Posts filed under ‘Friends’
Summer in Jackson
We are finding this to be a place in which we can live our values and our passions well, which is what everyone seeks in a home, is it not? That is not to say that this is the only place we could live in such a way, by any means, but that it is a fitting and lovely set to this story.
We live within 10 miles of everything we need, and can walk from our house to National Forest. We believe in supporting the local/slow food movement and a locally sustainable economy, and to that end, we are part of a farm-share from which we get local veggies every week, and we are able to bank, shop and eat entirely at locally-owned businesses. Living with some of our best friends is a good step in the direction of intentional community, and well worth a little less privacy at home. So far we have been able to share one car, since Lewis bikes into town and work. He also reached the summit of the Grand Teton last week, and with ease (over 18 miles of hiking and 2000 feet of vertical rock climbing in under 11 hours). I took a position at Teton County Library and two weeks later was offered a promotion into a position that allows me to do what I love: manage part of the collection, and directly help people find the answers to their questions in reference. On all sides, it feels so good to see your life moving towards things that you have willed or dreamed it to.
Living here is bringing out new sides of us as well. We’ve started growing a million basil plants. We’ve made a pact with our roommate Loren (Adam aside) to cook vegetarian at home, meaning we’re still allowing the occasional dining-out steak and chicken, but that we find it wise and good to decide against meat for the majority of our meals (and we’re open to ridicule if we fail miserably in the face of Saturday morning bacon or summer grilling). I’m considering buying a TV just so that we can watch the Olympics, then sell it again. Lewis has begun painting landscapes with watercolors, to great success. I can touch my toes for the first time in my life.
I won’t say that we have all that we need, because we do miss the wealth of relationships we have waiting for us in Denver. To that end, we have had several groups of some of our closest friends stay for a few days, sharing swims in icey lakes, the petting zoo at the county fair, gingerbread pancakes, full-moon river rafting, and that amazing feeling that you are understood and loved. We hope for more waves of loved ones to come.
We said we would stay for the summer and see what happens, but it appears we’re going to be here for a while longer than expected. Frankly we’re in love with living in a cabin, with wildflowers growing up to our waist, then higher, with moose in the yard and rain on the roof while we sleep. Sometimes bats swoop for moths by our windows in the dark. Tonight some neighbor, across the way through the forest, was playing scales on the violin during a gloomy sunset. Ah! And supposedly there are flying squirrels here—but they only come out at night, one would be lucky to see them by a full moon. For some reason that is as magical to me as if there were gnomes and fairies.
Oh: and there are many more photos on my flickr photostream (up and to the right), if you’d care to have a look.
Jackson and Wilson, Wyoming, USA
We drove into Denver early one morning in April, just as rush hour traffic was beginning, as the sun was beginning to shine on still-snowy mountains. It was strange to see a place that I had always been a part of until this year, but that very much continues to happen, to grow and change and live, with or without me. But then we went back to the places we were missed, and that we missed very much: the lives of my family and many friends, much changed but also refreshingly familiar. We shared daily life with my parents for almost a month, we had enormous breakfasts and dinners with friends, we went to long-missed Chipotle, Snooze and other restaurants. Even if and when we do not live there, Colorado, Lakewood, Golden, my childhood house, and our newlywed community will always be a part of us, change as they will. Change as we will.
We staid just long enough to celebrate my lovely Mom on Mother’s Day Sunday, and drove out of town with some (though not all) of our things from storage. And now, after 14 months, we have officially stopped moving. We have a residence! Imagine that.
For several years we have zipped up to northwest Wyoming a few times a year to visit the friends that have migrated here, one after the other. Which makes it feel quite surreal to live in the cabin in the woods we knew so well as guests. When we arrived, Loren, Adam, Chris and Karla were the current round of inhabitants (previous incarnations have included variations of Justin, Joel, and different groups of visitors sleeping on the floor). Chris and Karla are in the process of building a new home, and were generous enough to leave us their room (and their dog) while they live with friends during the last part of that process.
So here we are, trying to feel settled, looking for jobs. The cabin is as cliché as can be, and we love it. It is on Heck of a Hill Road, and there is a chopping block for firewood in a forested backyard. From the tall windows next to a wood-burning stove, you can see aspen groves, snowy mountaintops, and the occasional rabbit, owl, or hummingbird. When I walk down our dirt road, my nose and ears tell me that I am camping, or at the very least on some mountain retreat. It does not seem possible that this could be my home. It feels too much like an escape, an undeserved solitude, a place for reflecting, listening to God, celebrating life. What a blessing that it is indeed all of these things, but that it is also the place that I wake up, go to bed, create, clean, accomplish, and share daily events with my husband and two of our best friends in the world.
The culture here is fun and eclectic–it is a small town populated by outdoors enthusiasts, naturalists, wealthy second-home-owners, waves of tourists for Grand Teton National Park, the immigrants and young people who are here for the enormous tourism/service industry. Expensive galleries and t-shirt shops are unavoidable, but so is the rich history and natural wealth of the valley. I have never lived in a place where nature feels so constantly present, happening all around you, impossible to miss. We saw a black fox and a gray ptarmigan on the afternoon of my birthday. On Adam’s day off, we three boated for hours in the deep runoff waters of the Snake River. This afternoon I was reading on the deck when a moose and her calf silently passed 20 feet away.
Last weekend it stormed day after day, to my delight. Our roof is one that lets you hear the rainfall well. And even when it stopped, I stepped outside and could still hear the steady sound of water falling from thick, soaked pine branches onto the forest floor.
Thank you, friends and family who have kept up with my writing and photos. I am flattered pink! I plan to continue this blog as our life takes on new settings, roles, thoughts, and feelings. I may not post as often as I did when we were hopping from place to place, but I will attempt to present our life to the world when inspiration comes. The compliments I have received on my return only left me wanting more!
Toronto, Detroit, Ohio, Chicago, Kauai
We are developing a sort of splatter-painted sense of place this month.
We are back! Sort of.
We are back in the country, in our culture. Back where tap water is served endlessly in restaurants, where it’s okay to throw toilet paper in the toilet, where it’s easy to find those long-missed things like drip coffee, Thai curry, Mexican anything. Back in a landscape that is suddenly unbelievably beautiful and true and us, of old clapboard farmhouses with silos off the highways, old brick buildings in small towns, Amish carriages, a golden eagle, deer. Back in a beautiful Midwest winter, (instead the end of a southern hemisphere summer), lovely silhouettes of bare trees against a white sky and snowmen melting in front yards. And you can drive past it all listening to radio stations that play gospel, country, Billy Joel, NPR. So many beautiful, simple things that you forget to miss.
In that sense, we are back. But we’re still traveling, too.
We flew to Toronto, Canada because the tickets were by far the cheapest, and because our car in Chicago wasn’t too far away. Joel picked us up at the airport and drove us to Detroit, where we were able to begin our homecoming visiting family for the week–my aunt, my cousins Travis and Lisa and their beautiful kids, and even down to my Grandaddy and his lovely wife Ida Jo in southern Ohio, with its lovely woods and wide rivers. After sharing a couple of days with Joel and Steph in Ann Arbor, we took our last bus of the year (I hope) to Chicago, and we have been here all week with the Smirls and the Pieronis. We are even bizarrely wired and mobile again: car up and running, phone still functional, laptop completely addictive. Which means I am call-able, email-able, and even visit-able, should you be in the Chicago area. Lewis? Lewis is another story. Lewis is in Hawaii.
Several months ago, just after we had decided to buy these tickets back, his old boss contacted him in need of a short-term provider with a disabled client he had worked with the year before we left. In other words, Lewis is attending a wedding, eating at luaus, and taking helicopter tours over Kauai with a great family he enjoys working with. And getting paid for it. I miss him like a turtle would miss its shell, but he’ll be back next week, and then we’ll be driving out to Denver sometime in early April.
This all feels like a whirlwind, of course. We had grown attached to the friends, places, and feelings of Buenos Aires, and so leaving that city was initially felt more than the big picture, the departure from a continent, a lifestyle, a long adventure together. Our life in South America lasted 2 weeks short of a year, 5 months of which was in Ecuador, 5 more in Argentina. In a sense each leg of the journey had had its own conclusion, its own culture shock on entry and exit. So even though this was the last big move, I think we’re processing and reflecting on it alone, rather than the entire hurrah. It is hard to believe the whole thing is over. Or maybe we just won’t ever view it as a single trip, but as a series of places and people in our life. And there are new places and people to come in that series.
What has become of us in this year? It was the year that Lewis turned 26, I, 28, our marriage, 2. The clothes we arrived in are stained and worn. By November we had both completely worn out our shoes. Traveling down the South American continent, we went almost twice as many miles as the continental United States are wide. And for the record, 4000-some miles as the crow flies, including any number of detours, came out to more than 350 hours in buses. Between us we read around 60 books, including a triumphant few in Spanish in the last months. We were never robbed or threatened, never had credit card problems, and rarely felt more unsafe than we do in the States. People from all over the world were incredibly gracious in conversation about United States politics, open to hear our thoughts, quick to set opinions and emotions aside for friendship. We did not get more sick than we do in a normal year at home. We did not see Macchu Pichu as everyone is “supposed to,” or Bolivia, as we had wanted to. But all that we did see, do, and experience was absolutely irreplaceable.
In some ways, the ‘culture shock’ is slight—Argentina is very much developed, diverse, European, clean. It was more overwhelming to arrive there from Ecuador and Peru back in September than to arrive from this larger geographical jump. So yes, it is an adjustment, but the wealth, the consumerism, the cleanliness of a developed country isn’t the shock to us you might expect. What initially affected me most was the language, of all things. Even after a week, I still felt a remnant of hesitation when I talked to strangers: it has been over a year since I spoke in English to order coffee, to pay for groceries, to say “excuse me” on the street. My brain finds it hard to believe that someone could understand my native tongue, and I find that just as I was beginning to be able to speak Spanish thoughtlessly (on occasion), I suddenly have much more awkward intentionality when I open my mouth to speak in English.
And what did travel do for us, to us, with us?
I’m only beginning to reflect on the whole thing, but I know that we have been changed immensely, and that we want to change even more immensely.
I think we humans are, by nature, comparers. We’re terribly self-focused, which is of course a combination of prideful and insecure at the same time (those two are offspring of the same beast, aren’t they?). We tend to line up an enormous series of standards to which we hold ourselves and everyone else, and to rank accordingly. We do the same thing with our homes, our nations, our politics, our cultures. Subconsciously, of course, until something shocks us into really thinking about it.
And travel is one of the things that does this quite well: it shows us ‘other,’ and thus shows us ourselves. Better, worse, different. Walking through streets, entering homes, living briefly under a government, or hearing a distinct belief or emotion challenges you to reconsider all that you thought was the norm or perhaps the ideal. It creates a contrast that you don’t normally have and forces you to question why you, your family, your culture, your nation do things the way you do them, and why they are worth something or nothing, are to be proud or ashamed of. It is easy to forget and live with any number of injustices, lies, bad habits, if they are never challenged. If we compare, we can decide to remain distinctly different from what we have measured up, or to change. That’s not to say we always change for the positive, or that we always can. But it is when we realize how versatile life is from examples around us that we consider how it might be improved. And don’t get me wrong: As many beautiful things I saw that I seek to embrace in my own life, or long to see in the future of my country and culture, the contrast also gave me many reasons to love my life, my values, and my beautiful nation. But it was wonderful to see another side of the world, to think of the common denominators of humanity and consider what potential we all have from that point.
P.S. Those last two photos are of the people we grew closest to in our final 6 weeks in Buenos Aires: The first is us with Diana and Ezekial, the second with Pablo. We learned so much from them–about Spanish, about their country, city, culture, about living with passion, with kindness, with an open heart and mind to the world.
