Diary of a move, 5: Uncharted waters

I am approaching this move like the innate and forever student I am. Lists and spreadsheets, folders and a calendar, color-coded stickers and a definite action plan. I am excited and ready and feel like I'm definitely contributing to a smooth relocation process.

And yet I find myself in uncharted territory. These waters are unfamiliar and bumpy; I lost my sea-legs weeks ago. 

For as we draw closer to closing and moving, I struggle to articulate much of anything. My concentration is running at a seriously subpar clip, so much that I put our newspaper on hold this week because really, what's the point?

February is never my friend, even in the best of years. It's a chilly gray speedbump on the road to spring. If it weren't for Valentine's Day, it'd be a total wash of a month; thank goodness for hearts and roses and an excuse to drink pink champagne.

I'm cold, and I'm tired. I'm not sleeping well, and my GI tract is taking the brunt of various stressors. I'm sick of the old, dirty snow (except for the neat melt) and the misshapen foliage that's not weathered the white stuff's weight well. Just after we seemed to get back on track from the many snow days Snowzilla offered us, Ol caught another virus and was home sick today. It's not strep -never is- and my mother meter tells me that he'll be home for at least the next two days.

My sweet boy- he is the most darling, easiest sick child there is. But he has things to learn and friends to see, and I have my own things to do too. And both of us need sleep.

The one who never struggles with sleep.

I have sat down to write these past couple days and looked at the stark white screen and the blinking cursor that so often promise the world. And I have cowered. And frozen. And closed shop.

This is the most unfamiliar -unwelcome!- aspect of this February's chop. To want to write but to feel dry is beyond uncomfortable. It's scary and worrisome. It's as if I've been unwillingly corked, and I don't like it one bit.

I showed up here tonight with no expectations but with a determination to simply start. I don't have a tidy beginning, middle and end for you. I don't have wisdom or insight. I don't even have a laugh to share. 

If you're interested, I can tell you about easy and good chicken shawarma (made tonight) with juices that dribble down your arms. I can tell you, via Jack, that per Chinese tradition, I, born in the year of the dragon, could possibly have been a great politician (wrong), talk show host (wha? maybe.) or artist (possible).

I can tell you that a seriously feverish child will scare the pants off the most sanguine of us and that it's extremely hard to see your spouse stressed to the nines. 

I can tell you that if the Republicans have any sense, neither Donald Trump nor Ted Cruz will get the nomination and that if they don't and Trump or Cruz does, he would lose. I can tell you that's a triumph for this country; the glimmer of hope that hate won't, ultimately, prevail.

I can tell you how to organize pretty much anything, and I can tell you that even when it's uncomfortable, asking for and accepting help really is a beautiful thing. 

Maybe what these rough waters are teaching me is that sometimes, showing up is what counts.

Thank you for being here, with me and in my periodic absences. I can tell you that I'm grateful. 

A constant

We live two blocks south of the Maryland line, just inside the northwest part of Washington. We live two houses in from Massachusetts Avenue, too. And our address is 4416 which has always made me enormously happy because 4x4=16 and also, my birthday is 4/16. I adore the neatness there.

The intersection of Massachusetts and Western Avenues (Western being the dividing line between the District and Maryland) is a traffic circle, roundabout or rotary; DCers tend not to use rotary at all and most often traffic circle. But really, whatever you call it is fine. The city is riddled with them so you best figure out some moniker.

Westmoreland Circle has six spokes off of it, and in between Mass Ave into Maryland and Dalecarlia (pronounced Dell-a-carlia, as if those first vowels aren’t “a” and then “e”) Drive sits the Westmoreland Congregation United Church of Christ.

It is a beautiful church surrounded by always-green grass, a few picnic tables and a sign that regularly declares delightfully progressive things. When marriage equality for all became the law of the land, WCUCC put a rainbow flag up flanked by the message, “…And the greatest of these is love.” My eyes filled with tears of love and gratitude every single time I passed that sign, until they took it down, although the flag still remains.

My favorite part of the church, however, is its steeple which soars into the sky. It is as if the Earth has shot up a hand towards the heavens, trying mightily to hold tight and fast to both poles and all in between.

The boys and I drive by this steeple every morning on the way to school. I enter the roundabout on Mass Ave, drive past Butterworth Place NW and Western Ave before exiting onto Mass Ave once more. Every morning the same steeple soars, and yet a new scene awaits me. I anticipate it as I do breath, which is to say subconsciously but gratefully.

Some days the hand of Earth reaches through a blue sky toward a blazing sun. Other mornings it is the only contrast in a sea of gray. At times it looks bedecked with cotton balls and at others the arm of a great compass guiding believers some place.

Frequently I take pictures. Regularly I promise myself I’ll start taking one photograph every morning at roughly the same time. What a beautiful book of stasis and motion that would make.

I am not a believer, and I’ve never stepped foot inside the church. I’m sure I would be welcome, but I don't feel right.

Instead I stay outside, admiring the Sunday visitors, the new message on the sign out front, or the gleaming, expansive windows that line the long walls running parallel with the nave. Always I make time to look up at the steeple. Always I am rewarded.

The roots

In early September, 1994, my parents, sister and I hitched a small U-haul to my mother’s land yacht Lincoln Town Car and left southwest Louisiana. We drove and drove and drove, north to Evanston, IL, a beautiful town on Lake Michigan’s sparkling shores. I’d been accepted off the waitlist to Northwestern, my first-choice school.

We checked into the Omni Orrington, and I chose my moving-in outfit with great care. When we left Louisiana, it hadn’t occurred to me to be nervous. But as the reality of “leaving for college” set in, my palms grew sweaty and my stomach began to burn.

I matched my hair bow with my shirt and put on my cutest jean shorts and a belt. It was a fly outfit. Back home.

As we walked up to the fourth floor of Bobb-McCulloch for the first time, each carrying a box or bag, my mouth dried as if suddenly stuffed with cotton. A boy wearing just a towel slung around his hips and taut stomach walked out of the bathroom. My parents’ eyes widened as he turned into the room next to the one I was to call home for the coming year.

Because they were excited for me, they faked bravery and enthusiasm so well I didn’t know their stomachs hurt too. Dad went out and found cinder blocks to raise my bed. Mom strung cute twinkle lights around my window. Elia arranged my pictures. We met my roommate, Rosemary.

I got out my backpack, the black Janson with Emily monogrammed on the front pocket, a heart in place of the dot over the i, flowers and curlicues circling my name. This was an extremely hip backpack. Back home.

I had worked my ass off for four years to get to Northwestern. Had slogged my way through chemistry and calculus and physics, made a 4.0 year after year, got the glowing recommendations that I needed.

But I didn’t realize how rooted I was in the safety of my supportive family, and when the U-haul was empty and we stood on the steps of my dorm for that final hug, I crumbled, like a tree that had rotted from the inside out, looking mighty and lovely until a wind showed otherwise.

I heaved and sobbed and told them that if they loved me, they’d take me home with them. I couldn’t do this. Who was I? Their eyes welled with tears (and my poor sister looked terrified; I was falling apart, and she had to go home alone with emotional parents and be an only child for three years!) and they said firmly, “You must stay for at least a quarter. You worked so hard for this. We love you.”

I hid in my dorm room for four days until Rosemary said, in her Florida twang, “Emmy, you really just need to get out there.” I’m sure she said it as much for own sake (warranted!) as mine, but it worked, and I remain grateful.

As she put on her makeup, her “mask” as she called it, she told me about a party that night in the frat quad and about what she was doing during breaks in orientation. She showed me how she was putting down roots, starting small with little taps.

Later that year, that glorious, perfect, bad-grade year, I found that my new sorority sisters had kept the Emilys straight by referring to me as the monogrammed-backpack one. It still cracks me up to think about those conversations. They thought it was adorable, not weird as I’d worried, but I still got a new one for sophomore year.

That year I realized that uprooting can be painful and terrifying but also the most liberating opportunity. When you have, or feel you have, nothing, what can you do but grasp so as to avoid falling?

I “got out there” again and again and again, rooting myself in the shores of Lake Michigan, and the beer-soaked carpets of Fiji and Delt, the snowy sidewalks of campus and the twenty-four hour dance marathon that I completed after pulling my ACL while “skiing” moguls in Wisconsin the week before. I went and played hockey the night before a psych midterm, danced drunkenly to Ill Communication at a party, had the best first kiss of my life with the boy down the hall, had my heart broken, could.not.believe. the frigid windshear and cold of an Illinois winter.

In all of those moments of searching and rooting, of realizing how woefully ill-prepared I was for the rigor of such a fine school, I started becoming myself. A self that had always felt so elusive before.