Driving and Memories

Yesterday, I returned home from my quick road trip to take a car load of boxes for seminary up to Maryland.  I made this Facebook post:

"I left Maryland at daybreak and pulled into my North Carolina driveway at 1:35. Five states between dawn and noon: Maryland, W. Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. From the Interstate, I waved hello to my mother's birthplace (Winchester, Virginia) and my grandmother's birthplace (Johnson City, Tennessee). I waved hello to various schools that dear friends attended--too many to name. I crossed beautiful rivers and waved hello to the Appalachian Trail and other places I hiked in my youth. I said a prayer of thanks for all the green trees and the hope that resurrection of a tired planet might be possible."

I spent much of the drive awash in memories of previous road trips across these mountains.  While I've made the trip from Florida to the North Carolina mountains frequently, this past road trip took me to Virginia, where I haven't been in years/decades.  And I haven't been to Johnson City, Tennessee since I was in my late teens.  I have a memory of my mom and sister and I stopping in as we went from Knoxville to Charlottesville on time.  My maternal grandmother came from a farm in Johnson City, and my maternal grandfather's first call was to 5 churches in that area--that's how they met.

Instead of my zippy, subcompact Prius, I drove the SUV, a Rogue with all sorts of safety features and room for many more boxes.  I learned to drive on a 74 Monte Carlo, so you'd think I would be used to larger cars.  I am not.  It feels like a significant achievement to take a road trip in the Rogue all by myself.

There are many moments when I think, when did I become this timid person?  I used to take long road trips, back in the days before cell phones, in cars that leaked copious amounts of oil and were held together with chewing gum and good wishes.  I guess that one of the hazards/blessings of growing older is the awareness of all that can go wrong.

I am looking forward to the next road trip when I'll have another driver, and I can spend time looking at the views.  I was so focused on the road that I didn't really feel like I could take in all the mountain vistas.

First Time on Seminary Campus

My original plan had been to be back on the road yesterday--7 hours up to Maryland on Friday, and 8 hours back to North Carolina on Saturday.  But as I looked at the calendar, I realized I could spend an extra day.  And yesterday, I was glad that I did.

I was glad for all the regular reasons:  time to recover from Friday's drive, time to enjoy a day with my family.  An unexpected bonus was our trip to see the campus of Wesley Theological Seminary, where I've been taking classes online for a year and will be taking classes in person in just a few weeks.

We headed down about 11:30 after a fun morning of walking the dog, going to the Amish market, and eating treats for breakfast.  My sister was the driver, and she knew exactly where she was going, which made it easier.  We pulled into the deserted parking lot and took a look around.

We couldn't get into housing, which was a plus in a way.  If I'm living there, I don't want anyone from off the street to be able to wander through.  There was a number we could call for assistance, but I didn't see the need to interrupt anyone's Saturday, just to show us the inside.  I'll see it in 2 weeks, when we move in.  We did look in a few open windows, and it looks like pictures I've seen.

The classroom building was open, so we wandered through.  It looks fairly modern, in terms of seating and equipment.  But there's lots and lots of art throughout the building, a wide variety of subjects, mediums, and approaches. We were also able to see the chapel.

My sister snapped a few pictures.  Here's the courtyard, where we both said, "Oh, there's more to this campus than I thought":

And here I am, standing next to a high bell tower:

Here's the bell tower at full height:

We didn't take a picture of either of us standing at the iconic statue of Wesley.  That would have been a long walk down a grassy field.  I'm glad that the seminary is set back from the road.  I'm glad that there are so many trees and green spaces.  I'm glad that there are so many high windows to capture that sense of being nestled in nature.

After our brief exploration of campus, we headed down Massachusetts Avenue.  I was reminded once again of how much DC packs into a very small geographical space:  embassies and universities and all sorts of organizations.  Oh, yes, and the three branches of the federal government.

DC has always been one of my very most favorite cities, and I'm looking forward to exploring it again.  And I'm happy that I'll have a home base on the seminary campus to come home to each day.

Road Tripping Across the Appalachians

As we packed boxes at our condo in South Florida, we marked with pink packing tape the boxes that would go on with me to Wesley Seminary housing.  As the movers unloaded the moving van at our Arden house, we kept those boxes in one area.  We decided it would be a good idea for me to take a load of boxes to my sister's house in Maryland, which is very close to the seminary.  I've got a lot of boxes coming with me.

The seminary housing is furnished, but I still need things like dishes, cookware, sheets, and towels.   And art supplies and cloth for the quilt(s) I plan to make.  And books--lots and lots of books.

Yesterday I left my friend's house in Charlotte; I was returning her cooler and picnic basket and also enjoying the chance for a quick visit.  She's lived in the house for 15 years and transformed a basic suburban house into an urban homestead, complete with chicken coop.  What an amazing space.

From Charlotte, I travelled up I77, which was delightfully empty, once I left Charlotte.  After an hour, the climb up the mountains began.  I'm sure there were amazing vistas, but I was concentrating on the winding road.  I was in the larger car, the Nissan Rogue, that I don't drive very often, so I felt the need to stay hyper vigilant, even though the car has more safety features than my Prius sub-compact model.

In Virginia, I hopped in I81, which still offers plenty of lovely mountain vistas.  Here and there, I caught site of a beautiful farm, the kind of farm that is the larger version of a homestead like the kind my friend is creating in Charlotte.  I spent many formative years going back and forth across these mountains; I went to high school in both Charlottesville and Knoxville, so these ranges feel familiar.  It's been so many decades, yet much remains the same in terms of what one sees out of the car window.

I enjoy a long car trip, and I was lucky to stay within range of NPR stations.  The car is so unfamiliar to me that I forgot to bring my CDs, just in case I needed them.  These days, I tend to listen to the radio on a long car trip; gone are the days of mix tapes made specifically for a road trip.

I made excellent time--I was at my sister's house by 2 p.m.  We put my carload of boxes in her storage unit, picked up some provisions, and got settled in before the afternoon thunderstorms rolled through.  We had a great time catching up, and it's wonderful to realize that, with luck and grace, the coming years should offer more opportunity for similar visits.

The End of My Website

Yesterday I canceled my domain name and my website.  It was a clunky website, hard to update, impossible to make it look like I wanted.  But that's not the main reason I canceled the whole package.

I was paying a monthly fee of $21.00 to get the more accessible web design package, and that was on top of the twice a year fee of whatever it had gotten up to ($70.00?).  That starts to look like a lot of money.  That's part of the reason I canceled the whole thing yesterday.

I created the website back in 2008 or so.  I was late to creating an online presence.  I started a website and a blog.  I decided that I was serious about getting my creative work published and part of being serious meant that I needed to have an audience in place for that future time when I had a book with a spine published.  Maybe having the audience in place would make book publishers take a second or third look at my work.

That idea seems like such a long time ago--that a simple website might be enough to build a brand.  I was happy to do the blogging and to post on Facebook.  I was late to Twitter, but it doesn't seem too onerous.  But as the years have gone by, I just can't keep up with the various platforms.  But that's not the reason I canceled my website package.

The main reason:  my approach to writing has changed.  I no longer think that a book publication will change my life substantially.  Once I thought a book publication would lead to a better teaching job.  Maybe it would have once, when I was younger, when enrollment numbers at schools were rising.  The world is a different place now.

And I am in a different place now.  I'm no longer pursuing publication like I once did.  When I think about how much I've paid in entrance fees . . . well, I try not to do that.  It could have been worse.  I usually only sent my book length poetry manuscript to a few places a year, and I saw the fee as a contribution to the press.  I only submitted to presses I wanted to support that way.  I didn't spend money on nonfiction or fiction, although I did query agents here and there.

I will always be a writer, and poetry comes most easily to me.  Even when I'm not publishing, I'll keep writing poems.  It's a way of seeing the world, a way of gratitude, a way of forcing myself to take notice.

I will also send poems out here and there in the hopes of publication.  But I'm also a seminary student so my focus has shifted.  And because I'm on a platter like Twitter, I have an even more visceral sense of how many poems are out there and how few slots there are for publication.  I don't think a website improves my chances.

If I do get a contract for book publication, I'll revisit these decisions.  Is a website an important way to reach readers?  I do know that the website that I had was just as likely to lose a reader as to gain an audience--it was just that clunky.  And part of the fault was mine--I just didn't want to mess with it.  

It feels good to have made that decision just to be done with it.  Like so many parts of my life, I felt bad about my inability to do what needed to be done with that website, to update it, to make it look better.  It's good to just call it quits.

Rabbit Holes of Wonder

I've fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole this morning, listening to (and occasionally watching) the videos of Paul Simon at the Newport Folk Festival--he sung words I needed to hear this morning.  And so did Rhiannon Giddens--I had forgotten how searing "An American Tune" can be.  "We come in the nation's most uncertain hour"--no matter which year/hour it is when I hear that song, it seems so piercingly true.  This morning, it seems more true than ever; but of course, I would have said the same thing in 2016 or in 2002 or 1984 or any of the years in between.

That rabbit hole was a good one to fall down.  Paul Simon singing "Graceland"!  Paul Simon singing "The Boxer"!  Paul Simon singing "The Sounds of Silence"!--there are worse ways to spend the better part of an hour.  But not all of my rabbit holes have been as positive.

On Monday afternoon, I pulled up my bill for my upcoming term at Wesley.  That bill was much more than I expected.  I did a bit of calculating, a bit of looking up past bills, just in case my memory was faulty or in case I was doing math the wrong way.  I looked up the fee schedule and the cost per credit hour, and just to be sure, I doublechecked the catalog.  I did the math again and again.

I called the business office of the seminary and left several messages.  Yesterday, I wrote an e-mail and finally got a response--yes, there had been a glitch.  But by then, I had gone down a different rabbit hole, thinking about the cost of seminary, thinking about the cheaper options I had rejected, wondering if I was stupid to do this at my age.  Even as I observed my brain following these directions, even as I tried to redirect my thoughts, my brain continued down unhelpful paths.

Yesterday, I needed a break, so I suggested we go to a nearby county park to take a walk.  What a good idea that was!  Fletcher Community Park in Fletcher, NC is by a stream/river/creek, Cane Creek, with places where one can swim or wade.  The paths had a good mix of sun and shade, so the walk was pleasant.

My family gathers in the area most Thanksgivings, so I also had pleasant memories of being at the park in a different season--me walking by the creek while my dad went for a run, a round of frisbee golf, bringing dogs to the dog park, figuring out how the new fitness equipment worked, sitting on sunny benches with the littlest ones while the more energetic/older family members played soccer or football.

The whole area is full of these kinds of sites that send me tripping through a hole in time--a different kind of rabbit hole.  I remember all sorts of mountain paths that I hiked during earlier school days.  I remember thrift stores and book shops, some of which are still there.  There are versions of the Fresh Market that seem straight out of the 90's, while others seem a pale imitation.  There are mountain vistas that remind me of endless car trips, staring at the vistas, dreaming of a house to call my own.

And now we have such a house.  Yesterday we looked at various seedlings as we wondered what they could be.  I thought about calling the NC Agricultural Coop Extension--such a good resource in most states.  It's the kind of government that we used to be so good at, at every level.  On a day when the Speaker of the House of Representatives landed in Taiwan, it was good to remember my roots in a different way, good not to fall down the rabbit hole of worrying about nuclear war apocalypse.

Cross Quarter Hinge Point

Early August is a hinge point in the calendar.  In some ways, it's not as obvious a hinge as the autumnal equinox or the summer solstice; in fact, it's the time directly between those two hinges--we're as far away from the start of summer as we are from the start of autumn.  But in some ways, it's just as significant a point of seasonal shift.

August 1 marks the Celtic festival of Lughnasa, which Christine Valters Paintner describes in this blog post: "Lughnasa (pronounced Loo-nassah) is one of the ancient Celtic feasts celebrated on August 1st marking the time of the beginning of the harvest and the gathering in. It is said to honor the Celtic sun-god Lugh who was an ally to the farmer in the struggle for food. With the Summer Solstice six weeks before, you can start to really feel the shortening of the days in August in Ireland. There is a subtle shift in the light and the air that leans towards autumn’s crispness and cooler days. The energy in the world is changing."

We may have slogged through summer long enough that we may feel that nothing will ever change--it will be hot and humid forever.  The light hasn't changed significantly, the way it will in a month or two.  But we are losing more daylight each day as we hurtle towards a different season.  Students aren't in school yet, but the time draws closer.  Most of us aren't agricultural people anymore, but if we were, we'd be seeing crops in their final ripening.  Harvest would be coming soon.

Now is a good time to take an accounting.  Have we been planning some summer festivities that we haven't gotten to do yet?  Now is the time.  Do we need to adjust our trajectories for the rest of the year?  Let us make some plans.

Endless Summer

Yesterday was one of those days when I looked at my watch at 4 p.m. and said to my spouse, "Really?  It's not bedtime yet?"  It wasn't a particularly bad or tough day.  It just seemed to go on and on and on.

Finally I went to bed at 8 p.m.  The sun hadn't set yet, but the golden light stretched across the pines, maples, and oaks that I can see out of the bedroom window.  It was wonderful falling asleep with a view of the forest.

Admittedly, the word "forest" is a bit of a stretch.  While this part of western North Carolina is surrounded by all sorts of forests, I live in a neighborhood that has a lot of trees, a neighborhood between hundreds of acres of Lutheran church camp and a strip of shopping development (think Walmart and Lowe's and lots of fast food chains).

Here we are at the beginning of August.  Summer isn't over yet, but the end is in sight.  Here and there I see a leaf of autumnal color on a tree or on the ground, and it seems a harbinger.  At the same time, it seems that summer will never leave.

It's been a long summer for many reasons.  Would it have seemed as long and endless if I hadn't broken my wrist on April 15?  I know that buying a house was not on my radar when I thought about this summer.  We had an unexpected opportunity at the end of April, which meant that we had to put our moving plans on fast forward.

Years from now, when I think about this summer, I'll likely remember the endless packing of boxes.  Will I remember the stress of moving out of a condo?  Probably.  Will I remember how stressed I felt about our gravel driveway and the mountains?  Perhaps, but I'm realizing that a variety of deliveries happen in this neighborhood, and everyone is much more sanguine about the challenges than I was before I moved here.

Much like endless days, I look at this first day of August, and I say, "Really?  It's not October yet?"  But the light has shifted at both end of the day.  It's clear that the seasons are shifting, although one must be alert to notice it.  It's not the flamboyant changes of October, the chillier air, the pumpkins, the leaves changing colors.   But it's there, for those with eyes to see.