Prairie

I rode into the town where I currently live for the first time in the spring of 2000 for my job interview. I wanted to put Phoenix behind me. I’d gone there in love with the desert, and I still dream that landscape—the path I hiked every day in my last year there to the top of South Mountain, the rattlesnake’s tail-drumming, the ocotillo’s bright yellow blossoms, the feeling of being always on the edge. And I was on the edge in every way—the only safe place I had was that path, those walks—I needed to get out.

And so, of course, I fell in love with the flat nothingness immediately. The prairie didn’t feel like nothingness—after the mountainous, hot, suffocating desert, the prairie felt open and new and alive, but I wasn’t really seeing it. I saw pieces of the landscape—the corn’s floppy ears, the purple coneflowers straining their one-eyed, wild-haired faces toward the sun, the wetland’s pimpled-green, stagnant surface. If I had an eye at all when I arrived, it wasn’t a wood’s eye or a prairie eye, as Bill Holm describe them in his essay “Horizontal Gradeur”—it was a desert eye. The desert was beautiful in how much it held back, dangerous in how quickly it could enact violence. In contrast, the prairie was rich and full of wonder, its gems hidden in tall grass.

In college, I spent a lot of time sitting next to the Cuyahoga River, writing or lying around thinking about what I would write next, watching the leaves change and fall and the water move slowly toward the Ohio. The Cuyahoga had burned in my early childhood, so when I sat there, watching it heal itself, I thought about all the danger I had escaped by leaving home, how well I finally knew myself now that I had the space and time to feel my body, hear my thoughts. I didn’t know myself, really, but in that time and place I knew myself better than I had before, and that was enough to feel like I could do anything. Maybe my writing, or my work, whatever it might turn out to be, could create some kind of lasting change.

In Phoenix I was close to people involved in the green movement, advocating for more public transportation because the valley was trapping poisonous pollution. But in my mind, the danger in the landscape wasn’t about how humans had damaged the landscape, but about the extreme heat, the rattlers, the cacti. I tried once to press my finger against a saguaro’s needle and realized that any self-destructive urge I’d ever had was gone—I had left the bad relationship, the bars, the other dark places out of the intensity of sun where I’d slid back into a life on the edge like the one I’d had in childhood.

The longer I live on the prairie, the more I learn about the devastation industrial farming has waged on the people and the land. But the prairie feels safe to me in the same way the river-landscape did, though for different reasons. On the winding path through the woods along the Cuyahoga, I couldn’t see far ahead, so I felt both protected and excited about the next turn. Here, there is openness and possibility, and everything is clear. I have loved deeply here, but I also knew when it was time to ease myself out of the long-term partnership, to move on. I have loved many friends and students, too, but I’ve also learned to let them go, to let new people in, as they moved in and out of my college town. Even if the partnership, the friendships, didn’t last forever, there was hope and learning and wonder along the way.

When I visited one of my former students in Seattle, where she is working her first job out of college, She said, “I don’t get it. I miss the prairie.” She confessed that while she loved the mountains, “Sometimes I want to flatten the mountains and just see a little further, you know?” And then, she turned to metaphor, “But I know I’m seeing what I can, the next day’s work, and that’s where I am right now.”

Perhaps I moved to the prairie at just the right time, when I was finally confident enough in my own ability to move and see, finally ready to settle in a place where I could live openly. I love both the garden’s bounty in August and the six-foot drifts in my front yard in March—though I suspect if I knew they would remain all year around I’d love them less. I have changed my life here, become as much a teacher and an activist as I am a writer, committed myself to the people here in the same way my mother had committed herself to her people when I was a kid. I wonder how much the landscape’s openness, its turning and returning has influenced my decision to make this commitment, to weather the ups and downs in my work, to let go of living too intensely to live, instead, intently, day by day.

Still, I am not sure I could call this place home, even after eight years. My family’s three acres and much-too-big house, easily lost when my father fell on hard times, doesn’t feel much like home, never did, even though it holds the memories of my grandmother and mother, their passionate lives and slow deaths. Perhaps it has changed too much, from open, hilly farmland and a mossy lake to small, square lots surrounding a clear, watery hole.

When I went back to Ikaria, the island my parents are from, in 1998, I felt at home for the first time. Everything had changed since my last visit. There was a road going into my father’s village, which meant there was also electricity and heat. It seemed strange to see a tiny German car rolling into the village, teetering on the mountain’s edge, and my uncle, who had traveled most of his life by donkey getting out. Since then, I’ve made regular visits and I always gasp and tear up when the boat rolls into the dock—there is some elemental connection, genetic, I am sure. And yet my family doesn’t know me, not really, except in relation to my parents—my father’s anger and violence and work ethic and risk-taking, my mother’s deep love and laughter and enjoyment of life and early death. They can see all of these things in the way I live when I am with them, and they will tell me this directly at times—or sometimes, indirectly, calling me, accidentally, by my mother’s name. The language I’d known intimately as a child comes harder to me now, and my relatives poke fun, say I’ve gone too far away.

If only they knew. There is nothing similar whatsoever to the life my parents lived and the life I live now—not landscape, not language, nothing. And yet, in my most recent visits, I’ve felt, instead of loss, some kind of integrity, some connection between who I was before my birth and who I am now.

My daughter has no roots like these, so I know I am lucky. Her only home has been a landscape. “If I could forget everything about my life before this except the mountains and the ocean, I’d be happy,” she told me during her first week with me. Three months later, as her adoption date grows closer, she tells me she hates the mosquitoes, despises the winter cold. “But I’ll stay anyway, because this house is the only place I’ve ever felt safe in my life,” she said, offhandedly, the other day. She is in the process of acquiring things—friends, mentors, clothes, artwork, dolls and stuffed animals (to reclaim the childhood she never had), even a mom. I, in contrast, gave away several boxes of belongings in order to make space in my home for her. I have learned in my eight years here that nothing is permanent, but now, suddenly, I have someone who will be, most likely, a permanent fixture in my life until I die.

This is another lesson of the prairie—nothing is permanent, and yet, everything comes back. My own childhood suffering came back when I took her in, but I learned I could feel and remember without losing myself. My own rootedness came back when a rootless child came into my home, and I found, for the first time, integrity between the island-home that was never really home and this big-skied prairie.

Yesterday, my daughter and I walked the dog at the wetlands and admired the colors, purple and yellow and red-stemmed tall grasses, and the animals, dragonflies and butterflies and pelicans and geese. This could be my favorite time of year, but I feel the same way every year when the leaves change, and when the first snowfall sticks. It is easy, at least for me, to be in love with a place that changes somewhat predictably but still keeps me uncomfortable enough to take risks, to fall in and out of love, to open my heart to friends and students who will leave, to a child who doesn’t have any idea what it means, at all, to have a home, but is settling, slowly, into this prairie-life.

Retreat

When I lived in Cincinnati just after graduating college, I used to go once a month or so on a retreat at a place called Grailville. It was an all-women spiritual space, and back then, if I’m remembering correctly, I could get a room with a large window, a comfortable bed, an electric blanket and handmade quilt, and a small desk for about $15 a night. It was a beautiful place with walking paths in the woods, a meditation room, and a dining hall (with all organic meals and an indoor compost), or, if you preferred, a small kitchenette that was private. I’d go on group writing and spiritual retreats there, too, but I loved knowing that once a month, I’d have this time and space away from it all, on my own.

What was I escaping exactly? I can’t say for sure. I lived alone, unless you count my anti-social cat. But I had a wide circle of friends back then, friends that stopped over regularly, friends that were like family. I also had a few intense, short-term relationships that felt all-consuming, most of which ended amicably enough. It was a good time in my life in many ways—I was coming out, finally making my own money at a job related to my major, even if not ideal, I was connecting my personal/spiritual self to the larger social and political world in deeper ways than I had in college.

And yet, for whatever reason, I knew I needed those weekends of walking and reading and writing and being quiet.

Last week, S’s college friend who cares for her while I’m at work came over for her usual five hour shift, and I asked if she could stay for eight. She agreed. Instead of going to work, I checked into a local hotel for the day, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. I got a reduced rate and a tiny, dark room that smelled faintly musty. It was hardly the picturesque cabin space I used to get at Grailville, and even with my reduced rate (inflation taken into account), it was probably more expensive. But I intended to do nothing outdoors, not even open a window—as it was, I felt as if I had to skulk into the place, as the town is small and it would be hard to explain what in the world I was doing there.

For some reason, I knew I needed to rekindle my reserves, to find my center again. I was tired. I was snapping at S. I knew I was at an edge, dangerously close, even though there hadn’t been a clear trigger. Yes, I’d had some bad news, but it was the kind of bad news that is distant and therefore not completely real or fathomable, about death and grief and sickness among people no longer close to me, whose lives I could not touch. Maybe it was this helplessness that made me want to retreat—this realization that there are limitations to what one can do for others, for the world. Maybe it was simply exhaustion.

As I sat in my little room, totally blank at first, unable even to write, I remembered that I’d lived in this hotel for a few weeks when I first moved to Morris, while I was searching for a place to live. My cat and I had settled into a routine; I’d leave in the morning to look for a place, taking a sandwich with me; I’d take a break in the afternoon to go to my new office and unpack one of the boxes of work-related books; I’d come back to the room in the evening, eat something at the hotel restaurant, stare blankly at the television, fall asleep. I remember being unable to settle my mind except when I was in the room; it was racing with all my new job responsibilities, with the overwhelming task of getting settled, finishing syllabi, etc.

Eight years had past, yet the décor at the local hotel had not changed a bit. I felt the same strange calm as soon as I entered the room. Two summers ago, around this time, I took a desperate retreat in a room not unlike this one in a similarly mediocre, décor-challenged hotel in the Twin Cities. I needed space and time to heal from the break up, and all I could think to do—I tried some nicer retreat spaces, only to be turned away because of short notice—was to check into a dark, dingy room and not leave for a week. Strangely, it worked. Little by little, I went from weeping in bed to doing yoga to venturing outside. I never turned on the television, hardly wrote a word. But somehow, I worked my way into a place from which I could move forward.

I always figured I’d find another Grailville wherever I went, but I really haven’t. In graduate school, about once every three months I’d go up to Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon for a weekend by myself, something I managed to do even in a period when I was in an abusive relationship. The canyon was beautiful; I learned how to avoid the touristy areas and was able to enjoy hiking along its rim and (not too far) into it. Still, when I went, it was again a dingy, stale-smelling hotel room where I did my best thinking and writing. The hikes were amazing; there were coffee shops in Flagstaff that would have made excellent writing spaces; but somehow I was attracted to a place that was clearly not intended for comfort or warmth but simply for convenience.

I’ve been here eight years and just now realized that besides the week in the dingy hotel in the Twin Cities two years ago, this is the only true retreat I’ve ever taken. Now, having said that, one can hardly feel sorry for me. I took a two-week trip around Greece on my own in 2005, writing, thinking, visiting sites that only someone with my particular interests—the feminist movement during the Greek civil war-- could possibly find interesting. I wrote a draft of a novel that I’m still working on, here and there, without any specific plans to finish it. And I am now much better than I was at earlier times in my life about taking breaks each week—hiking at the wetlands, driving out into the country, doing yoga in the morning—or at least I was before S. came into my life. Now I take an hour every night to do nothing, which sometimes results in writing poetry, or surfing the internet, or reading a book, usually one I’ve read before. I know I need this time—but perhaps I also need those longer reprieves—maybe not a week, maybe not a weekend, maybe just a day here and there—to do nothing at all.

I remember at Grailville that after about my third visit I learned to expect nothing. One weekend I wrote drafts of all the poems that got me into grad school; another weekend during winter I spent most of the time under the electric blanket, in and out of sleep; another time I went to the meditation room but couldn’t stay still, so I walked and walked and eventually fell into a long, deep sleep for more than 15 hours. Once I sat still in the meditation room for almost an entire day. Somehow I was able to let my body and mind go and do what they needed to do.

The little room at the local hotel felt like a cave to me. There was nothing at all aesthetically pleasing about it at all, but I was able to sleep, to do yoga, to write and pray. I felt like a new person when I left at 6 and met S. at her horse lesson. S’s little annoying habits, which I generally weather very well, were starting to make me snap at her--no longer.

But immediately I was faced with some challenges I hadn’t anticipated—challenges that definitely would have pushed me past my limits if I hadn’t taken my little retreat. That night I had to confront S. about something inappropriate she’d posted online, to give her consequences. For the first time in weeks, she had a meltdown, showed some old, self-destructive behaviors. But then she apologized, took the consequences, and by the end of the night she was hugging me again, saying she was glad I was her mother.

And then the real bad news came a day later, the news I must have somewhere in my body and mind been anticipating--S’s biological mother wants to get her back. This will delay the adoption date. I also learned that her two biological brothers will not be adopted after all, at least not by the families that seemed committed (in one case) and interested (in the other). I can only imagine their heartbreak. I can only hope the families did what they needed to do for themselves, acted with care, knew their own limits.

This news was hard for me on so many levels—pure terror—what if I lose her? –anger at the system for allowing an abusive woman who won’t take responsibility for what she’s done the opportunity to delay the adoption—sad for S’s brothers, and for her, because I know she wants me to take them and of course I can’t--worried about how much of this, if any, to share with S.

It’s as if my body and mind knew what I would be facing this week, knew I needed to increase my reserves. I need to do this more—to carve out the space and time each month to take a day off, a real day off, and not to feel guilty. For so long I have been so sad when I have to be away from S., so glad when we’re together, and I’m seeing her grow into a completely different person than she was when she arrived. I thought I’d miss the things I used to do, my old life, more than I do. This is a good thing—but I need to be realistic and realize that even if I don’t feel that I do, I do need breaks, and not just breaks to get work done or to see friends (though of course both of those things are incredibly important). I need settling-in time, time to be present with myself. I am committing now to finding a way to work that time into my life.

Post-note: I have been working on this during a very busy week paragraph by paragraph. Since I wrote it, S. has learned the bad news about her family. She is taking it well. She wrote her brothers beautiful letters. She says she knows that I am hers and she is mine, no matter what the courts have to say about it, forever. And so, we go on…

The other day, on a walk with our dog, a daycare provider in town who has taken a special interest in S. called to us, invited us to sit with her and the kids and have a popsickle. S. entertained the kids with the dog, and she asked how things were going.

"It's been a rough week," I said.

"What are you doing to take care of yourself?"

I told her what I hadn't told anyone else (except Lisa's caretaker, who needed to know where I was that day): what I'd really done last week. She laughed and gave me a high five. "If you know yourself well enough to do something like that, you'll be OK," she said.