Dust…flies free for a moment, then returns, leisurely, to the habitual road—that bruised string which leads to and from my heart.
-Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

A full year before our wedding, my husband got an offer to complete a master’s degree at the University of Wyoming, which meant that we spent most of our engagement in different time zones. Once a month, I’d fly to Denver and drive two hours north into Laramie, Wyoming, my eyes blind to the mountains flanking the distance, my heart focused on seeing Jeremy standing next to his mailbox, waiting for me.

Now we are both here, and I am seeing that Wyoming is a place that reveals as it haunts, the red rock of the valley we live in as raw as the longing we bring to it, longing we can only face in the wide stretch of plains and sky.

That longing is for both space and safety, for transcendence, for the feel of solid, immovable rock beneath our feet, beneath our life.

When Jeremy first moved here, the miles of snow on either side of Interstate 80 and the feeling we were seeing more land in one blink than we had ever seen in our lives terrified me—an existential kind of fear, both blinding and startling. [Read more...]

May the Lord bless thee out of Zion; and so shalt thou behold the good things of Jerusalem all the days of thy life. —St. Gregory of Palamas

Last night, I dreamed that I was in Montana. My neighborhood looked the same—same Tudor house, same cul-de-sac, same wooded corner where I take my dog for morning walks. But there were mountains to the south, gray and wide, and the grass was a rust-colored brush, dry and prickly beneath my feet.

My only visit to Montana, in real life, has been a thirty-minute layover on the way to Seattle. I have no way of knowing Montana other than television shows, travel ads, and other superficial images.

But I know that, in my dream, there was a moment where preconception gave way to knowledge, a knowledge that made me feel awake, alive, sure that I knew where I was. In the dream, I stood on the scratchy ground and watched the sky turn from sunset to dark, and a burst of stars opened above me, bunched together in bright knots against the blue-black stretch of night. [Read more...]

Growing up, my siblings and I were left on our own to figure out how things worked. I learned what a condom was from the dictionary. I studied the secrets of applying lipstick and eyeshadow from Seventeen, and figured out how to ride the bus from our house to the mall. I read our dusty copy of Martha Stewart’s Christmas over and over, hoping to make those gold leaf gingerbread houses someday, somewhere.

I was desperate to learn how to live, how to make a life under the weight of the knowledge my mother tried to slough off—the missing history of her mother, the unhappiness of my parents’ marriage, the family stories she held so tightly to herself, to us.

“I don’t know how to be a mom,” she wept to me, “so I have no idea of who I am supposed to be.”

And so I tried to do things that I thought mothers were supposed to do: I cleaned house, heated frozen pizza for dinner, sorted laundry. I taught my sister how to put on makeup, and tried to keep track of my brother’s whereabouts. I wondered why my mother couldn’t learn from my example, or why she couldn’t stay home from the bar long enough to simply watch how it worked.  [Read more...]