Letters from Home

I don’t know anything about Dante.

I know he described the Inferno and the sign leading into it that read, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” I vaguely understood that there were circles of hell where things went (as they say) from bad to worse, but that was about all I knew. When I learned that a class in Dante was being offered right before the class I teach this summer I decided to take it, although I was pretty sure it would be grim.

I didn’t expect it to be all about love.

My professor is from Italy— Sardinia, to be precise— the large island on the southwest side of Italy. She is a tiny woman with a radiant smile and graying hair who wears short, chic dresses and Italian shoes. She grew up reading Dante as a child and, for her, a class about Dante is a class about love.

There is Dante’s great unrequited love of Beatrice, but there is more. There is my professor’s love of Italy, love of Italian, love of the ideas and ideals that came from Dante and his contemporaries. She cannot talk about Dante without talking about her father whom she adored, and her mother who gave up everything for love, and her grandmother who scandalized everyone by eloping, and her husband, the American, whom she married in Reno (“So not Italian!”) because he begged her to.

“Everything is part of Dante, in my interpretation,” she told us on the first day of class, “Cat Stevens, the Beatles, ‘paving over paradise…’ it is all part of Dante!”

We have not even gotten to the Inferno yet. We are reading love poems and talking about the world into which Dante was born. We are talking about the relations between men and women and God. We are talking about life in Florence and Sicily and gardens filled with fragrant lemon trees and cities with walls that shimmered like silver and the pain of these long-dead lovers parting with the one they adored and the terrible fear of losing their love.

It is a summer love seminar.

My professor brings in a suitcase full of books to show us every class, always apologizing for not bringing more because she could not carry them all. She shows us medieval drawings of lovers and volumes of love poems, scholarly texts littered with her tiny margin notes, and Italian tabloids chronicling the activities of celebrities who are the great-great-grandchildren of famous lovers from long ago, carrying on the grand tradition of Italian love. It is heady stuff.

“Carrie, will you read this poem in English after I read it in Italian?” she asks, and so I do. After her beautiful lilting Italian, I read the words of someone suffering and stumbling, someone confused and distraught. I read in these verses how utterly unchanging and universal this experience of love is.

Stepping into the sunshine every afternoon after two hours of love poetry, I look around at the nearly-deserted campus and my heart swells. Everywhere, it seems to me, there is love. Still smarting from my own misadventures in love, it is good to be reminded that love, like life, is a journey and never a thing accomplished or realized. I feel a little less alone, less of an outcast. Instead of being a washed-out lover, I am part of a grand and revered tradition. I am in the leagues of the lovelorn. I am an active participant in this great human experience that makes us more fully human.

Till next time,
—Carrie

It was nearly dead when I moved in.

The Peace Lily was sad and brown and had ceased to bloom long ago. It was in the same unattractive green pot it had been in when I purchased it at a grocery store. It had never thrived. Its one bloom faded and fell and then all the leaves started to do the same. It was really more out of reflex than plan that I brought it with me when I moved into my landlord Robert’s house.

While unpacking, I realized the lily did nothing to improve the appearance of my new room. On my way to the compost pile, I told Robert I was pitching this sad-looking plant.

“Why?” he demanded.

“Because it looks awful. It’s almost dead. It is an eyesore.”

“Don’t throw it out!” he insisted and he took it from me and set it on one of his oversized stereo speakers. Robert is not interested in new, compact sound equipment. A musician, he prefers to listen to vinyl records on very large speakers that sit in the corners of the room.

My old plant found a new home in the corner of the living room and spent the remainder of the winter getting dustier and sadder-looking while Robert dutifully watered it. Twice I threatened to throw it out when company was expected and twice he stopped me, insisting that the plant was preparing to stage a comeback. I left the nearly-dead plant where it was, shaking my head a little every time I passed it to go to my room. It was his house, after all.

Robert is a special ed teacher. He has a college degree, but not in the subject he is teaching and he does not have a degree in teaching. But special ed teachers are hard to come by in the public schools here, so Robert is diligently working to qualify for licensure while teaching his special ed classes. The kids— many of them young adults— have every imaginable kind of challenge. Many of them are poor, most come from difficult home situations. They have learned, by the time they come to Robert’s class, that they do not like school and teachers do not like them. They are angry and bitter and often swear at each other and at Robert, sometimes letting their anger erupt into physical violence. It is not an easy teaching gig.

But Robert has lasted a long time in a field where burn-out is rampant. He laughs with his students. He keeps trying different things to help them learn. He disregards rules that have no tangible benefit to his students and complies only with those rules that are useful and enforceable. He explains, in very blunt terms, why finishing high school would be a good thing. He does not expect miracles, but he does not throw in the towel.

I returned from the Midwest and sitting in the middle of the dining room table was my old plant. I did not recognize it at first. Robert had re-potted it into a bright blue pot and it was enormous. It had turned a brilliant shade of green and had huge new leaves popping out in every direction.

“I don’t believe it,” I told Robert.

“I may have to get a larger pot,” Robert replied.

I was touched by his faith, touched by his optimism, touched by his willingness to believe that this plant was capable of becoming something so strong and beautiful.

I think I could learn a lot from Robert.

Till next time,
—Carrie

I’ve decided to rent out my house.

There are lots of sensible reasons to do this. I have two more years in graduate school. I could use the money. The house sits empty all winter and my father tells me this is not good for it. (I suspect he is right.) My poor friend Judy feels obligated to be checking in on it far too often and has become a full-time caretaker by default. There are lots of very solid reasons not to have my house sit empty. But this does not mean that it is an easy thing to do.

Actually, renting it was a very easy thing to do. Thinking I would have to take out an ad and interview people throughout the summer, I started to ask a good friend how he thought I should try to rent it. Before I finished the question he told me his friend was looking for a place. I let it slip to another friend and a friend of hers was over the next morning to see the house. Before I knew it, it was rented. Then I sat in my house for the rest of the day and slowly realized that I had let it go. I was floating free.

When I recently told someone that I was studying in the Southwest, they asked, “Oh, is this a permanent move?”

“No!” I replied vehemently.

It was not so much the idea of living in the Southwest that I was rejecting as the idea that anything in my life could be considered permanent at this point.

For quite some time I have been working on becoming less attached. I want to be less attached to my preconceptions of how things are supposed to work out or what I am supposed to do. I want to be less invested in hoping for a particular outcome and more accepting of whatever life offers. Much of my time in life’s river has been spent swimming against the current or hanging tightly onto the riverbank. For the past few years I have been thinking that this is the time in life when letting go of the bank— letting the current take me— might be more fun. I also think, if I were really and truly able to stop fighting life so hard, I might go further and faster than I ever imagined.

But now, recently out of a romantic relationship and about to be out of my house, I am wishing I had something (other than my dog Milo) to hang onto.

Loss is disorienting, no matter how inevitable. Really letting go of the bank is a lot easier in the abstract and much more difficult when it comes to parting with piles of books and artwork and wondering what to do on a Saturday night.

At the last minute, I got word that the university wanted me to teach a four-week class, so I am headed back to the Southwest with Milo for a few weeks before returning to the task of deciding what in my house will be packed up and saved for my imaginary future, and what will quietly be left behind. I am leaning towards letting most of it go.

Because now, with the house rented, I feel one more certainty is gone and I have one less tie to that sticky riverbank. I’m starting to get curious how it would feel to stop dragging my toes in the sand, hanging onto the rushes, and finally find out where the current might take me.

Till next time,
—Carrie

Milo has gotten fat.

Of course, our vet does not put it this way. Milo’s veterinarian is sensitive and well-informed. He discusses the potential for joint stiffness and the possible treatments and their various advantages and disadvantages and the fact that none of the medications available are as effective as simply losing the nine pounds (nine pounds!) that Milo has gained since his last appointment.

Milo wasn’t buying it, I could tell. I was having a hard time believing it myself. When I look at Milo, I still see the svelte puppy I adopted from the pound four years ago. I was telling this to my friend Andy. Andy was sympathetic. Andy has also had a few pounds slip on while he wasn’t looking.

“He’s not fat!” Andy said. “I think he looks great. You look great, don’t you Milo?”

Andy is my oldest friend and I’d invited him over for dinner, but all this talk of unnoticed weight gain and preventable health consequences had diminished his appetite and we had a lot of uneaten lasagna sitting in the pan. Milo lay sleeping happily at the feet of his new ally while Andy refused a second piece of lasagna.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that I am a lot fatter than I think I am,” Andy announced.

Andy is the friend who has seen me through every major life change. I have not had a mad scheme since high school that he was not privy to. We discussed my latest escapades: going back to school at middle-age, teaching for the first time, the end of my romantic relationship, the loss of my cat Lucy. We talked about the changes in his family and mine. It’s good to have a friend like Andy.

Andy and I can go for weeks or even a couple months at a time without talking; but I know he will call if he needs me and I know I can always call him. At this point in my life, there are people who know me as a person who is one thing or does another, but very few who have seen me through all my metamorphoses— in and out of marriage and relationships, in different careers and at different addresses. Andy knows the person at the center of all these different personas and is never surprised by whatever change occurs.

Back in my farmhouse after a year away, I am looking to lighten the load, make room for new books and new art and new ideas. I looked at my bookshelves despairingly— stacks of yearbooks and family genealogy— knowing that I will never part with as much as I hope I will.

I dragged out two high school yearbooks which I could not remember looking at in decades. I saw the photos of girls with strangely flipped-back hair and enormous glasses. I saw teachers who were so much younger than I am today dressed in polyester and wearing muttonchops. I read inscriptions from people who promised to be my friend through thick and thin and noticed that Andy hadn’t signed my yearbook. Typical, I thought. He couldn’t be bothered to write in my yearbook so he just stayed around to be my friend for the next three decades.

“I must be old,” I commented.

“You’re getting old,” Andy said, “but you’re not old yet.”

Milo nudged Andy’s hand and got some more petting. Milo and I both think it’s a good thing to have a friend like Andy who sees us for what we are.

Till next time,
—Carrie

Milo spent the day tracking dinosaurs.

We are camping in northern New Mexico where, according to the signs in the state park, dinosaurs left their tracks. We pulled in late— too late to see our own tracks, never mind the dinosaurs’. Our tent was perched atop a sandstone rise, surrounded by soft-colored boulders, overlooking a beautiful little man-made lake in the middle of the desert.

I wanted to get in earlier, but things took longer than I expected, as they always do. I dithered and changed my mind about how much I should get accomplished before leaving. I worried about things I didn’t need to worry about and, in the end, I was setting up my tent in the dark and sipping a glass of wine just as the stars came out. I let Milo run off leash as we were the only ones in the park— just us and the dinosaurs. It was too late for me to track dinosaurs, so I sat and listened to the many unidentified sounds of splashing and squawking and rustling around the lakeshore. None of them sounded dinosaur-sized.

Much of New Mexico was once a giant sea that reached all the way to Canada and scientists figure this piece of land must have been a beach. The park stands on what was once a dinosaur thoroughfare. Herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs trudged through the mud, passing between a great forest and the sea. The last dinosaurs left 65 million years ago, but most of the tracks were made before that. “More than 100 million years ago,” one of the signs said. Some earlier visitor, apparently as incredulous as I that anything that happened on a muddy beach could survive that long, had scratched off the “million” and written “thousand.” I thought about that. A hundred thousand years was an incredibly long period of time, but I could almost believe it. A hundred million years was outside my ability to imagine.

In the morning, Milo and I walked around the boardwalk, looking at these platter-sized footprints. The signs pointed out the different types of dinosaurs and the direction they were going. One sign pointed out a set of tracks where the dinosaur had hesitated, hopping from one foot to the other and back.

“Can you imagine why it might have done that?” the sign asked, but offered no suggestions.

In another place, a dinosaur steadied herself (for some reason I am sure it was a female) with her tail. The sign pointed out that this was highly unusual, as dinosaurs usually held their tails “several feet in the air.”

I was suddenly very glad I wasn’t a dinosaur.

“Can you imagine why she might have done that?” asks a voice a hundred million years later about that moment on the beach when I didn’t know which way to turn, when I started to do one thing and then stopped, and then realized I wanted to do it after all.

“She usually keeps her tail several feet in the air— except when she slips,” says this altogether-too-observant observer from the unimaginable future.

I looked at all these blunders and missteps recorded for, if not eternity, as near to it as I could imagine and thought of all the times I had stumbled in the mud. I wanted to step back in time, just a hundred million years or so, and reassure these dinosaurs as they slipped and dithered and got their tails muddy.

“It’s okay,” I’d say, “no one will ever know.”

Till next time,
—Carrie

I’ll be home for Mother’s Day.

School is over for the semester. My obligations as a teacher and a student are, temporarily, finished. For a little while I go back to being a person without a schedule. It is a good time to see my mother.

After a great deal of trying and the best of intentions, my relationship with Daniel has come to an end. I am no longer one in a party of two, half a pair of tickets, Carrie and… anybody else. It is one more role I have to give up. And it is a good time to see my mother.

Saying goodbye to my students at the end of the school year was hard. Not a mother myself, I felt a little like one as I gave them brownies and last words of advice. Saying goodbye to my fellow classmates was painful in these workshops where we have all laughed and learned and shared so much. My cat Lucy died last week and saying goodbye to her was hard, even though I could see she was tired and needed to leave. Saying goodbye to Daniel was hardest of all, even though I know we had both tried our best to make things work out differently.

And even if all of these endings came at an appropriate time, all of these endings make it hard to know who I am, in this moment, hard to remember who Carrie is without any of her roles.

But through it all, I am my mother’s daughter. And, in this time of not very much definition, that sounds pretty good to me. Because my mother doesn’t really care if I get a book published, or land an important job, or have a fancy title, and she never has.

While I worry about whether I am learning fast enough or teaching well enough, my mother asks, “Are you having fun?”

My mother doesn’t see me as a middle-aged, divorced woman, mourning her dead cat, just washed out in the romance department and feeling adrift. While I feel like a bit of a failure and wonder if I will ever have anyone to share my life with, my mother says, “I’m so sorry, we really liked him.”

And that is why it is good I’ll be home for Mother’s Day.

Because I need my mother and the other people in our life— my family, my oldest and dearest friends— who know me too well and have shared my life for too long to be influenced by my professional conquests or my romantic tribulations. The people who care about me most see me as the imperfect and struggling person I have always been.

I met a woman recently who did not have the loving relationship with her mother that I have with mine. She kept a photo of her mother on her desk that showed her mother as a young woman, young enough to be this woman’s daughter. When she felt frustrated with her mother, she would look at this vulnerable young woman in the photo and her heart would soften. It helped her accept her mother as the person she was, as a daughter, as someone who was once a child. I like that.

I like the idea of looking at everyone a bit more as a mother would. I want to remember to see others not for what they do or have accomplished today, but see the child inside that never entirely goes away, and remember to ask…

“Are you having fun?”

Till next time,
—Carrie

My cat Lucy left me last night.

Lucy’s health had been failing for several months. She got much better for a few days and then she got a lot worse. Then she rallied one final time when I thought she was gone for good.

I came home from school to find that she had emptied her bowl. I don’t actually know how much she ate. Her balance was still off but her determination was obvious. Her food (canned food mixed with dry food to make it more tempting) had been thrown in all directions. There was food on the floor, food halfway across the room, food sticking to the walls. I imagine she got some of it in her mouth. She had food on her whiskers and her head was tilted oddly off to one side, the after-effect of the strokes she had suffered. I looked at the empty food bowl and then back at this unbearably tenacious cat.

“I’m hungry!” she said.

But that was the last time she ate. After that, she got busy dying and she did that— like everything else she put her paw to— with grace.

I adopted Lucy after she had spent almost a full year at the Humane Society. No one wanted to adopt a deaf cat with a perpetual sinus drip. The volunteers had made every effort to get her a home. There was a calendar made while Lucy was in residence and she was Miss April. But no one wanted to adopt Miss April until I met her.

As her health failed, I hoped she would make it home with me. I had wanted to bury her with my other pets under the willow tree. But I saw yesterday that she was not going to make it to the farmhouse. Stretched out on her fleece bed, she lay motionless as her limbs became stiff and her head grew heavier until, at last, it was too heavy for her to lift. I spent a lot of time, those last couple days, petting her and she would still purr when I touched her. Finally, last night, her breathing grew labored and I knew we were close.

“You do what you need to do, Lucy,” I told her.

April was drawing to a close and Miss April was preparing to make her exit before the month was out, a final flourish from the cat who always had a dramatic streak. I was working at my desk and it grew quiet. I checked and she was breathing very softly. I checked again and she had stopped.

“Goodbye Lucy.”

“If you don’t want the ashes, you could do a combined cremation,” the veterinarian told me. “There is a volunteer group that takes the ashes to the top of Sandia Mountain and scatters them in the forest on the mountain top.”

I thought about the Sandia mountains, turning brilliant pink in the sunset. I thought of the winds blowing in every direction and about how Lucy always loved to travel. I remembered all the airplanes she had flown in across the ocean with me and the cross-country drives in Africa. I thought about Lucy eating guacamole in the travelers’ lounge in Amsterdam. I remembered how, every time she saw me packing my suitcase, she would hop into her carrier and look out expectantly.

“Where are we going next?” she’d ask me.

“Yes,” I said. “I think bringing her ashes to the top of the mountain would be fine. Lucy would want one last adventure.”

Till next time,
—Carrie

It is the end of the semester. While I have missed the spring blizzards at home, the weather is still cold and blustery. Everyone is getting a little short-tempered.

I decided I needed something to look forward to when the weather got warmer. I thought about spending time in the woods and I decided I would like a chair I could carry up into the mountains with me. While I realize that this is total luxury, I have come to feel that the comfort of my tired old behind is worth something. The question is, how much?

Camping equipment is a lot like lingerie; the smaller it is, the more you can expect to pay.

I started out by looking online and saw the enormous range of prices in camping chairs. I’ve been spending a lot of time sitting at my desk lately on a chair that I purchased online. It is not very comfortable and I find that portions of my rear end go numb if I don’t stand up on a regular basis. I have vowed that I will never buy another chair that I have not personally sat in and so, even though the weather is still chilly, I made a trip to the sporting goods store.

Just as I arrived, another woman of about my age appeared in the same part of the store on the very same mission. She told me she would be taking her chair kayaking, once it was warmer. I told her my chair was going hiking. We both started out looking at the very tiniest chair. It only had two legs. The other two legs would be provided by the person sitting in it. I tried it out, dubiously.

“There’s no way I could drink a glass of wine in that,” my new friend observed.

I considered this. I imagined it might pose a problem. Once in a seated position, the two-legged chair was surprisingly comfortable, but getting into a seated position required considerable gymnastics. I imagined trying to do this with a wine glass in my hand and I immediately saw her point.

“And after I’d had a glass of wine, I’d fall over backwards into the river. It would just be alcohol abuse!” she added and laughed. I agreed and we kept on shopping.

We sat in one chair after another. We assembled and disassembled the chairs to see how easily this could be done. We imagined the sunny days we would enjoy, sitting in our chairs: mine in the mountains, hers on a riverbank. We found two chairs we liked; one weighed less but didn’t have a price tag. We decided this was probably a bad sign. When we finally located a clerk, our suspicions were confirmed. The slightly lighter chair was twice the price of the chair that weighed ten ounces less. We each bought the less expensive chair— we carried out the last two cheerful orange-colored chairs in stock.

Outside the store, the wind was still cold. I still have a lot of papers to correct before the semester ends. But now I have a small, comfortable chair waiting for me. It is waiting to go into the mountains when the weather gets warmer (and it will). It is waiting for when I have time to read for fun again (and I will). My little chair is waiting for spring and it is ready to go.

“Enjoy your chair!” I told my new friend as she left.

“You too!” she called out.

The sun felt warmer already.

Till next time,
—Carrie

It wasn’t entirely unexpected.

Lucy’s health has been going steadily downhill. My cat’s age was listed as “mature” when I adopted her, eight years ago, and she has always had health problems since she was found in the woods with an infestation of ear mites that took both ear drums. I adopted her after she spent a year with the Humane Society. She lived with me in Africa, was micro-chipped for travel through Frankfort, shared guacamole with me in Amsterdam, and went camping in northern Minnesota. She has had a full life. But lately she has not been doing well.

Still, I was surprised when I came home Friday afternoon to find that Lucy was very ill.

She seemed to have had a stroke or something similar. One eye was unfocused, she could not walk across the room. When she tried, she walked in circles, around and around, crying. She was confused. She could not eat. I realized that I had better get ready to say goodbye to Lucy.

That night was hard. Lucy kept pacing, looking for something she could not find. She made Milo nervous. He would growl when Lucy started pacing over by his bed. (Milo will not be winning any Florence Nightingale awards.)

Lucy has never weighed more than six pounds, but now she was losing a lot of weight. When I stroked her back, I felt every vertebrate. She was fur-covered bones. The next day, she stopped pacing. She seemed exhausted. When I came into the room she would notice me and, looking off in slightly the wrong direction, she would meow. I sat by her and pet her and she purred loudly.

By the third day. I was making preparations. How would I know if she became too uncomfortable? Where would I take her if I woke up and she was dead? Living so far from my farmhouse, it made me sad that she would not be joining my other pets, buried together under the willow tree. My landlord, Robert, gave me the phone number of a kind and understanding vet who was open weekends.

“For when you need it,” he told me, and I thanked him.

The next night I sat up every hour or so to see if Lucy was still breathing. When I saw the tips of her ears move, I laid down again and went back to sleep.

The next morning, when I woke, Lucy was sitting on the arm of the chair, looking at me.
Her eye was no longer looking sideways. She looked at me and meowed. She jumped down and walked over to her food bowl, filled with dry food. She looked at the food. She looked at me. She meowed again.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re not dead and now you’re hungry.”
We started with liquid food from the vet. I squirted it down her throat with an over-sized syringe. Lucy liked it. Two days later, I put the liquid food directly into her bowl. She ate it all and demanded more. I replaced the liquid food with canned food. She liked that a lot and started putting on weight. Her sinuses cleared up for the first time in months. Her belly became round.

“Lucy, how many lives do you have left?!” I asked her this morning as she hopped off the chair and came to see me. She purred.

I am filled with admiration for Lucy. She is making the most of what certainly must be her last life. I figure I should do the same.
Till next time,
—Carrie

This weekend Vince’s bush burst into flame.

Vince is our next-door-neighbor in the quiet neighborhood where I rent a room, not far from the university. I was sitting at my desk, pretending to write (which takes more time than the actual writing) when I heard a loud “BOOM!”

I jumped up and ran to the door. My landlord, Robert, was already outside in the front yard.

“BOOM!”

There was another loud explosion two blocks down and this time I saw the source. A car full of what looked like (and almost certainly was) teenagers was careening down the road pitching lit firecrackers out the car window. They landed with a loud noise, a small flame, and a lot of smoke. One landed on Vince’s bush and instantly started a fire. The bushes were only a few feet from large pine trees that tower over Vince’s house.

“Call the fire department!!” Robert ordered, and so I did.

Vince was out of town, it turns out, and missed all the excitement. While I gave the operator our address, Robert subdued the flames with several buckets of water and a shovel. Soon, there were just smoking cinders and a gathering of gawking neighbors. It was a lot of excitement for a Saturday morning.

Two nights later, I woke with a start when I heard more yelling and another “BOOM,” in the middle of the night. Milo and Robert’s two dogs all began barking wildly. I heard Robert’s door slam, I jumped out of bed imagining intruders or a home invasion or…. I don’t know what I was imagining. It was the middle of the night, after all.

It turns out it was only Ben, my other roommate. His room is at the far end of the house and he woke up screaming from a bad nightmare. The dream was so bad, it propelled him up and out of his bed and he crashed into his bedroom wall.

“It’s okay! Everything is okay,” Robert said to Ben, then to me, then to the dogs.

And everything was okay, but it’s good to have someone watching out for you.

I remember shortly after I moved to Africa, living alone and feeling ill. I put water on the stove for tea and laid down. I almost fell asleep, then suddenly remembered the boiling water and jumped out of my bed and ran to the kitchen. That’s all I remember until I woke up, looking at the kitchen ceiling. I had a bruise on my elbow from where I hit the granite countertop on my way down and I wondered how things might have been different if I had hit my head instead of my elbow when I passed out. Shortly after, I moved in with Nora, who was also living alone. We agreed it would be better to have someone looking out for us, and I stayed with Nora for almost three years.

Vince got back into town and brought over a bottle of wine to thank Robert for putting out the fire. Robert and I shared it last night while the dogs lay around us. Milo was sleeping and his paws began to twitch, muffled barks came out of his mouth and he got more and more agitated.

I walked over and stroked Milo’s belly. His eyes shot open and he gave me that disoriented look we all have when we suddenly go from battling monsters to realizing that we will be okay after all.

“It’s okay, Milo,” I said, “everything is okay.”

Till next time,
—Carrie