About that wall...

Photo by MabelAmber on Pixabay

Since November 2016, there has been an awful lot of big talk about walls. Got to protect ourselves, right? There are a lot of bad hombres out there, after all.

Here's the thing. I get it.

Keep reading, please. I'm still the same center-left tree-hugger – or far-left liberal nutjob, depending on your lens – that I've been far longer than most of you have known me.

Still. I know a thing or two about walls. And I bet if I pushed hard enough, you'd admit that you do too.

Think about it. Walls aren't all bad. It's March 8 in the South and I'm sitting here watching it snow. I'm pretty dang grateful to have a set of sturdy walls between me and all of that.

Or take my cats. True, they are not fans of walls unless said walls can be climbed. But walls sure come in handy when they won't stop fighting and need to be confined to separate corners!

It's not really snow or cats that are leading me down this thought-path, however. I'm thinking more of the times walls don't work.

Like border walls.

Like school walls.

Photo by Oladimejj Odunsi on Unsplash 

Like the walls we build around our personal space, both physical and emotional.

I don't know about you, but I've got a few too many of those walls. I'm talking several layers thick, like some kind of medieval fortress for my soul. It's a wall made of a lot of different materials – the election, yes, school violence, yes, but so much more. Things like the disaster that was my marriage. Learning that "innocent until proven guilty" is just a pretty phrase unless you have the right combination of color, cash, and connections. The lonely exhaustion of solo parenting, knowing I can never come close to being everything my kids deserve. The dozens of betrayals, large and small, the relationships cherished and lost, the fear of being hurt again. None of these building blocks are necessarily all that effective on their own, but stacked together, they're pretty hard to breach. If you add that I'm a natural introvert, perfectly content to be left to my own devices, well, if I'm not careful my self-made fortress can suit me awfully well.

Photo by Angello Lopez on Unsplash 

The thing is, even introverts are not made to live alone. A house built for one is not necessarily much of a home. I know this, and so I'm trying. Through heartbreak, trial, and error, I think I've found my tribe, the ones who are still and always there when the dust clears after life's many storms. Even when I wall myself in for self-protection, once I start tearing that structure down, I find them there on the other side, patiently waiting for me to emerge.

I've not yet been able to quit my wall habit. Maybe I never will. But I am happy to report that I am losing my touch. The walls aren't as thick as they used to be, and it takes less to knock them down. It's a work-in-progress, though. I still have a mean perfectionist streak that would love to stack every block so perfectly that nothing can get in.

If 40+ years on the planet have taught me anything, though, it's that perfectionism is overrated. Life is fuller, richer, better in the gaps, the places where you leave a way out... and in.

Photo by MissEJB on Pixabay

Nellie

Nellie her first year home

It all started with an ad in the paper.

Well, not really. It all started when we adopted two kids. They hadn't been here long before we realized every kid really should get to grow up with a dog. I was a vaguely known entity in the local animal rescue community, had helped re-home a few before, so I imagined one would come our way. And one probably would've, but then I saw this ad:

Female black lab mix free to good home. Has shots. Spayed.

Ads like this bother me. First of all, I don't like to think of any creature being rejected. Secondly, "free" animals around here are all too often sacrificed to fights. Combine all that with an early childhood spent with labs, and you can guess what happened next. I made the call, and we haven't looked back since.

Until now.

Nellie is...was...to my kids what my dog, Misty, was to me. Misty was not a lab, but rather an Australian Shepherd we got when I was young, sometime after Barnaby, who was a lab, was lost to complications of Parvo. Despite her fear of cows (admittedly not a great feature in a herding dog on a beef farm!) and one entirely too-close call with a passing car, Misty lived a long, full life. She was smart, funny, and occasionally brave – at least when it came to defending her red pick-up truck! Most of all, she was my constant companion, a girl's best friend. More than one chapter of my life closed when, during my senior year of college, she finally crossed the Rainbow Bridge.

My kids had that with Nellie. Like me and Misty, they've literally grown up together.

Nellie going gray

The only thing is, Nellie being a dog and all, she didn't just grow up – in fact, one could argue that is the one thing that didn't happen in her fourteen years! She grew old. The seizures she'd always suffered lessened, but she lost a third of her teeth. Her heart, the physical one, began to fail, even as the other, the heart of love, continued to beat strong. On the last day, the one we'd feared for months yet never could imagine, she got up, had a snack, and stretched out for a nap. It was a morning like any other, except this time, she didn't wake.

I've said before that it is hard enough to lose a pet, that it's a thousand times worse to see your kids losing one too. I imagine most of my readers know such pain entirely too well. So rather than dwell on it, I thought I'd share a few snapshots that reveal Nellie as she is was, show why we loved love her so:

• Whining from inside her crate at our lion-maned cat as, dangling from the top, he taunted her.
• Stealing a bologna sandwich and swallowing it whole.
• Standing at the back door barking, usually around midnight, her hair –and mine!– standing on end.
• Basking in the admiration of friends, strangers, and passers-by: "Look! There's a dog at Niagara Falls, and it's smiling!"
• Taking off hell-bent into the woods, hot on Cooper's and later Roxie's tail, even if we suspect she rarely knew what she was chasing.

  

  Nellie and Roxie

• Sheepishly belly-crawling back into our yard after sneaking off for a bite or two of new-lain horse apple or stinking fresh green cow pie.
• Getting skunked, and good, right smack in the face.
• Looking at me mournfully through yet another round of wormer – she never could quit those pasture snacks!
• Curling by my feet as I slept fitfully on the couch, keeping vigil through another night of illness, usually hers, sometimes the kids' or mine.
• Leaning on my knee, gazing up goofily with her snaggle tooth and her bugged-out eyes.
• Snoring. Clicking toenails. Clandestine crunching of cat food. It's way too quiet now.

I know this post needs some kind of end, but I've had about enough of things coming to an end here in black cat land, so let's just say to be continued. We'll catch the rest when we meet again, somewhere across the Rainbow Bridge.

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My Home in the World

In her stunning memoir, In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri describes what was for her the painful duality of growing up between lands (India and the United States), languages (Bengali and English), and loves (family and writing). As her reflections unfold, she shows us that a third way, a way out of that pain, is possible. For her, that path is Italian, a language that opens up heretofore unknown, untried parts of her mind, body, and soul. Through Italian, she charts a way forward, one in which duality could become a good, desirable thing: "It's not possible to become another writer, but it might be possible to become two."

I cannot say enough how much I loved this book. I love it like I love Jane Austen, like I love that first morning cup of coffee, like I love those rare shining moments when my pen translates my thoughts on the very first try. Her writing is finely wrought, worthy of a life richly lived. It also helped give new shape to my response when, for approximately the 1000th time, someone asked me a version of the tired question, "how did you end up here?"

On the one hand, I can kind of see their point. I'm a Yankee born and bred; unlike many Americans, I am multilingual by choice, and I've lived in nearly a dozen different places from small-town America to Houston to Versailles (yes, yes, that Versailles). Given that, I guess I can kind of see why some might wonder that I am so happy to call this corner of Appalachia home.

On the other hand, I don't get it at all. Yes, I've called 3 countries, 5 states, 11 cities "home." I've left...and, more importantly, found...a piece of my soul in every single place. Why, then, should I only lay claim to one? There is a version of my best self basking on the terrasse of a Mediterranean café, another so ensconced in a book that I found myself unexpectedly snowed in (true story!). I can suit up and speak at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, or I can throw on jeans, boots, and flannel to share my musings with a herd of Hereford cows.

I am all these selves and more. They come from a lot of different places and taken together, sometimes those selves and places don't make a lot of sense. Do yours? I didn't think so. And yet. They're yours, right? Your places helped create you, just as Lahiri's form part of her and mine are shaping me. They morph and meld, grow and change, yet ultimately, remain ours. Ours to carry wherever we go. Ours to keep within our hearts, the true home where all our best selves live.