Master Caswell's Second Essay

"Write about a place you like to call home" 

I thought this was the most difficult essay I've ever written, but it's actually the most difficult anything I've ever written. I wanted to make this "both happy and sad, like me," but I don't know how well I did in the happy department.

I learned a lot while thinking and writing this essay. I could feel myself learning. It was incredible. I've never learned so much about writing as I have in this class.

I stayed up until 2 in the morning the night before workshop day trying to finish my draft. I spent hours on it, but I felt so awful and was so stuck that I still didn't get much done. I finally went to sleep dreading the morning. I tried to get up early to print it before class, but of course that didn't work.

I had to tell Caswell that I didn't have a draft to read. I could say that to my high school teachers without flinching because they didn't care overly much about the creative process of writing. They were all about grades and responsibility. But Caswell... to say that to Master Caswell, someone who cares about my writing enough to make comments in friendly blue ink... I dreaded that, and I felt sick saying it.

I don't know what I expected, really. Just a look of disappointment, a statement that points would be deducted later for not having it today, or a simple, dismissive "Okay." Something like that. But instead he said "Well. You'll just have to tell us about it and we'll have a sort of conversation instead. Good?"

Oh, Caswell... if you knew how kind that was.

I felt better knowing that my essay would still get sort of workshopped. I very much needed it. But I was also nervous about this "conversation." It was a lot to explain and a lot to remember, and yet again I was choosing to share painful personal information, and I worried what people would think about that. I also worried that they would think it ridiculous that I was trying to fit so much into one essay.

But when it was my turn, I found words. Not the best words, but fairly clear ones. As I talked about it, seeing Caswell nod from across the circle kept me going, and I eventually finished describing my 5 pages of rambly draft.

The first thing anyone said was "Wow. You have a lot to write about," but he didn't say that it wouldn't fit in one essay.

I felt so much better just telling people about it. I kept the actual essay to myself for weeks because I could see how it should go, and I thought it could be really powerful if I finished it. So I didn't want anyone to see it until it was finished. It felt much better to tell people about it, though, and I realized by keeping it secret I missed a huge part of writing it.

Something Caswell is teaching us that is extremely difficult for me to accept is that most of the time the first paragraph or two we write will need to be thrown out later. Tossed, entirely. He says that usually just gets our thoughts going, gets us used to weaving them into a thread instead of a pile.

My initial intro to this paper talked about memory. Some of it was pretty. But I realized that obviously, since I'm writing about home and a time when I was very young, a reader can already tell it's difficult to remember. People already know what that's like. For a few moments, it killed me to throw it out. To get around that, I saved it elsewhere, just for the prettiness. It still bothered me to completely remove an entire paragraph like that. But then, after getting over it, after reading my essay again, I realized that by doing that my paper now started exactly where it needed to. I realized Caswell is right.

I love writers.

Also, Laura, thanks for being my first reader. Your comments were very helpful, but I didn't have time to implement many of them. This essay could have used another week, really. But I'm very glad you read it before I turned it in, and I'm very grateful for the title.

Jacob, thanks for putting up with all that thinking.

So, here it is, in all its length and imperfections. Like a marathon, I'm just happy it's finished.

Fist on a White Door
 

Wheeling, West Virginia 1990

My mother tells me we lived in the hills, with apple trees and rain, with long, winding dirt roads and wild blackberries and raspberries. There were gardens and pies and days full of sunshine. If I was lost, my mother found me in the garden, digging up potatoes and dropping them in baskets while our huge English mastiff Plato kept watch.

West Virginia. Mountains, rain, illness, and poverty. One of the poorest states in America, but as a child, all I knew was that it was beautiful. All I remember now is warmth and leafy giants with arms full of golden apples. I do not remember any of the houses my family lived in when I was very young. My maternal grandmother’s house, nestled between a creek and a mountain, is what lingers in my mind.

Her house was my first home. The sidewalk in front felt like laughter, like tears, the garden in back like a happy sigh, and the porch swing was deep, steady breathing. In the arms of that swing, every trouble in the world could vanish with a kick of my feet. Her little house, with its low, sloped ceilings that hugged the furniture, was where my older sister and I ran when we were not supposed to, where I learned to roll a ball of yarn, and discovered the vast mysteries hidden within a basement. In the grass of my grandmother’s front yard, I had conversations with ants and caught fireflies in glass jars. I skinned my knees and broke my nose in that yard. On the sidewalk I chased ducks with my older brother and tried to pin the world down with chalk. At the edge of the creek across the street, embedded in the earth just beyond a wall of evergreen trees, I learned to skip stones.

All I knew was that it was beautiful. But illness and poverty moved my family to Texas when I was six years old. My father and I were both hospitalized with pneumonia, and jobs were impossible to find. I am told I nearly died twice when I was four, so my parents sought a new state with more employment and cleaner air.

Cooper, Texas 1996

Population 2,150. A lazy town where one can always find cows and fundraisers without looking. Since moving there, this is the town I write in the “permanent address” box of all the paperwork I fill out.  

After staying for a while in several temporary places, we moved into a two story white house on the outskirts of town. It is easy to find; go to the museum, the old railroad tracks, pass the Feed Store, make your way around a bend in the road (watch the holes), and there it is, leaning on an overgrown lawn amid clusters of pine, oak, and pecan trees.

The house is beautiful from afar. Closer, it is still beautiful, but in a sad, neglected way. The roof caves in at some places, the paint is peeling, the porch always wears a heavy set of junk, like too much jewelry, dozens of spider webs adorn every corner, and the whole house leans and shifts with the seasons. Some doors open only in the summer, others only in winter.

In that sad, neglected way, it is incredibly beautiful.

The inside is much the same, but more cluttered and even lazier. Nothing ever quite gets done there. There is simply too much to do. Hundreds of things get started, but most are fated to sit abandoned in corners, closets, the attic, and the hallways. The past is everywhere, watching, waiting, and none of us can escape it.

It was a sad place, but I had two havens there. The first was the yard around the house and the pasture behind it. I spent most of my time wandering around outside, talking to the grass, trees, and birds, catching butterflies and grasshoppers, and going on adventures with walking sticks that I found beneath a massive pecan tree beyond the back door. The second was the kitchen, my nighttime sanctuary. In the kitchen, I read books, made tea, conversed with spoons, and watched Nick@Nite. There I found solace in the dark when the rest of my family was out or elsewhere in the house.

There was beauty there, and plenty of happy things, but my memory of the house is stained by the anger. My house was a place of slamming doors, my father the man behind the knob. When I try to remember what exactly he was so angry about, details elude me. Like the subtle humming of a refrigerator, or the high-pitched whine hidden within the organized noise of a television, over time, that constant presence becomes so normal and expected that one no longer hears it. That anger scarred me, but I can’t fully remember a single specific incident. Only fragments.

I remember…

Slamming doors, footsteps that rattled the floor, the terrible flash of his eyes, the awful timbre of his voice tearing the air in front of me, a long, rigid crack in the wood—the mark of a fist—on a white door.

A question directed to me, my mother’s answer, and his shouted reply. “Is your name Tracey? I didn’t ask you, so shut your mouth!” the sharpness of his tone, and the sickening contrast as he turned to me, eyes full of what might have resembled kindness if I tilted my head a certain way and lied to myself long enough. “What were you saying, Tracey?” Voice full of feigned kindness, as if he could get me on his side.

I remember that razor sharp voice, the immediate tensing of my every muscle. A wave of fear coursed through me every time, fresh and raw, no matter how old I grew. Staring at the new crack on the door, the legacy of an angry man, I remember various culprits sitting embarrassed on the kitchen table—late bills, forgotten permission slips, a broken dish, bad news in the mail. There was nothing to do after he stomped away, nothing to do but stare at the table blankly and feel the pressing weight of assumed guilt. We all felt it in silence.

Later, under the familiar veil of normalcy, my mother spoke in calm, understanding, reassuring tones. She carefully placed the blame on herself—he would not have gotten so upset if she had seen that bill at the bottom of the mail, she had not interrupted him, or she had caught the falling bowl. She apologized to us, as if her fist marred the wall, as if her words marred our hearts. It meant nothing but sadness. I tried to tell her that something was wrong here.

And she said, in this tired voice, “He’s your father,” as if that justified everything.

Lubbock, Texas 2009

We left at four in the morning. My older sister began the long drive through the dark, and we made our escape. Everything was packed light so that we only needed to make one trip. We drove in shifts and stopped only when absolutely necessary until, six hours later, we arrived in Lubbock, Texas, population 212,169. Every passing mile filled me with an exhilarating sense of liberation.

Lubbock is flat, wide, and open, with the largest sky I have ever seen. I stepped out of the car, stretching my arms up to that huge sky, and basked in the bright morning light. I felt the tension seep out of me from my fingertips.

I was a college student, six glorious hours from home, and free.

We arrived a week before classes started, and I helped my sister move into her new apartment. I carried in clothes, lamps, and cardboard boxes full of books. My sister and her roommate filled the apartment with art, and their friends from two doors down filled it with music. The sweet sounds of mandolin, banjo, and guitar sang from their fingertips as we unpacked or cooked dinner in the tiny kitchen. A friendly, life-sized stick man stood against one wall, welcoming everyone who entered. This was a place where no one’s word was law, and I could laugh and speak my mind. This was a new place, a new city, a new day, and all the dust came from the land outside.

Later in the week, I marveled that I had been happy for five days in a row, and was awed when this streak continued. My sister helped me move into my dorm room at Texas Tech University, where I discovered I had the incredible power to Do Things. In a single day, I opened a bank account, bought a computer, and acquired a photo ID—things that might have taken a month or two in Cooper. I went to my first college class, and began meeting people with different ideas and philosophies, people who previously existed only in books.
For three blissful weeks, I was happy. I was free.

Until I realized that it follows me. Until something crept in at the edges, a familiar feeling of nameless dread, a familiar pain I don’t understand. Until I realized…

Home is haunting me.

It slips back in through phone calls and emails and the approach of holiday breaks. The calendar reminds me that I still have to go back. And I know when I do, that tired house will still be where I left it. The dark hallways will be waiting, preserving the past while I have lived in the future.

I began to understand the appeal of burning bridges, eliminating links to the past, and beginning anew. I began to wish I would never see that town again, that home of old dust and sadness, never hear my father’s thundering voice, or see that rigid crack on the door. I thought about Oregon and financial independence. I thought about fire.

As the weeks went on, I realized something else; bridges are rarely made of wood anymore. The bridges to my past are made of stone and steel. Home, each one I find, both beautiful and painful, is etched into my being. I was shaped by the rain of West Virginia and the dust of that East Texas house, by the leaves of apple and pecan trees. The sun is in my skin. The air is in my blood.

I could light bonfires on those bridges, but nothing would change. The path would still be open, only scarred black and covered in ash and the smell of smoke. I could run from it, but it would always follow me, always haunt me.

I must go back.

Even if I chose not to return physically, my feet would cross those bridges again. Lacking transportation and financial independence, Thanksgiving and Christmas will find me back in that old house. I know I must return periodically over the next few years, but afterward I will not stay. Oregon is calling me.

First, I must make my peace.

Now, when I think of home, I like to imagine a new one, built very, very carefully. I think about how much I would love to be a mother, how much I want to tell my children stories, and show them how beautiful the world is. Someday I will make a new home. It may be a house, an apartment, or it may be a bicycle and a backpack. I may have a family, or I may be alone.

I am not certain exactly what I will do, but I know one thing I will absolutely never do. I will never allow anyone who finds rage in things like lost luggage, interruptions, and unexpected inconveniences to dwell in my home. I refuse to allow anger to pervade my walls. I will never let the imprint of a fist decorate my door.

I will make my peace.