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.

Two quick giggles.

1. "Customers who visited this page ultimately ended up buying ..."




2. "In Gorillas. Edit categories."

Oh. THAT'S what I look like to other people.

Because my computer isn't working -- and neither is my car -- I've gotten into the habit of waiting for the bus at the local university library, where I can use a computer to work on my writing stuff. I only live a few blocks from the university, so it works out pretty well.

Today, just as I was leaving my apartment, I thought of a perfect conversation for two of my characters to have. My hands were full, and it was snowing, so I didn't stop to write it down. I just repeated it to myself over and over so I wouldn't forget it before I got to the library.

Let me back up. Walking across town, I was carrying:

-a shoulder bag with writing stuff in it -- pages with my editor's handwriting in the margins, pens that rarely get used but often get lost, notes to self on the back of McDonald's receipts -- and random stuff I need for the day, like a hairbrush and Tylenol and half of yesterday's lunch because I forgot to clean out my shoulder bag.

-Another shoulder bag full of school stuff -- data sheets, random sight word cards, a plastic rhinoceros that I think might have come out of a borrowed testing kit that I've already given back, and pre-test materials for a germ unit (which is annoyingly well-timed, since I'm fighting a head cold).

-a plastic bag with my breakfast and lunch in it (today's).

I was bundled up because it's not a long walk from home to campus, but it's a windy one, and I had these bags draped over me like Christmas tree tinsel. I was taking huge gulp of hot coffee every two or three steps, because, did I mention it's windy and also very cold?

And I was talking to myself. Animatedly. With dialogue. Using at least two different people's names. Saying the same thing over and over.

I don't know why people think writers are eccentric. This all makes perfect sense to me.

This time last year ...

I lived in a rural county and there was a blizzard on. Most of my days were spent in the office with the orange walls and blue gauzy curtains. The view out the window was of the preacher's house, giant metal star above the door, trampoline laden with snow in the back yard. No children ever played there. Stray dogs crisscrossed the highway over and over until they were killed. My fingers stayed on the keyboard, but my mind refused to go someplace else. I was stuck there, frozen like the neighbor's purple asters.

Sometimes I feel like I will never completely leave that room.

But I have.