feet.

I want to be where your bare foot walks,
because maybe before you step, you’ll look at the ground.
I want that blessing.
Rumi

Jacope Road begins as a clean slice out of the side of the Luanshya highway, then immediately takes a sharp bend to the right.  The road winds past the back of the large, white, colonial house where I stayed, then along the edge of the Kafakumba complex.  It ambles by the main gates, the woodworking shop, and the banana distribution center on the left, and on the right, a cluster of small houses set back from the road, then a wide field of small orange flowers, like daisies, bobbing in the breeze.  Along the way, here and there, small footpaths break off and steal away into the vegetation.  The road slopes gently downward for another quarter mile or so, hemmed on either side with tall trees and spilling bushes, before leveling off and unraveling in three different directions.  To the right it retreats into bush.  To the left, it climbs steadily tow Just where the road begins to slope, one whole section of the left side has sunk about a foot and a half lower than the right side, making driving an interesting business.  ards the highway again, past a couple of small farms and several large homes—one with a snarling orange dog—a wooden kiosk selling shirts, cell phone minutes, and a bit of food, and a local club comprised of a small, thatch-roofed shack and a few wooden benches scattered in a dirt yard.  And the ray of road that continues dead ahead leads, eventually, to Kafakumba’s chair factory, to a center for the blind, and ultimately to the highway again.

Almost every morning, somewhere between 6 and 8, depending on the rain, I’d go for walks and runs along Jacope Road.  If I headed out early enough, I could have a quiet, solitary run, with few other people on the road.  Just me, my thoughts, and the dew-sprinkled vegetation, glimmering under early sunlight.

But days begin before sunrise in rural Zambia, and Jacope was the red-dirt vein that pumped traffic, most of it human, through our rural neighborhood.  Soon after the sun rose, women began sauntering in from both ends of Jacope, towards the banana distribution center at Kafakumba, to wait in lines.  Their hips, wrapped in chitenge cloth—green, yellow, tan, black, orange, blue, stamped with chaotic patterns—swayed as they walked.  Most bore loads, often in crates, on their heads and under their arms.  They walked and they waited in groups, chattering in Bemba, a language of which I understood little, laughing and complaining, eyeing me as I jogged past, sweating.  I usually waved and smiled, and frequently, women would smile back.  Sometimes they threw out a Good Mo-ah-ning.

A little later, white or blue trucks, all smudged with dirt, rattled in from the highway. Like all vehicles on Jacope, the trucks either weaved around potholes and ruts or bounced violently into and out of them.  They kicked up clouds of dust.  Their beds were filled with Kafakumba workers in blue coveralls, men from Beluba and Fisenge villages, and when the drivers hit potholes, the men bounced, too, and gripped the sides of the vehicle.  The trucks pulled into the Kafakumba complex and dropped the workers off to begin their day.

Not long after the women, school children in blue uniforms filtered onto the road.  Some, usually older girls, ambled together, talking in low tones.  Others skipped, tumbled, and bounced down the road, like a pack of puppies, swinging their sacks as they went, hollering to one another and bursting into fits of giggles.  Sometimes, when I jogged past the kids, they would cry out.  How ah you?  Good Mo-ah-ning!  How ah you?  I’m fine! If I turned and, jogging backwards, called to them mwashibukeni, good morning!, their mouths fell open, they shouted with laughter. If I slowed and stopped, as I eventually began to do when I saw the same children every morning, and shook their hands, and asked how are you, ‘shani? they smiled shly.  Bweno.

One morning, I glanced behind me to see a handful of the children break into a run.  They were sprinting to catch up with me.  I doubled back, chuckling, and joined them.  I pressed my hands to their backs and urged them forward.  “Come on!”  I laughed.  “Go, go, go!”  I broke away, slightly.  “Keep up!”  I threw the challenge over my shoulder.  The oldest girls did keep up, galloping to match my trot.  We barreled down Jacope, and when the road flattened out, we screeched to a stop.  All of us put our hands on our knees and huffed.  The girls looked up at me and grinned, a thin sheen of sweat glinting on their noses.  I put my hand in each of theirs and shook it.  “Good work!”  I said.  Just up the road a ways, the littlest girl, a tiny thing with braids that stuck out from her scalp and flapped wildly as she ran, called out to us as she scrambled to catch up, waving her fist in the air.  I was glad to see she was laughing.  When she joined the group, her little chest was heaving, but she was smiling, and she, too, grabbed my fingers.  One of the older girls took her other hand, and I nudged her and the others down the road.  “Go to school,” I said, wishing them a good day.  I caught my breath, and when they’d gone a fair distance down that beam of Jacope that winds toward the blind center, I kept jogging.

As rural African roads go, Jacope is actually very sound.  At the point where it first peels off the highway, it even makes a heroic effort at pavement for a couple hundred yards.  Then it breaks off abruptly into a rutted and rocky dirt affair.  It is uneven, to say the least.  Lumpy, in some places—at a couple of points, the heavy roots of trees have pushed up through the ground—and deeply crevassed in others. Just where the road begins to slope down, one whole section of the left side has sunk about a foot and a half lower than the right side.  Jacope, like so many other roads, is scrubbed down and carved out by heavy rains, at one time of the year, leaving it wrinkled and dry and splitting, like old skin, at another.  It makes driving an interesting business, especially during rainy season, when little rivers rush down the seams in the ground, making red mud out of red dirt, and the waters converge and swell in a small pond at the base of the road, rendering Jacope pretty nearly impassable for anyone without four-wheel drive.  Or able feet.

I admired the feet of a blind man on Jacope.  I routinely passed him on my jogs, marching from the center for the blind, I assumed, to some unknown destination, and later in the day, he marched back.  He was skinny and fragile, but dapper, with thin patches of silver peppered over his scalp.  He wore tan slacks and a gray tweed jacket, and the hems of each stopped a couple inches short of covering his bony ankles and wrists.  He carried no cane, just swung his arms.  He wore sandals that slapped softly against his heels as he marched.

Each time I passed him, I would greet him, breathing hard.  “Mwashibukeni, mukwayi.”  I always hoped my thudding footfall and labored greeting didn’t startle him.  He never showed it.  He would turn and raise his hand as I passed him.  “Eya mukwayi.” And then he continued on his way.

I had been trying to learn Jacope Road by foot over many mornings since I first arrived in dripping wet Zambia towards the end of rainy season.  I learned by falling, in fact; on several different occasions, I caught the toe of my sneaker on a root or lost my balance on the slippery edge of a rut.  I hit the dirt face first, rolling and bouncing, like the proverbial apple off the cart, and came up bruised and stinging and smeared with red mud, shame-faced.  I’ve been a flatlander all my life, born and raised in Indiana, where relatively smooth country roads stretch for miles between cornfields, from solitude to solitude, where a young runner like myself doesn’t have to pay much, if any, attention and can lose herself in the rhythm of her feet pounding pavement.  There on Jacope Road, I was learning to pay attention, to keep my feet up, to look at the landscape in front of me as well.  Eventually, to raise my eyes from my own two feet to faces, to pay attention to people too.  To smile and wave without stumbling.  Generally.

I wondered how, in a rainy season such as this, where the wrinkles on the road are never exactly the same from day to day, a man without eyes to see or a cane to feel could learn his two-mile landscape by foot alone, and could walk with his brisk confidence, like he owned the land.  Like his feet knew where to go, and the rest of him followed them forward.

The first and only time we touched, it was afternoon.  He was headed back in the direction of the blind center, and I was on the last leg of a late run.  Under the hot afternoon sunshine, the road was drier and firmer, but still muddy after heavy morning rains.  The water had rushed down the slope of Jacope and pooled at the bottom of the road, as usual, swelling to cover it almost entirely.  Every time I had to pass the small pond, I picked my way around its muddy edges and kept going, half expecting some exotic amphibian to suddenly leap out of the depths, snapping at my ankles, fearing I would slip in the mud and tumble face-first—of course—into the muck.  As I turned back onto Jacope and prepared to face the mess again, I saw the blind man a hundred yards away and drawing nearer, his arms swinging, sandals slapping.  I hopped around the pond, from one patch of firmish mud to the next, looking for shortcuts, even if they required greater leaps.  I bounded onto solid ground on the other side and began jogging again.  I slowed my steps as I approached him.  “Mwashibukeni, mukwayi,” I huffed, and the man half-turned, and he put his crinkled hand lightly upon his tweed jacket, over his heart.  “Eya mukwayi,” he said in my direction, beaming toward me.  I smiled back.

I jogged a few more paces before I stopped and turned to watch him march toward the pond.  I knew he knew it was there.  He’d obviously navigated it every day, part of the landscape of rainy season.  He would have navigated it that morning.

“Excuse me!”  I called, trotting after him.  He turned at the sound of my voice.  “May I help you across?”  I had no idea how much English he spoke, and there was nothing my gestures, my face, or my eyes could do for me here.  But he surprised me; he nodded.  “Yes, yes.”

I took his right hand and I led him awkwardly, inching ahead, sometimes backwards and sometimes sideways, glancing at the ground beneath his feet and mine.  Assuming he could understand at least some of what I said, I tried to guide his feet towards the bits of high ground that weren’t too much of a stretch.  “Just a small step here.  To the right.”  We weaved together through the yards of gray-brown sludge, and when he wobbled a couple of times, I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him.  When we finally stepped onto dry ground on the far side of the pond, his sandals, like my running shoes, were caked in mud, but he had stayed dry.

Then, as now, I was fairly certain he didn’t need my guiding hand.  Even as I led him, I was both reasonably and self-consciously sure that his intelligent, able old feet could have navigated the whole of his small corner of the world unassisted.

He put his hand over his heart once more.  “Natotela, mukwai,” he said with a grin, and he clapped his palms together gently.  I clasped my hands together too, a sign of respect.  “Eya mukwayi,” I said, smiling, “Have a good evening, sir.”

The thing I am grateful for, as I was grateful then, watching him march away from me, sandals slapping, arms swinging, was that he let me take his hand and try.

an interesting find: saying goodbye

i’ve been reading back through my Zambia journals and annotating, so i can continue writing about my experiences there, without flipping through the pages every time.  i haven’t read these in a year, so some of what i’m reading is surprising to me.  i’ve forgotten more than i thought, and isn’t that funny, when it comes to formative experiences, what we choose to remember and what we let go, or just leave to pages of scribble?

anyway, it’s rainy here in GA, and for some reason, that’s making me a bit weepy anyway, but then i stumbled on the entry below, and all of a sudden, i am missing Therese and Patricia and my friends half a world away, missing them terribly and remembering why i am not into  goodbyes.

from March 10, 2009:

when I think about leaving early, when i think about two weeks less with them, it’s not days i’m giving up but:  two Bemba lessons, four women’s groups, all those morning walks past the kitchen, all those afternoon visits, two baking lessons, four walks to Fisenge…

how will i say goodbye?

i remember Mama Ella [the woman who was Ken and Deb's housekeeper when i visited in 2003], when Ken and i let her out of the car at her house in Ndola, on the last day i saw her before i left.  i hugged her, and i can still hear her scruffy old woman’s voice singing to me, “God be with you till we meet again…” clapping gently, saying goodbye, and we haven’t met again, and won’t in this lifetime. [shortly after arriving in January of 2009, i found out Mama Ella had passed away.]

if i can ask one selfish thing, if i can ask you something personal and special, God, if this is the kind of small thing you look after–
please don’t let this be the last time i see Patricia and Theresa.  they have given me pieces of myself back to me in the right order, and they have no idea.  they are stitched into the fabric of my life as a woman in a way i couldn’t have predicted.

i can’t handle the thought of leaving if i can’t believe i’ll see them again.  i’m not overwrought. i’m not grieving. i do realize it’s a possibility.  but to get on a plane in a month, i’ll have to tell myself “TILL” and not “IF.”

MidWinter Day

happy Midwinter Day!

if you’re confused because you’ve never heard of and never celebrated Midwinter Day, allow me to allay your anxieties:

no, you’ve not been left in the dark about some culturally significant seasonal ritual (if no one had ever told you about Christmas or Kwanza or Hannukah or Thanksgiving or–God forbid–Valentine’s Day, well, then you’d be a sorry, lonely sack of sad, wouldn’t you?).
i just happen to be friends with folks who make up holidays.

well, that’s not true, either; there’s nothing made-up about the fact that February 4 is the day when winter is officially halfway over.  45 days down, folks, and only 45 more to go.  it’s a question of whether or not you celebrate that fact.

in an Indiana or an Illinois winter, you look for anything to celebrate.  and you celebrate it hard.

that said, i learned the particular pleasures of Midwinter Day in high school, under the wacky guidance of Terry Iden, my psychology, American literature, and creative writing teacher.  among other fabulous quirks, he has a near obsession with the color orange, so on Midwinter Day, he used to festoon the room in that and other bright colors.  he’d hand out jelly beans and Starburst and handmade paper smiley faces, and he made us eat the candy and wear the smiley faces on our chests and be joyful, damn it, because winter never, ever has the last say when you live in a place that sees four seasons, and that, boys and girls, is a reason to celebrate!

now that i’m grown, or like to think that i am, Iden has become one of my closest friends.  he’s become something between an uncle, a grandfather, a father, a peer, and don’t ask me how that kind of a relational miracle happens.  he takes care of me.  he gives me good books to read and orange and purple ornaments for my Christmas tree.  several friends and i spend most of our Halloweens chasing him through a maze of pumpkins that are dressed and painted as cartoon characters, scampering after candy and little toys that he hides in a cemetery, and watching old scary movies with him and his mother in their living room.  wherever in the world i travel, i go looking for orange things of any sort, and i take pictures and send them to him.  for smiles.  he makes me eat dessert almost every time.  i make him cookies and warm, orange and purple blankets.  he makes me happy.

and he taught me to spread the gospel of Midwinter Day.  every year, he sends out instructions:  Starbursts and balloons, smiley faces and REALLY bright clothing.  or just, as he says, “Smile at people.  It puts wonderment in their day.”

he’s got me nursing this terrible determination to splash all kinds of color onto other folks.

i celebrate every year, partly for the sake of Midwinter Day itself, partly for my own happiness, but largely, it’s to honor Iden.

every year, those of us who celebrate just come off as happy and kind of batty, but really, who cares because at this time of year, when it’s so difficult to believe in much of anything but the safety and warmth of my own bed, Midwinter Day always arrives as this glorious love letter, this insane and improbable promise:

head up, young person.  winter doesn’t last forever.

i make him cookies and warm blankets that are orange and purple.

mind and body

your body, Coach Karns used to say, can always do more than your mind thinks it can.

over the course of twelve years of swimming, my body proved him right again and again, but my mind also did a lot of proving him wrong–proving me wrong, i should say, because i spent years believing him:  your body can always do more than your mind thinks it can.  i spent years believing in my body, and i’ve spent the last few years trying to regain that belief, mostly by running.

but i deeply miss swimming.  there’s no other sport so connected with its element, i think, and nothing holds an athlete like water.  it cradles, even as it inhibits.  i miss the tenderness of that love-hate relationship.  it was me who loved and hated; the water was indifferent.  at the end of the day, at the end of a practice, it cradled me.
i would give anything–except, apparently, the money it costs to buy a membership to the YWCA–to be cradled like that again after a self-induced struggle.  when i was a competitive swimmer, most nights, if i could get away with it, i sprang or dragged myself out of the pool without doing the assigned cool down.
i was busy and stupid.
i would go back and linger, if i could go back.  i would be cradled.

this past Saturday morning, i ran eight miles on a treadmill at Tremont Fitness.  at 5am.  (there’s little to keep me in bed at 5am when Ben’s not home.)  i finished the last half mile of each of the last four miles at a dead sprint.  i have to say, i was damn proud of my body and gave little thought to my rational mind.
however, i guarantee that when you’re listening to “St. Elmo’s Fire,” you, too, can do anything.

on May 1, Cindy Bangert and i will be running the Illinois Half-Marathon together.  there’s a good chance she’ll blow me away, this being her fourth mini, but i intend to be so proud of my body that i won’t care.

********

i’m working on revising a couple of very short pieces for submission to a small handful of online literary journals.
considering publication, though, here’s the ever-present CNF dilemma:
it’s weirdly easier for me to write about distant experiences in countries half a world away than to write about my family.  my grandmother will likely never read my work (actually, i’m not sure she can really read anymore), but it feels distinctly more important, more urgent and immediate, to “get it right” in a piece about her than in a piece about Mwela or Marita.  that’s not okay, but that’s how it feels.
my commitment has been to telling the truth, as best i can.
but Alzheimer’s, at its most powerful, steals every ounce of truth, even from a moment.
perhaps that’s why writing it–from within it and from outside of it–is such a life-saving act.

BMV, June Fifth

Today, she wrote June five 2 zero zero nine.

She didn’t know her address when that nice redhead at the BMV asked her, and to the question, “What was your mother’s maiden name?” she responded, “Audrey.”

No birth date flickered in her watery blue eyes.  Hell, I wanted to giggle, forget about asking for a social security number, sweetheart, because I’m standing here with one of the dearest women you’ll ever meet, but it’ll be better for all of us if you don’t hassle her for the official details of who she is, the letters and numbers.  Be satisfied.  Just love that she can still sign her name, and that, in this crinkling, crumpling memory of hers, it is still her name.  Be glad.

The redhead, whose nametag said Judy, slid a few more forms of various colors across the countertop and held out a pen to her.  She took it in her wrinkled fingers and smoothed the yellow form, squinting at it, and patted at her wispy white hair, and mentally, I navigated the ever-shifting landscape of her autonomy.  I gently took the pen from her and shuffled the forms together while the redhead asked her questions—“courtesy questions”—that mostly, she couldn’t answer.

“Are you a citizen of the United States?”

“Yeah,” she chuckled.

Name, and I penned in Leona Mae Searls.

“Have you lived in Ohio your whole life?”

“Yep,” Leona Mae Searls said, soberly, and I wrote 5280 Foxfire Dr, Zanesville, what’s the zip, shit, oh, 43701.

“Have you ever had a driver’s license or an i.d. issued here before?”

Silence.

I left Driver’s License # blank and nudged her.  “Yes,” I whispered.

“Ye…Yes,” Leona said.  “I drove for quite awhile, there, but not for awhile these days.”  I felt relief again, though those fights have been over for a few years.

“Sign here, Grandma.” I put the pen back in her hand and pointed at a couple of blank lines squeezed below fine print.  I smiled, encouraging.  She held the pen loosely, and she drew the tip, rather than pushing it, across the paper.  She formed spindly letters, her signature wobbling along the bottom of the page.

She hesitated at the date.

“June fifth,” I coaxed.

June…fifty…

“Two,” I stammered, “2009.”

Two…thou…

I took the pen from her again, gently, and she flapped her left hand in my direction and let all her air out in a puff, a small hmph, flustered.

June fifty, two thou 2009.

She signed maybe three or four more times, with varying degrees of success, Leona Mae Searls.  She wrote June five 2 zero zero nine.  She stood in front of the blue screen and smiled blurrily for the crappy camera; on her freshly-pressed state i.d., her smile was a smudge.  I spread my fingers across her soft back and steered her through the glass door, across the parking lot to her Buick, and I steered her car home, and for the tenth, the fiftieth, the millionth time, maybe, I missed her.

running and editing are good for me. really.

both good for me, even when they’re not appealing.

i went for a good, brief run around my old stomping grounds today: Ball State University and surrounding Muncie roads.
and i’m not overstating when i say this: it’s fuckin’ cold outside.  BSU’s campus has never been kind to those on foot in the winter (and Muncie isn’t kind either, winter-wise, to the homeless or anyone without regular shelter).  the campus is long and straight, so the wind comes whipping down McKinley Avenue, the main artery, in a fury.  on the right days, it hurts.
i went running in that.  i didn’t want to, deep down inside.  i’d spent such a nice afternoon with Corby, including a cozy, lazy movie-watching session, that getting up to go prance around in the cold weather didn’t feel like my heart’s desire, to say the least
then, as i was putzing around online, thinking about (maybe) running, mapping my (potential) run, but keeping my butt in this deep corduroy chair she has, i saw this on her Facebook status:

My philosophy on running is, I don’t dwell on it, I do it.

—Joan Samuelson—

i got up and went for a run.  and it was nice.  really.  frozen nose, frozen fingers, tired limbs all included–it was nice.  and it was good to be on foot again in a place i loved for four years.  and it was good, ultimately, to prove myself wrong, as i so often do.  small challenges faced are small victories won, and for me, at this point in my life, that means the world to me.

********

and speaking of running, there are two half-marathons on the same day, May 1.
Indy’s full, but taking transfers.
Champaign’s only an hour away from me.
i WILL run one of the two.  and that’ll be a large victory, for me.

anyone wanna join me?  : )

********

also, a word from my friend Joel, to whom i would like to gift a megaphone.  i’m so looking forward to when he comes back from Seoul, for multiple reasons, but the top two are completely selfish:
1.)  i miss his company.
2.)  we need his voice too.  badly.

********

Letter to Erin: On Mothers (2nd half, with some editing)

And at the end of four months with Donna, I felt like I understood a woman’s heart a little better, particularly a mother’s heart.  But then, a few weeks ago, just before I left for Zambia, I visited the first baby born to any of my lifelong buddies, and it was this beautiful but shocking and alien experience.  Like I’d suddenly stepped into a foreign country, and I no longer spoke the relevant language.

Liz and I were tiny when we first met on a pool deck.  We competed together and supported each other, and we watched our bodies grow at nearly the same rate.  And then she married when we were nineteen.  I couldn’t be at her wedding, but in my mind, it seemed she’d become something new and other­.  Then she got pregnant when we were twenty-three.  And I couldn’t be at her shower, so for me there was, once again, no tangible evidence of her change.  Until a few weeks ago, of course, when there was tiny, rosy Ella Grace.  In my arms. There was Liz, cross-legged on the bed, beaming at me and her beautiful baby girl.  An hour or so later, I drove away from their house and wondered, where had they come from, Ella and her mother?  They both had happened while I wasn’t paying attention

I also wondered if maybe I’ve been skipping out, somehow, on some of life’s most ordinary and heroic moments.  I suddenly felt penniless, like I’d turned the pockets of my own existence inside out to reveal nothing but clean white cloth and a bit of lint.

Then, very quickly, I came to my senses.  I could love Ella for what she was: a miracle.  Someone else’s miracle.  When I’d stared at her and felt that warmth, like a balloon rising in my chest, it was a response to what she was, not to motherhood itself.

Thank God.  It was a close call.

I can marvel at mothers, Erin.  I can appreciate them.  But because I’m not yet ready to be someone’s mother, because I’m still struggling with the concept of being someone’s life partner, there are deep places—terrifying places, magic places—mothers can go where I can’t follow.  I can’t begin to understand.

I’m thinking of one particular mother here in Zambia.  Her name is Sharon.  She teaches the God’s Kids classes here at Kafakumba, the pastoral training and economic development center where I volunteer.  Sharon has had several miscarriages and stillbirths in the last few years.  She had not given birth to one live child yet, until this last baby, a girl.  The child had been sick since she was born, but she’d lived eight long months.  I arrived here a few days ago, though, to whispers about Sharon, the mmm-hmm kind, the poor-baby kind, the well-meaning kind: Sharon lost the baby, did you hear?  Made it to eight months, then died mysteriously.  Mmm hmmm, poor woman, poor baby, mmm hmmm… When our friend Caroline told us the news, I looked at my host, Debbie, and her face was dark, so dark I couldn’t read it.  Then I felt a thick and oddly familiar grief for a woman with whom I’d not exchanged one word.

Patricia introduced me to Sharon the other day.  She lives in Beluba village, and Patricia and I were meandering through after church.  Sharon’s a tall woman, very thin, with a face scrubbed flat by sadness—that kind of sadness, like yours, Erin, that I can’t sing, even if I feel it, because I don’t know it.  Her eyes held the sadness to which I pay so much attention, and which I hate.

I wonder if some mothers receive a kind of secret strength from their babies—a blessing, with that first wail, that helps them beat back sadness.  Like Liz, Ella’s mama, who is a nurse.  She’s worked in OB and loves it, but when I visited Ella, Liz told me that she would rather work in oncology, eventually, with terminal cancer patients.  Over the body of her sleeping baby girl, I blinked at her.  “You’re in for some really painful, sleepless nights, love,” I said.  “That’s such a difficult job.”  Obviously, she knows that—she’s a nurse.  She patiently explained herself to me.  In a cancer ward, unlike any other ward, a nurse can really come to know and develop relationships with her patients because they’re in there all the time.  She can bring some real, lasting good into a room.  Pain is simply part of the gig, and to Liz, the caretaker, the nurse, the keeper of one brand new life, it’s worth it.

When I heard about Sharon’s baby, I thought of Liz, and I thought and of you, Erin.  You, wanting to be a doula and a midwife, your intense passion for women’s lives and stories, your need to involve your love of women in your spirituality and in the work you love.  You, like Liz, are in for some painful, sleepless nights, my friend.  Of course there’s a particular pain that comes to anyone who works exclusively with men and men’s lives, too.  But to intentionally tangle yourself up in the world of women is an act of bravery.  If you’re willing to endure the everyday sadness, you are going to be so privileged.  You’ll be present for the very holy, most intimate moments in life.  You’ll be one of only a handful of people who witness a baby’s first breath and a first-time mother’s first tears.

In all of this, I envy you, Erin, and I miss you.  I wish for you tonight.  I would make you a cup of tea in exchange for your company and your perspective.  In a sad or confusing situation, you always seem to see what I don’t.  You have a wisdom I haven’t gained.  I’m cheerfully one step behind at all times, even here in Zambia—especially here in Zambia.  If I’m finding it very difficult to gain any clear understanding in this place, at least I always have the perspective that relativity offers.  Perspective isn’t comfort, of course, but then comfort isn’t the point.  Relativity isn’t vision, but I welcome the perspective:

I’ve cried many times over the past seven days for ordinary love.  I have wanted to hold my niece so much my arms have throbbed; I want to hear “Aunt Daisy.”  I want my sister’s cooking and her bossiness, and I’ve wanted Ben’s scruff on my face and his hands in my hair.  I’ve wanted my father’s hugs and my mother’s worry.

All of those are exactly what they seem, though: they’re the elements of a healthy dose of homesickness, a clear and very classic case of a woman wanting exactly what she can’t have and wanting it now.  I would settle for their voices on the phone, but even tonight, I can’t have that because I made my own difficult choice, and that is always when we want something most.  So perspective, at the end of the day, says mine is more of an old, old ache–the dissatisfaction of loneliness–and not true pain.  I chose to leave my home and live in a new place, and that requires vulnerability and an awareness of the possible consequences.  It’s like walking barefoot; you accept the possibility of broken glass, but you can’t keep your eyes on your feet all the time.  This is the first choice I’ve made in years that requires me to grow up and commit to and learn to live with its costs.  To do otherwise—to consider this a mistake, to go home tomorrow—would be shameful.  I suppose I’m proud of myself for making the choice.  In a way.

Perspective, at the end of the day, says I don’t really have to live with anything.  Remember that, barring any unforeseen craziness—maybe the remote possibility that Zambians will love me so much that they ask me to stay instead of kicking me out when my visa expires—I’ll get exactly what I want most in just under three months.  I will be at home, with my lover, my sister, my father, my mother.

So, very simply, I wonder:  what kind of love and horror and longing does the woman feel who’s lost every child she’s ever conceived?

I know that folks ought not to go around comparing their lives to the most awful situations simply to feel better about their own or to avoid facing their issues altogether.  That’s not healthy or realistic, and that’s not the point.

But.

There’s something to recognizing the spectrum of what is possible and endurable.

Also, there’s something to the fact that for every year this old rock has been turning and sustaining human life, women–rich women and poor women, women of every color and class and country–have borne babies and have lost babies.  There is really nothing new, nothing selective about it.  There have been women of every color and class and country there to witness those moments.

I’m not trying to oversimplify anything.

I am, however, making the argument that whatever we do or don’t agree on in this world, women can, on some level, understand each other, feel each other.

If we could bottle up that particular power and anoint the world with it, it seems to me that the kingdom of God would then come, and we would have done God’s will…

Just a thought, and at the end of it, I do love you dearly,

Sarah

planes. cars. editing.

all are a means of getting some place new and, if we’re lucky, better.

better: yesterday, i put Ben on a plane to Georgia, where, as he informed me by phone this afternoon, it’s currently 65 degrees, sunny, and breezy.  i’ll join him on Saturday, if winter in the Midwest doesn’t thwart the best efforts of my pilot.

better: after i dropped Ben off at the airport, i hit the road in my Buick.  i’m bouncing around central Indiana for a few days, visiting friends in the Indianapolis, Anderson, and Muncie areas.  while it’s still cold and snowy here, in the company of precious people, we’re not lonely.  if i had gone directly home to an apartment without Ben, i would have been.

and…doubtful: i’m working on editing a piece (half of which is posted below) to include in this hodgepodge collection of writings about Zambia.  it began as a long letter to my friend Erin.  when it began, it was good.  as i’ve been editing it, i’m having doubts that it’s getting better just because it’s a little longer.
meatier was what i was hoping for, but i’m a little worried that, in exercising it, it’s just getting flabbier.

********

Letter to Erin: On Mothers

January 28, 2009

Ndola, Zambia

Dear Erin,

I was so glad to read your newsy email, gladder still for so much good news!  I have to say, though, that I’m trying to picture your sister as a pregnant lady, and I can’t.  I’m trying to picture you rocking your own adopted baby.  I can’t.  No matter how much those images suit both of you, I just can’t quite make those pictures in my head.  It’s this chronic condition I seem to have: shock and awe that we are, in fact, grownups, constructing our own lives and capable of creating new ones, and responsible for seeing both of those through.  Do I need to remind you that you were five, like, yesterday, and I was recently in diapers?

Seriously, though.

My world at twenty-three-nearly-four is suddenly, mysteriously full of newly married folks and new mothers.  To me—single, transient, jobless, homeless, free as a bird and floating—this is both hilarious and creepy.  In a weird way, it’s like I’m kneeling here in the center of my own life, awkwardly untangling my arms from my legs from my pigtails from my big girl britches, struggling to stand and become an adult.  And off to the side, there, all my friends are happily playing house.

All things considered, I’ve decided I may be learning how to grow up until I’m eighty.  When my teeth have fallen out and my hips have been replaced and my kids have kids, then I’ll consider myself an adult.  Maybe.  In the meantime, I’ve realized that I’m learning vicariously, through the experiences of people I love, like you, and of people I don’t know.

There’s that bit about motherhood, right?  Let me begin with the four months I just spent living on a farm with the parents of a college buddy.  I’m not sure what I expected, but I know I grew closer to his mother, Donna, than I intended.  We had some long conversations.  That is, I did a lot of listening, learning the particular pain that a homemaker, wife, and mother feels when her nest is newly and profoundly empty.  Her daughter graduated from BSU last summer and married right after.  She and her husband moved to Indianapolis, and now they’re much too busy to visit often.  And then her son just graduated from BSU this spring.  He told me he wants to spend the summer rolling around the country with his car and his guitar, playing music on the street, playing for change—playing for a change, really.  We’ll see what comes after, but he’s got that gleam in his eye that tells me the chances are good that he won’t go home.

Suffice it to say, their mother Donna, my new friend, is lonely in a big way.  When a woman has thrown all of the love and energy of twenty-five years into taking care of her children, where does all that love and energy go when children no longer seem to need her care?  She lavished me with all that restless, big-hearted nurturing, but I’m not a child and had no desire for another mother.  I did want the friendship of another woman.  And when I moved out of her home last month, I hoped she’d feel the absence of a friend.  Not another child.

And at the end of four months with Donna, I felt like I understood a woman’s heart a little better, particularly a mother’s heart.  But then, a few weeks ago, just before I left for Zambia, I visited the first baby born to any of my lifelong buddies, and it was this beautiful but shocking and alien experience.  Like I’d suddenly stepped into a foreign country, and I no longer spoke the relevant language.

Liz and I were tiny when we first met on a pool deck.  We competed together and supported each other, and we watched our bodies grow at nearly the same rate.  And then she married when we were nineteen.  I couldn’t be at her wedding, but in my mind, I she’d become something new and other­.  Then she got pregnant when we were twenty-three.  I couldn’t be at her shower, so for me there was, once again, no tangible evidence of the changes.  Until there was Ella Grace—born perfect, Erin, flawless as babies can be but usually aren’t.  And there was Liz, cross-legged on the bed, beaming and cuddling this tiny, rosy girl.  Where did they both come from?  This woman and wife and mother had happened while my back was turned.

I realize that experiences like that are universal, and they’re sugary and flowery and make good Hallmark movies and Christian romances, but seriously?  There’s a lot of truth to the sweetness and strangeness of them, and I felt privileged to be present.

I also wondered if maybe I’ve been skipping out, somehow, on some of life’s most ordinary and heroic moments.  I suddenly felt penniless, like I’d turned the pockets of my own existence inside out to reveal nothing but clean white cloth and a bit of lint.

Then, very quickly, I came to my senses.  I could love Ella for what she was: a miracle.  Someone else’s miracle.  When I’d stared at her and felt that warmth, like a balloon rising in my chest, it was a response to what she was, not to motherhood itself.

Thank God.  It was a close call.

the religious studies student in me

would first like to recommend my

classmate CJ’s blog project:

it’s a fascinating effort (makes me miss the ethnography class i took as an undergrad), and his writing is clear and honest.

********

and secondly, the religious studies student in me would like to submit this thought from Poor People, by William T Vollman, for your consideration.

Speaking of his conversations with a man in Yemini, whose two wives stayed “forever at home” and whose “greatest joy was to pamper them, because unlike Christian women they had given the beauty of their faces to him alone,” Vollman muses:
“Cultures, like poems, shape by restricting.  A negative space, an incurve of the bottle, is also a positive boundary.  In short, what you or I might interpret as institutionalized dependence (as indeed it is), a Muslim sees as cherishing, as expressions of respect.”

obviously, without reading the whole chapter and the book itself, your understanding of the context is impoverished, but i’d be very interested in anyone else’s thoughts on the theory of cultural development that Vollman whips out in two sentences, there.

absent

minded:

–adjective

so lost in thought that one does not realize what one is doing, what is happening, etc.; preoccupied to the extent of being unaware of one’s immediate surroundings.

i like this definition.  it’s kind.

some of you may remember back a few years to the night when i was closing the MTcup, and i threw out my phone with the night’s garbage.  (no, i didn’t go dumpster diving; the man driving the garbage truck found it and turned it in to the coffee shop.)

what about the time…ahem…times, the many times i’ve locked my keys in my car and had to be rescued by university or city police, god bless their Slim-Jim-wielding selves?  There was that night I closed the MTcup, locked my keys in my car, and had to leave my vehicle outside the shop.  I return the next morning by bike only to find someone had smashed in my back window with a brick, neatly arranging the brick and an empty bottle of Upland Pale Ale in the middle of the backseat.  Come to think of it, the police wouldn’t help me that night.  Or, wait, that one time last year, when, much to my horror, by my brother-in-law-to-be had to bust into my car for me.  In a cornfield.  During harvest season.  With a wire hangar we borrowed from the Amish family living nearby.

when Ben and i were roadtripping west during our spring break, senior year, i got out of the car in Sausalito to pump the gas and pay.  it wasn’t until we’d reached Petaluma, California and needed to get a hotel room that we realized i must have left my wallet on the roof of the car at the gas station.  all my money, all my id, everything–gone.  and you need stuff like that to catch a plane from Washington to Indiana.  i called the Sausalito police, but no one ever turned it in.  luckily, the airlines were kind and gave me paperwork to fill out.  i must have looked tired and unthreatening.  who knows.

but the three other times my wallet has been returned to me, fully loaded, make up for the one time it wasn’t.  especially that time i left it at a university busstop.  oh, wait.  someone turned it in to the Anderson police a few years ago, but it was empty…except for someone ELSE’S credit card.

finally, if any of you have a guess at how many times you’ve  called me up after i’ve visited to let me know that i left my phone, my book, my shoes, or my underwear at your place, kudos to you.

or the times i’ve called you up from my car, frantic, because i missed my exit miles ago (i was…thinking, okay?  just lost in thought!) and have no idea, actually, where i currently am.

the grand prize beauty, though, was on this day last year.
i lost my passport in the Johannesburg airport on my overnight layover.  as best i remember, i laid it down on the baggage counter when i was consulting the Northwest/KLM personnel (incidentally, the airline had lost MY baggage somewhere in transit), and i just…didn’t pick it up again, apparently.  i came to this realization at about 2:30 in the morning, and my host, Peter, spent the whole next morning combing the Joburg airport with me (at which point, i could safely classify my passport not as “lost” but as “stolen”), then racing around that giant city to get me to the Embassy, put an emergency passport in my hands, and get me on the last flight out of Joburg and to Ndola safely.  which he did.  the saint.
(now is when i admit that, while i was waiting in the Joburg airport later that day, i tried chasing down my lost bag one more time, and in doing so, i briefly misplaced my NEW emergency passport.  thankfully, airport staff found it, and i reclaimed it.)

you’re all–all of you, the whole world–constantly saving my butt.

and it’s all very funny, i know, except when it’s terrifying.  there are situations, remember, when you’re not acknowledged for your personhood but for your papers and numbers.  your identification.  and when you don’t have that, you don’t exist in ways that count, say, in an airport.  at a bank.  at the border.

i have been absentminded for as long as i can remember, and i’ve been fighting it for as many years.  and it’s very tiring when i fix the situation myself, but on the days when i have to be rescued, it’s downright humiliating.

in the past few years, though, i’ve improved remarkably–no, really!–and i have to say i’m really proud of myself for doing so.  i’ve developed little habits, checks and balances for myself, to make sure i have what i need when i need or…or what i had when i left the house, if you will.
door doesn’t open until keys are in hand.  check.
hands don’t leave keys until they’re safely in pocket. check.
the whole wallet, not just the credit card, comes out and stays out while i’m pumping gas.  the credit card goes straight back in the wallet.  it does NOT go in my back pocket.  wallet stays in my hand until i’m safely in the car, and i do not START the car until it’s safely in my purse.  check, check, check.
i don’t leave burners on, lights on, car on.  i do leave keys around my neck, which sometimes leaves me frantically patting my belongings and my person.  but they’re always around my neck or in my pocket.

i’m a changing woman, people!  i’m on my way!  it’s a new world!

yesterday, i left my keys at the post office.  hanging in the lock of my post office box.  just before the post office closed.  since i had no way to start my car, it had to stay parked all night in front of the little bar by the library where i’d been working.  (in the library, not the bar.)  i supposed that if no one towed me, then the worst thing that could happen was that people saw my car, shook their heads sadly, and assumed i’d been too drunk to drive myself home.
i called the post office this morning, and wouldn’t you know, some kind soul had turned my keys in.
and i was not surprised.

Departure

When I left for Zambia in January, I unapologetically skipped the last half of a harsh Indiana winter in favor of rainy season in a warm place.  The rains had come to Zambia in mid-November, months before my arrival, when my parents were visiting Victoria Falls with some friends from Kafakumba.  My father and Ken Vance were climbing down into the gorge, to the boiling pot, when Ken looked up at slowly lowering sky.  “We’d better think about heading back,” he said.  Before he and my father could make it back out of the gorge, the rains started, and, my father said, “They just didn’t stop.”

By the time I arrived two months later, my Zambian friends had deemed it one of the coldest and wettest seasons in remembrance.  They were tired of the sogginess, the leaking roofs, the washed-out roads, the mosquitoes and malaria.  They were chilly.  But emerging from snow and sub-zero temperatures, I was guiltily warm and felt like a living thing again.  I loved the heat and the heavy downpours, the rippling green and the purple flowers spilling over the walls of Kafakumba.  Even the mud.

The day before I left the country, the rains stopped.  Suddenly, like a door in the sky had closed.  Since I came back to Indiana a little over a month ago, my family and I have been joking that I’ve stolen rainy season from the Zambians and smuggled it back with me to the States.  Driving back and forth between Indiana and Illinois, from my parents’ front porch to Ben’s apartment, I’ve been watching the Midwest landscape of my youth yawn, turn over, and cover itself in a fine, new green.  It’s good to be here, I think.

Each time the clouds stack up this spring, I remember Theresa and Patricia, umbrellas in hand, picking through the red mud roads of Kafakumba, and of the question, “Will it rain?”  We were traipsing to Fisenge village, as we did every Thursday, and like some great atmospheric joke, the sky was darkening, as it did every time we left our houses for the village.  The clouds would just hang over us, threatening, or we would be drenched halfway through the trip.  We were four women in a single file, Theresa, Patricia, Dru, and I.  Each of us was dressed in bright colors and carried an umbrella that was brighter.  Set against the steely sky, we must have looked like four wildflowers with legs, pushing through the weeds and maize, bobbing down the footpath.

“It won’t rain!” I crowed.

“It will rain…somewhere.” Typical Dru.

“It will rain this afternoon!” Theresa predicted.

“It will rain,” said Patricia, and we giggled, and on cue, we were swallowed up in sheets of rain.

We slogged through the high grass until we reached the first clearing, a cluster of flats, a couple of trees, a porch, shelter, and we huddled there. We pulled up chairs next to a handful of children crouched or kneeling on the porch—sisters, each knotting and combing the others’ hair, and a baby boy, looking concerned.  There was an old man sitting in a chair to our left.  Patricia and Theresa had greeted him in Bemba.  I assumed this must be his porch, and that he had welcomed us in out of the downpour.  From Theresa and Patricia’s gestures and talk, I gathered the man had asked about Dru and I, the two muzungu women, the old one and the young, and why we were traipsing through the rain with these two respected black women.

I shook out my yellow umbrella as Patricia and Theresa chatted with the man, and I set it on the porch in front of me, useless and limp, as the rain dripped through the ceiling onto my flowered Crocs. I turned to smile at the children crouched in the corner, wishing I could offer one or two my chair without being rude to my host.  The oldest girl smiled back at me tentatively, her busy fingers never slowing as they worked through her sister’s hair.  The little boy grimaced.

“That one,” Dru pointed at the boy, “needs to be checked for worms.” His round belly poked out from under his t-shirt, and Auntie Dru had noticed, of course, and had assessed the situation. He was shivering, and Dru waved him over to her and cuddled him close to warm him, and the rain fell, and we waited, patient. We looked out from under the dripping eaves of the porch and waited, unconcerned.  Waited, because that is so much of what we all did in that place—waited and hoped.

one year ago today

Ben, my sister, and my niece put me on a plane for Zambia.

********

Departure

One morning last November, late in the dry season, folks at Kafakumba began their day’s work early under a barren blue sky, bodies baking between the sun and the hot, red earth.  Within a few hours, huge clouds had gathered, scowling, over the fields.  People sprinted for cover before the clouds tore open, and the rain fell until late March.

The day before I left Ndola, the rains stopped.  We went to bed in the dripping cool of evening, and we woke to a blue sky scrubbed clean, and with that, the wet season left us in the same way it had come, abruptly.  My friends won’t see a drop of rain for the next seven months.  Seasons come and go unceremoniously in Zambia, and there are no lingering goodbyes.

********

Sunday night, I had a nightmare.  I dreamed I killed a young woman who was, apparently, a danger to someone I loved.   I dreamed I shook her like a rag doll before dropping her and running, screaming, to tell someone what I’d done.  I haven’t had a nightmare in awhile, and I’ve never dreamed I was the one committing violence.  That made this particular dream startling and confusing, and so that much more terrifying.

Suffice it to say, I woke up soaked in sweat, completely disoriented under that awful, suffocating sense of fear, like someone sitting on my chest.  I managed a choked whisper.   “Ben! Nightmare.“

Immediately, he had me in a bearhug, stroking my hair and trying to bring me back to the present.  Poor guy.  I was sobbing and snotting all over his chest.

When I dream like that, no matter how ridiculous the scenario, the intensity and the immediacy of the experience is the crippling thing.  It’s extremely difficult for me to peel myself away from the dream-reality, even if the event itself is over, and I’m awake.  I had no idea what time it was, only that I was terrified to shut my eyes again, to be left alone with myself.

Ben started murmuring our good memories, these sunshine and water memories.  I laid there shivering and damp while he talked us back to little diners in Colorado and beaches in California and mountains in Washington, back to New Zealand and home again, leading me to all these good and green places in my mind until my breathing slowed, and the shaking stopped, and we could both sleep again.

********

Maybe prayer is an earnest request.  Sometimes, maybe, it’s an invocation, sometimes a naming, a conjuring up of the best of life and the best in us.  I’m not sure always sure what prayer is, but every once in awhile, I think I can point to it when I see it.

It’s not difficult for me to admit that I’m not always sure what marriage is either, but I think I can point at it when I experience it.   Maybe marriage  is also an earnest request, an attempt to do and to be better.  Sometimes, holding each other against the ugliness outside and inside ourselves, then also naming and calling up the best, the most good and green places, in the world and in each other.