In January of this year, as I was packing to move, I made a call to one of my closest friends … a flare sent out for sympathy and solidarity,
The move was my fifth in four years, the pandemic was raging, and my younger brother was dying a dozen states away. I was flailing around, waking and weeping in the middle of the night amidst boxes full of stuff I couldn’t part with. Relics from fifty odd years of questionable choices.
A minute or two into the phone call, while trying to describe how distraught and unmoored I felt, she interrupted me and brushed aside my feelings like a summer fly, “moving a few blocks away doesn’t count,” she said. This was the friend who knew me best in all my worst, and looking back now, I wonder if she was just trying to lighten the mood, a failed attempt to make me feel better.
But back then, her dismissive laughter was not at all what I was expecting. Or needing. It was jarring and disorienting. A painful reminder of how our friendship had been changing for quite some time.
It shook me.
The day after my brother died, I decided to confront her about the call. I was full to overflowing with emotional wreckage and needed her to hear me. But she didn’t hear me, and used the conversation as an opportunity to list the many ways I had hurt her over the years.
If I’d known at the time that it would be the final blow to our friendship, I wonder if I would have made the call.
In the silent months since, I‘ve rifled through ten years of unsent emails and journal entries. Evidence to justify my anger and sadness, to fortify the narrative I’d been constructing from my memories, and to convince myself that it was all inevitable. The same documentation showed how my silence, my lack of courage to send those emails, bears some responsibility.
I’ve also spent a lot of time looking through old photos of us, wondering how in the world we let this happen.
I began writing this as a personal exploration about home, but it keeps circling back to her. Maybe because she used to feel like home. Welcoming, comfortable, the light always on. I can’t pinpoint a time when it all began to fall apart. When the little cracks and fissures first appeared.
Maybe as the years went by and physical distance made getting together more difficult, she needed me to be a less demanding friend. She inadvertently hinted as much once when she described what an easy visitor another friend of hers was. How she was the kind of friend that didn’t need to spend every minute together. I remember how my cheeks burned with embarrassment, knowing I was the difficult kind.
She has a husband – her third - a solid partnership but not always an easy one, and how many intense relationships can one person manage? She has children, grandchildren, and sisters. All requiring emotional presence.
I remember being so happy when she was finally emerging from the sadness of her second divorce. We had much more time for the exchanging of confidences, the hilarity, the long conversations traversing every inch of each other’s emotional terrain. But way too soon another man came along, and they moved away.
Through the years, we visited each other often, and I came to really love this husband. I miss them both. He’s Italian and a lot like the men I grew up around. Funny and charming, loud and belligerent. He loves her and accommodates the most difficult aspects of her, in homage to what’s lovable.
A few days ago, I learned that they’re moving to the east coast to be closer to her family. They’ll be leaving the house they renovated, re-designed, added to, and so carefully tended over the past two decades. The place where I spent so much time with them. She’s leaving her studio, their gardens, neighbors and friends, their home. This must be hard for her. And for him.
The word home insinuates permanence and history. Safety. A landing or a return. Warmth and beauty. The structure itself is irrelevant. Whether an apartment or house, a trailer or yurt. It’s what we infuse it with, and who we live with, that animates it and makes it so hard to leave.
For me, home is longing, but a longing that is completely at odds with my restlessness and need for solitude. It’s a concept that seems as out of reach as God or the strand of coral left on the horizon when the sun slips beneath it.
Inside the tiny house where I’ve lived for ten months now, I’m curled up in my chair, doing this, and watching giant evergreens across the road, waving their heavy branches up and down like supplicants as they face strong winds out of the southwest. Behind them, the northern sky is colorless and flat. The power is out, which isn’t unusual here, so I’m wearing thick socks, fleece pants, a puffy coat and a wool hat. Surrounding me are bookshelves, and piles of books needing shelves. In my site line, perched on every surface and sill, are strategically placed rocks, plants and treasured gifts from my daughter and friends. My desk is a mess of notebooks and scraps of random musings and unfinished stories, chiding me to get to work.
A few blocks away is Lake Michigan, which in the past few days has gone from serene to insane and back again – crashing waves to quiet ripples of constantly shifting shades of blue. And maybe that’s why this feels more like home than anywhere I’ve lived before. My moods made manifest.
Perhaps back in January I simply needed to choose a different word, so my brother being alone on the boat he lived on and so loved at the end of his life, wouldn’t have seemed so wrong, and moving would’ve felt less like an endless quest for home and more like an adventure or what lots of creatures do when the seasons change.
Nest.
Den.
Hermitage.
I’ve moved to a hermitage in Northern Michigan, graciously rented to me by the owner who has entrusted me to live in it, love it, and tend to it, for as long as I’d like, in exchange for a modest sum of money each month. A place where, hopefully, I’ll live happily (or at least interestingly) ever after. For now.
Since moving here, I’ve painted and planted, and most recently decked my modest halls for the holidays. I have friends coming over for dinner this week, (if the power comes back on) and in a few days, I’ll ask my neighbors to watch over things while I visit family and friends in Detroit.
When I walk along the lake or in the woods later, I’ll think of the brother I lost this year, and my friend. I’ll look back on my missteps toward each of them with regret. I’ll likely shed tears, while renewing my vows to live and love better.
When Hemingway was asked what the most difficult thing about writing was, he answered, “Finding the right word.”
It’s a constant struggle, to find that right word, and connect it to other right words in an order that will take a story, a letter, a poem or anything written, to its destination and provide a pleasant or at least entertaining ride for the reader.
Words are the main way we communicate, and by the very nature of their job - which is making a connection between one human’s consciousness and another’s - finding the exact right word is important and nearly impossible.
Take the word pink.
If I mention in a sentence that something is pink, depending on who’s reading, the word will conjure up different images … the underside of clouds right before sunrise, tongues or intestines, fat bows on the bald heads of baby girls. My mother’s soft cardigan she sometimes wore when pruning roses.
And roses.
Or that pink baby doll dress I wore to a party in 1968, but more on that later.
And then there’s the sound.
Pink.
Rhymes with mink, ink, stink, link. The sound of a word can elicit a response as distinct as its meaning and has enough power to make or break the connection between other words.
To be certain that pink is even the right choice, and to convey exactly what kind of pink I mean, will require wandering away from the point, which, presuming there is one, will mean having to find the way back. It’s a bit like stepping off the trail and bushwacking through an unfamiliar forest. There’s always the possibility of getting lost.
Recently, a gallery hosting an exhibit called Color, invited people to come and spend time with the art and then write something inspired by one of the pieces. Ekphrasis is the term used for this sort of exercise. The gallery offered no inducements like prizes or publication, no deadlines or pressure. It was simply a beckoning, a dare, so I thought, why not and went to look at the art.
And there it was. Calling to me. A 50x30 inch illustration titled ‘Pink’, depicting a mound of rocks. The ones at the base were large and arranged into cairn-like supports. On top of this base the rocks got progressively smaller and packed tightly together, forming the suggestion of an evergreen tree. The rocks had soft edges, and instead of being varying shades of gray as one might expect of rocks, all of them were pink with a dusting of white. (Think bubble gum right out of the wrapper. Or pink sweet tarts.)
There’s something irresistible about the piece. Color contradicting content. Heavy and light at the same time. Pink rocks. It’s almost subversive. And noteworthy in terms of my peculiar attraction to it, considering the prejudices I’ve always attached to Pink – its assumed femininity, and its suggested submissiveness that my Sicilian father spent years trying to bully me into.
A few weeks previous to visiting the gallery, I had come across a photo of myself, age 17, at a party, wearing a pink baby doll dress, much like the pink in the painting. In the photo, my high school boyfriend’s arm is around me, and in his hand, a lit cigarette is dangling way too close to the taffeta covering my breasts.
I’m smiling, either unaware, or just not caring.
The dress, which fell mid-thigh and had a frilled bib that buttoned up from the waist was typical for the role my girlfriends and I were playing back then. While painting my lips a shiny pink and wearing the shortest skirts I could get away with leaving my house in, I was seducing boys while carefully policing my virginity. In the suburb where I grew up, staying a virgin until marriage was what good Catholic girls did. Not that I was particularly good, or Catholic. I had given up on the church at age 12, shortly after Vatican II robbed me of the fantasy of the God I’d grown up with. I had believed literally in the stories of Adam and Eve, virgin births and flaming bushes and remember the humiliation I felt when the curtain was lifted and the mystery and incense evaporated. I was left facing my own gullibility and ugly felt banners.
Staying a virgin until marriage was not about God at all, but the fear of judgement by my peers, society at large, and the names I’d be called if I crossed that line. The reality was that my virginity was a technicality. All through high school I enjoyed a pretty good sex life. I flirted and beckoned, teased my then boyfriend with possibility, allowing him to lay on top of me fully clothed, his hands roaming here and there, pantomiming sex until I had an orgasm, which came easily and quickly, the pink dress scrunched up to my waist, but with my underpants still on, my virginity intact, his frustration on going.
It would be a few more years until I would discover that intercourse didn’t involve some out of this world experience beyond the orgasms I had been experiencing quite regularly. My disappointment was acute. The actual act I’d been saving myself for, proved, at first, to be either laughable or painful. I was fumbling around in the dark like an inexperienced actor auditioning for a role she didn’t understand.
Fast forward forty years to a porn convention in Hollywood Florida that the Detroit Free Press sent me to when I was a photographer there. Think auto show, but instead of cars, blow up dolls and robotic dildos. Instead of Bill Ford, Ron Jeremy.
I went with a younger male reporter. I thought I was an odd choice for this particular assignment but figured the editor saw me, a woman pushing sixty, as a means to prevent raised eyebrows. I was kind of annoyed by the presumptions, mine and theirs, but was more than happy to fly off to Florida in the middle of winter.
One of the exhibitors at the convention was Pink, a porn production company who’s after party was basically live porn.
I documented as much as I could within the confines of what can be published in a family newspaper while wearing my Press Pass which had my name, The Detroit Free Press, and Pussy Cash, emblazoned on it in shiny pink letters.
Fast forward once again to the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election and the millions of women marching and wearing pink pussy hats in reaction to a misogynistic reality star being elected President. Perhaps this was the origin of a shift in my perceptions. One that I wasn’t fully conscious of and perhaps why I find myself wanting to spend 900.00 on a painting. That’s pink. I won’t be hanging pink curtains anytime soon, but perhaps a sweater or some pink peonies for my garden.
Soft pink.
Rhymes with think.