Milestones

I started seventh grade from a campground. Battle Run Campground in Summersville, West Virginia, to be exact. It's a beautiful place, tree-shaded, lakeside. In fact, it's made up of a sort of sprawling peninsula, surrounded on three sides by shimmery dark-green lake water.

It is the perfect place to vacation.

Up until school started, it was the perfect place to live.

Let me tell you about school nights and school mornings in a campground. Campgrounds are not built for school days. They are built for hazy summer memories of campfires and marshmallows and bathing suits and bicycles.

And, apparently, beer and country music. At least according to the campers at Site 16 next door to me. The campers there stayed up well into the night, blasting Alan Jackson's newly-released "Chattahoochee" over and over.

I'm sure it was shocking to those drunken campers when, at one in the morning, a disgruntled twelve-year-old stuck her head out of her tent and screeched, "Don't you people know it's a school night?"

But it wasn't their fault I couldn't sleep. It was not because of the song.

Up until now, it had been summer. Summer was when you're supposed to stay in a campground, but now it was school time and school time is fall and fall is when you're supposed to rake leaves into neat piles on the flat lawn of your three-bedroom brick ranch-style house with the chain link fence and the one-lane street.

Well, we had the one-lane street. It looped and spun among progressively-empty campsites as September came.

I don't remember being nervous about school, but I do remember being cold. Five-thirty a.m., walking barefoot to the shower house and waiting longer each day for the water to get warm, I cursed the hour and the lack of sun. Why did school have to start so early, anyway? Why didn't they leave time for a swim first?

After school, I came home to the campground and unleashed my stress in the form of a swim, or a gallop on foot around the campground, or a bike ride. It wasn't till darkness gathered, an inch earlier every day, that I remembered about homework. Me and my sisters would stroll down to the shower house, most always empty these days, and set up shop in the laundry room, scribbing in notebooks and watching the storms come, occasionally remembering to do a math problem or to study a spelling word.

It was awesome.

Waking up, and coming home, in a place like Battle Run, well, that was blissful. It was the middle part of the day that stank. Seventh grade was a shock because it was different from anything I had known. People I knew -- a lot of people, since I had attended four elementary schools, two of them twice -- were suddenly taller and meaner. The pressure to conform, to fit in, to be like everybody else was immense, which was a challenge for a very literal kid, since no two people in that school were alike. Everybody had their own problems, their own situations, their own rude comments and their own little hang-ups.

As far as I knew, none of them lived in a campground.

For the first time, I wondered if maybe I wasn't supposed to like where I lived. But I still did.

A while back, I wrote a book about a kid living in a campground. For a lot of reasons, she doesn't love it as much as I did, but a big part of her loves it very much. Which is how most homes are. The book is called BODY OF WATER and it will start seventh grade -- I mean, it will be released -- October 25.

God, I hope it doesn't fit in.

Camp NaNoWriMo!

This morning, while attempting to type "Camp NaNoWriMo," I managed to post a whole blog that was nothing but the letter C.

Then, just now, while attempting to type "while attempting to type," I typed "tpyed."

Then, while attempting to type "Camp NaNoWriMo," I typed, "NanOwrImo."

Then, while attempting to type, "while attempting to type 'while attempting to type'", I typed "tuyped."

And then at some point -- I'm so lost now that I really don't know WHAT I was trying to type, except it included the word "typed" -- I typed "typied."

Maybe I should NaNo in longhand.

At any rate, it's that time. You in?

http://campnanowrimo.org

Stopping and Starting

Every time the bus driver slams on his brakes at a stop sign – I don't understand, he drives this route ten times a day, does he not remember where the stop signs are? Do they sneak up on him? Are they camouflaged until the last second, whipping off their branchy costumes and leaping into the street? – my broken computer hinge gives way and the screen falls backward onto my knees so the computer is lying flat, looking up at the WIC ads and stroller guidelines and rate increase announcements on the ceiling.

There are a LOT of stop signs on this route.

So I'm writing and it goes like this:



I don't know what makes Monday different from every other sweat-in-your-butt-crack just-this-side-of-committing-murder-for-a-cold-drink early August day in Delbarton. Maybe it's the heat, which

*thud*

"Crap."

is holding in the nineties even hours after the sun's gone down. Or it could be Hyacinth's ear infection, which has caused her to scream for three straight nights while I have lain awake on top of the sheets, studying the dead bodies of moths in the light cover. Maybe it's the fact that I am

*thud*

"Crap."

halfway through an ice-cold jug bath, pouring gas station water out of a gallon milk container and shocking my system into full alertness, when I remember our water service was turned back on yesterday and I could be taking a piping hot shower.

Maybe it's Lock Rawley

*thud*

"Crap!"

dying.



And this is about the time I remember that I'm on the 6:45 to Barboursville, which is about as crowded as a bus can get, not counting the inbound Walnut Hills coming back from Wal-Mart. I've got headphones in, so I can't hear the repeating litany of thud-crap, thud-crap all the way out Route 60.

Odd, nobody else this morning is wearing headphones. Except for the lady who is asleep against the window with her purse slowly spilling off her lap into the aisle, and the woman with a cell phone pressed to one ear and her palm pressed to the other – presumably to block out the noise of my computer being shaken to pieces -- everybody can hear everything I'm doing.

So now I'm making a conscious effort not to throw a minor hissy fit every time the bus skids to a halt, and it seems to me like the bus driver is making a conscious effort to come to a sudden stop at least once per mile. I think his goal is for my computer screen to detach completely and fly up the length of the bus and shatter on the “Passengers Must Remain Behind The Yellow Line” sign.

I think it is safe to say I'm not going to get much writing done this morning.

This office sucks.

Unpacking

Things I found in my duffel bag while unpacking from West Virginia Writers Conference:

-Six new pens, three new pencils, and 14 bookmarks advertising every type of book, from romance to murder mystery to picture book

-One of my dress shoes. If anyone at Cedar Lakes comes across a high heel, I ... don't need it back, actually. I had to ditch them halfway to the dining hall anyway. Who wears high heels to a lakeside conference that feels so very much like a dreamy summer campground from childhood?

-My room key, about which the conference center was very gracious in allowing me to mail back to them instead of charging me $10. I thought I'd locked the key in the room. Turns out I had, for reasons that escaped me, neatly packed it next to my toothbrush. (Seven hours sleep all weekend, folks. This is what happens.)

-An unpopped bag of popcorn Julee gave me (thanks, Julee!) at two in the morning when I realized I hadn't brought snacks and I was hungry, but then I fell asleep before I managed to locate the microwave

-Hand-outs from some excellent workshops and classes

-Scribbled messages in notebook margins: "Remember chicken poem." "Open with exercise?" "B-fast 7:30." "Change 'second' to 'last' in final poem in FV." (Which I forgot to do.) And my favorite: "Casualties: 111111111" -- I kept track of all the times somebody likened deleting passages from your book to murder. Twice it was me and I don't even like that metaphor.

-One dirty sock. Seriously, between the shoe and the sock, I feel like I ought to check and make sure I came back with both feet!

-A bunch of beads that fell off my flip-flop. But for every bead I managed to find and bring home, I'm sure I left at least four in my room at the lodge.

-So much relaxation, inspiration, and excitement it didn't fit in the duffel bag and I had to carry it in my feet that won't stop skipping and my lips that won't stop smiling and, most importantly, in my pen that won't stop moving.

I can't wait until next summer!

The Class I Failed

How many minutes in my life have I spent staring through golden mist on a morning highway? I remember it being the most romantic, intoxicating feeling. At six years old, chocolate milk in one hand and crayon in the other. At ten, Coca Cola and a pencil. Sixteen, coffee and a Bic. Scratching out the story with every mile: where I was going. Or where I wished I was.

When I was a kid, I thought every highway would go exactly where I wanted it to. I thought the mist would always be golden.

This time last year I had a foot on each end of the highway. Sold the house, moved three hours away, two weeks before school let out, and commuted to finish out my contract. Every morning I was in the car by four, driving down and down on roads that crumbled and steepened the further south I went.

This morning, children woke up there, in houses next to the crumbling highway, where the mountains are so tall the sun doesn't rise till eight. The highways run in circles. The mist is gray. I spent a year trying to get those kids to tell me their stories, to dream big, to tell me where they wanted their highway to lead.

They didn't understand the question.

Ten months I taught them and they never understood the question.

It has taken me a year to even be able to look back on those months in the coalfields. My anxiety level ratchets up several notches and my mind tries to change the subject, tries to find something else to dwell on before I have to remember each specific face, so adult, so tired and old, so tragic on a seven-year-old. How I hated that look in their eyes. How I hated that year, trying to teach my kids something that can't be taught. Hope and dreaming and a little bit of peace. How to be a damn kid for a minute.

Some days – every day – I wish I could have another shot. Do better by those children. But this time last year, I couldn't force myself to stay. I put in my resignation and the nightmares stopped. I put a For Sale sign in the swampy yard of the house with messed-up plumbing and locked windows. I jumped on the highway at the first opportunity, drove up and up until the mist turned gold.

Left those kids behind.

Sasha's Voice

The novel I'm working on now is written partially in verse. More specifically, in incorrect verse. Sasha takes poetry forms and bends them just enough to fit what she needs to say.


HUSH
Here in the darkness,
crickets call and night birds sing.
I know to keep still.


DEAR MR. STONE
If you really tried,
you could be a little more
totally clueless.


TODAY
Window panes rattled
with anger and thunder, till
the sun went away.


JUNIOR'S VISIT
“Sasha, why don't you
talk no more?” he wants to know.
Wish I could tell him.


I don't know much about writing poetry, and neither does Sasha, but I'm having fun learning along with her!

Moving Day

The prompt (from Writer's Toolkit):
Write about something you did that you didn't want to do.

My response:
I love moving day, and I hate it.

I mean, I know, right? Everybody hates moving day. Everybody hates filling out change of address forms and saying goodbye to the good neighbors. Everybody hates boxing up the big things.

But the little things are worse. The things that are lost until the big things are gone. All these things end up in a box that is impossible to label:

This box contains a half-empty shampoo bottle, five socks with no mates, a plastic horse with a broken leg, four playing cards, and seventeen filthy pennies.

I've moved. I've moved again. Some years it seemed like there was nothing but the moving.

So I know all about the pennies in the carpet after the boxes are gone. I know about things that are impossible to label.

My mother woke us early every moving day, but she didn't have to. We were up. We were going over and over it in our heads: What's going to be next? Will this one have a nice kid next door? Will this one be furnished? Will there finally be a sofa? Which stray cat will find us this time? How will we bear to leave him when it's time to move on?

Then the sun rises, and mom comes in, and we spend the next hour piling a truck's worth of belongings into the car. Deciding what to leave. What to take.

Saying goodbye to this neighborhood's stray cat.

We never think there will be tears. We're six, eight, and ten. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen. Seven, nine, eleven. This never was our cat.

Still, there are tears.

It takes a mile for our eyes to dry, but then we get to the fun part. Moving day is about packing and it is about unpacking, but my favorite is the part in between. The reprieve. The drive, which may be long or short, which may be fast or slow, but which is inevitably full of promise.

The hope is always the same: This place will be different. This place will be perfect. We will have our own bedrooms. We will each have a best friend. We will unpack and unpack and there will still be space. We will finally open the door, bring the cat inside, because this time, we will stay. The cat will be permanent and we will be permanent.

We giggle, on that drive. We make jokes. Even Dad, creased with tension over roads and rent and security deposits, will smile.

I love the drive.

I love the drive so much, I hate arriving.

Arriving to basement apartments with no windows, rooms too small to fill with dancing. Kids who won't be as nice as we hoped. Another stray cat we will love and lose.