With every swing of the hammer

Things come full circle. Again, and again, and again.

As I wait out the rain this morning, I think of Jack. 

As I tend my wood stove this morning, as I spend an afternoon stocking the woodpile, as I shiver getting out of the bath at night, as I swing my hammer, I think of Jack. I always will.

As winter begins to show herself here on the mountain, my mind is suddenly filled with more and more thoughts of my early years in Wales… When I first began to try out a life in the countryside, in an old, cold house, in a place with a true, trying winter… When the man who taught me to build walls also taught me how to exist in those ways, and contentedly. I think, too, of the women who tended to me with hot baths and hot water bottles and hot tea at just the right moments. Many people taught me how to thrive in the place I now live.

It’s funny, as I move further from the period of book writing and editing that became Between Stone and Sky, my memories are less and less vivid of the time the book covers. I never thought they would fade—not really. Now, it feels—as you often hear from people looking back—like another lifetime. And so I become another of life’s clichés.

I don’t know if my fading memories are a subconscious release from duty for my brain, knowing much of it is held in written word, or if it is simply that some of the key players chose to exit my life (some in very dramatic fashion) and it’s simply not fruitful to think of them as I used to, and that they aren’t here to remind me of themselves. Perhaps a bit of both.

In a way, I miss being awash in those memories, just as I miss the people who filled them, but I also feel liberated to get on with my life, to be here now, to think of what’s next, and perhaps to absolve myself of any questions about what on earth went wrong and if I could have stopped any of it. I don’t think there will come a time when I don’t automatically think of them—in recent days I have been hit over the head with several powerful reminders.

For no particular reason but the enhancement of my own good fortune and the making of space in someone else’s basement, I was recently given a beautiful collection of Old Willow china. Old Willow is an old friend, a ubiquitous sight in British houses, and something I’ve always wanted for myself at home, but I knew I couldn’t justify the expense of collecting it when I needed to do things like, oh, remodel my entire kitchen on a shoestring or put adequate guttering on my house so it doesn’t rot and sink into the earth. In the contents of this collection I found a bowl very much like the one Kate used to drink her coffee from. It was a style choice I found endearing, and of course I found most things about her endearing. I’ve had my coffee from it every day since. I like remembering my mornings with her in her kitchen. She was always so warm and loving from the second she swung through the door, and it is that warmth I want to remember—that first embrace of the day—rather than the hole she leaves in my life now.

Sensory memories are among the strongest for me, and they bowl me over every time. After the shower the other day I was putting on a certain facial oil that I’ve used for years. I stopped buying for a time because I couldn’t bear the reminder it always brings, but now after two years I finally feel able to use it again, and I was instantly transported back to summer in Italy with Rose. It was a time of learning self-care (and skincare), of feeling true self-acceptance and mutual appreciation, of looking forward to adventures of the present and future, of a deep sort of sisterhood, of wildness and an electric connection to the world around us. The separation from Rose was the most violent of the three, and I mourned the loss of her presence as well as all of the hope (specific and general) she very consciously instilled in me. It was like a death without an actual death, and I couldn’t bear that smell—any smell that reminded me of her, and she loved a lot of perfumed things!—for a very long time.

But that facial oil, that coffee bowl… Those are choices, you might say. You don’t have to fill your life with those things. You don’t have to be reminded.

Yes and no. Those stylistic and lifestyle decisions and even habits may be intimately and inextricably tied to those people, but they have also become a part of me, and to leave those things behind just because those people left me behind would be a betrayal of myself.

The hard part is that someone(s) tainted the joy of remembering for me. Accusations were made—some directly to me, some behind my back, and it’s impossible to understand exactly what happened—before the book came out, but as these relationships were crumbling, that I was somehow unhealthy in my love for these people. The words “obsessed” and “stalking” came up, and the trouble is that once anyone has framed you in this light, anything you say or do can be seen to confirm those accusations. It’s a brilliant accusation to make if you truly want to disempower someone and ensure that they disappear. So for someone like me who is deeply attached and also deeply sentimental, it’s kind of a nightmare.

It’s this part I remain bitter about… That they wanted to leave me with a feeling of shame and disempowerment. People have to go their own ways sometimes, but it didn’t have to be this extreme. Should I be talking about it? They would say no. I actually don’t care anymore. I retain the rights to my own story. As the great Anne Lamott wrote in Bird by Bird, “You own everything that happened to you. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Folks who know the whole story (or at least as much of it as I know) have asked me, “How could this happen? I know they really loved you. How could they abandon you like that? And they all look so good in the book! What were they worried about?” My only response after all this time of wondering the same thing has been to say, “People behave very strangely when they feel vulnerable, and I suppose that is how you feel if your friend is writing a book that might involve you… Especially if you refuse her offers to actually read the text and comment and have some agency in the process. [insert literal and metaphorical eye-roll emoji]” 

But I’m left with these memories, and although they are bittersweet ones, it feels important to recognize them and give them space. It’s not a bad thing to be reminded of what shaped us, of joy and subsequent loss, of beauty and pain. That’s just part of being alive, of being human, and I don’t want to suppress that. I can’t escape the strange feeling of honoring the memory of someone while also being a little big angry at them, but again, that’s just being human. Big hurts take a long time to heal, and some never do, I guess. I feel okay. I’ve learned to sit with all of this. (Yoga is a good lesson in that.)

I sometimes wonder if they think of me—if something reminds them, regularly or randomly, and whether they have to reckon with this stuff, too. I know that not everyone’s brain works like mine, but every person involved here is human with their own pain and their own needs. I know Jack burned and deleted much of the record of our time together because he felt the need to tell me that quite pointedly, but the record is still there in the landscape. Rose was still in possession of a good bit of my stuff when it all fell apart… Treasured steel-toes, overalls, tools, books, a yoga mat—stuff I’d love to have back, frankly. She’s probably trashed it all by now, eager to erase my very existence, but I don’t know that for sure. Kate, bless her, lives with things I rebuilt for her. She used to write me to say she thought of me every time she went down the back steps into the kitchen because I’d fixed a wall that had bothered her for as long as she’d lived in that house. Does she still think of me?

My agent is waiting on me to send him a long-delayed book proposal on navigation, but I’m still processing this stuff. There is some sort of Jeanette Winterson-esque exploration of that that wants to get out of me. Whether that will ever see the light of day I do not know. I thought I’d focus on a non-fiction story about something other than myself, believing that would be less emotionally exhausting for me, hence the navigation thing… But you know what? Those people are wrapped up in the navigation stuff, too… Who took me sailing the first time? Who taught me to read OS maps and use a compass properly? Who took me exploring without a map in the hills of Italy? They did. 

In the meantime, I’m back on a walling job for the first time in a long time. I had a bit of a reminder this summer as I taught dry-stone walling for Black Mountains College in Wales—back out on the open hill, and delighted to remember my own skill and discover the joy of teaching it to others—but this is my first real construction project of this sort in a couple of years. I took time off for my aging spine, for the book, for a quick dip back into the cultural bureaucracy of Washington, and then on a detour through the wine importing and distribution business. After all that time away and the contrast of each of those experiences, I come back to construction knowing that I belong here. I have a renewed sense of gratitude. Whatever I find stressful here about weather and client-wrangling and small business, I see now in a new light. It’s familiar stress, and that’s a stress I can handle. It’s also stress with a reward at the end: what I’ve built and a paycheck that is all mine. I remember now what I first learned years ago: I need the freedom and satisfaction of working for myself. I need to be physically engaged instead of sitting in a chair or a driver’s seat all day. I need to be creative. I need not to work in a bureaucratic system. 

It’s a relief to be back in the open air with my simple tools, plodding away. I’ll spend much of the winter in a shop welding, but for now, I am home.

I can’t believe it’s November, and I haven’t written here since June, and I missed the opportunity to tell you about how amazing my last little book tour was, criss-crossing Britain from Penzance to Hexham, and then how wonderfully rewarding it was to teach walling to six people in Wales alongside the writer Owen Sheers. Perhaps I will do a year-end wrap-up for that. Please hold me to it! Someone has got to make me accountable in this space.