Dear Erin,
This last week, instead of writing, I went somewhere warm.
Have I told you about my obsession with being warm? I think it’s important. I think you really can’t understand me completely until you know about this obsession.
You see, for the past twelve years of my life, I have lived in either Iowa or Idaho. I’m not saying I don’t know the difference, that I’m not certain where I lived… although it is true that people mix up the two states regularly, even if they are miles from each other… I’m just saying, in a rather inefficient way, that first I lived in Iowa and then I lived in Idaho. And that it’s been 12 years.
12 years, let’s be clear, of being cold.
Admittedly, the summers are great in both these locations. Admittedly, I had a heating system in Iowa, and continue to have one in Idaho. But still: 12 years of winters that insist on regularly dragging themselves into June.
Just. For. The. Heck. Of. It.
Is it surprising my only true goal in life is to be warm?
When I first got married, we moved to Las Vegas. I was suffering from “life-change depression” at the time. I’d left school. I’d left home. I’d left family and friends. And I took it out on Vegas. I complained that the only thing growing in my yard was a weed. I insisted my husband never pick it and begged to live somewhere else, anywhere else, as soon as possible.
Are my 12 years of cold a form of belated karma for hating Vegas? Sometimes I wonder.
Regardless of how it came about, all I do now is wish for the world of warm. And every spring, on the first day of true warm, I lay on my south-facing driveway and let the heat soak into me. My children used to be concerned about this oddity. Now they dance around my prone body, amused and comforted by the strange tradition. What is home, after all, if it’s not your mother lying on the driveway like a dead body on the first day of spring, baking in the sun?
So, I didn’t write this week. I went to Las Vegas to see my husband’s family, and I spent every moment I could soaking up warm. I’m hoping, really hoping, it will get me through to June.
Luckily for our discussion about writing, I did manage to pick up a book of essays along the way: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. And so, I’ve been soaking that in too. I love her essays. I love their connection to the natural world. I love all that I’m learning from her life experiences. It’s made me thankful, once again, that you’ve been willing to write these one-draft essays/letters with me. I don’t think I realized how much I missed writing essays in all the fiction-writing frenzy of the past several years. But I have missed them. I’ve missed how they connect you to people, and how they distill outward all the rumblings that churn around in a person’s brain.
Did you know that in the year 2008… a time my brain doesn’t remember much… I applied to and was accepted to a Creative Nonfiction MFA program at Dartmouth? We didn’t end up moving to New Hampshire, so I didn’t end up enrolling, but I still feel a little befuddled pride in being accepted to an Ivy League graduate program. (Even if it was only for a tiny program like Creative Nonfiction.) Still, I guess me missing out on Dartmouth was a good thing, when I consider it would have negated the MFA program where I met you.
Still, sometimes I think about those essays I would have written, and I’m glad I get to write them here instead. I’m glad you take the time to churn out words to me, even when you’re churning out all those other words, seeking the right path to the right story. I liked how you talked about that, about how there’s no time to waste in the pursuit of where you really want to be. How every wrong path tells you just a little more clearly how to get to the right one.
My own method of writing is more of an effort of reaching as far as a I can, and then returning for another go at it once I’ve hit a wall. I write and write and write, and when I don’t know any more, I return to the beginning, read again, clear up a few fine points and see if my repeat effort at understanding my own writing will allow me to walk any further. Sometimes, for me, it’s only by going back to the beginning and fixing my mistakes that I can figure out where I’m headed.
No surprise then, that I’m back to essays, is it? As I try to figure out my writing and determine what path, exactly, I’m supposed to be on.
Thanks for coming with me on that journey,
and enjoy that warmth in North Carolina.
If you see a body on your driveway,
don’t be too concerned…
Jamie
On the importance...
I love this so much! I do the driveway thing too. Maybe it’s an Iowa thing? Also, that book of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass, is the recommended winter reading for our local county library. I debated reading it because I didn’t realize it was a collection of essays. I so love essays, and your recommendations have never steered me wrong, so I’m going to give it a try. Keep writing these letters. They’re so fun.