What To Do In Illyria

It seems that somewhere crossing the prairie, I lost my narrative thread. I feel untethered and windblown. I don't know my lines. I have no back-story. It is the wonderful and the terrible thing about moving to a new life and starting over. Nobody knows any of my formers selves. It is liberating but a daunting task, starting life over from scratch. I try to write and fail. I go for hikes or splash in the creeks with friends. At night we stay up too late, half the neighborhood, drinking delicious spicy margaritas and watching the last efforts of the perseids. There are fires, music, gardens. The children run through houses likes packs of marauding wolves and everyone I meet is from somewhere else. In the morning I can only sit up dazed, blinking in the tree-shrouded dawn, and wait to see which shapes are real and which are only phantoms to burn off with the mist.


I get to decide what becomes of this life. Like a vision board lies blank before me, no past dragging it down, and I can pin to it whatever I want. So far I've selected only: meditation, hikes, and saying yes. It takes a moment of reckoning to convince myself that it's all right to be happy here. I don't know why I'm this way. I'm afraid if I let go of other things--dreams of Paris, dreams of Santa Fe--I'll never have them. But this isn't true. The truth is, if I don't let go of them, I'll never have what's right here, now. I'm just traveling, I've decided. With no set routes, only bright changing stars. If I have no final destination, I'll never be lost.

We Have Always Lived In The Forest

1. No time to talk, but I had to check in to tell you this, a bit of an emergency as you will see. I am fairly sure my neighbors are selling their trash to mole-people. I have not jumped to this conclusion as you may assume. I have evidence: a) on trash day, their curb bears no garbage can but a single white bag waiting out for the collectors. That's all my evidence but clearly no family of four produces only one bag of trash a week without mole people getting involved.


2. On one of our first days here, Indy called me to her window to show me a bit of old bark peeling off a tree. "Look," she said, eyes wet with fear. "A koala did that. They have very sharp teeth. They can kill you." I told her not to be stupid, no koalas live here. The bark was obviously stripped off the tree by the mole people, who boil it for soup. This calmed Indy considerably until she thought to wonder where mole people live. "In cemeteries and in mommy's French drains," I told her. That was the day she took to carrying a rusty scythe, but I'm pretty sure she's just playing "confederate".

3.On Tuesday my husband taught the girls to ride their bikes by first teaching them how to fall. I'd had a glass of wine, this struck me as profound. While he was out there, two Jehovah's Wittnesses arrived to ask us where we go to church. Noah made a curt reply, we believe anyone worried about souls other than their own is being just plain rude. The JW's tried to get all chummy and bond with us against the Southern Baptists, a stupid move. Give me a Southern Baptist any day. My friend I've made who was raised SB is incredibly Christ-like. She brings sweet tea flavored vodka to all social gatherings.

4. Today I drove to Trader Joe's and realized that I really do live in the mountains. I put on my music, enjoyed my latte and almond croissant from the Bracken Mountain Bakery (tastes like Paris), and made the long journey to Greenville. The drive was beautiful and sickening. The road is truly serpentine and my path was arduous. I mean, I'm like Strider up in here. Winding through the forest scavenging food for little people. Folks keep calling Brevard "the mountains", but I grew up in the shadow of Long's Peak and didn't believe them. Then I went over a series of switchbacks, emerged from the green ceiling and the gray-misted trees, and found the highland sun. I realized it could be a sunny day and I might not know it, nestled here in my greenwood. Before I came here, a friend told me these old mountains hold magic and I know now, he was right. Driving through the trees with the sun streaming through and Basia Bulat on the radio, an alchemy occurred. The woods held my heart and for the first time in awhile, I felt my old self.

(5. This is what it looks like when I drive to Trader Joe's, just saying.)

August 2012

August 2012 is the month I had a premonition about, when I was out for a walk on a cold clear day last November and craving new life, the kind of clear day I already miss, the air dry as long dead bones but crisp like newborn apples.

August 2012: I woke up to a crashed hard drive. Along with some videos and the start of a new piece, I lost months of work I'd done editing my book. Not corrections for grammar and spelling, but the part where you take your heap of words and breathe life into them and I'm grieving, going along just fine until some song or word catches me with cold hands and I start to cry.

That was the night I opened my bathroom door and found a hundred black flies, bred there overnight in my drains, and I went in to battle them, screaming like a Hitchcock blonde. Like a mean girl in a chick flick with her hair on fire, making my pioneer grandmothers proud.

But the people here are wonderful and there is music and light washed green through all the trees.

The daughters will start school, my husband will visit for 8 days total but not all at once, and I will continue forming my new life here, which is precious and wonderful, and hope that the moon is nothing but a pearl, something formed in a shell at the bottom of the sea until one day someone cracked it open and look how it shines.

Archways

photo thanks to RWLinder from rbgstock.com


It took forever to get out of Colorado, but too quickly the mountains were gone from my rear-view and that was the last time I knew solid what was west. The night before, we ran errands at the end of the day and I saw the sun set in Colorado for the last time in I don't know how long. The foothills were cold and planetary, blue under the full moon and a starry starry sky. I miss the grand expanses of the prairie with a sky-arching ache. The prairie was the one thing always gave me the space I needed. I watched the hills and the fields go dark and didn't know what to feel. I still don't.

We crossed into Kansas, whose small towns are the boyhood home of everybody you never heard of. Forgotten writers, never-mooned astronauts, and a Chrysler or a Carnegie, memory fails. We drove forever. We never stopped driving. I felt empty inside, task-driven, no thoughts to comfort me mile after mile. I didn't know what prayers to say, I said none, except the one the heart speaks straight to blue skies.

Kansas never ended but when it did there was Missouri. So many signs advertising Jesus like Warner's Old Time Cure. Like a panacea, but if it were that simple we'd all know by now. So many porn shops and adult stores and live nude girls, more than I see driving through all of Denver. "The Lion's Den Adult Store" and in front of them, signs claiming Porn Destroys Jesus Heals, except they'd thought of a synonym for destroy that rhymes with heals and I can't remember it now. And guns & ammo stores. Guns, girls, religion, American as apple pie.

It was supposed to take fifteen hours to get to St. Louis. It took eighteen. We checked into a smoking motel, only room available, outside the city proper at just after midnight, local time. I wasn't happy, but I didn't miss anything, my emotions stifled by road-drunkenness and the path ahead. Noah slept about five hours and left before me. At 6:30 in the morning, I hauled two girls, three bags and three pillows down to a car full of bees and we drove straight through St. Louis. The city was a beautiful reflection in my mirror as I crossed the Mississippi River and didn't know it, which is something out of a book I already wrote. After St. Louis there would be the awful fringed-and-glittered Nashville, the hours of rain, the semis crashed on the highway and the unexpected stay in a dank and dirty motel room, alone with the girls and no hot water in depressing Rockville, Tennessee. The rain would follow us all the way to our new home, which is where I sit now, where I've been sitting for two weeks and I'm unable to tell you about it yet, because I don't know what's happened and I'm still not sure where I am.

What I can tell you is that while I was writing this, a honey-thick female voice wafted into my windows, blown in on the wind down from my neighbor's porch, and I set aside my computer and walked through the grass to the place where people were gathered, five or six on guitar and one man on a harmonica, and they sang sweet and forlorn tunes while the green hills of Carolina undulated like vibrato behind them and the moon rose and cast us all in golden, bee-hewn light.

I can tell you about leaving St. Louis before rush hour on a Thursday morning with both of my daughters sleeping lightly like fairies a thousand miles from home. The arch was so beautiful, gleaming silver like the river itself had surged up over the city and froze there, in perfect symmetry with the orbit of stars.

July 27th, 2012

Woke up too early with Indy's eyes shining up at me, blinking like soft bats in the dawn. She hasn't slept a night in her own bed since her dad left. They fight over his pillow and one or the other takes it to bed every night, robbing it from me, the lonely wife. Rolled over and sent a text begging off an invitation for a short hike to a swim hole. Didn't have a backpack or the energy. Fell back asleep.

Later, after the mist had burned off, the thought of hot coffee in the stovetop espresso pot got me out of bed. The girls had carried all their blankets and pillows to the living room. My footsteps on the hardwood floors were their cue to start fighting. Fighting before coffee is strictly forbidden. Somehow it happens anyway. The girls are relentless, they miss their dad, they are in a strange land and overwhelmed. Relentless needs, relentless boredom, relentless fighting but deeply felt kisses and snuggles at night. If I spend too much time alone in the house with them, I won't make it. I know this. 66 days of 75 alone to go. I texted again, taking back what I'd turned down. Plans changed, we cancelled the hike. I brewed another pot of coffee over ice this time and drove a van full of children and new friends up to the lake where the retired folks with salted caramel skin dangled in floaties and complained about the cold spots.

We ate peanut butter and jellies and coconut brownies. We got sunburned and nibbled by fish. The girls fought and didn't share and embarrassed me. When I flat out told them this, they replied that I was embarrassing them. Both things were true. Authority is something I never wanted and I never did learn to wear it right. I wield it well only over myself, and even then, there are mishaps. I stay up too late, blow my budget on Thai food. I turn down invitations I should keep, but look, it all comes out all right.

We splashed and sunned and floated until the clouds rolled in, when we packed it up and drove away. By now, I've learned to find my way home.

Hearts in Dixie

I love you guys and I miss you so much.

It's like the pacific northwest here. Our neighbors called it a rainforest and we laughed.

But they weren't joking.

I can't wait to tell you everything (and catch up on your blogs, hot damn, do I miss them!) but I have no perspective on my own life right now, as well as no internet connection. Turns out things like cable companies run slow here in Transylvania County. Transylvania, you heard me right.

I'll be 'round in a couple weeks.

Until then, all my love from Dixie.

xoxo

-V

Have Bees Will Travel

The three girl cousins roamed the yard like fireflies in the dying light. We said goodbye. I cried myself to sleep at four in the morning and woke up seven hours later with my cheeks newly wet. We discovered Indy, who wants to change her name to Tinkerbell, had left her teddy bear at my parent's house. The teddy bear was a special gift for the road trip so we drove back to Denver to get it. The rain had passed. I stopped crying for a little while and the sky looked like this. No two things make beauty like prairie and storm. After hours of crying so vigorously that my eyes swelled like I'd been hit with a fist, I got a terrible case of the giggles. We watched TV in the dusk and after all those tearful goodbyes, the manufactured drama was hilarious. The polygamists on the television kissed their stepsons and had emotional breakdowns on live TV and plotted to kill their brothers and I laughed through it all. The wisdom of my body, seeking balance. 

Tomorrow night we'll sleep in St. Louis.

The bees will be in the back seat, screened and

draped in tulle like thirteen thousand little brides.

Farewell Tour

There was a farmer's market in the Highlands with a bouncing castle 

and the best veggie quesadillas I've ever had, that

they only sell at farmer's markets, that I've only found

twice in all these years and both times by accident. 

Everyone was out on bikes, with dogs,

with kids paddling along on skateboards like canoes. Everyone

was who I want to be when I make a million dollars and 

finally learn to run and everyone lived where 

I want to live and knew

what to do with their patios.

Denver was jogging and biking and eating ice cream, buying

farm fresh vegetables, going to the arts festival,

shopping at the Tattered Cover and Twist & Shout. The kids

hit a pinata in the park and we sat outside Red Mango on

Colfax and it began to pour. I drove from the Highlands

to Congress Park to Cherry Creek to Lodo and I 

remembered everything and I

won't forget these streets and I

am going to miss you, Denver.

Three days to go and before I forget to tell you again: we are taking the bees.

Fourth of July

Because of the statewide ban, we bought no fireworks.

We left my sister's house at the fullest bloom of dusk. Got in the car and we drove, drove on the highway, drove on a summer night with the windows down. That kind of free-fall driving that can cure your ailments or nurse them into heart sickness, depending which you choose. Around us, in every direction, the few professional displays that hadn't been cancelled exploded flowers in the night sky. The wind whipped my hair and we passed the glittering city. The city where my parents took me to art museums and theater in the park, to the capitol building and the Denver Mint, when I was a child. The city we cruised through as teenagers, went the wrong way down one way streets and screamed, ate quesadillas at the Pavilions, eased each others heart aches, made each other laugh to tears. The hotel where I stayed with my husband for one of our anniversaries, the pubs and microbreweries we visit in the fall, for pumpkin beer and sausages with spicy relish and brown bread. Past the bookstores, the place where we saw Wicked and Cyrano and Dracula and Les Mis, the stadium where we watched the Broncos beat the Titans empty and blazing in the night. Past the museums where we took our own children, the Six Flags they beg to visit again and again. The place where the St. Mark's coffee used to be, where at nineteen I licked whipped cream off a mocha and pretended to study on a night near Halloween, the fancy restaurant we pretended we could afford at twenty-one, the Paramount where I saw Tori Amos and had the most spiritual experience of my life at twenty-six, the beautiful Mayan, the seedy Bluebird where we made the mistake of going to a show that wasn't twenty-one and over and left, feeling old, annoyed by versions of our former selves. The Ogden, where we saw the Decemberists and walked back to our car in temperatures plummeting below zero, my hand clutched in my husband's against the cold, the busy city for just this once silent and still on a frozen night.

Goodbye, city.

We'd driven down to Denver on a brutally ugly afternoon. The smoke from the wildfires covered the city and everything was yellow. Yellow sky, yellow air, parched grass yellow in the haze. Like the apocalypse without any of the glamour, like living inside a decaying mouth. The sun a red iris in an angry open eye, glowering a sickly tint onto the pavement. Now we drove in the hot wind with the windows all down and the haze began to clear. This is how it's always been. For one fleeting moment, two dark gray clouds of smoke parted open like a blackened nut and the almost-full moon shined through. It was orange, it was sherbet, it was soft tangerine.

Life in Glass Mansions AKA Murder Houses

One thing about me is that for a writer, I often make myself spectacularly unclear. Last week, when I was saying that I was going to live in "a van down by the river", what I meant is that, during the ten day interim between the end of one lease and the beginning of another, we were actually going to be living in a pop-up camper that would not be on a river but across the street from a Target in one direction and the movie theater in another. It wouldn't have been the end of the world, it's just that we weren't sure how we were going to shower or cook or keep from turning into cave people. "Need to pick up wood.We'll have to build a fire every night," I said bracingly to Mr. V, who then informed me that under no circumstances would we be building a fire every night, a statement I still don't understand. How does one camp without a campfire? Can't be done. How would you make the s'mores???

However, the night before we were to go take up our new lives as mole people who live behind the Target dumpster, a very kind person we know called us up and said, hey, rather than living in a van down by the river, why don't you come stay in my mansion down by the river instead?

So it was that yesterday we found ourselves moving for a ten day stint into an enormous and fabulous house, whose owners have only just moved out and are trying to sell it. Let's just say that walking through it, I feel like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, treading on plush carpet past high vaulted mid-century modern fireplaces, dancing a gin-soaked shimmy while the owner remains unseen. Naturally, my immediate instinct was to throw a giant party, invite all the parents who paid real money for the private school my girls attended on scholarship, as well as everyone I went to high school with, pretend the house was ours, and then be all super casual about our seeming wealth. "What, this? Yeah, we became rich like, yesterday. I know, right?" And then we'd serve Chef Boyardee, which everyone would think showed how down-to-earth we still are, but really it would be the only thing we could afford. "Gwenyth Paltrow recommended Livingston Cellars Blush Chablis on GOOP today," I would say conspiratorially, pouring generous gallons of the stuff.

Of course, I know from Hollywood that the only two things to do in huge houses are to throw parties or get murdered in them. After dropping us off at the throne we are pretending to, Mr. V left to work the night shift at the brewery and left me alone in a huge and empty house that has floor-to-ceiling windows everywhere and no blinds. Needless to say, the surrounding woods were just crawling with rapists and axe murderers, and those guys that came after Harrison Ford in his lake house in Patriot Games were swimming out back in the river. To allay my fears, I put on the movie Gone, expecting Amanda Seyfried to be all cute and clumsy and got instead a flick about a man who kidnaps women from their homes at night and drags them into the woods. This was a mistake. I spent most of the night standing in front of the picture windows, watching vigilantly for my demise. I realized that if anyone was out there, they were going to see me looking scared and timid. So to throw them off, I started doing karate moves, busting out clumsy chops and off-balance round kicks in front of the glass. Ok, I didn't actually do that, but I thought it might make a funny scene for a movie. (Somebody remind me to call Mindy Kaling on a totally unrelated-to-my-movie-idea issue).


So this is where we are. I'd love to stay and tell you all my movie ideas, (Jensen Ackles is War Horse's trainer. I need riding lessons. We kiss.) but our fake pool house doesn't have wi-fi and the robotically polite Chick-Fil-A teenagers are giving me the stink-eye. 


xoxo
-V