On life right here, the absence of tools, and the tail end of spring
May 6, 2019
May 10, 2019
Dear Eva,
I am on a plane en route to Lisbon via Philadelphia. For reasons I don’t fully comprehend but will not question, I feel on top of the world today and just generally lately. Despite our abhorrent president, despite apocalyptic warnings of speeding toward human extinction — here I am, just enjoying the dance, loving the challenge of brainstorming the ways I can make tiny contributions toward progress, ways I can spend precious hours of my remaining dance to weave together words in new ways and find delightful ways to cherish my time with the three humans with whom I am lucky enough to share a home. Maybe this is just the view from the tail end of spring, as I peer over the ledge to a summer that feels full of promise and quiet moments on humid nights and barbeque smells and the laughter of two very happy young boys. Whatever it is, I am happy to be experiencing it and riding this wave, somehow feeling both invigorated and totally serene simultaneously.
I am sitting one row ahead of a couple with two young children, each parent tasked with trying to console and entertain one sleepy and restless child. As I listen to the intermittent wailing and screams, I feel only empathy and relief that, this time, it’s not my stress. It’s making me think about how much of raising young children is so physical and visceral. Going from Point A to Point B suddenly becomes a video game — a trip to the store might involve navigating an explosive dirty diaper in the grocery cart or a child in a car seat screaming during your car ride, maybe both. The simple acts of everyday life suddenly take on a whole new, challenging form.
--
It is now several days later, and I feel different than I did when I began this letter. Jetlag and hours spent in windowless oxygen-deprived conference rooms have me feeling a bit flat in both body and mind. We got word this week that a law school classmate has stage 4 cancer, and this news changed the color of the Lisbon streets to me. I am anxious to get home to put my arms around my boys.
I am thinking about how when I was a kid, I spent a huge amount of time dreaming about my future life. It was always out ahead, and it was always outside of Iowa. Then, when I was a new mom, I sometimes felt like life was on pause, thanks to the daily obstacles children bring into the mix. That feeling was exacerbated when we moved to Iowa, just a couple of miles from the house where I was raised. Life somehow still felt out ahead, suspended in time for a bit.
It seems as if motherhood, and then a cross-country move, required a change of gears, and then I’ve spent the last few years in that clunky space where the gear shifter gets a little stuck. Lately, it feels like things have finally fallen into place, and I can ride off smoothly. Thank goodness! Because life is not out ahead, and it’s not on pause. It is here, and I am lucky to have it.
Your friend,
Sarah
Wednesday May 8 + a dollop of Friday May 10
Dear Sarah,
We’re traveling again this week, and I’m ever so slightly at loose ends. Putting pencil to paper to write this letter is already grounding me a bit! I think travel has that effect on me sometimes — the body can move from one place to the next seemingly faster than the mind, and I find myself here in Lisbon in body, with my mind roaming elsewhere. (A nearly impossible thing to imagine — being in Lisbon and thinking of other places — and yet!) The result of my wandering mind is my currently stationary body. It is possible for one’s mind to wander in a different direction than one’s body, while the body is also wandering (see: me when I exercise) but it feels like the preferred situation is mind and body in one place.
I’m thinking about a moment that happened this past weekend, when M and I accidentally locked ourselves out of our new home. I have a habit of locking doors as soon as I am behind them — it just seems like what one should do, or it at least feels comfortable to me to do it. We entered through the front door, which I promptly locked. Then we walked out the back door and I pulled it closed behind me — also a habit, wary of any early spring bugs that might find their way straight inside our home to burrow and multiply — and when we later turned to walk back inside, all the doors were locked and neither of us had a key on our person. I unsuccessfully tried to break in through our front door, snaking my arm into the mail slot, and also tried picking what appeared to be our weaker locks, but nothing fell to my wily ways. The single apparatus we had was the fob to our apartment back in town, and eventually we decided M would talk his way onto a bus and ride home to get our alternate set of keys, and then ride back. In addition to locking our keys inside, we’d also locked away our wallets and cell phones. So, we’d be out of touch with each other, briefly, and also both out of touch with whatever we usually did on our phones. It was quite satisfying not to be able to touch or see my cell phone. I felt serene! Suddenly a rule was being enforced: to simply spend time outside, no phone in hand, no wallet for wandering and shopping as a means of entertainment.
My plan for part of the day had been to do some gardening anyway, plucking some old leaves from our new flower beds in places where the rake was too unwieldy a tool. This was my plan and now, especially, I was set to take it on, completely uninterrupted. I combed clusters of sprouting plants gently with my bare fingers, peeling away dead matter from the vibrantly green new bladed leaves. In some cases the skeleton of an old leaf was wrapped around a new leaf, binding it like a cuff, requiring the dead leaf to be delicately snapped away. I saw a few slugs, oozy, and — unsure exactly what I should do about them, if anything — I left them to go about their time in the soil. In this way I passed an hour or so, making small piles of dead leaves around the yard as I groomed the green clusters one by one. It was a luxurious hour: my mind stimulated naturally, my thoughts wandering, fresh earth smells wafting, slugs slugging. Would it have been the same with my flat plate of a phone poking out of my back pocket? Would I have set it aside and forgotten about it even if I hadn’t locked it indoors? I think I might have been compelled to take some pics of the slugs if I had had it at my fingertips. I’ll try not to lock myself out of the house again, but I may lock myself away from my phone here and there!
Working on grounding myself,
Your friend,
Eva