This Is Not My Beautiful Life

In the summer of 2001, I met the man I didn't marry. I was just barely twenty and away from home with a friend, a city girl transplanted from the arid plains of Colorado and dropped in the sweltering humidity of rural Michigan in August. It was Amish country. When we could muster the energy, between lemonades and naps in the drowsy heat, to go for the mail or shout down the road to the neighboring farm, we'd see them rolling by in their carriages—sad, scrawny broke down horses, heads hung, leather reins clutched in the hands of men wearing round black hats from another time. They never looked at us.

We'd flown in for an O-Town concert. Too old to be chasing boy bands around the country and on top of that, we'd picked the lamest one. We'd missed Backstreet and N*Sync and I suppose we wanted to catch the tail-end of a fad when we still could. We were products of our Lutheran High School, held apart from the world, told we were above it. As a result, we were a little behind on everything. We'd worn shapeless Old Navy t-shirts and clunky white shoes all through high school. We'd take pints of ice cream to the magazine aisle and sit by the racks, browsing Teen Beat and eating Cherry Garcia, spitting out the cherries. We drove by our friend's house, honking the horn. We watched American Pie and cried when it showed us that boys were everything we'd always feared they could be.

Leila's family was from this strange, forgotten part of the country, like nothing I'd ever seen. Green rolling farmland stretching for miles, creaky old farmhouses, thick, impenetrable abandoned forests.  We were staying with Leila's grandmother, Leila's cousins lived in the nearest farmhouse, about fifty yards down on the other side of the dirt road. Her grandmother had given us the attic bedroom, up a stretch of stairs so narrow and steep I never once climbed them without clutching the rails. There were cobwebs around the drain in the sink, dried little gnat bodies suspended in old dust. The pipes creaked. For the first few seconds, the water always ran brown.

 I don't remember exactly when I met him. I think really it started the night we asked him to build us a bonfire next to the trampoline. We'd spent the day floating down the lazy river in black inner tubes. We thought it was a common enough recreation, but as the stream had meandered through back yards, people watching us perplexed from their back patios, we'd wondered. In the late afternoon we arrived, wet and dripping, back at the old farm house. We'd tied bandanas in our hair. Now the picture makes me laugh. I think we look like Friends of Ellen. For the life of me, I cannot remember how we thought we looked, except cool and hard and everything we weren't. There were fireflies in the red soaking light and goosebumps on my pale skin. We asked him to build us a bonfire, and he agreed.

We stood around the fire in the starry Michigan dark. He had to rise early for work the next morning but he stayed up with us. He still lived with his parents, it wasn't uncommon in farm country. He earned money and on the weekends he helped with the farm. He told us about castrating pigs. Our city indignance baffled him. How cruel, we cried, how sad, and he looked at us in honest confusion. Farm pigs must be castrated. So it had always been. As soon as the sun went down, the humidity on our skin left us chilled and shivering. Leila and I fell asleep, damp, on the trampoline. When we woke in the misty dawn, the sun pink through all that moisture banked over the cornfields, there was a blanket over us. We snuck back down the road to Leila's grandmother's house, bleary-eyed and possibly barefoot. He was gone.

That weekend he agreed to take us out on his boat. Most of the boys I'd met until this point hadn't been nice to me. I don't know why. In high school, boys ignored me, at best.(I count myself lucky for this now but at the time, it was devastating). The college guys I'd fallen in with were partiers and treated me as a circus rarity they'd developed a strange affection for. They'd cajole me light-heartedly to drink, to smoke, to do things I swore I wouldn't do. I was still under the spell of my upbringing, still equated normal college-aged behavior with the evils of the world. I still thought I was better than some people for the things I wouldn't do.

But he was different. He was relaxed and kind. He didn't speak much, he took our teasing with a slow, warm smile. I don't remember much about that day on the lake, only that it happened, and it was good. I have a picture he took of the two of us, me and Leila. I've got one arm over the wheel and one around Leila's shoulders. In pictures with other women, I always ended up looking like their boyfriends. There are still some feminine nuances I don't understand.

On our last night there, we piled into his Jeep. I rode in the back with him. By this point we were holding each other's gazes too long and I was looking up from beneath my lashes. You know the look. Leila and I fell into the role, adopted the personas of country girls, the highlight of our week a trip down dirt roads in the back of a Jeep, a hot summer evening, the wind in our hair, into town for French fries at the Hot & Now. I remember he was wearing a black baseball cap. His skin was tanned and rough with stubble. He touched my hip as I lit from the Jeep. I kissed him on the cheek.

The trip ended, I returned home to Colorado. He and I stayed up late, holding bashful conversations over the phone. Plans were made for him to visit me. I have a mind that spins wild fantasies quickly, before I can stop them. I saw myself back in the white farm house, overlooking the green fields, the buggy air and the evenings on the gators, by the fire. I ignored the insistent doubts in my heart and imagined a life for myself that involved tractors and pig castration and Amish people.

The day he was booked to fly in to see me was September 12, 2001.

I can't remember if classes were in session that day. I think they were. I do remember that campus was far quieter than usual. I remember walking across the green to the building where many of my English classes were held, my Jansport sweaty on my back. I was on my new cell phone with him. He was sitting at the Sturgis airport, just in case flights started going out. They didn't. He went back to the airport the next day. No flights went out the 13^th, either.

In the days that followed, we got to know each other better over the phone. What can I say? I was a feminist, a budding liberal, a college girl writing papers on bell hooks and Claudia Card. I was too young yet to understand my own nature: a lone-wolf who needed emotional wide open spaces, a dreamy heart and precious little pragmatism. He was a Midwestern farm boy, salt of the earth, hard-working and family-oriented, a builder of bonfires, castrator of pigs. I know clearly the moment things between us fell apart. For some reason, it was important to him that a wife would sit and watch the basketball game with him, not because she loved basketball, but because she loved him. I told him I would do no such thing, all my sensibilities piqued. We bid each other a terse goodbye. We never spoke again.

Just two or three weeks later, I would meet a boy who had a J.R.R. Tolkein tattoo and feminist leanings of his own. Who kept a picture of his three fierce-looking sisters in his wallet. Who would call our house and leave silly messages for my roommate's dog and who would, unbelievably, be attracted to my rougher edges. Just under one year later, I would marry him.

When things first ended with Leila's cousin, I was devastated. I'd never had a serious boyfriend, I thought something was terribly flawed in me and that I would never be loved. At nineteen, it seemed the world brought good things to everyone, but not to me.

What I feel now is lucky. To have come so close. To have danced with, and then escaped, a fate that wasn't mine.

We Are The Weirdos

As a teenager, I spent most of my time driving all over Denver with my three best friends, in one old Honda or another, seeing movies and eating Italian food and daring each other to do things like go through the drive-thru backwards or take the forbidden bus exit off the highway, the one that goes underground and says BUSES ONLY(scandalous, I know). We called ourselves The Blood Sisters, and liked to pretend we were the girls from that 90's girl power gem, The Craft. We each had a direction. I was West (I lobbied hard for West) and when we needed a little magic, to make doors swing open at school or to become impervious to unrequited love and popular-girl disdain, we would chant "North, South, East, West, Craft, Craft, Craft!!"

So as you can see, we weren't going on a lot of dates. My friends did occasionally, but never me. I can say this now because of years of therapy high self-confidence. When we weren't out, awkwardly trying to make some coffee shop "our" place (like on 'Friends')by over-staying our welcome and over-tipping, or "crusing", in the technically illegal sense, around the Arvada mall or sitting in King Soopers eating Ben & Jerry's and browsing Teen Beat for pictures of boy bands, I was content to be at home with my family.

My family isn't exactly normal either. We sing in restaurants and talk to each other in accents and the first time I brought my now-husband home to meet them, we all thought it would be funny to pretend my parents were alcoholics and scare him. It made more sense at the time. But before that, back in high school, if I wasn't out dabbling in witch craft I was at home, where every Saturday smelled of barbecue and the soundtrack to every evening was Garrison Keillor. I was content at home, penning damply emotional poetry, or gleaning a rich sexual education from novels, or spending my requisite hours on the phone. My sister's room was right next to mine. "I can hear everything you're saying," she would taunt me. We got along, mostly, in high school, and if we weren't driving around together listening to Save Ferris and Aqua, my sister would sit in her room and make things. The first thing she made me was an Altoids tin covered in pictures of moons and stars that she'd gleaned mainly from the Delia's catalog. She didn't have modge-podge then, so she'd stuck the pictures to the tin with clear glittery nail polish and presented it to me. It was lovely. It was so me, back then. I still have it.

Now my sister has refined her artistic talent and uses it to run a small business and throw incredible parties. On Sunday she threw a Red Riding Hood themed party for her daughter Violet's very first birthday. Violet has red hair, and I am sick with envy. I wanted a little ginger kid, someone to smell like sunscreen and stay inside with me year 'round, in the dark, where it's safe. There, there now. Safe little ginger. Mommy's got you.

Anyway, my blonde sister got the red-headed child who earned the nickname (what else?) Little Red. And the red-headed child turned one. Below are the results.




Ayla, Cousin Eisley, and Owl Indy


Who doesn't love a craft? (Besides me.)



I make funny expressions when I talk to people:




Me with my lovely sis and the birthday girl, Viv. (Short for Violet).


(My style secrets, you ask? I have two hippie tunics and one hip-modest cardigan and I wear them to every single holiday, party, and wedding. Done.)


My mom, my grandma, my daughter


My mom and dad



Red Scares The Wolf



Look, I might spread Nutella on a Wal-Mart croissant and call it a work of art, but my sister is the real deal. You can visit her blog here, where I'm sure she'll have a party post up soon, with lovelier pictures. (Vintage photos are probably out now. I'll be the last to know it). Or you can visit her craft blog, Lark & Lola, where she does amazing things like turn tea towels into pillows I covet, and is kind enough to tell you how.

Now hipsters, please excuse me. I have to go pen some damp emotional poetry and steer backwards through the Wendy's drive-thru window.

XOXO
-V

Soft Things

image via Pinterest

Today I'm thinking about the Nutcracker. My parents took me when I was little, too little to remember any of the performance. The hush of the theater, my itchy black tights. All the adults in their woolen coats, the bright lights inside, the cold white outside. My dad carrying me to the car when it was over. I'm thinking about his winter coat, the velvety elbow patches. I always had to touch those elbow patches, brushing the grain of the suede back and forth, back and forth. Gramma had a mink coat, soft as silence, soft as heaven, and in its folds were sweet things. Butterscotches and Lifesavers. I spent a lot of my childhood sitting in church in itchy tights, being slipped hard candies to keep me silent.

I would tilt back my head and count the lights.

Today I'm thinking about the Christmas pageants. The brown paper bag that held an orange, a red apple, chewy peppermints.

Today I'm thinking about soft things, things that settle quietly on the soul. Things you might need to learn to live with, that melt away imperceptibility or maybe never. That take time to resolve. Today I want to know how to do it.

I want to know the way to be.

Last night another branch fell on our roof, and today we wake to more snow. When it snows you need to get up early, but you want to sleep late. You stumble around the house and envy hibernating, furry beasts. You think maybe your soul needs what you can't give your body. This quiet. This dark. This stillness.

The thing about snow is that your bed is always calling, but you can't go to it any more than usual.

I'm so grateful to the pagans for their festivals of lights.

I remember that it's always been the same. Our spirits, needing the stillness, but fearing the dark. Millions of souls, millions of years. Waking in darkness.

Searching for light.

Now and Then

One year ago this time, I was about to be hit with a monster of a depressive episode that has me feeling saddle shy about the upcoming winter.

Two years ago this time, we were preparing to move from our home in Denver to live with family in Ft. Collins. We were preparing to leave a beloved neighborhood, a steady income, a city we loved, a first preschool.

Seven years ago this time, almost this hour exactly, I was at Coopersmiths eating fish 'n chips and waiting for Ayla to be born. She was six days overdue. I had scheduled an induction for the next morning. I sat in my seat rocking back and forth with strong contractions I was afraid to hope were real. That night by one am I was in the hospital euphoric with gratitude for my epidural, all plans of a 'natural' birth (like any birth is unnatural UNLESS you are named Rosemary) tossed aside. She came on her own in the morning. I held her to my chest, heard her first cries, sang her a first song looking down on the gold and crimson leaves outside our window.

Nine years ago this time, I was days away from my wedding. I was young. I was stupid. I was thrilled.

This year, I blame her October birth for Ayla's love of the spooky and macabre. For her deep, innate drive to face her fears head on. For the fact that she eschews pink and princesses for Zombies, Darth Vader, and grasshoppers.



This year Indy turned five. She still runs to me with her arms wide open when I pick her up from school.



This year Mr. V went to the Great American Beer Fest, a place where he had once gone and wished. This year he went to win.



This year we drove up the canyon, parked by the river, got caught in the rain. The sun was brilliant, illuminating the shower against the blue sky. We headed east. Got ahead of the storm, at a place along the same river. A willow tree, a river island. The girls said it was the perfect spot.

The rain'll catch us again, I said.

But you know, it never did.

Peaches

The girls after swimming, August 2009


We went to the pool today to catch the end of summer.

It ends next week when the girls start school. I hate the way they schedule school. It should go two weeks into June when it's still not hot here anyway. Then the kids wouldn't have to to back until September.

September is the proper month for school starting. No one should be putting on their backpack and walking to class until that chill is in the air. Until the light has changed.

But any day now, it will start to.

I read an article in which a man said "Summer for me is all about the search for the perfect peach. You find it, you eat it, it's gone."

It's enough to make you melancholy until you remember: Peaches come back every August.

I remember the last time I ate a perfect peach. It was August and we were living with Mr.V's mom (for the first time) at the old farm house in Windsor. Ayla was on her way to turning one and not yet walking. She'd scoot around those hard wood floors in the onesies I didn't like and saved for days at home. She still had curly hair and I loved it so. I was reading "Angry Housewives Eating BonBons" and "The Bergdorf Blondes". You know it's a time of stress for me when my reading material goes light. We were eating a lot of spicy dumplings from Hunan Taste back then. Noah was doing some kind of labor (it wasn't clear to me exactly what even then) building a massive house for the Barr's of Spradley-Barr Ford, where I had been working when I met him, at 20. When he got home--around three or four back then, but it always felt like he'd been gone for ages--we'd put Ayla on the trampoline and bounce her around. I'd tell him what I did all day. (Chased after Ayla, read chick lit, watched the marriage of Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson slowly dissolve on their reality show.)

I bought the Palisade peach at Safeway and ate it in that little room with the Murphy bed and the dust bunnies and the big view of the sky. I went back that night and bought more.

There's a good chance I've eaten other perfect peaches since then, but that's the one I remember.

Hunan Taste is called something else now and no one lives in that little farm house off the country road. That was the house where Mr. V fell out of a tree and bruised his own perfect peaches all black and blue. The house where we'd sit on the back steps eating Mercy's fried pepperocinis. We saw clouds that looked like jellyfish. The house where Ayla fell head first out of the deep bathtub. The house by the road that I drove down to get Noah and Josh the black lab jumped out the car window when I was going 55 and I thought I'd killed the family dog and it would have been the second one to die that summer. The attic was full of bats and the upstairs bathroom smelled of guano but we could watch them in the evenings when the sky went violet and the grass grew cool. We would lie on our backs staring at the sky.

I don't miss that house. The man getting maudlin about the peaches just made me remember.

I put down the article and looked around. There in front of me Ayla was splashing in the pool. Her hair is stick straight now, her limbs have lost their plump and gone gangly. She wanted me to watch her first real attempts at swimming. I held up her back and she smiled, eyes squinted, at the sky. Every few seconds she'd kick and sink, but I always caught her. She doesn't trust the water yet. She still trusts me.

Indy asked if I wanted to see her "super cool show". The show was her slapping the water and twirling with her arms in the air. But oh, how she smiles. Back at the farm house there was no Indy, and I remember: what a miracle, to have this little person in front of me. Fragrant and soft, like all late harvests. I don't remember who I was before them. I don't know how to live without them. Ayla lifted herself out of the water and curled up on the pavement in the sun. She burrowed into my thighs and belly like she used to as a baby. The hair on her back was thick and downy, like a peach.