the beauty that is everywhere

I had two high schools. One was in suburbia, outside of Toledo, in Sylvania, Ohio. We lived there from when I was in sixth grade through the middle of my sophomore year when we moved to the city in Cincinnati. We bought a row house in Mt. Adams which looked out over downtown if you sat on the roof and we would renovate every square inch of this house and sell it later but for now, this place I found myself was a place where everyone had known each other since they were born. They had lived within a 15-block radius of each other, and been christened together at the Church of the Holy Cross, and their parents had known each other forever, sitting together on the barstools at Crowley’s Highland House Cafe, the pub my children’s great-grandfather founded just after Prohibition, or was it during?

These people took me in – lost, homesick girl that I was – and gave me a place among them, and I became a part of them. I even married one of them, so now my children are part of the place, too. Mt. Adams became a sacred place to me, a place with a history that melded with my own a little bit, a place where I walked with people who had walked these same streets and sidewalks thousands of times before. I was a wild child – there was never going to be any stopping that – but there was something just a little bit steadying about having steep hills to walk up and down, vistas of the city, the people who had known each other always.

My friend is coming. My friend who dated the same boy since the third grade, and married him. This same lovely boy who, when I arrived there in Mt. Adams in a car years later to bring my children to their father, was walking up the street, and lifted his arm in greeting like he always did, as though he’d seen me yesterday, and said, “Hey, Lis,” which was the best thing anyone could have done just then. And my friend has had the sense to love him forever. Even though he seemed to have slipped from earth a year ago last June and left her and their dear children in an ocean of grief, she will keep loving him, knowing him.

She arrives tomorrow. And I will get to take her around this city of my birth and be in the beauty with her, and dance at the folk festival, and eat wonderful food, and laugh and carry on with the story of who we are, each bright moment flashing forward, past, changing everything, changing nothing, river-like, free.

My mother makes apple cake and waffles, cooks bacon, polishes the silver, washes and irons the doily in her room in preparation. My dad fills a little vase with orange flowers and puts them in her room. They are so lovely and so excited.

This photo is of us in Eden Park in Mt. Adams, our playground. I am on the left, and Kathie is second from the right.

Some friends of mine started a writing group around the beginning of the last decade, and this is how I first met them.   I am so deeply grateful that I did, as they are the loveliest people and writers:  Leah, and Nathan, and Melanie.  And RaasaLeela, who was in town visiting Leah for her birthday at the very first writing group and so offering her magic to the group.

The way it worked was this:  one person would host and feed us all delicious food.  While we ate, we bandied about prompts that came to us and everyone wrote them down.  Then we’d all sit and write, trying to use all the words in the prompts, or veering off into wherever the prompts took us.  Then we’d go around and read what we’d written to the others.   There was something mystical about what would happen, about the stories that would come through.  More often than not, the same mermaid or rainbow or jetski would appear in more than one story even though it wasn’t the prompt.  You know what I mean?  Love would arrive — not that it had ever left — and we’d write down what it said.

This went on for a number of years and one by one we were called to other places — Nathan to Pennsylvania to teach, Leah to Berkeley to make films, Melanie to Baha to marry and write and take pictures.  I stayed here.  Left a few times and came back.  Others joined the group and it changed to something different and I met more dear friends, all lovely writers, lovely worshipful people.

When I moved to California last year, Leah started another writing group and we met in a yurt.  It was just a delight.

I think what I am getting to here is I am always in a writing group with these people.  It doesn’t matter where anyone lives or that we meet and write together every year or two or three.   Like we did Monday night on RaasaLeela’s farm.

The prompts were:  “lightning,” “bumper-to-bumper,” “bulimic,” “sooth,” “ferment,” “fig,” “party” and “overwhelmed.”

Here’s mine.  Or, at least, here’s what story came to me to write down.  I don’t really think of these things as mine.

Believe me, he said,  this overwhelm 

you are seeing everywhere,

this bumper-to-bumper,

lightning-round life where bulimic girls

are throwing up at rest stops,

this,

is something you are dreaming.

It can be just this complicated,

just this mystifying,

or you can let something warmer, something more

soothing

ferment at the very back of your dream,

like a fig, maybe,

and you will forget suddenly about all the things you found so annoying because they are

gone from the dream, as fast as that,

and what’s left is the quietest little party, everyone humming dance tunes,

tapping

their feet.