As another year draws to a close, I sing this textured garment of life rubbing rubbing rubbing against our tender human skin.
Ten years ago I was preparing to move back to my Michigan hometown from my college town in Tennessee. When I think of that time, my memory unravels a variegated yarn spun of daily moments compressed into vivid composites. My car's engine ticking behind me in the hospital parking ramp's oblique shadows. Scarfing down the day's unsold cafeteria fare on the winding drive up the mountain after work. Inhaling the tar scent of Incline Railway timbers on morning jogs beneath them. Mockingbird song from the Craven House's antebellum wooden porch. That one tight sun-struck curve on I-95. The breathtaking freefall into sky and city alongside Scenic Highway. Coffee steamer and barista banter blurring into white noise around my table while I scribble in my journal at Barnes & Noble.
All of these memories and a thousand like them have a certain texture: solitary, inward, uninterrupted. They are notably devoid of technology, and contemporary me is staggered by its absence, and the consequent absence of politics and pop culture in my life at this time. I had a company flip phone and a landline, and blogged and emailed on a big stuttering desktop. My unfolding romance livened these outdated channels with the thrill of waiting for a new email to load, of mustering guts to return the missed call blinking on the caller ID. I kept in an oft-visited compartment in my mind the thought of my early December plane ticket to visit this guy from college I was getting to know. A decade later, a handful of songs from mixes he gave me then still usher me back to that mental chamber of possibilities that haloed my 2010 retreat with a gracious shimmer of newness and nerves.
I packed my '87 Chevrolet Cavalier, settled my dog in the passenger seat, and drove.
I had barely unpacked my bags in my childhood home before I was watching Jonathan's Toyota pull into sight through the snow-flecked gloom of MSP airport twilight. He squinted out a foggy windshield that his arm periodically wiped clear as he scanned the curb for the spot where I waited, shivering with cold and excitement.
The ensuing week I toured rural and urban Minnesota on his arm. On the drive across stubbled fields to the Twineball Museum I giggled over Weird Al's "Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota." We chatted, building Legos, while Nirvana played beneath the alligator wallpaper of his childhood room. I eavesdropped from the church pews while he and the Christmas choir rehearsed their carols, attuning my ear to his voice's steady strain. My city memories are slightly different, less auditory, full of vapor and shine. Watching sunlight wink off the saliva escaping from the cloud of Jonathan's breath while he performatively hocked phlegm at the Mississippi River. Fog filling my glasses as we entered the Minneapolis Art Institute, where we shyly wandered through aisles of art before descending the vast front steps an hour later into winter's enormous sparkle and dark. Jonathan's chandelier-lit company Christmas party that weekend, when the season conspired to deliver a storm that shrank attendance and made for a memorable drive downtown. I can still see the lumberjack of a man who sauntered across our headlight beams in the middle of the street, his shovel spanning his shoulders under fluffy twirls of snow as we crawled along at the speed of his boots.
Into this setting, a flurry of firsts filled in blanks of experience I hadn't known existed. First interactions with future in-laws and friends, first telling of now familiar anecdotes, first assembling and dining on the famous family enchiladas, first group listen to Peter Gabriel through the fine living room speakers. First Broadway Pizza chair across from Jonathan, first time he debuted a surprise mustache, first twining our fingers, first worship at his side, first sips of coffee together in the white morning glare that follows a night of snows.
Though I didn't predict that these moments, their texture at this time exquisitely new to me, would eventually become the homespun of my life, I enjoyed wrapping myself in them during my unexpected overnight at the airport that weekend, and over the blizzard-prolonged return journey, the weeks of finding my footing back in Michigan. And they did indeed become my happy quotidian: three Decembers later on a glittery winter morning Jonathan and I were married. Seven Decembers and three children later, we still live in the same large Minneapolis home that welcomed us from our honeymoon.
Now it is 2020, and I can't relate my love story without thinking of my dad, abruptly widowed after 33 years of marriage. I find myself imagining what it would mean, after being folded year by year into intimate habitude with another, to adjust to the texture of solitude again. The hair cloth rasp of it, symbolized by sackcloth in other times. The gauntlet of significant firsts that he is always facing do not merely fill a blank of life experience, they necessarily pose a stark negative to positives that precede them.
The loss of my mom changes the texture of my days, too, coarsening and dulling areas that once held great comfort and color. I feel I am wearing cherished memories thin by compulsively reaching for them, swathing myself and my children in them over and over. How she loved lighting candles, bargain hunting, and the look of snow spuming off the top of the rushing trains at night. Her alto voice strong with praise beside us in the pew. How her head would tilt back when she wheezed with laughter. The way her knuckles creased around the curve of her coffee mug. How her thick graying hair ran through my braiding teenage fingers.
As another year draws to a close, I sing this earth that wears out like a garment, and all our experiences raveled within it.
I sing this textured garment of life rubbing rubbing rubbing against our tender human skin.
