documenting change: eight.

triathlon trainin'.

Last Friday I was so very proud of myself because it marked a full week of training for my triathlon every single day, beginning with the Sunday prior. Sunday was a bike ride, Monday was a swim, Tuesday was a run, Wednesday a bike ride, Thursday a swim, Friday was a run, and Saturday was a REST day.

This week - on Sunday we did another bike ride. I think the biking will prove easiest for me. I can do 10 miles easily, and my ride is only a 12 mile ride. In fact, on Sunday, I was telling my husband c., "I'm really not worried about the triathlon anymore. I think it's going to be easy."

Then last night happened. Last night my triath training class was a "hard" workout. This is what the instructor said. He said, "Tonight, we're going to do a 'hard' workout, and tomorrow, you'll do a nice easy cool down workout." I don't know why I am writing *quote* hard *unquote* - because the workout was just this: HARD.

Midway through, I was listening to this internal dialog:
"Why the hell did you sign up for a triathlon? Are you crazy? Who are you trying to impress and what are you trying to prove?"
"Well, I was trying to impress...just me. I wanted to prove something to me."
"You don't need to impress yourself. You don't need to prove things to yourself. What's the point of that?"

Also midway through the HARD. workout, I thought I might need to stop and throw up. I did not.

This is what we did: 2 slow warm-up laps around the track. Then the painful stuff began: 2 laps around the track ran with intensity - 20 crunches, 15 push ups, 20 super mans (where you lay on your stomach and quickly lift your legs and arms simultaneously, stretching the legs out to the back and the arms to the front), 20 bicycles (where your lay on your back and move your legs in a pedaling motion while you move your elbows to opposite knees). All of that happens FAST. And when we were done with the first set, we did FIVE MORE JUST LIKE THAT.

While I was making my third set of laps around the track, I thought, I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore. But I kept going. I finished it all, was huffing and puffing at the end. I said, "Can I lay down now?" and our instructor said, "No - Don't lay down. Now ya'll go do two cool down laps around the track."

Internal dialog:
"Is that man crazy?"
"Am I?"

I called c. after and told him what we did. c. says, "You did 100 push ups!?" I stopped to calculate. "No, I did 90 push ups." I calculated more. "And I did 120 crunches, 120 super mans, 120 bicycles and 16 laps around the track!!!!"

I drove, stunned.

here at home on this globe.

Today I took a drive to Ponchatoula, Louisiana where I visited a strawberry farm. I interviewed a farmer about the economics behind a family farm. Particularly, I was trying to better understand how large corporate farms in California and the sales of California berries here impact his business as sole proprietor of a small farm in Louisiana. I left with more clarity, but also more questions.

Seeing the nine Mexican migrant workers picking berries and filling flats struck me. The farmer said he houses the workers, and I refrained from asking what he pays, if he insures their health, if they are legal, and if not, how he gets around the immigration laws to hire them. I didn’t ask these questions because I am writing for a publication that wants me to raise the issue of local food chains in a “friendly” manner. They haven’t said so, but the intent of this publication is to make people feel good about our rural to rural-ish landscapes and lifestyles. I get it; I know my audience.

As I left the interview, I thought, Someday, maybe I’ll conduct oral histories with migrant workers. Someday, maybe I’ll tell the story of agriculture in a different way. It will be about backbreaking work and traveling long distances; it will be a love story, and it will be about the nourishment of souls.

On the drive back into Baton Rouge, I listened to a cheesy soft-rock station. I turned the volume up when "Crazy for You" by Madonna played. The image of bright red strawberries and brown skinned migrant workers was vibrating in my mind’s eye like white spots blinking behind closed eyes after you’ve stared at summer sun and then shut your lids.

Listening, I remembered that it is almost Valentine’s Day. One beat later, I remembered that today would have been my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. Not that I’d forgotten, but I permitted this knowledge to slide from the background to the forefront of my consciousness.

My dad is flying to India today. The woman he married has not been able to obtain a visa to travel to the US, so he is going there to stay until May, when he hopes to return with her. Last night I was talking to my sister on the phone, and she said she’d wished him a happy anniversary earlier in the day, or maybe over the weekend while she was visiting him. I thought, He has a new anniversary now.

She said she’d asked him if he intentionally planned to travel to India on this date. He said, “No, it just worked out that way.” I could not help but think, Huh. Well, he’s got rotten timing. Travel dates don’t just “happen.” You choose them. Dad chooses rotten timing.

Then, my interior dialog went rampant. This is what you get - American man makes hasty decision to marry Indian woman, and lives with the consequences, the way it has to shake his life, the way he has to travel across the world for months-on-end to a place he can hardly stand to be for a single month to ward off a corrupt immigration system for his new bride.

And this is where I am with it all. Stalled along the roadside, my engine still overheated, still silently blowing smoke all over the place.

The farmer had narrated to me what this day has been and will be. The pickers began harvesting strawberries at 6:00 a.m. They filled eighty flats by 10:30 a.m. They stopped to take a break. When they return to the crops, they’ll clean the plants – remove dead brown leaves. There are rows and rows and rows of plants – over twenty acres of strawberries. As the last act of the day, they’ll cover the crops to protect them from today’s expected rain and the temperature that is to plummet from today’s 70 degrees to 40 degrees tonight.

Ponchatoula is the strawberry capital of Louisiana; yet there are only five strawberry farms there now. Ten years ago, when the man I spoke with began farming, there were about ten berry farms. Twenty or thirty years ago, he told me, there were at least a thousand people farming berries in Ponchatoula.

These remaining five strawberry farms do not survive without the migrant workers. The farmer told me, “Without them, there would be none of this. There’s no such thing as local labor. It’s a myth. No one else wants these jobs.” Just as he explained to me that, even though he is not an organic farmer (organic farming, in our year-long growing season of heat, humidity and heavy rain, would cause the berries to rot from mites and fungus), everything he does meets federal regulations.

“Produce you purchase in grocery stores that was grown in Chili, Mexico, who knows what standards there are or what laws govern regulations? They could be watering crops with sewer water. You purchase imported items from these countries, and you don’t know what you’re eating.” I considered this. Then I thought about the migrant workers – I wondered if lax regulations regarding pesticides, fertilizers and fungicides is in line with lax regulations regarding workers. Are labor standards more lax than our own in the US (as the farmer was implying to be the case regarding the use of chemicals)? We certainly hear a great deal about factory workers in other countries. Is it the same with agricultural workers?

These people all over the country and all over the world, from dawn into the heat of the afternoon, handpick each and every berry, apple, cherry, and orange – hand cut each banana bunch, artichoke, broccoli head, lettuce head, asparagus stem we devour, digest, nourish ourselves with. Are they better off in the US, all these human beings who have literally touched our food? Are our regulations a step up? This would be the hope. I didn't get a glimpse of the housing the farmer provides his migrant workers. It was nowhere in sight. I strained my neck to see.

The farmer’s other implication in the statement, “no one else wants these jobs,” did not escape me. By “no one,” he meant, poor black people. Of this, I could not help but ponder the legacy of slavery and whether there exists a cycle of inherited, warranted resentment among southern African Americans over having been virtually kidnapped and imported to the US - as slaves, as property - to work the white plantation owners’ fields. I wondered, Would I want to pick berries if my great-grandfather had been a slave and if my grandfather had been an indentured servant? Would working fields today be too insulting for me, even in the most dire straits?

Considering this importation of human beings, I had a revelation - Hasn't there always been a globalization? Cultural, social, environmental, economic globalization- ethical or not?

I made it back to Baton Rouge before the storm began. Back to the comfort of home. By now, the migrant workers have cleaned and covered the strawberry crops. There are reports of golf-ball sized hail and a tornado in Tangipahoa Parish – the county in which Ponchatoula resides.

My dad boarded his plane a little more than an hour ago – same time as the rain started falling. He has a two-hour layover in Chicago where it is 20 degrees and where snow showers are expected as part of the winter storm in the north. He told me last night that he hoped the weather in Chicago would not delay his flight to India, that nothing would cause a stall. He is anxious for his life to begin again at home.

SONG: Crazy for You, Madonna

discipline and debauchery.

Last night, in a moment of decadence, I cooked a meal. I made mussels steamed in a white wine, butter, challot, garlic and lemon grass broth. We dipped buttered French bread into the broth. After, we ate mashed potatoes and sautéed spinach and seared scallops smothered in a thick butter and garlic sauce. For dessert, I made poached pears set in dark chocolate sauce and topped with fresh whipped cream. I haven’t had dessert in my house since August (except Thanksgiving). But it was time to indulge. In celebration of accomplishments, attitude changes, the meaning of mardi gras. And in preparation for more discipline to come. A triathlon, school, an art show my husband c. is preparing work for.

When I woke, still feeling full, it was cloudy. But sky and sun pushed through, broke the blanket of gray into scattered puffy pillows that have been gliding all day – floating away from us.

The day has been strange and lovely, and it has teased, maybe I’ll rain, maybe I won’t. It’s been the kind of day one should take advantage of by walking outside, running, riding a bike, sipping coffee and reading on a porch swing or napping on a hammock.

A few things I did today – the highlights.

I went to my class at the Y. [We have a new teacher, and I’ve been trying intently to like her. But I hate the music she plays (extended mix versions of songs no one should own to begin with). I don’t like her nasal, childish voice, or that her boobs are most certainly fake. Mostly, I don’t care for the particular way she teaches the class. A rant. I’m still trying to like her.]

I swam 600 yards. [Yesterday was the first day my triathlon training became a daily thing. I began last week on Tuesday, then Thursday. But as of Sunday, I’ll be doing something each day w/ one rest day per week. So. Yesterday was an hour bike ride. Today, swimming. I love to swim, yet I am a terrible swimmer. My form sucks. So in my 600 yards today (20 25-yard laps – I rested in between every other. i.e. I stopped to heave in and out as I poured water down my throat.), I practiced some drills my instructor gave me last week. The good news is that I could tell my form was improved by my last lap. I am determined to become a good swimmer. Someone who loves the water the way I do has no excuse for bad form. That’s what I’ve decided.]

I went to the grocery store. [Something I used to suck at that I’ve become really good at. I make a list of dinners for the whole week. I list what I'll need, and I mark which ingredients I'll buy from the regular store, and which I'll by from Whole-Paycheck Foods. I can manage to get to both stores and home within one hour. I feel very self-impressed by this.]

Now I’m going to go home and eat dinner. Something healthy. And stretch out. And read. And prepare for tomorrow. It’ll be Fat Tuesday. I begin working on two freelance stories – more time inside my own head. I’ll revel in it while revelers chase beads, hoard debauchery. I've already had my debauchery. I ate it last night.

impossible descriptions of nuances.

I got a letter from Sarah Lawrence today. They say they will mail out notifications of acceptance no later than March 17th. Sarah Lawrence and NYU are more and more my dream schools, along with UT Austin. New York and Texas, two places so different from each other, and also so different from my hometown.

I’ve begun thinking of all I will miss in south louisiana.

I will miss erratic weather and the way past and present and future and you and me and they and we twist into one another. Braid and unbraid like language. ya’ll, youwall, yawl, youwall, ya’ll.

The way it dips from 75 degrees to 30 degrees overnight during the month of December and again in February. Thunderstorms that violently swallow every bit of existence – the houses, the streets, the trees – until they simply STOP. Like a punctuation mark on paper. A period writ in bold print. You’ll miss humidity and high temperatures in July, 99 degree moist heat that incapacitates you. No good public pools, just expanses of uninviting swamp water-bayous of mosquito larvae. Hurricane season in late summer and early fall that binds you to your house to drink white Russians and mint juleps while you play cards.

I will miss the way a person cannot go anywhere without knowing someone. Just as I was typing those words, a girl I know walked through the door of the coffee shop I am sitting in. I smiled and nodded recognition. She waved hello. When you leave the red stick, you'll feel it sharply – how you have suddenly been displaced from the closest thing you’ll ever be able to call community. Even people you don’t know, strangers passing on the sidewalk, will say, “hello” as they pass. “Hi. How’s it going?” “Great. Thanks.” All these words formed and sounded out while you both continue to move. Then you pass one-another, move toward the next stranger with whom you will interact. Leaving BR, you’ll be displaced from the top-two asked questions, “Are you from Baton Rouge? Where did you go to high school?” For years, it was excruciating to you – you used to try so hard to not notice all the people you knew you knew in the grocery store, at the bank, at restaurants. But you’ve embraced it in recent years – knowing all these people who are not your friends, but who know you enough to say “hello,” enough to acknowledge your presence in generic spaces.

I will miss the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade, and every other excuse in the world, or rather, in southern Louisiana, to dress in costume. [This past Saturday was the parade. I wore the cowgirl ensemble again, but I wasn’t happy with being labeled “The Red Stick Ho.” I’m not a ho, and I don’t play one at parades, either. Even though I couldn’t pull together the pink sari, I’d say to people, “Hi. I’m Bobby Jindal’s little sister. Betty.” It went over very well. As I anticipated, there were Spears-family floats a-plenty.]

I will miss crawfish season, and festival season in general. Springtime filled with food, music, perfect weather.

I will miss the LSU and City Park lakes – grimy as they are. The year-round praying white herons and the annual meditating pelicans that bless those still shallow waters.

I will miss the rawness of this place. The relationships between brown and black and white. The way you know a white woman who was raised by a black woman, her nanny or maid or both. The way she loved that person like a mother throughout the day, then rode in the car in the evening when her real mother dropped this surrogate off to her own neighborhood. The way you listen to this woman, your friend, who could be many women here, narrate her confusion when she saw there were other children – the nanny’s own – who went without while their mother was away at a white woman’s house to mother white children. Her house. Her as a child.

The way it was to work in restaurants. White and a couple brown and maybe a couple black female waitresses, black male kitchen staffs – each staff spitting curses back and forth at one another. Each crew pissing out all of its toughness at the other – later, the way you sit at the end of a shift, no longer angry at the fuck-up the kitchen made with your table’s order. The kitchen staff, no longer angry that you let a steak sit too long in the window. You sit together, drink some beers. In this reality, because you are not the 50 or 60-something woman remembering and passing on, you are the 20-something college student – in this reality, you might take one of the kitchen crew home. Drive through poverty to its front door to drop off. Then it is up to you to make sense of it all.

I’ll miss the way I see and am part of these cycles still, the way I observe and feel them shift ever-so-slightly, not quickly enough. The way I sit brown in a mostly-white-bar on Monday nights to hear mostly-black poets perform words. The way the crowd is always slightly mixed but grows more and more mixed. The way, for a $5 cover, everyone respects everyone, even as the white people in the crowd squirm occasionally to be minorities in a room, to experience that discomfort first-hand. To have to make sense of what it felt like for those two black kids and those 3 asian kids that where in their English class in high school.

The nuance and complexity of race relations that has been part of my life for so long. Those nuances not reported on the news, never a part of a collective consciousness. I’ll miss being among friends who know these nuances intuitively, and who equally work intentionally to create shifts, shifts, shifts, that move us forward. Not so much the dirty south as it is the messy south. There is a white Baton Rouge and a black Baton Rouge. More often than we even recognize, there are points of experiences of, intersection. In these points, there is real beauty, there are serious challenges, often there is a level of comfort – sometimes helpful comfort, other times harmful, enraging comfort.

I fear stereotypes and inappropriate boiling-down that may be splashed in my face outside of this state. I fear that people will want me to, in my writing, validate their perceptions, rather than write my truth about experiences I am barely capable of articulating with justice.

I will miss the greenness of this place – the quality of light and color I have lived under for so long. Umbrella of dark green above brown water, pink azaleas and japanese magnolias dotting the horizon - what only a painting can properly capture. maybe impressionistic, maybe realistic.

Everything in south Louisiana is erratic weather. people and their interactions. food we eat. music – r&b and zydeco and jazz crossing paths. fusing and diverging, weaving in and out of one another. thick braid of humid, wet, spicy, spiteful, ignorant, forgiving, friendly, suspicious, industrious, common-sense and no sense – all these parts that occasionally melt into each other, rain down while wind blows hot then cold then hot and if you're lucky a spray of rain will touch your cheek, wet your eyelids.

When What Seems Ordinary, Isn't by Herpreet Singh

From Country Roads Magazine, February 2008

here are moments when history/ passes you so close/ you can smell its breath/ you can reach your hand out/and touch it on its flank,” reads a stanza in Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change.”

The poem reflects on our proximity to historical events and matter, and particularly, it draws attention to our inability to recognize seemingly ordinary moments as significant until the moments have passed. In other words, hindsight is 20/20.

Certainly, historians stitch together timelines, geographical paths and even cultural norms of a period by evaluating written records, but it is the distinct work of archaeologists, once history is made, to physically locate even the most pedestrian objects and to further draw out the historical relevance that underlies those objects.

If historians narrate what happened in the past, archaeologists seek tangible evidence that confirms, or potentially negates, historical narrative. More importantly, in uncovering physical links to the past, Louisiana Division of Archaeology’s southeast regional archaeologist Dr. Rob Mann explains that archaeologists “tell us a different kind of history—what general life was like,
how people lived, food they ate, how they got along with different cultures.”

In an LSU Union leisure class Mann will begin teaching this month, it is literally the everyday artifacts of living—utensils, ceramics, food remains—which he will show students how to unearth and evaluate in order to pinpoint the exact location of the eighteenth century Canary Islander settlement Galveztown. Not only will laymen gain a hands-on opportunity to learn the ins and outs of an archaeological dig, they will be contributing to real research.

Located in Ascension Parish at the confluence of Bayou Manchac and the Amite River, Mann explains that the hardships Canary Islanders faced in the 1779 Spanish-founded community are well documented. However, no excavation has ever taken place to confirm the sites of the Galveztown village, cemetery and fort. Initially created by the Spanish to protect their territory from the British who occupied land on the other side of Bayou Manchac, Galveztown was not only doomed from the start, but it virtually disappeared after a mere twenty-year existence.

Unable to convince their own countrymen to colonize the site, the Spanish enlisted destitute Canary Islanders with few options to migrate to the territory. In January of 1779, fourteen Canary Islander families settled the village. The fifty-five members of these families arrived by traveling through New Orleans, then across Lake Pontchartrain and finally, up the Amite River to Bayou Manchac. By April of the same year, over four hundred Canary Islanders were living in Galveztown.

Mann says that initially the Spanish were good at setting up the Canary Islanders. It is also known that, over time, the colonists were continually writing letters to the Spanish to complain that they were short on supplies. When the British were no longer a threat to the territory, it became expensive for Spain to continue supporting the colony.

Challenging living conditions and increasing reluctance on the part of the Spaniards to supply Galveztown caused it to dissipate. By 1798, only a hundred colonists remained. According to Mann, “By 1804 the village was on decline… By 1820, there was nothing recognizable as a settlement out there.” A historical marker placed by estimation sometime during the early twentieth century is the only visible contemporary indication of the ghost-settlement.

Yet, there is living evidence elsewhere of the Canary Islanders—the Lombardos, Pinos, Rousmans, Landrys, Martins, Hernandezes, Diazes, Bruns and others who inhabited Galveztown. In the face of destructive hurricanes, annually flooding crops and a smallpox epidemic that killed children in droves, the remaining inhabitants migrated to land granted by the Spanish. There, they settled into still-thriving Spanish Town, Baton Rouge’s first neighborhood.

The class will focus specifically on the location of the village and everyday life in it. Mann hopes he and his students will uncover remains of Canary Islander homes. It is known that these structures were wooden and thirty-two by sixteen feet in dimension. Mann will also instruct students in the search for items including glass bottles, religious paraphernalia that demonstrate the Canary Islanders’ conversion to Catholicism and beads that may have been traded with Native Americans—commonplace matter that illuminates day-to-day life with surprising intricacy.

Mann says that because it is known the residents were short on supplies, “we would hope to find out if they were having to eat local game, turtles, hunting evidence.” One goal will be to find evidence of the hardships that have been documented. “Might we find British goods that would demonstrate a black market trade with the Brits on other side of Bayou Manchac?” Mann asks, suggesting that these discoveries will not only answer questions about how the colonists survived, but that they will also demonstrate how the Canary Islanders interacted with other cultures.

The leisure class, which Mann hopes to continue over subsequent semesters, is the first of its kind to be offered through the LSU Union. Mann is giving the course as part of his work with The Louisiana Division of Archaeology. The state office, which exists within the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in a joint program with state universities, employs a regional archaeologist at each of five partner universities. These regional archaeologists conduct research particular to their personal interests and to the region in which they work. Partner universities are the University of Louisiana Monroe, Northwestern State University in Nachitoches, University of Louisiana Lafayette, Louisiana State University and most recently, the University of New Orleans.

Mann’s area of expertise is the French colonial period of Louisiana archaeology. As a regional archaeologist, he conducts research, performs public outreach, responds to calls from the public who know of archaeological sites. He also assists public agencies in getting sites excavated and documented.

Most often, when excavations are scheduled and volunteers are needed, Mann says he will seek volunteers through the Louisiana Archaeological Society, a group comprised of people who have a strong interest and some background in archaeology, but who are not professional archaeologists. The leisure class is being offered as one way to pique the interests of people who may have no prior background in archaeology.

In addition to conducting the first excavation at Galveztown, beginning this fall, Mann will do work in a Point Coupee Parish French settlement. He will also research some plantation sites on the west bank of the Mississippi River where a private property owner has asked for a survey of a nineteenth century home.

All of the research conducted by Mann and the other regional archaeologists for the state is housed with the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, which acts as the gatekeeper for archaeological findings. The division has produced projects that impact how we understand Louisiana history. For instance, the division has played a key role in protecting Poverty Point, a large prehistoric Native American settlement located outside of Monroe in Epps, Louisiana.
Poverty Point has since been nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, of which, there are only 871 in the world.

The division has also been prominently involved with the creation of a Louisiana Indian mounds trail which will include a driving map of over seven hundred Native American mounds in northeast and central Louisiana. This project, conducted by a collaborative group of archaeologists, is still underway.

Asked why archaeology is a relevant method to understand history, Mann says, “Most human history is only accessible through archaeology … Historians domain is typically the written record that they compile into written history. Archaeologists deal with material culture primarily, what people left behind … It’s the only way we have access to what life was like before there was written language.”

Of archaeological excavations Mann says, “There are lots of clues in soil about what we’re finding or not finding. Color, texture, these things give many different meanings. Students will become detectives and note-takers. It is a physical pursuit. You dig, shovel, strain soil; but it’s also a mental pursuit. Without this kind of thought process, you’re only treasure hunting.”

LINK TO STORY: When What Seems Ordinary, Isn't

steeped in filth.

For the past few days, I have been dirty. No. Filthy. And I’ve relished being so completely unclean. As I mired in my own muck– sweat layered upon sweat, oily hair that made my head itch, the general grime of day-to-day living– I also became mired in spiritual muck.

I’ve not wanted this blog to become a confessional. Rather, I’ve aimed to make it reflective – writings that deal with experiences already passed, or passed enough that I can derive out of them some kind of insight. But even avoiding confession, reflectivity should also be honest. In the spirit of honesty, I’ll admit this – after a great high (reported in my last silly-babbling entry), there comes a deep low.

Lowness is a terribly difficult truth to admit, particularly for me – a girl always dishing out practical, logical advice; a girl eternally helping friends twist their perspectives so they can see the bright side during difficult circumstances. But I am no stranger to occasional bouts of long-depression.

The first time I can recall being inexplicably swallowed by internal sadness was as a sophomore or junior in high school. I remember distinctly that one night –another night of insomnia – I laid in bed and cried until there were no more tears. Then, I simply prayed. I had not been a deeply faithful person, but in that moment of lowness, I knew no other options. I stared at a shadow cast across my closet door as I silently prayed, something to the effect of, “If there is a god, please give me a sign, please give me a sign, please give me a sign. Some sign that I am being watched. Some sign that I have a guide. Please give me a sign.” I could not stop praying as I stared at the shadow. I don’t know for how long I prayed, but finally and suddenly, a perfect square of light illuminated in the center of the shadow on my closet. It could have been that something disrupted the way the streetlight outside was hitting the ground and casting its shadow. I don’t know. But there was a perfect square. And relief washed through my body. Then the square was gone. Finally, I slept for the first time in months.

I never had to premise a prayer again, “If there is a god.” I didn’t become dogmatic in my beliefs – but I became faithful in the truest sense. I believed in god – in spiritual power higher than myself, in the idea that I am not alone in the universe, but instead that I am guided, protected, watched as I navigate my own purpose in the moments of my life.

The next time I recall a similar sadness was as a freshman in college. It hit for a third time two years later during the winter of 1995. I had been in the throws of a dissolving relationship that finally broke in the winter. Suddenly, what should have been a run-of-the-mill month or two of sadness extended into months, months, months. A year. It affected me so heavily that I’ve since apologized to my then-roommates for the misery that I was within our house. I stuffed myself into my bedroom. I didn’t socialize with anyone if I could help it. I cried. I hated myself. I slept and slept and slept. I felt like the bottom of the earth – like a worm, a slug, like dirt – not intelligent, not fun, not interesting, just brown funk.

Before the summer of 1996 I began having intensely strange and vivid dreams that I was compelled to write down. I knew intuitively that they had to do with healing. In one, blue corn was being given to me – I was supposed to eat it to cleanse myself. In another, I swam with a pack of bears in the Atlantic Ocean. The bears and I breathed and swam beneath the water, absorbing oceanic life with still awe, and finally, we went to an island where I lived with the bears at a makeshift campsite where the bears cared for me. In another, I was in a glass home – a contemporary home full of odd angles – so glass panes jutted out in various directions, sometimes intersecting so you might look through one glass pane to another before you observed the exterior world. Inside, it was minimal – the only furniture, a cushioned round bench. I sat on the bench looking at this glass home, and I said aloud, full of amazing discovery, “I can do this. I could have designed this. I never knew I was intelligent before.”

That spring, I stopped burying myself in my room. I stopped feeling afraid and stupid. I began, as I have been recently, attempting, attempting, attempting. I began socializing again. In the summer, I tried to sew – making a dress I actually wore and curtains that hung in my room. I took my first camping trip with a group of equally inexperienced girls. I read every book I’d ever thought might be interesting. I took art classes when the fall semester began, because I’d always loved art, but I’d always been afraid of it – sure that I could not possibly create anything worthy of being called art. I found myself making, pre-art-classes, simple little mobiles out of broken glass. It became meaningful to me, to make something new and whole out of something fragile – glass – and particularly out of things that were already broken. When winter came, I bought myself a plane ticket to Boston, a city I’d always wanted to visit. I stayed in a hostel and I explored the city alone and completely at ease. I began dating again, moving past the way it feels to think no boy will ever love you again and moving past the way it feels to think no boy will ever be as good as the boy you’re not with anymore.

I was waking from that inexplicable state of sad sleep. When it happened a year later, when I began waking, and a few months later when I really felt awake and had perspective on the barren recluse I had been, I made a promise to myself. I promised I would NEVER EVER allow myself to get so low again, to bury myself. I had been unhappy. The people around me had been unhappy. I was a presence in that time– and not a good presence.

I began dating my now husband soon after I had become, if I can continue to use the metaphor, wide-awake. It was April of 1997. When I met him, I felt I was a new person – courageous, social, adventurous, confident. I’d just emerged from my own cocoon, and I was glad he didn’t really know me before.

Since, when I’ve felt bouts of that sadness coming on, I’ve worked consciously to fend them off – truth be told, I think I created my own mechanisms for dealing – being positive, shifting my point of view to discover what good is coming out of the situations I am in.

Even when my mother had her first stroke in the fall of 1998, I never fell into the kind of depression I’d fallen into previously. And when my mother died, I can’t say I became steeped in a negative mental and spiritual sleep. I felt grief. But grief, for me, has felt distinctly different from personal internal inexplicable melancholy. Grief can be explained. That is the difference. Grief has an explanation.

I suspect that one of my coping mechanisms, when I determined I would never allow myself again to become swallowed by my own sadness, was simply to actually allow myself to feel sad when I need to. But it has a time limit – the sadness. It is like a guest – it’s welcome becomes worn.

These last few months, in the midst of extreme happiness over pursuing writing, I know I have also felt nearly equally sad. Inexplicably sad. Sure, part of it is grief. But part of it, I cannot explain. I’ve handled it, for sure, as best as I can. I’ve warded it off. When I’ve been sleeping too much, I’ve let a voice snap in my head – “It’s time to GET UP. It’s time to GET GOING.” When I came out of that depression during the late 90s, I came to rely on lists. My lists began, always: 1. Wake up. This item on my list has been the source of great humor for my roommate at the time and also my husband. I have laughed about it myself. But truth be told, I needed “wake up” on my list – I needed it as a command, and I needed to be able to scratch it off of my list as an accomplishment. As a completed chore. As a precursor to the other parts of my day. There certainly had been a time when I refused to wake up, when I refused to crawl out of bed, when I slept and slept and slept. I never want to be there again.

This weekend, on Thursday, I felt that sadness enter. No rhyme or reason, just a feeling. It settled in, thumbing its nose at the euphoria of the past week or so. By Friday, I could sense it more definitively – I could sense that I’d decided not to ward it off. All day, I thought, I am hungry for nothing. I am hungry for nothing. And I wasn’t – no appetite for food. But the emptiness in my stomach was not just the lack of desire to eat. It was a spiritual kind of emptiness that I lacked the hunger to fill or even the knowledge to know how to fill it.

That night, I dragged myself to a writing workshop at a friend’s house. I thought I wouldn’t be able to write a single word. As it turned out, I began a poem with those very words: I am hungry for nothing. And in the writing, the words got shifted, moved deeper into the poem, instead of introducing it. But the poem itself depressed me.

On Saturday night I did something fun – but I had to force it. Not only was I not in the mood, but my stomach ached and ached. “You go be social. You go have fun.” I commanded myself. And I did, but in the midst of socializing, I felt waves of chills come over me, and I left early, took two Tylenol and went to bed certain I would wake with the flu. Sunday, I didn’t wake with the flu. But I didn’t wake until 11:00. I got up and forced myself to be nourishing. I made blueberry pancakes and cut up some fruit to eat with them. I ran a few errands. By 3:30, I was in bed again – alternating between sleeping and watching TV.

My husband peeked in. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Nothing.” I answered. “Are you depressed?” he asked. “It’s the weekend,” I replied, as if I am entitled to do nothing on the weekend. At 7:30, he forced me out of bed – “Come on, let’s clean the kitchen together and cook dinner.” “No,” I said, “Why don’t you get started on the kitchen, and I’ll cook when you’re done.” I wanted to beg more time in bed. “No,” he said, “We’ll do both together.” I obliged. I skulked out of bed. I cooked. I felt a little better.

Later in the night, I commented, “tomorrow is Monday.” “And?” my husband asked. But he answered his own question: “You won’t be able to lie in bed all day.” “I won’t be able to lie in bed all day,” I confirmed.

Today I forced myself to go to my class at the Y. I walked on the elliptical machine after. I took my dogs around the block. I showered for the first time since this past Thursday. It was a ritualistic cleansing. First I bathed. I put scented oil in the bath water. I put a sugar-lemon scrubbing mask on my face – which is supposed to make my skin “GLOW.” I sat in the tub and made a to-do list full of things I knew I could scratch off (including things I’d already accomplished), and some things I knew I would not get to. As I let the facemask dry, I read a short story. When I finished reading, I drained the tub. I turned the shower on and scrubbed off the facemask. I needed citrus, sunshine – I cleaned up with lemon body wash. I washed my superbly greasy hair – which I observed had left a stain on the mat at the Y earlier in the day (I cleaned the matt off!). I conditioned my hair. I let myself rinse in cold water. I towel dried. I put orange-ginger lotion on my legs. I went to my yoga mat and stretched. I stretched, stretched, stretched. I thanked god that I have the luxury to reignite this way – to peacefully recharge.

The sky was blue. (It had been gray all weekend.) Cool outside, but the kind of day when your feel warm under the sun. I rode my bike to a coffee shop. I’ve been working today. Not sleeping. Not blanketing myself in sadness, or embracing it as I did this weekend.

I learned something when I came out of that last terrible engulfing sorrow. I learned that it is okay to feel depressed. But it’s up to me to chase it away. I’ve come to accept that sometimes I can chase it away alone, and sometimes, I need help scaring it off. But at the end of the day, I’ve got to feel it to some degree. Highs and lows come in pairs, I think. What would it be to experience euphoria at all times? How tragic would that be? So I also know I can’t allow myself to slumber indefinitely. Balancing joy and melancholy, I believe, is what I assigned to myself as a goal for 2008.

Today, while I am enjoying the taste of solitude I have been craving lately, I am no longer steeping in my own filth. But occasionally, I enjoy it – the impurity, the grime, my personal muck – internal and external, physical and spiritual. It helps me recognize when I am becoming awake and clean.

weather change

It has been cold outside for many days. It feels as if it has been gray and gloomy too. But yesterday (as today) was beautiful. At 12:30 I saw that the clouds were clearing. I noticed the temperature increasing. An hour later I was riding my bike around the lakes, listening to my I-Pod and feeling grateful that I can notice the day transitioning, that I am not stuck behind a desk unaware of weather changes. Passing by the lakes, I saw that the pelicans are here. Every year in Baton Rouge, the lakes are visited by a burst of white pelicans – floating on the water full of stunning quietude. The gratitude I felt yesterday while I rode my bike was so powerful that it made me ache in some way.

I have been working to find balance between joy and melancholy, because instead of balance, I have felt both sensations so intensely that it overwhelms and exhausts me and somehow feels sharply painful.

On New Year’s Eve, my husband and I went to my friend a.’s house. She had gathered about twelve people together for drinks, a little food and sharing. We were to bring an object, a trinket, a song, a poem, anything that summarized what 2007 has been for us. When we gathered to share, we each spoke about the prior year and also about what we hope the coming year will be.

I scavenged around my office about ten minutes before we were supposed to head to a.’s house, and I picked out these items: a postcard of a Salvador Dali painting – a woman looking out of the window at water, a postcard with a black and white photograph of Flannery O’Conner standing on her porch and a peacock in the foreground, and the Collected Poems of Langston Hughes – marked in two spots.

I passed the two postcards around, and as I passed them I read two poems.

First –

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

The second poem was this.

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends
Soft as it began-
I loved my friend.

Why these four artifacts? How do they summarize the past year, and how do they relate to one another? On New Year’s Eve, my thoughts were disjointed. Even still, I’m not sure that I can adequately define their relationship to each other, to me and to 2007.

I will attempt. Attempting is a thing I’ve been doing lately.

First, for me – the last year began in August of 2006, and it ended in December of 2008. That period feels distinctly like one full cycle that can be summarized with these themes: experiencing, processing and accepting loss; re-evaluating goals and attempting with all energy to make dreams reality – to live in a way that is authentic to the core of who I am; and renewing friendships – renewing the fluttering social side of me which had been slumbering.

When my mom died, I felt numb for a long time. Even in that numbness, the writer part of me was rising. The week after I returned from her funeral I wrote a note to myself in which I proclaimed that it was time to be a writer – time for me to work at it. I agonized over whether this was a realistic goal. I wondered if I would have nothing to write about. I feared I would fall into the depths of poverty.

In my 8th grade English class, there was a poster on the wall that contained the “Hold Fast to Dreams” poem. I remember sitting and daydreaming as I stared at that poster. Reading and rereading those words, I could sense the depth of loss that comes from relinquising dreams. At Christmas last year, the “Hold Fast to Dreams” poem revisited my memory. I told my husband c., “I really want a collection of Langston Hughes poems.” He gave the collected works to me for Christmas, and I immediately searched out that poem. Two months later, in February, I decided to it was time to try. To attempt to be a writer. To attempt.

The Salvador Dali postcard is one my sister gave to me on my sixteenth birthday. On the back, she wrote simply, “Dream Big.” On New Year’s Eve, I told the people with whom I was gathered, “When I see this card, it reminds me that every sixteen year old should be told simply, ‘Dream Big.’ What more vital message can you offer a kid?” It reminds me still to dream.

The Flannery O’Connor postcard is one I’ve had for 12 or 13 years. I bought it myself, so nothing is written on it. I think it embodies my love of the south – its strange mix of flamboyance and crippling paralysis. The image also reminds me that forever I’ve wanted to be a writer. And in some way it is homage to a woman whose work I love.

I’ve kept these two cards in a visible space wherever my workspace has been over the years – in my bedroom, in my cubicles, in my landscape architecture studio, now in my office at home. They summarize the year because they remind me that I am finally attempting. In the past they have seemed like a nice inspiring but unattainable idea.

And what of the second Langston Hughes poem? It captures the sadness of the year. On New Year’s Eve day, my friend e. was at my house. Standing in my dining room, fresh from the memorial we’d held only days earlier for marcie, she began crying softly. She said, “I was just thinking about that Langston Hughes poem, ‘I loved my friend.’” A third grade teacher, she said, “I see it in children’s anthologies all the time, and I never know what to say about it.” And she cried more. I sought out my Langston Hughes book to find the poem she spoke of. I’d never read it before.

It was a helpless moment. A moment of missing marcie. A moment of knowing that acceptance is a must. “There’s nothing more to say,” the poem reads.

marcie, my other bookend of loss – she prompted something different than my mother. If my mother prompted me to revisit my oldest and inner-most dreams, to attempt them, marcie prompted me to revisit my inner-self as a friend. Losing her has made me remember a time when I was surrounded by female friendships, surrounded by the give and take of gossip, beauty, intense longing among women to be more like one another, and also intense unspoken understanding of one another. I don’t know if it is possible to capture the depth of my female friendships. But marcie remembered hers, loved them all and longed for her friends to always get along, to always gather, to always stay honest and not guarded with one another as we aged and grew more independent and less reliant on the security of togetherness.

Sometimes you meet a woman, and you note, “that is a guy’s girl.” I have always been “a girl’s girl.” When I think back to the time I first began dating my husband, I remember being surrounded by a gaggle of girls at all times.

As my husband and I began dating, I discovered that he loved his male friends as deeply (though differently in the physical and emotional and spiritual act of connecting) as I loved my female friends. It is a quality in him I admired quite a lot. When we continued to date, I somehow became immersed in his group of male friends. I remember that I was often the only girl in the group of his guy friends. Some of this was of circumstances – I’d had fallings out with some girlfriends, others had moved away. But as I think back, I also know that I allowed it to occur on some level. I wanted to be with my now husband at every turn. Luckily, my roommate at the time was not as outgoing as I was, and she stuck to us – a second female presence in a brood of testosterone.

In 2007, I made two new girlfriends. One is ten years younger than I am. She is Indian like I am. And American like I am. Her appearance is striking, like I like to think mine occasionally is. Like me, at her age, she is caught between her parents’ Indian expectations of professional and financial security (and the awareness that they traveled across a continent and an ocean to provide, provide, provide something better) and her own desire to live a life that expresses the art inside of her.

The night I met r.– I was leaving a restaurant, and as I was walking to my car I heard a distinct laugh filling the air. It was laughter that belongs to my other new friend a. I said to my husband, “I hear a.’s laughter – let me stop to say hello.” And I walked to the patio where I found her at a table with a group of people. She made introductions, and r. looked up at me. With all of the enthusiasm and pleasure in the world she asked, “Are you Indian???” I knew immediately from the tone of her voice when she asked, from the wideness of her eyes, that I liked that girl – a New York transplant working for Teach for America, and so sheltered in her Baton Rouge experience that in a year and a half she had yet to meet another Indo-American. And me – so judgmental and certain that I was different from every other Indian kid I knew in my nearly life-long Baton Rouge experience that I had never had an Indo-American friend – not once beyond early childhood.

My other new friend is a. What is that saying, everything old is new again? I wonder if that could apply here? a. and marcie were friends. Me and a. went to middle school together. a. remembers that I was her friend in 6th grade science class, and to her dismay, I do not remember. We also went to high school together where we were both in drama. Often we talk about how we ran with different crowds – hers was ultra-alternative. My own crowd was so internally and self-consciously quirky that we wanted desperately only to be status quo.

When a. moved back to this red stick, she and I encountered each other through some volunteer work. We ended up planning an event together. I recall thinking how much I liked her. Our friendship was slow to build – layering on top of itself through our community endeavors. Then last Christmas – the same time I received the Langston Hughes book that I was so happy to have on hand this year when e. recalled the “I Loved my Friend" poem, c. and I had a post-Christmas gathering at our home. marcie called to ask, “Can I bring a.?” I said, “Definitely!” So a. was at my party, and I remember that after, she thanked me for the good time.

We kept doing little things together, adding more layers to our slow blossoming friendship. a. is a remarkable, powerful, energetic woman – she exudes, I tell her. She simply exudes. Energy, sensuality, vibrancy, compassion, intelligence. When a. walks into a room, she exudes.

When I got news of marcie this past August, it was I who called a. We had a long phone conversation that night. And we’ve had so many long phone conversations since – along with late nights staying up talking in her living room 'til 5 a.m.

With these two new friends, with a few girlfriends who I already had and who live in town, because of marcie’s passing, I’ve remembered how it feeds me to be in the company of women. Before marcie died, I don’t know that I remembered what it felt like to fall in love with a girlfriend – to be enamored and to want to be inseparable, to want to talk all the time. Yet, as a girl-child, as a middle schooler, as a high school student, in college – I was never without those friendships.

I’ve desired more than anything recently, the space to re-cultivate that girlish part of me. I’ve wanted dance parties and girls’ nights reading magazines and eating ice cream. I’ve wanted intense conversation over things that wouldn’t interest any man I know. I’ve wanted to swap horoscopes and advice and humor – to be charged up. There is a kind of electricity between women friends, and I wonder, how do we grow out of making these kinds of fast and furious friendships as we age?

This is where the joy and the sadness merge in a deep and upsetting way. I know why I am attempting my own dream to be a writer – losing my mother prompted me to ask – “What do you want to do with yourself? Who do you want to be, and how will you live up to that? Because you won’t be here forever.” And losing marcie propelled me to remember the quality of friendship we once had – the way she loved her girls. I’ve had to ask myself, “Does being an adult mean you give that up? Does being a married woman mean you stay guarded and never share yourself with your female friends again? Does it mean there are no closets to raid but your own for the rest of your life?” In experiencing myself as a writer and as a girlfriend in a gaggle of girls, I get overwhelmed with the joy and sadness of how this has come about, the loss that has supplied joy. I act in extremes to try and accommodate the new things I’m attempting and the old things I’m rediscovering.

My head has occupied a strange space in the last year. I’ve been excavating my guts, so to speak – taking a look at what is inside of me – what parts I want to keep, what parts I want to toss out. Truthfully, I am still on this archaeological dig of sorts. Equally, I feel like I’ve been swimming in the depths of the ocean, seeking out treasure, finding some gold and some trash – torn fishing nets and sails, being amazed at all I see – things I knew existed in the ocean and other creatures I never imagined.

The other morning as I woke, a voice entered my head. The voice said, clear as day, “This is enough,” a command to move forward. And when I heard that voice, I immediately felt the sensation of coming up from water – a blast of air hit my face, I blinked water out of my eyes, my hair clung heavy to my scalp.

What prompted this digging/swimming? (For any astrology-savvy friends – my sun sign Capricorn is ruled by the element earth, but I think my moon sign is Aquarius- ruled by water.) It’s difficult to say exactly what – because along with, or perhaps as part of, the digging/swimming, I’ve been – as I announced to my friend e. recently – having a second childhood. She asked, “Did you ever feel like you grew up?” Never having considered this question before, I was still able to answer promptly, “Not until I realized I’ve been acting like a child again. And then I knew I’d grown up somehow at some point.”

The weather inside of myself has been changing. 2008 will be about embracing adulthood, but also embracing what is at my core, rather than telling myself that what is authentic to my core is childish or unrealistic. 2008 will be about finding the balance between joy and melancholy. It will be letting creative productivity and my social-self (myself as a friend) be the pivot on which I balance my life.

documenting change: seven.

the waiting game.

Last night I finished the last of my grad school applications, and this morning I mailed it off! I have applied to these MFA fiction writing programs: UT Austin, TX State San Marcos, UC Irvine, Sarah Lawrence, NYU, Johns Hopkins and UVA.

I have preferences – UT Austin, UC Irvine and Sarah Lawrence are my top three schools – all equally positioned in my mind. NYU is up there too. Truth be told, I’d be thrilled to get into any of the programs to which I’ve applied, and I'd be elated to get adequate funding so I can actually attend.

Now, I wait for spring. And as I wait, I work on new stories, I submit to journals, I continue working for an amazing poet, I continue this blog, and I continue freelance writing for Country Roads. And MAYBE, I take on just a bit more freelance work (that is yet to be determined)…

The other thing I do while I wait is burn off the energy that comes from anxious waiting. The triathlon I start training for in February takes place on April 22nd… For this very moment, I will revel in the fact that I am FINISHED with the GRE and FINISHED with applications.

In the meantime, if anyone has attended or does attend any of the MFA programs to which I’ve applied, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

marcie among clouds

Friday night, marcie’s friends gathered to celebrate her life – the person she was. We pulled together and created a party that marcie surely was wishing we’d thrown while she was here on earth, just as we were wishing deeply to have her with us in the flesh.

In a brick courtyard that is attached to a metal smith’s studio, we lit a great big bonfire and sat around it to remember. At the front of our semi circle was a Mexican Day-of-the-Dead offrenda filled with the colors and qualities and objects that made marcie. Bouquets of orange and red roses with peacock feathers poking out, loose roses and other flower petals scattered across the white tablecloth. At the center of the alter, a photo of laughing marcie – her head tossed back slightly, her eyes turned out to us, bright, happy, shining, alive – blue sky and mountains in the background. A plate of food Marcie would’ve loved to indulge in – homemade enchiladas (she was so proud of her own enchiladas), crawfish queso (seafood being the one creature-type she could not permanently give up during her long years as a vegetarian), guacamole, potatoes au gratin, brie and bread, hummus, spinach dip, bread pudding, strawberries and blueberries and pineapple. A pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, a bottle of red wine, a bottle of framboise, a bottle of chimay. The Book of Birthdays, open to her day – August 19 – The Day of Startling Surprises. (When a friend helped sort through marcie’s belongings after her death, she came across astrological charts Marcie had completed for many of her friends.) Incense burning in a praying Buddha burner, a deck of cards, Frida Kahlo images, photos of marcie’s son, marcie’s sister, marcie’s husband, marcie’s friends. To honor her as an artist, a camera and an old wooden box full of charcoal pastels. To honor the pleasure she took in aesthetics and her own femininity, glitter scattered across the alter, earrings and a broach, draped scarves that looked like her, sandalwood beads hung around the frame that held her photo. A neatly-rolled joint placed in a small box, because marcie not only loved weed, she took great pride in her ability to roll a joint. She did it with such drawn out dramatics.

Off to the side of the offering, a table was set with a scrapbook and postcards – Frida Kahlo postcards and cheeky 1950s images with sarcastic phrases. Everyone took a moment to write a memory or a message on the back of the cards. One old friend opened to the first page of the book and wrote the story of how he and marcie came to be friends. A story written to her young son.

marcie had an endless playlist of songs on her Myspace page. We hooked a computer up to a speaker, and her music poured into the courtyard – Nina Simone, Ween, Billie Holiday, Sia, Lee Scratch Perry – lots of reggae, some dub. We were missing some things – Stevie Wonder, Brand New Heavies, Sade. But nothing felt missing, except marcie alive.

Over the last month, we had set up a flickr account and people had been uploading photos. Another of marcie’s friends took the flickr photos and created a slideshow that we projected onto the cinderblock wall of the studio. We watched her grow in front of us – marcie as a child transforming to marcie as a mother.

Red lights lit the walls and chili pepper lights draped the inside of the white tent that hovered over her offrenda.

We spoke of her – her bossiness, her nurturing, her humor, the two-hours you had to set aside to have a phone conversation with marcie. There we all were – the collection of marcie’s friends, all of us with such strong personalities, all of us so different and distinctive – the many sides of marcie together like facets on a brilliant cut stone. We laughed and cried. We cherished and shared her. We gave her credit for all she loved to take credit for – “So and so are married to each other because of ME,” she might declare of 4, 5, 6 sets of her married friends. She loved to be the connecter – the one who was the reason that various groups of people intersected, knew one another. What a full and gorgeous picture of our friend we all evoked together.

We spoke of her inherent coolness – how her sister marisa had taught marcie her joint-rolling skills. How she was the only freshman we knew who lived in an apartment. How natural and easy she made it look for an eighteen-year-old to mother a dog. The way she blared her music from stereo speakers. The way she teased and demanded. The particular stomp with which she walked – “I am here. I am at the helm.”

One of marcie’s most cherished friends, an older man who was responsible for getting marcie her first job as a waitress at a 24-hour diner, spoke, in his booming Barry White voice, of the fact that marcie had no skills, she couldn’t wait tables worth a damn, but what saved her ass is that she was so damn bossy. And we all agreed that marcie knew exactly how to command a group of unruly drunk frat boys at 3 a.m. Of her, he said, "marcie was like the daughter I never wanted, but I got her anyway."

I’ll carry the mood of the evening – the way it felt to be wrapped in the arms, voices and personalities of marcie’s many friends, similar to the comfort and security of being swaddled in marcie’s great big bed, her Chihuahau mina curled against me. (My friend e recalled how when marcie was working a late shift or out for the night, mina would sleep in e’s bed. Marcie would stomp into e’s room at 3, 4, 5 a.m. and yank mina into her own arms to carry her to the mother-bed.) I’ll also carry the weight of sadness that hung in the air. How can I not feel both the joy of celebrating marcie and the weight of our collective loss?

As the night was ending, I could not stop fixating on the photo of laughing marcie. It is the image that makes my heart both smile and weep. I wanted to hug it to my chest– burn it into my skin. It’s an image I’ll also carry: laughing marcie, smiling-eyes marcie, marcie among mountains and clouds – looking over us all with admiration and delight, occasionally sending a gust of wind our way. Tickled marcie who I love.

too full.

Thanksgiving is THE holiday for me. It is the holiday for which I have fondest childhood memories. It is the time of year that, as a grown person, I begin anticipating weeks out. It means these things: a too crowded house, savory smells from a warm oven, board games and competition, my mom's fanciest plates set on a table that travels a straight line for miles (or until there is nowhere further it can extend), comfort, banana bread, cranberry bread, herb bread, bickering with my sisters (over which way to make the gravy is the BEST way, or which way to marinate the bird is the BEST way). When I was younger, Thanksgiving meant cousins. Now it means nieces, nephews and brothers-in-law, and it has always meant being full. Full in every sense, and also, with my mother. Thanksgiving was special because my mother made it so. It was her holiday, the one she passed on to us.

Last year Thanksgiving fell 3 months after my mother had died. Instead of traveling to North Carolina to cook a big dinner in the new home my parents had built - the one large enough to fit all of their kids and grandkids during this holiday - we rented a beach house.

It was a startling Thanksgiving, not because of any jolting event, but startling in its air of melancholy. The evening we arrived, there was a thunderstorm with wind so strong it shook the stilts our house stood upon. On our last day, sitting on the balcony, wind striking my face, I cried in front of my sisters. I cried because I missed my mother. I cried in fear that my father would remarry too soon - before I was ready to accept another female presence in his home - my parents' home. I remember my oldest sister saying, "If dad marries someone else, it doesn't mean he loved mom any less. It means he had a really good marriage and that he wants to be in that kind of relationship again." This made me cry more - the injustice that he was a widower.

At thirty-two, I love my dad in the way that a tiny girl loves her dad. I still, in his presence, feel like the five-year-old who used to tickle his feet while he slept, who accompanied him to the barber shop around the corner and later played barber on his hair while he sat in his Lazy Boy. The way it feels to love my dad is the way it felt to thrust my body on the floor in a tantrum when he was headed to the store and I could not go, the way it felt to have him take me to a movie when I was in first grade, the way it felt when he praised the made-up ballet I danced in our kitchen as we listened to the Love Story soundtrack on vinyl. Even now, when my dad looks at me, I can see him, a younger man, admiring his baby daughter. It's a love frozen in childhood.

I suppose I have been angry with my father for some time now. Since his birthday the October before that beach-house Thanksgiving. I had flown up to stay with him that weekend, and on my last day in North Carolina, some of his longtime friends arrived from Michigan to visit for a few days. That evening I went off to be alone in another room - to leave the grown ups to their talking. Curled up under a blanket - one my mom made and one I covet - just over a month after her passing, I heard my dad tell his old college buddies of his lonliness. I heard him, fragile and weak, explain that he was not the kind of person who could be alone. Before I could know to cover my ears, to turn up the volume on the television, they were all speaking of his options - of what the situation would be were he to remarry, of how he should go about seeking a new bride. I wanted to rush down the stairs and lambast them all - tell them I was just upstairs and I could HEAR what they were talking about, and did they think this was APPROPRIATE? And HOW DARE THEY - ANY OF THEM. And my mom had only been dead a month. One month. One long, lonely, sad, depressive month. I would have shouted every word.

Instead, I called my husband that night and cried on the phone, unable to speak of the reason why. At the airport the next day, I called two of my sisters. I sobbed the story to them. I felt for the first time: I am not supposed to be a little girl anymore. I am not allowed to be a little girl anymore.

Last Thanksgiving, sitting on the balcolny, I remember my sister - which one I don't know - saying, "He's not going to get married tomorrow. I don't think you need to worry about it." But the weight of the conversation I'd overheard a month earlier remained with me - too heavy to lift. It just sat on my chest. Now, this Thanksgiving, if I were to have blinked my eyes, that last Thanksgiving, would indeed, seem like yesterday. It does feel like yesterday; so he was getting married tomorrow. He was.

And during that yesterday-Thanksgiving when we cooked a big meal in an unfamiliar rent house, the ocean rumbling at our doorstep, we had also sent my mother off. We scattered her ashes over the Atlantic, bid it to take her away while we prayed for her soul to rest. After, we walked slowly along the shore back to our beach house. Inside, I remember that John Denver singing Country Roads spontaneously began playing, mid-song, out of my brother-in-law's computer. My brother-in-law said, "That's funny, I had a different play list going than the one this song is on." We sisters had all looked up at one another as the words, "Country Roads/Take me home/To the place I belong" crept into the room. Then we just listened, quiet and certain that our mother was saying hello. Or goodbye. Or that she was saying, "I am with you on this Thanksgiving." The holiday that is my mother.

Only a few weeks since his surprise marriage to a woman he met in India through a matrimonial search, my dad returned to the US alone, but with plans to file all the necessary papers to sponsor his new wife so she can join him in America. He called me a couple of times, and both times, I was not near my phone. I knew I needed to call him back, but I felt angry and wordless. The way I finally mustered the strength to call was to tell myself before I dialed,"I'm going to pretend my dad is not married." That is what I did. I called, and I told myself, "I am speaking to my dad who is a widower who lives alone in North Carolina and is not remarried." This was the weekend after Halloween - so only 3 weeks before Thanksgiving. He said he hoped we could all come to North Carolina for Thanksgiving.

I could not respond. The thought hushed me inside and out. In those weeks, I struggled. I cried. I thought. If I went - it would be the last time we would have Thanksgiving as the family unit familiar to me since his new wife has not yet arrived. And it would be our first Thanksgiving in the North Carolina house - which they had very much been intending when they built that home. Yet, if I went, I would be angry. And sad. And incapable of asking about or hearing a word about his new wife. No matter what I did, my mother would be a missing person. A missing presence. I did not go.

On Thanksgiving morning, I woke with a swollen heart - both wanting to be with my family and glad to be in my own home in Baton Rouge. We had friends coming - all of our transplant-friends who couldn't make it back to their hometowns. I cleaned my house. Standing at my mantle dusting the colored glass bottles that sit on it, I remembered how my mother had commented on the bottles once when she visited. In an instant, I missed her painfully. I ached in my want for her. I called my oldest sister to say, "I'm just missing my mom." And she said, "It's a hard time. Those are some good memories." And I sobbed, "They are good memories. I just wish it didn't hurt so much to have them." And what could she say. She knew. She knew and agreed.

That evening, eight of us, friends, sat around a table. We each told what we would be doing if we were home with our families. Someone spoke of his pushy grandmother and how her baked goods made it worth having her there. Someone spoke of a super-terrific dance party that was inevitable after having eaten and digested. Someone spoke of his parents embracing his vegetarianism fifteen years earlier and how they would experiment with the latest in vegetarian meat technology. Someone else spoke of the farm she grew up on and the four pies she bakes each year. I spoke of my sisters. Of how we would argue about how to cook everything and how my brothers-in-law would go to the grocery store a hundred times and how it would be crowded and stressful and joyous at once. And I talked about playing board games later in the night. After we ate, more friends arrived. We stood around a fire pit in my backyard, all talking. Talking until two in the morning. Seventeen of us all together. Old friends and new friends meshing just right. Everyone full.

Today, I wondered what Thanksgiving will be next year. I wondered if I will be angry still. I wondered if I could go home and eat turkey with a strange woman. My father's wife, but not my mother. I thought, my dad can't look at me anymore and see a baby daughter. Or can he? Will he see an angry woman and a baby daughter at once? Will he see disappointments and gratitude stewing in one pot the way I do? I thought, now you are supposed to be an adult. You are not supposed to be a girl.