Love song for 30

We the Case daughters were not so happy when Dad took a job in Ohio. He had an offer in Indiana, twenty minutes from grandparents; fifteen minutes from cousins; two hours from friends. Instead we ended up in Buckeye country. Turns out OSU fans aren’t quite as endearing as Notre Dame ones.

What we inherited was a road– specifically, Route 30. We made the five hour trip back to family nearly every month. They built bypasses around Crestline and Celina; we experimented with 71 South on one end and Route 224 on the other. But for the most part, I’ve been driving up and down the same road for the last fifteen years. I filled my learner’s permit night driving-quota on 30, and took my first solo road trip on it. (Spilled Cherry Pepsi all over the center console after just twenty minutes. What a rookie.) We would make up extravagant back-seat games and break into pent-up-in-the-car hysterics. When it got dark we settled into the hum of the road and had family hymn-sings.

Most of the significant conversations I’ve had with my parents have happened somewhere along 30: one on boys and dating in high school while headed east; a long, weighty decompresser on re-entry and reverse-culture shock when Mom and I were traveling west the summer after I returned from South Africa. I fell in love with baseball while listening to a Cleveland game just outside Canton. And I was on 30 for the most awful afternoon of my life, mostly numb and otherwise frightened, scooting east as fast as we could through the speed traps around Dalton.

There are prettier roads. Quicker roads, more notable roads. But the ribbon of 30 between Canton and Van Wert is one of the only places I feel I have a claim to. When I’m asked where I’m from I usually say I grew up in Indiana and Ohio. Wouldn’t it be better to tell them about 30? It’s that lovely little stretch where you are always setting out into the world and headed towards home at the same time.

Yardwork

The Cases have been yanking up vegetation like nobody’s business lately. We did have help; a crew came by yesterday to unceremoniously tear out the pear tree. It didn’t quite survive the set of thundery deluges we’ve been having this week.

(Mom was up on the roof in the gale, ostensibly checking gutters, right before the second landfall. “I can hear the tree cracking!” We can too, Mom. Hence we’re inside.)

Today I found Dad ripping forty-five-year-old ivy off the northern wall of the house. I haven’t done much housework lately so I shamefacedly offered up my services, such as they were—which, in the end, weren’t too stellar. So what if I tied the ivy into slim, six-foot bundles and took them out to the curb when instructed to leave them in the back? I contributed! (I hope the garbage guys will take them. They’re supposed to only be three feet.)

Afterwards I settle on the patio wall to watch Dad rinse off the chain saw—really, to watch Midge. She’s grown out of most of her puppy ways (she didn’t bat an eye at the rake today, which used to set her barking and whining), but she’s still obsessed with the hose. It’s hard to tell if she gets the basic premise that it’s water, uncatchable water—she’ll switch back and forth between snatching and lapping at it with equal gusto. “It’s good exercise for her,” Dad comments, swinging the hose around in circles for Midge to chase, “especially since your mom’s out of town and there’s no one to take her running.” (Note: start running. It’s good for you and Midge.)

It was a nice moment, like solid ground. Everything is moving pretty quickly these days, and while I’ve been slowly building up a set of sea legs, the summer has been just as dizzying as I thought it might be. I went through old high school yearbooks while cleaning; between that, the weird dynamic of returning home as an adult, and all the Egypt prep, I’m nursing a little vertigo. Moments of refuge, when an action feels poignant for its own sake rather than for pointing me forward or backward, seem nearly sacred right now.

Also, when Midge gets wet her face looks a little like a Chihuly, no?

You never do know the actual nature even of your own experience.

“Strange are the uses of adversity.” That’s a fact. When I’m up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in my hands and it’s nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it’s as though I’m back in hard times for a minute or two, and there’s a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand. But that only enhances the value of it. My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing “The Old Rugged Cross” while they saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. In those days no grown woman ever let herself be seen with her hair undone, but that day even the grand old women had their hair falling down their backs like schoolgirls. It was so joyful and sad. I mention it again because it seems to me much of my life was comprehended in that moment. Grief itself has often returned me to that morning, when I took communion from my father’s hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that’s what it was.”

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

What I’ve Accumulated

The word ‘detritus’ keeps popping back into my head, maybe because I don’t actually know how to pronounce it. I mostly just read it in print. (De-TRI-tus? DET-ri-tus? Like detriment?) 

Also, it keeps being relevant. I clean out my car; I wipe down bookshelves; I move furniture and vacuum. I’m putting things in boxes and I have no idea where it all came from. A lint roller. Lotion. Vitamins. Board games. A DVD cleaner. Headbands. 3 rolls of tape, because apparently there’s this trend where I lose my tape somewhere in the midst of all my stuff and go out and buy another roll of tape. A jar of pennies. Church bulletins from March. Books. (SO many books: just about the only thing I actually try to accumulate.) I think I have significantly less clothing than most American women my age, but let’s be real—whatever moral ground I’ve gained there erodes pretty quickly under my own self-righteousness about it. And okay, fine, let’s be even more real: I have too many clothes.

My parents call it takataka, the one Swahili word they incorporated into their vernacular when they got back to the States. I mostly remember it being directed at me: B, can you clear all your takataka out of the living room before your grandparents get here? I’ve still got stuff in their house. When I move back there this week I’ll pool it all together and do inventory, I guess. But for now, I’m watching Lost in Translation, listening to The Head and the Heart, packing it all into boxes and feeling a little guilty about having so much stuff.

How’s Singleness These Days?

Summer this year means weddings, family, and reconnecting with old friends, and in turn, all of these things mean that at some point I’m going to be fielding the now age-old question: any guys in your life? 

I used to dread it because it made me feel self-conscious and defensive. At the moment I’m more bummed that it’s such a conversational non-starter.

 

A: Any guys in your life?

B: Not really. You’ll be the first to hear if I meet someone, though!

End scene.

 

I used to try to sprinkle in anecdotes just to keep things moving: Got a guy’s number on the T the other day. Went out with a guy I met at a wedding, but it fizzled out. Then I realized that:

1.) this isn’t what my gentle questioner is really interested in anyway

2.) I’m just trying to make myself feel less lame

3.) it’s still a conversational dead-end.

 

You know what I could talk about forever? Singleness. I never feel the same way about it twice. Just this week I’ve careened from indifferent to despairing to pleased about not having a boyfriend. I used to be defiant. I also used to be defensive. I’ve got the prerequisite criticisms about how the church approaches singles. I’ve got all sorts of thoughts about having married friends; about having single friends; about having guy friends. I’ve got lots of questions about community and singleness. Hospitality and singleness. Sexuality and singleness. Mobility and singleness. Family and singleness. Selfishness and singleness. I get all sorts of frustrated with friends in relationships who have singleness amnesia. I get panicky and I worry that I’m doing it wrong. Sometimes I feel pressure to single-handedly come up with a blueprint for fixing the world, because if I’m not pouring time and energy into a healthy relationship, I’d better do something to prove that my life wasn’t a net loss. Sometimes I remember to be grateful for the things that singleness allows me to do—like go to Egypt with SALT for a year. Sometimes I just like being alone.

 All this is to say: I don’t have any guys lined up, but I think where I’m at is kind of interesting in its own right. Ask me about it—I’ll have things to say. 

Photo Journal: May