about country kids on the farm, girls who like boys in trucks, boys who like tractors.  This liberal agnostic found herself singing along to songs about trusting God and letting Jesus take the wheel. And once that sweet boy from South Dakota, the one with the truck and the dog and the ranch and the tractor, started sending me song lyrics, I knew I was done for good. I found songs that fit my life and my longings and melodies that stuck like honey. Eastern grunge techno cynic be damned.  Yes, ladies do like country boys, just like the song says.

"The Blowup," by Tim Cox.
A reminder to save a horse, ride a cowboy.

It was hard to break my newfound love to my family.  I did so gently, easing them in with crossover music, and reminding them that they had voted for Carrie Underwood on Idol.  I was met with raised eyebrows and smirky smiles.  Really?  Country? Are you sure?! Don’t get me wrong, they are getting better, but it’s still going to take time. My dad will now sit in the same vehicle where it is playing, and my younger brother is kind of bi-musical (Bluegrass being the happy medium); my mother, however, it still a bit of music bigot. “It’s ok if country music stars are on reality television, but please don’t let me have to listen to them sing.”  Although she does like Luke Bryan’s butt (who doesn’t?).

Perido Ghost Hotel Free-Write

I used to have my students do free-writes from anonymous photographs. The Perido photos(www.bryanperido.com), specifically the Ghost Hotel series and #5 from Portfolio 1, provided great fodder and a chance to work with a semi- series. So much fun! It is an extra challenge, though, if you know someone in the photos. Jared, thanks for the great images and inspiration. All are fictionalized liberally and meant fondly. Enjoy!

The barn coat carried that olfactory fingerprint singular to every person. His was a combination of sawdust perfume from maple and cherry, hickory and pine, chewing tobacco, and the faint lingering essence of sweat from hundreds of cattle, a few good horses and one perfect dog, all brushed sweet and clean by tall grass, prairie wind, and summer rain. Its ochre color brought out the gold flecks in his eyes, softening them, although, just like we are unaware of our own scent, he was unaware of this particular effect.

It was a strange juxtaposition between the faded cotton duck and the fine wool of the black topcoat and the crisp linen shirt and cravat that he wore beneath it. But it is also a strange day when you contemplate your own mortality in a very real sense. His decision was whether or not he would walk through the door of the Perido Hotel. Fate would decide the rest.

He knew the stories. Some people come to a point in their lives when they stand at a crossroad, which is exactly where the boarding house stood, on the crossroads of a little non-town far out in the South Dakota grasslands. In its day it met passengers from the great coal and steam locomotives, providing them simple fare and a clean bed for the night between destinations. Now it stood between the end of time and decisions, the end of confusion, and a new take. But the choice wasn't up to you once you walked through that door.

He had dressed for the occasion, a fitting combination of in between. He chose clothes that he might be laid out in, the fine coat and shirt, in case that was to come to pass, but combined with soft jeans that hung well and sturdy broken in boots suited for a long walk or ride, a serviceable hat, and his coat, in case his journey on might continue.

The drive out to the Perido has been a silent and solitary one, eight hours in the old Buick with no radio, its red paint, scoured completely clean of clear coat, fading even closer to brick brown under the dry heat of the open road. He had taken his time on the drive, but knew he wanted to be standing on the dilapidated veranda before the sun settled beyond the horizon. No one had been able to tell him exact directions to the place, so he drove on instinct until the crumbling shell came into view.

He edged the car off the road and sat, letting the engine idle and gripping the thin wooden wheel in his slightly shaking hands. This was it. What was he hoping to find here? Where was he hoping to go? He had lived the past year in a morass of cheap hotels and cheaper women made tolerable by many, many of the cheapest beers. His stomach clenched when he thought of the number of mornings he had woken only to realize nothing had changed except the color of her hair or the number of empties lying on the floor next to the bed. He would dress slowly enough to ease his throbbing mind, but with enough haste to get away clean before her scent permeated his skin. Every daylight brought him back to the morning when he should have worn his fine shirt and coat, had a great tawny cat not taken his heart and hope and torn it to shreds. Since then he moved like a man haunted and hollow, because he was both, and wanted neither any longer.

He had heard it told that if you went in and the hotel decided that you had nothing more in you, nothing left to give, then that is where you stayed. You joined the ranks of the heartbroken, the mind broken, the ethereal glue holding the weathered stick framed building together. If you woke whole, you left new. At this point he was willing to take that chance.

He swung open the door of his car, thinking briefly of what would happen to it if he didn’t come back out. It had proven solid transportation and not infrequent lodging for some time. But now wasn’t the time to wax sentimental. Unfurling his long legs from the cab, he planted both feet on the rusty ground, closed his eyes briefly, then set off up the walk.

The building gave off the ancient smell of granite foundation stones crumbling to dust alongside rodent scat and bones, mildew, and neglect. The front door hung off one crumpled hinge, but before grabbing the porcelain knob he glanced through the parlor window. It looked as though someone had ransacked the room eons ago, and no one had bothered to put things to right. The drawers and doors of the desk and sideboard stood open, their contents of bottles and paper, nails and fabric, scattered across the tops and floor. Dust gathered inches thick on everything, clouding the contents of the glass from view. He knew chaos, items thrown about in haste and anger and left. But now he just wanted to find a room at the end of a long hallway where he could empty the contents of his mind and be done with them like so many emptied bottles.

The knob felt cool in his hand, despite the heat of the day. He could feel the sun beating through his many layers, making the hair that grazed his collar cling to his neck. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair, deciding in that instant to enter the foyer like a gentleman, hat to his chest. As soon as he thought it, the door fell open and he was across the threshold, inside the inexplicably cool entry, door closed behind him. No sound, no movement, simply done.

The walls were quiet around him, although not the quiet of an empty house, but instead the silence of people saying nothing. Before his eyes and ears could fully adjust, he saw a woman off to his right. Her pale yellow dress glowed like gossamer. She gave no notice to him, but continued her task of counting the jars in the jelly cupboard.

Mother-woman, child dead. Couldn’t feed him. She goes from counting food to reading him fairy tales. Only he isn’t here. But she doesn’t know that.

The words had come through from everywhere and nowhere at once, filling in behind his eyes and making his head buzz. He passed the door of her room and went up the center staircase in the center of the hall. He didn’t want to hear anyone else’s story, didn’t want to see any more open doors. On his way down the hall, the way he knew he needed to go, however, more doors stood open and more stories ran out.

Killed a man, his brother. Accident. Couldn’t pull the trigger twice. Cleans his gun and waits until he has the courage. He watches out the window for him to come back.

Daughter gone, no note, no sign of a fight, just gone. Her cat paced frantically at the door for days. The two hoped they would find something here.

Finally he came to an empty room, his room. The door stood ajar and no story came out, so he knew he had to go in. He pushed it open and leaned against the frame, taking in the duality of the space. He could see it for what it was, thin lathe barely covered by decaying horsehair plaster, oilcloth rug haphazard on the floor, vacant and cold, but he also saw it for what he wanted it to be- her room. Robin’s egg and azure cheered the space against a winter’s pale sun. The fine finials on the thin wrought-iron bed gave a child’s room a lady’s touch. It stood empty, trunks against the wall, waiting to be moved to his house, their home. He wanted to bury his face in the pillows that weren’t there and take in her lilac smell. Slowly he eased himself onto the edge of the bed and closed his eyes, for there the decision would be made.

Running alongside a spaniel pup, sandy hair and round cheeks. Grass higher than his head. Indefinite possibility.
Moving cattle, spring and fall, on a sweet bay mare. Golden time.
Stolen kisses under enormous sky. Promises. Plans.
Labors of love. Details carved, not into stone, but wood. Every possibility.
Tackle and slice. Gone in an instant. Dip into oblivion.
Dark bars, garish lights, attached but alone.
Falling faster, spinning. Self destructing. Nothing.

And for an eternity or an instant his mind was still. His past had been weighed against the potential for his future. The bones of the house seemed to respirate and hum as beneath the weight of time he lay pinned to the bed, unaware of himself, but still existing in the now.

Images flicked past like numbers on a roulette wheel. Bright eyed children mashed against bar brawls against the smell of vanish against the tang of blood. Would he land on something of worth, something with a future? Or would he languish on the bed with the task of waiting for the future that wasn’t?
He felt himself begin to thrash as though being held under water. His arms and legs anchored him to the thin ticking, but his head whipped from side to side, his face finding soft fabric beneath his left cheek. He inhaled like a drowning man, frantic. Pulling in a ragged breath, his lungs filled with his own scent, his self, his reality. His past cascaded through his consciousness, hauling him through to a newfound present.

His eyes opened to blinding morning sun bleaching clean the walls of the little room. He could tell without looking that he was stripped to the waist, though how and when that had happened he didn’t know. His fine clothing lay in a pile on the floor, but his coat was balled at the head of the mattress beside him. His grounding. Gingerly he assessed his reality. The sun was not yet hot, but he could feel its warmth on his bare skin. A good sign. Reaching up, he covered his eyes then ran his hands down his face. He paused as he grazed his cheeks. He figured he had about a 60 grit stubble going on, indicating that it had been at least a couple of days since he had been in this world. But he was back. And he was whole. And for the first time since he wanted to remember, he was excited to get dressed, to create, to be.

He stood and let himself look down at the bed, wondering what he would see. But it was just a thin mattress in bare room in a decaying house, no longer a longed for nightmare. Quickly but with care he redressed himself, thinking that his next chapter might require this particular blend of clothes. He was ready for anything. He carried his hat in his hand as he pushed his way out the front door to his waiting car, covered in a thin layer of driveway dust. The door creaked open in its familiar way, and he settled inside the worn seat. Before fitting his hat back on his head, he looked back at the house and half smiled. Then he gave it a little tip, a nod to Lady Fate, before closing the door and driving away.

South Dakota Musings

Black eyed susans run the length of the road

Perpendicular to the parallel horizons

Big sky, huge land, open smiles

Sunrise

Yes, the deer and the antelope DO play

Amidst countless head of cattle

Cowboy hats and scuffed boots, drop yoke shirts

and tobacco without a hint of irony

If I had a type, it would be your type

Sam Elliot meets Monty Roberts over rhubarb cobbler

and Bud Lite

At the rodeo

Talking horses bred for quick boned cowiness

And Vaquero dressage

Thunderstorms shoot rain straight down

From the heavens countless miles away

Rainbows over wheat and round bales

A different kind of gold