Expatriate

It occurred to me, as I looked over the sad decline of my writing here on this blog over the past years, that my writing – my mindset, really, which would lead to my writing – needs a serious jumpstart. The frightening thing for me, as an expatriate of the writing world, is that it is not merely the writing that has waned, but also the perspective. A writer must look at the world through a storyteller’s lens, whether she is embellishing the truth or sticking to it, and the less one writes, the less one sees the world through that beautiful, exhilarating writer’s lens. And a writer without a lens? That is a sad and miserable misfortune.

            Emily Dickinson was the first poet I ever loved and when I began this blog, my greatest wish, perhaps, was to be that little stone that rambled in the road alone. There remains a part of me that yearns to be that stone – that, indeed, is that stone. That is not Dickinson’s only wisdom for me right now. There is also: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” and “Hope is the thing with feathers- / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words - / And never stops – at all,” and, if I really want perspective, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Dickinson took my adolescent angst and helped turn it into an identity for me. And so, the name of this blog has always been an ode to her. But it seems to me, now, that for someone who is trying to reenter her homeland after a lonely spell away, only originality of voice will do – that if I am to be a writer in this world, Emily Dickinson must be a part of me, but cannot be all of me, cannot be my voice. Voice is a thing this blog needs most right now. So I am starting with a minor facelift: a new name, inspired by my own life, the same old hope of “fulfilling absolute decree.” This is a short story of how the Catalpa Tree is an ode to my own life and writing.

            It seems to me, sometimes, that I can recall my childhood in snapshot memories of perfect moments. Even those moments that should not have been perfect – could not have been perfect – were made perfect by the people who cared for me and the places we were together. There are perhaps no memories that I recall more vividly than those I spent in Southern Virginia on Pappy and Granny’s five acres off of Rural Route 2. If I were writing about those trees, in Southern Virginia, I would be writing about Sycamores and Maples and Cherries. But I wouldn’t be writing just about those trees – though trees are a worthy and weighty topic – if I were writing about Southern Virginia. Because for me, writing about those days and those people and that place is like trying to capture in a foreign language the taste of sweet tea on a sticky summer day; or the feeling of a firefly’s tiny legs on your palm and that inexpressible feeling in the pit of your stomach when he lights up on your hand that makes you believe in God and magic; or the purple that comes over a mountain at dawn that some people can’t see; or the thrill of car tires on a gravel driveway; or that feeling you get – both inexplicable sadness and overwhelming happiness – when you watch somebody you love across a room, unbeknownst to him. You see, it is thoroughly impossible for me to sum up Southern Virginia in three words – or to sum it up at all, in small or great detail. I have tried. Many times have I tried.

            Western Pennsylvania is to my mother what Southern Virginia is to me. And it is not far behind in my own memory’s list of perfect moments either. Should I grow old and gray and forgetful, I pray I will still remember picking blueberries in Great-Grandma’s yard, and all the tastes, smells, and sounds that accompanied blueberry picking with my cousins and sister. But the Catalpa Tree is from later in my life, well after the Spring of 1998 when my world ended for the first time, after I had begun – just begun – to grow up and learn that happiness is far more complex than it ought to be. It’s from a more realistic time, but perhaps a better time for that very reason. The Catalpa Tree grows outside of my Great Aunt Helen’s home. She is one of my favorite people on earth and I share her middle name – something which has always made me proud. No matter how long gone I am, going to Aunt Helen’s house (and Uncle Fred’s – another part of my growing up that ended something in me) always feels like going home, which is somewhat unusual since I have never spent expansive amounts of time there. Visiting Aunt Helen has given me an awareness of the charm and profound romance and rightness of quiet, beloved, wood-smelling, well-kept places and I hope that my home will someday welcome the people I love as warmly as hers does.

            My mother, I am sure, could write poetry –or a novel – on the Catalpa Tree alone. There is more to the Catalpa Tree story than even I know. But this particular snapshot memory is only a brief, vague remembrance. I didn’t know, at the time, that there was anything extraordinary about that beautiful tree out front – just that everything about Aunt Helen’s home was beautiful. Do you know those moments in your youth when you realize people that you have known and loved for ages actually have a life and identity outside of who they are to you? My mother has always had this gorgeous quality about her where she remembers something, or is tickled by something, and her laughter and her words take on this warm, joyful, secretive tone. In those moments, I always catch a glimpse of what she was like as a child, before my time, and also a secret glimpse of her beautiful soul. For whatever reason, the Catalpa Tree snapshot has always seemed so important to me because of my mother’s tone that day when she pointed to the tree and said, “That’s a Catalpa Tree,” as though she had a story to tell about it…as though it had a story to tell us. “Catalpa” – a lovely and intoxicating word. Mildly exotic, somehow also earthy and familiar. She had one in her own yard as a kid and they called it, she told me, a Cigar Tree because of its long brown late-Summer seed pods. Out of curiosity, I also learned that Catalpas are sometimes used in the making of guitars and are found both here at home and on the Caribbean coasts, so I was right about its exotic and familiarness.

            Aunty and the girls and Mom and we girls were there to visit Aunt Helen that time. Maybe it was just a malleable moment in my development. Perhaps I realized, then, that life didn’t need to be perfect to be perfect, that change did not mean you lost all the things you loved. Maybe it was a salve for the growing pains of knowing that people and places get old, and responsibility sucks, and paving your own road is a lot harder, and sometimes less gratifying than it looks. Whatever it was, that Catalpa Tree stuck in my mind as a symbol of both every good past moment I loved so dearly, and also as a threshold to embracing the creation of my future and the role I have in its unfolding. We decided to take some pictures under the Catalpa Tree. Family picture time, it seems, gets sadder the older I get, because it always feels like we are trying to capture a togetherness that none of us are sure will ever come again. But also, it was Summer on the east coast and I wore shorts and a tank top and my hair stood out like a frizzy mane from my scalp and I was road-tripping with some of my favorite people. Both nostalgia and a hearty enthusiasm for the moment had control of me. And there we were – snapshots on a camera – and in my mind. I still have the pictures. In them, I look young and awkward and adolescent. We all look thoroughly steeped in the Pennsylvania-summer humidity. We were not the same family we once were. Granny and Uncle Fred were gone. Sira and Miya had joined us. And yet there we are, all just the samely interconnected as we have always been – as we will always be. Though we come and go, we are indivisibly family, intertwined undebatably, in the picture, beneath that tree – a few of us representing the all of us.

            And that is reality. Which I think is my point, here. Because along with all the awful things we wish we never knew – about Santa, and death, and politics, and the like – there is something else that reality gives us that beautiful childhood illusion cannot – and that is a recognition of, appreciation for, all of the unflappable, immortal rights in our lives. The rightness of family and nature and stories and scuffed knees. The rightness of counting our blessings, of roots and of wings. It is, to me, reality, more than anything else, that tells me that there are universal truths – they have been and they are and they always will be. It tells me that goodness exists and cannot be suppressed for long – love and gratitude are ways of life and should be embraced. And so this snapshot in my mind, of the eight of us under the Catalpa Tree – so many of us missing – each of us missed – seems symbolic, somehow, in my mind, of the bittersweetness of adulthood – of experience (which may be all that adulthood is after all). I love it because, once things lost the glow of childhood, everything also took on more meaning. Stories became more powerful. Life, though more painful, also became more adventurous, which, after all, may essentially be what writing is to me: my heart and my head grappling with experience, wanting and not wanting to go back to childhood, trying to understand how the ancient ties that bind me and the every-day-new world ahead of me coexist, balance out, affect each other. It seems to me, sometimes, that if I just go back, sit under that Catalpa Tree, alone, for a good few hours, that some things would come to me that would not come on their own. I can see, almost, a faint dust of magic shimmering beneath those lush leaves. And maybe it would. Or maybe it would not. It’s difficult to say with those things. In adulthood magic is more ephemeral than it is in childhood.

            And so that’s how the snapshot with the Catalpa Tree is the story of me, and yet, still a story to me, because I’m not sure why it, out of all the snapshots in my mind, feels so profoundly old and new, then and now, familiar and enigmatic. Like a good story – to read or to write – I understand it in my soul, and yet know there is still much more to understand. So it is that tree, that seems a fitting place to end one era of writing – which has lasted my entire  life thus far, which is the beginning of my passion and my love for the field, which is rooted in a family and life so full of love and happiness that it often overwhelms me and a restlessness that continues to overcome me – and to begin a new era of writing – which begins in Kansas, of all places, and hopefully never ends, but instead feeds into another writing era for another person or another time, and whose direction I have not entirely decided upon yet, but that offers me the same adventure of familiarity and mystery that I cherish so dearly.

            Children have so many restrictions that adults do not remember about: where they are going and what they do when they get there and when – and how – they are to get home. And to an adventurous heart, one of the joys of growing up is to not have to tell anyone anything about all of that anymore and to be able to just go where the wind blows. My soul, for example, yearns constantly to climb mountains, and to sail in the winds, and to ford brooks and to lay on grassy hilltops and watch horses roam. It has always yearned for these things and perhaps the first thing that writing was for me was a way to adventure without being able to adventure. And so now, if my heart yearns, constantly, to climb a mountain, to seek adventure, so also does it yearn to write – and to read – about these things, a pastime for a rainy day, a responsibility day, an entire adventure to be had somewhere as simple as sitting beneath a Catalpa.

-R.E.A.