Amber in the swing
Sweet Amber died today. Poor BFF E and her family. She was a good girl who will be missed.
Athlete Aimee Mullins
“Born without fibulae in both legs, Aimee’s medical prognosis was discouraging; she was told she would never walk, and would likely spend the rest of her life using a wheelchair. In an attempt for an outside chance at independent mobility, doctors amputated both her legs below the knee on her first birthday. The decision paid off. By age two, she had learned to walk on prosthetic legs, and spent her childhood doing the usual athletic activities of her peers: swimming, biking, softball, soccer, and skiing, always alongside “able-bodies” kids.”
My father in law just asked me to bring him a piece of cheesecake. Because he is too obese to walk to his electric hoverchair.
Aleksandar Hemon’s article about hit attachment to his hometown of Sarajevo, and finding a new home in Chicago, was spot on. Not to compare my bubble-like city in Ohio to Hemon’s Sarajevo, when you grow up someplace that is totally walkable and neighborhood-like, you grow into it and it grows into you. Your feet know exactly what the landscape, the soil, even, should feel like and it imprints on you. Maybe some people chafe at this, but so many people I grew up with moved away, and then, inevitably, move right back when they have kids. “There’s just nothing like it where we were living,” they say vaguely when explaining why they moved back. I didn’t want to live in the exact same place, because the people weren’t totally my “type,” the city having become a bit too precious for my taste, so I moved to the most similar neighborhoodlike place I could find the closest I could get— about a half mile away from my parents’ house. Because in order to be home, it had to feel like my neighborhood— a place that was walkable, had bikeable or walkable distance parks, swimming pool, woods and school, and neighbors. It’s not as tightly knit as I would have hoped, but it suffices, and actually is better in different ways that I wouldn’t have experienced had I stayed in my hometown a half mile over. Too difficult to explain further due to a cold and not enough coffee yet. But it’s close enough, and I get to feel the same terrain underfoot, smell the same air, experience the same feel of seasons: smells, the way the wind feels differently depending on the time of year, things that are particular to exactly this latitude and longitude that are a part of me. I get to drive down the same streets that bring back memories, and without this depth of memory attached to the place, the place would be flat and unimportant to me. Far Hills would be nothing if I didn’t remember the nights walking down it in a heavy cold mist with my boyfriend at Christmas, looking in shop windows, playing at running away from each other into the fog and hollering out when we couldn’t see each other anymore. Or how I thought the ridges in the distance, when you drive downtown, looked like the ocean to me, and I convinced myself as a four year old that if we just drove out of the Miami Valley there would be an amazing beach waiting for us. That drive down Far Hills always filled me with excitement, just knowing the beach was on the other side of the ridges (when in fact, it’s only just Vandalia…where my future husband was growing up). I couldn’t wait to grow up and leave and go on beach adventures. I did. But I was incredibly homesick. Exotic beaches are exciting for only so long. The foreignness of the turf, the lack of that sense of place, is heart-wrenching after a while, especially when you realize that nobody knows you at all, and you aren’t a regular face to anyone. I fled home after several attempts at living abroad and promised myself I would live in the Miami Valley for the rest of my life, because it was my only home.
Nothing is really as exhausting as staying home with one’s little kids on the weekend. Or maybe it’s just me. I find myself, standing in a mess of unfinished dishes, laundry, and meals, wondering if other people have more structure and discipline with their kids, so that, say, their kids aren’t asking to eat every two hours, or they aren’t needing a new outfit (see laundry above) because I just sort of let them play with glue. Because it seemed like a good idea at the time because it kept them busy while I was attempting to finish the dishes. But after two, or three hours, the dishes still won’t be done and I find that actually, they are now buried under feathers (see glue project above) and clothing changes. And after four hours straight on one’s feet, one thinks to oneself, I might crumple up and die now becaues I am exhausted, and also in a bit of a pavlovian nightmare wherein the sound of a child’s voice asking, “Mommy…can I ______,” sends me into tears/shakes. It’s not the picture I envisioned when I imagined having kids when I was youthful and starry-eyed. I thought my husband and I would skip merrily into the future with our lovely children (I imagined a boy and a girl, both blond and curly haired smart kids who never argued or screamed) for a lifetime of exciting, madcap adventures with our little family. Instead of exciting and madcap it’s really just mad. Or I’m really just the mad one. I guess it’s never too late to change things and make them how I want to be…after all, I’m the one in charge here and in charge of my life, but then the day settles in and my brain fuzzes over and I forget what I envisioned for my day in the first place. All I can think is, when do I get to go to bed?
Prelude
by Fleur Adcock
Is it the long dry grass that is so erotic,
waving about us with hair-fine fronds of straw,
with feathery flourishes of seed, inviting us
to cling together, fall, roll into it
blind and gasping, smothered by stalks and hair,
pollen and each other’s tongues on our hot faces?
Then imagine if the summer rain were to come,
heavy drops hissing through the warm air,
a sluice on our wet bodies, plastering us
with strands of delicious grass; a hum in our ears.
We walk a yard apart, talking
of literature and of botany.
We have known each other, remotely, for nineteen years.
