It Feels Like a Remedy

There are moments in life where the incredible happens: when you receive something that you’ve only ever dared to wish for in the very quietest parts of your subconscious.   And even then, the thought is fleeting.

I used to crinkle my nose at the word, ‘settled,’ but of course I had the rare ability to shun settlement in pursuit of unsettling the world at large.  When you are young and have a home that brims with love in which you can always return, adventure is far less daunting.  Knowing that you can simply return to a place where your bedroom remains nearly untouched since high school days, where the same birds return every summer and gather in gossipy groups on the lawn, where with every Spring green vines snake up the side of the porch with an upward sisyphus-esque journey, fully aware that by the time the crisp Autumn air starts to sneak around the corners of brick walls their upward journey will promptly  reset for the following spring-well, it’s comforting.  It makes exploration less frightful and I am sure that Columbus and Magellan had a place they kept in a tiny treasure chest in their head, revisiting when the seas became stormy, the dark water stretching endless. 

Therefore, my time spent in Los Angeles-which now seems worlds away-felt much like one would imagine stepping into a television set, (if those 1980s music videos had made honest such travel possible).   There were perfectly oblong shaped pools; deep suits mingling with flipped flopped sunglassed boys on the same patio where Jayne Mansfield had once claimed a chaise.  There were elderly bellhops in legendary hotels who, recognizing the constant saucer plate eyes that give us recently relocated Midwestern girls away, had taken me aside and pointed out bathrooms where Marilyn Monroe had once stripped down to nothing and trounced out to the pool as though she were standing in her own, heavily fenced back yard.  There were late nights on strips and sunset was not a time of day, it was a place.  Palm trees tapped my windows to signal a rainfall and giant boulders took the place of benches on rocky beaches, where with my right hand placed visor like over my eyes, I would spend early mornings watching my friends as they crested over waves like seals.  During the days, I directed people I’d only seen through my television set to my various bosses' offices, asking, ‘would you like a water?’  Then returning to my desk as I tried to shake the fact that I had just spoken to real people and not cardboard cut outs come to life. 

I have sat on a rooftop of my friend’s hilltop house, drinking syrupy red wine while marveling at the brightly lit Hollywood sign to the left.  A deer grazed before us and my friend shuffled the pages of his latest novel.  The landscape looked as though God had opened up a pouch and scattered it with diamonds and the air was filled with opportunity that both intrigued and frightened me. I was swept into an impromptu tango across the wooden floors of Humphrey Bogart’s Wilshire home the same night I shared secrets with a West Hollywood Drag Queen.  Life was eccentric, and frankly, that eccentricity was the only thing that kept me afloat, made me feel comfortable- made me feel, somehow safe.  It is within that living, breathing bazaar that I felt at peace.  I was not alone.

But eventually my settled place called me back and I returned to Chicago.  My Dionysian life suddenly took a turn, as days and nights were spent behind desks, working among reporters, journalists, cameraman…. If there was a story to be covered, we would cover it.  But unlike Los Angeles, a city bathed in fantasy and fiction, these stories were all true.  High rises and hipsters, deadlines and the occasional drudgery.  I ran from relaxation about as quickly as I ran from men; one relationship to the next, each lasting only so long as the next commercial break. 

Too bold, probably naïve, I had an eye for danger and a need no different than eating or sleeping or breathing to prove myself capable of overcoming peril.  I dipped my toes in gang-swept waters and marched across mental and emotional plains of earth where the platelets below the surface constantly threatened to shift.  Ironically, I told myself that I was conquering my fears, proving myself unshakable, when in reality I was just using hazardous procrastination to avoid meeting up with my greatest fear of all: accepting myself enough not just to actually feel loved, but to give it back in return.

At that time, while standing in the middle of a ghetto known for it’s near constant drive-by shootings and grabbing on to a drug dealer by the collar of his shirt, warning him against ‘speaking to his mother that way,’ while teetering around in black stilettos like some off-kilter dandelion I felt oddly safer than, say, sitting down to a dinner in which red wine might  cause me to lower some of my defensive walls and just…be honest with who, exactly, I was.

I was called a workaholic many times, cold and sarcastic with too many nights felt ripped from the bindings of a Tennessee William’s play. 

But then there were the saving graces.  Friends.  But the word doesn’t seem to fully encapsulate the sentiment, so family.  Sitcom-esque in the perfection of our dialogue, in the lighting of the scenery, the staging, the action, and the eventual dénouement.

Without them, I struggle and struggled deeply.

Yet, now, as my bare toes scrape against the rough brick of my new porch, I call these memories to mind: coasts away from all those safety nets, watching as a third party as the home I once knew as my lighthouse among all these occasionally rough watered adventures is neatly packed and shipped away.  To another house up north of which I am fully unfamiliar. 

And I find myself here: smack in the middle of a heat wave in just about central Virginia.

How in the world did I get…here?

Allowing my mind to wander, I ponder this as I unsuccessfully attempt to coax my dog in from the one hundred degree heat of our back yard.

Before now, there were the urban porches and the Baz Lurman-esque landscapes, but today there is simple brick and the sound of a determined Bumblebee flitting past my head.  Even more odd, I find myself admitting that this place, this home, is that which I’ve always dreamed: those days in the hills, those nights in the office.

Here, wrought iron windows inlaid in wooden fences reveal overflowing gardens that lead to bricked patios and brightly colored umbrellas.  There is a lazy river that winds throughout town, old mills now converted into bistros and condos boasting river front views.  The only competition in the neighborhood exists between antiques stores.  There is even an old drug store with a soda fountain that delivers delicious Green Rivers, Black Cows, Root Beer. 

My days, once spent cramming in thirty seven hours of work in a twenty four hour period, are now spent on other pursuits: working with children in an adoption agency, writing, researching and occasionally padding down to the local library, a pre-Civil War mansion that stores books in every crevice, including the fireplaces. 

It is the kind of place where I imagine women find solace after traumatic events: the death of her husband, a divorce, an empty nest. Or where families flock, seeking character while trying to escape the confusion and cookie cutter streets of nearby Washington D.C. and its surrounding suburbs.

In the local bookstore, a gaggle of elderly men meet, all wearing hats that designate their time of service in one of America’s military branches.  Last week, local baker Mary Sue made brownies and they sat around the table discussing their book of the week, ‘How to Write a Sentence,’ by Stanley Fish. 

After the meeting, I ask two gentlemen if they enjoyed the book.  One wrinkles his face in knots and tells me it was superfluous, while the other, laughing, grabs at his chest and mimics falling backwards.  I find out that the former gentleman is a retired FBI Agent, the latter, a professor at our local university.  A jovial argument between the two breaks out and I realize that they still wear their former careers like the ranks emblazoned on their hats.

There are fresh vegetables and flowers to be purchased in the every day Farmer’s Market down the street.  I pick up some cucumbers and end up giving a few to my neighbor, ninety three year old Virginia Smith.  Who greets me, as she greets every one that comes to see her, ‘I’m just Virginia loving Virginia!’

But more importantly, there are hundreds, if not thousands of stories to be written here.  It is the type of town that begs a writer to discover, to settle in to one of her hundred year old houses, grab a typewriter and just release inky thoughts through his or her fingers. 

It is the ‘Some Day,’ wishful place: something I realized quite quickly after moving here from our old ramshackle hovel in Northern Virginia. 

Again, it is when I try to usher my Gilda dog in from the outside as she lies on her back and suns herself in a sliver of flashing white when all these thoughts above rush through my head like a tidal wave.  Gilda lifts her head, narrows her eyes, sighs, and then lowers herself to the ground once again.  I shrug my shoulders and smile, resigned to stay outside and watch her for a few more moments.  Just a few.  And yet, there’s something about the way her head drops against the cool of the brick that relaxes me and de-clutters my thoughts. 

It is amazing how life can give you exactly what you’ve needed and wanted for so long, even when you’ve pushed and resisted and tried unsuccessfully to run kicking and screaming in the other direction.

I lean my head back and let the sun wash over my face, imaging the freckles that will start to appear and spread across my cheeks in moments.  It feels like a remedy.

Settled can be a lovely feeling.