photos from my visit to the Victoria lily house at Kew Gardens, London last summerI must have been about 6 when I finally got round to asking my mom about where babies come from. She said later that she'd been preparing that speech for years, she wanted to paint a realistic picture, didn't want to be too explicit but still wanted to avoid the birds-bees metaphor and make no mention of the stork at all. She and my father had discussed it at length and decided to be honest. So on the big day that I finally popped the question, my mom made me a big cup of hot chocolate, sat me down and began to tell me the tale she had prepared. I wish I could remember any part of it, but in truth I wasn't really listening to her carefully planned speech because I was too anxious for her to finish the story so that I could ask my true burning question: "So, where do volcanoes come from then?"
My mom admitted to me over a glass of white in her back garden hot tub last spring that she'd never felt so deflated. All this build up and the preparation and planning, heated discussions with my father to decide what information would be included and what would be introduced as I got a little older in order to fully explain to their first born the beauty of life and of love. In the end, all I really was concerned with was the nature of volcanoes. Her bubble had burst.
I'm pretty sure my body's been hijacked. All I can think about these days is having a child of my own. Everytime there's a kid on tv, walking on the sidewalk hand in hand with his mom, or when I get the rare chance to talk with my nieces or nephews on the phone - something in my heart swells just a bit. I never thought I'd be that girl. I've always been more interested in volcanoes, or seabirds or making things. I didn't even really expect to get married, truth be told, nor have I ever had any intention of living a conventional life.
I sit in my little country house, sewing machine on the dining room table, fabric strewn about in summer colors, swept aside to make room for the laptop while I type this. There's a fresh salad ready for dinner when my husband comes home from his business trip to London, adorned with vegetables picked from the garden I've grown mainly from seed. Sorry, Bee, what part of this life is unconventional exactly?
Shift.
It's a shift in my thinking. My lifestyle. My sense of who I am. I get letters from my family that still remains in Alaska with their tales of caribou hunts and fishing trips. Uncle Dave's moonlighting as a 'bear guard' for the builders of the new gas pipeline and cousin Becky killed her first moose. This after having cleared her own land, falling and honing the trees herself, building her log cabin and all it's intricacies including the plumbing and electricity. She makes beaver mittens and runs a trapline for wolverines and lynx for fur to make clothes, boots and hats from. Because it's that cold in the winter. She got married this spring and now there's a baby on the way.
Could that have been me? Stocking my freezer full of salmon and moose meat for the upcoming winters? I'm reading a book my mom gave me now called "Merle's Door" Have you read it? It's about a guy and his dog and this fabulous no fences lifestyle they live in Wyoming, where their well written days are filled with skiing in the backcountry, hiking in the Rockies and hunting elk or pheasants for their freezers. It's got me thinking a lot about where I've come from and the 180 I've taken since then. My husband puts on a suit and tie every morning. I don't think there's a man in the entirety of my family history that knows how to tie a windsor knot. I often wear heels when I go out or sometimes even to work. This straightforward conventional life that I live now seemed so exotic to me when I was looking at it from the outside. When I was imagining what my life with the G would be like during all those years that we were thousands of miles apart and there was all that longing in my heart.
I'm torn. I love my life here, my husband, my job, our cat - but I long for the freedom of my childhood wilderness and open spaces. There's no wilderness to get lost in here. I used to hike sometimes in the backcountry of Denali or in the deep into the North Coast's Redwood forests and wonder when the last time someone stood on the same spot as me or more honestly, I'd wonder IF someone stood on this spot before me. Here I think of all the thousands who've walked these roads before me. This is Shakespeare's county you know, where our summer breezes and winter storms have been immortalized in his prose. There's a building in our village that was in the Doomsday book (an 11th century census.) Before them there were Romans and Celts and Vikings and the builders of stone circles and bronze-age tools. Every tree alive today has been planted by someone's grandfather. Or great great grandfather. I live on what remains of a plum orchard - I wonder who's orchard was it?Contrast.
When I was a young girl I lived in the house my mother and father built on the side of a mountain overlooking the Eagle River valley. I'd watch moose wander the riverbank below looking miniature because of the distance, I'd listen to wolves calling each other mournfully across the valley as I drifted off to sleep in the glow of the midnight sun, every morning I'd count the little white specks that were the Dall Sheep so high up on the mountain top above us. Now I live on someone's abandoned orchard. There was a brick maker here before him. Southam, the village 2 miles down the road, was an important layover on the journey from the textile markets of Coventry down to the storefronts of London and for hundreds of years, until the last 80 or so years, and the advent of car manufacturing, the humble village of 5,000 was the largest village in the county. The air is simply abuzz with history and it's magical, it is.
Though I'm not convinced that I want to raise children in the context we live in now. England is an island the size of Oregon, jam packed with 60 million people. I want my kids to know the freedom of wild open spaces and hear the distant cries of coyotes as they drop off into dream. I want them to get filthy with fish slime from the trout pond or skin their knees climbing trees. I'd like to be able to walk them up to the highest point around and not see any sign of anyone else all the way out the horizon. I want them to know about skinny dipping in a mirrored lake on a hot summer's day and of digging up razor clams on the beach at low spring tide and of building snowmen in the yard after a big snow.None of these things can be done here..... and I worry that my well-dressed man wouldn't cope well with the loss of structure. He is a chronic hand-washer, afterall, as most good English children are.* He's a good little camper though, my guy, as our adventures in the North Cascades, Vancouver Island, Eagle River Valley, Los Picos de Europa and around Tucson have proven. And he's eager to learn and do and experience more. Think he can throw in the tie?
*when I taught outdoor education here, I was astounded by the number of young kids who refused to hold the toad that we found under a log in the wood or were too afraid of getting their hands dirty to reach into the pool of water for a closer look at the stickleback we'd collected in our mist net.
