I’ve been thinking a lot about houses lately. Maybe because I’m rewriting a chapter I started a long time ago, and a new structure is requiring I dig through memory and walk back through places I’ve called home. Or maybe because I do this same thing every spring as I shake off whatever cocoon state I’ve been in all winter and emerge with an intense nesting instinct. I’m planning for the backyard garden (zinnias, verbena, petunias, and for the first time this year, yarrow.). I’m scrubbing forgotten corners and purging closets for the donation pile. I drove home from my grandfather’s two weeks ago with a trunk full of spring lettuce that’s on the patio now, and we have backyard salads on the table nearly every night. I’m more at home here than I’ve been anywhere, at least in my adult life, but spring brings the urge to dig roots a little deeper and to shift things around and start something new.
The unfinished writing I’m stuck on is about childhood and landscape and ways that the land I grew up on became a part of me, locked somewhere between my bones and my flesh. But the new structure I’m working with begins in a big new house in the suburbs where I lived when I divorced and tumbles backward to the acres of my childhood. I’m experimenting with that contrast because that time was the farthest I’ve ever been, metaphorically speaking, from where I began and who I am. The land I grew up on was wild and real; that house was sterile and prefabricated. I moved in on a rainy July afternoon thinking it was Our Dream House and then it became Our Last House that I left behind only a year and a half later. It was glossy with vaulted ceilings and double ovens, and it still smelled like paint when you walked in the door. There was one young tree in the front yard, placed there by the builder, on a fresh green square of sod. The irony isn’t lost on me. This place that exuded beginnings and newness was actually an end, a detail I can see in hindsight but failed to predict when I was living it.
I’m getting frustrated with this piece of unfinished writing. When I sit down to write and walk through the house in my mind, I’m having a hard time getting my imagination back to what my perspective was in that moment without the distortion of hindsight. Usually I can close my eyes for a minute and go somewhere I’ve been before, then ride the rhythm of words and sentences until I’m back in that moment again. Not this time. I can’t get to that place. I can only see that moment in my life from the vantage point of this one. My year there feels like some glitch in time I can hardly remember at all, a blank screen.
Words I may have associated with that house in the year I was in it: spaciousness, opportunity, beauty, security, certainty. Words that keep showing up when I’ve been trying to write about it a decade later: hollow and cavernous. I see that vast difference between then and now, but what I can’t get to is the visceral feeling of what it was like in that place, the way I moved through the space and what it felt like in a literal sense. I don’t have many distinct memories there at all. It’s frustrating me because the truth always lies in the gritty and tangible. I’m writing to find that truth, and I cannot feel it because I can’t remember much of anything I can touch.
In trying to understand why I can write with detail about nearly any time in my life but that one, I remembered that season was a lot for me in every way. I had four little legs following me everywhere, working full time in a university English department with a long commute, parenting two preschoolers, married to a man who traveled nearly all the time, and holding expectations for myself that were ridiculously unattainable. Every day felt like a lot for me to maneuver, but somehow I handled it. Or I thought I was handling it. I do remember one particular Saturday afternoon when my nerves were on fire and I felt overwhelmed, so I drove to a health food store to buy Ashwagandha or some other supplement I’d read could help with anxiety. Like a magic pill could fix it. I got to the store and realized in my frenzied dash out the door with a hundred things on my mind and buckling two kids in car seats, I’d forgotten my wallet at home. Proof of my sputtering and overtaxed brain, a fitting end to a quest to help my overwhelm. My frayed nerves became a soundtrack to my life that was so steady and constant I hardly noticed anymore.
At the first session I had with my current therapist after my prior one moved away, she asked me a few usual questions and we talked a while. When I’d explained a few details of my childhood, I remember she said, “Wow. That was a lot for a little body to handle. What did you do to handle it in your body?”
I couldn’t answer then and I can’t answer now. That question won’t leave me alone.
Sometimes I think the way I handled it is that I didn’t have to because the landscape held it for me. Wilderness and soil and stone and cold creekwater, all there for me to touch and to hold, and in turn it held me. Like some instinctual and mystical transfer of grief and confusion from my own fingertips to the dirt itself. But that’s my poet brain talking. If I’m being honest, probably my little body didn’t handle it at all. Or “handling” meant locking it up tight, a heart like a cage, steel bars. Whatever there was that felt broken or splintered or unanswerable became a tight frozen cube between my throat and my belly that took thirty more years to finally thaw. I think about all of that when I think about that big sterile house that smelled like paint. That place where I can’t remember much at all except the buzzing of my own nerves, smoldering and fried.
I started writing about houses, and instead I’m writing about bodies again.
Maybe I don’t remember much of anything from that time because it’s the body that always remembers, and in that year, I vacated the premises entirely. I was there, but not there. Hollow and cavernous: those same two words again. Like an empty bird's nest, brittle and tightly woven, tumbling down the sidewalk in a gust of wind.
Am I writing about my old house, or am I writing about my body in that house? Maybe my body as my house is the truth beneath the truth. I have not always left the light on in here. I haven’t always been home. When it feels like too much is happening or there’s a feeling I don’t want to feel, I have slipped out the side door to run somewhere far away. What does it take to make a house a home?
In the midst of trying to write about all of this, I checked Facebook on my birthday last week, and because the algorithm likes to twist the knife a little deeper, it gave me a visual reminder about exactly what I was doing ten years ago. There I was, 33 years old again, a remnant from a lost year I hardly remember at all. On that porch and in that life. It feels weird to look at her now from this view. That frozen sea inside was about to thaw, and she wasn’t ready for it. Knock, knock. Is anyone home in there?
Maybe the reason my insides were a cavernous echo was so that I didn’t have to feel the weight of loneliness and exhaustion, and beneath those feelings a tightly controlled rage, as a whole system and series of expectations suffocated me. The only tactile memories I have from that year are the weight of my children in my arms, the sound of their voices, and the way their skin felt pressed against mine; maybe that’s because those were the only moments I didn’t feel the desire to fade out of my own existence. When my detailed memories return is about seven months after that photo in a moment that was so primal I’m not going to write about it here. It felt like that frozen cube began melting, and I couldn't shove it down anymore. The dam broke. I found a way back inside myself, and after that, I remember everything.
I’m sorry, reader, for the rambling here. And I wasn’t going to share this with you. But when I opened an email this morning from a writing community I belong to, it linked me to a poem I’d never read before from a poet I hadn’t heard of. The first line is Body my house. I don’t believe in much anymore with certainty, but I believe in some inexplicable Jungian synchronicity that sharpens my writing voice all too often. Body my house, my horse, my hound. My memory keeper, my oracle, my guide, the animal I live in.
I have started and stopped this attempt at writing at least a dozen times. As you know by now, this space holds the scribbles in the margins for me, the mess before a rough draft. But I’ve hesitated to post it because it’s even messier than my usual first drafts, too disjointed, too raw. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say yet except that it’s something about a body and a home. Something about the year I felt lost from myself, the ways it scared me then and still scares me now. The ways we can leave our bodies when staying would tell us something we don’t want to know. The ways that the things we don’t want to know will find us anyway eventually, every time. How I have finally come home to myself, and I’m still discovering what it really feels like in this body and how many layers of experience it holds. How the ice has melted, and now it is a still, deep pool of feeling, hidden in fog and wilderness somewhere inside that I can reach when I want to. The way it’s a little easier to let go of fears that others will leave when you know you’ll never leave your own self again. The way my own heart beats against its walls, and I’ve learned to sit here in a storm, to stay here, to listen, even as the wind and rain fall outside. Like a little cabin with the steady sound of a tin roof and a fire in the hearth, my home is finally somewhere I want to stay.