Following Elias

In-between Places

I no longer remember what awaits inside the cardboard and plastic boxes in storage.

Kitchen gadgets, artwork, professional clothes, toys, stuffed animals, games, random knickknacks, all stacked upon each other, like building blocks of a past life, with room for collecting objects, like memories, like proof of participating in a material world.

We are in the process of moving from our 30-foot trailer to a cabin that is not any bigger, but warm and dry, with hot water on demand. We feel both relieved and frustrated as we make yet another move, its nice to be in a place without condensation dripping down the walls, but we are now even more discombobulated as we were before with items split between our trailer and under-construction home as we add a third destination for clothes, food, shoes, and for the dogs to wonder to on their own.

We are living in-between places.

And yet I need to toast my children, with an extra hip-hip-hooray for Elias, as they continue to adjust to all these changes with relative ease.

"I love this cabin," Olive said, as Nick and I glanced at each other with tired eyes and dropped our bags on the ground.

Elias, our boy who covets routine, who loves elevators for their predictable patterns, tells a neighbor, "There was some issues with the framing of our house and so we can't insulate yet and so we are living in a cabin now. Its so small!" He says, as he smiles and claps his hands.

Its smaller than the cabin we lived in last winter, about the size of our living room in the house we're building--but I woke up warm on my first night and didn't need to haul water for dishes. There's a shower and a toilet, that flushes, inside. No more running across the muddy yard to the outhouse in the rain, in the dark. No more shower surfing between family and friends.

We finally met with our contractor last week and he walked through our house shaking his head and apologizing for the mistakes made. He took responsibility for the corrections needed, even though he sub-contracted out the actual work. He says a crew will arrive next week to fix all the issues and get the place ready for insulation.

We want to believe him.

We hope to move in this winter, but chose to rent the cabin in case we can't.

And so in the meantime, we will be packing and unpacking bags to move back and forth between sites, to spend evenings at our house doing what projects we can, driving down the half-mile driveway to the Captain's Cabin at Miller's Landing on Lowell Point below our home.

And yet, I can not wallow when I remember the world around me, the people of Puerto Rico without water or electricity, without a plan to rebuild their broken homes, their destroyed infrastructure, without the ability to navigate between places.

That which feels hard to me, is a mere pebble compared to the obstacles other people face.

I had an opportunity this week to travel to Soldotna, to walk on the south beach of the mouth of the Kenai, where I collected driftwood and stones for my garden on a rare sunny day. I packed an apple, my journal, and a bubbly adult beverage in the backpack I used to haul rocks.

Towards the end of my two hours of beach-combing, a young couple walked in my direction, they stopped more than once, his hands on her hips, her fingers graced his face. I picked up a striped rock and glanced their way just as he turned from her and started to walk briskly in the opposite direction as she continued on towards me.

Some sort of chasm came between them and the distance grew as they marched towards different poles, heads down.

I couldn't help but watch them retreat from each other.

And then, just as suddenly, he stopped, turned, and sprinted down the beach after the girl whose hips he held in his hands only moments before.

When I looked back, caught up in their drama, more riveting than rocks, he reached her and she welcomed him into her soft folds, they stood on the beach intertwined, her head resting against his heart, two bodies united where the Kenai River meets the sea.

I'm not sure how this story connects exactly, except to say that it stayed with me, the sight of him racing back to the girl he deserted, the walking away and running to return, the falling into each other, the sun rays on the water, the volcanoes in the distance, the miles upon miles of sandy beach.

I guess I'm left with the feeling that we can't turn away from each other.

In the US we tend to promote this false idol of individualism, wave it like a flag above this country's head, but we are all tied to each other, to this land, to the weather that changes as we breathe in the September air.

We are never alone in our thoughts, our dreams, our fears, our actions.

I may see nothing but sand and sea before me, but there are islands out there with people who are a lot like me.

We are all in-between places, even if we surround ourselves with seemingly impenetrable walls, with mountains of stuff, with endless defensive layers, we are all just traveling from here to there.

 

And We Have Each Other

"Mom do all houses have issues?" Olive asks me, as she scooters around on the subfloor pushing her doll's pink stroller around the table.

"Yeah, I think they all have issues."

I'm heating water on the stove to wash dishes in the plastic tubs that serve as my sink. It's only September and we all wear coats in our unfinished home. I can hear the plink of water falling into a metal pot placed behind the wood stove.

Our dreams await, placed on hold temporarily, as Nick and I struggle to maintain the vision, as our stress radiates into our children's pores.

"Is everything Ok?" the director of Olive's after-school program asked Nick when he picked her up last night. "Is something going on with your house that you're building?"

The list is too long for a simple response.

After a two day reprieve, two days of pause-in-your-tracks sun rises and blue skies...

...the rain returns.

Prescipitation predicted for days.

 

Elias shakes his head at me when I ask him to feed the dogs. He swats at his sister as she scoots past.

This is when I want to hide.

To find my own den in the forest and line it with leaves for winter. To curl up in a ball and sleep for days.I stop calling friends, as much as I need their love and support. I choose paths through the woods where I am least likely to run into another soul, as much as spontaneous connection would do me good.

I envy other families with their social ease. With their easy-to-babysit children, with their teenagers off on their own, with their ample adult time.

Or at least I imagine it so with typical kids.

I remember fondly all my babysitters as a child, thinking I was the lucky one earning Saturday night play time with my beloved Nina-- and yet now I see the glimmer in my parents' eyes as they headed out the door to find a dance floor. Or adult companionship. Or food prepared by someone else, served on dishes neither my Mom or Dad would wash.

There are so many small accumulative losses on this special needs parenting road.

One of which is the ease of engagement. Every outing needs to be carefully measured and weighed, as if we are cataloguing our chance for a successful outcome.

Do we have supplies? Does he have that certain look in his eyes? Will we need to divide?

This weekend is the Seward Arts and Music Festival, plus one of our favorite Alaskan bands, Hope Social Club, is playing at the Yukon Bar, and in my alternate life I'd be enticing Nick to swing me around the dance floor for countless hours night.

But nothing flows quite so eaily in my actual life.

And yet, we are the lucky ones.

We are fortunate to have four hours of respite on Saturday evening, one of our last weekends with our fabulus provider before her overwhelming responsibilities of single parenthood and full-time school force her in a different direction.

And we have each other.

I actually want to spend time with my husband.

I miss him even when we are in the same room, responding to the needs of our kids. When we are shooing Olive out of the kitchen with her scooter and asking Elias, yet again, to just do something besides tripodding on his cane, with his fingers in his mouth, in the middle of the entryway.

I miss Nick as we sit together in our shell of a home, after the kids are asleep, trying to prepare for our upcoming meeting with our contractor to discuss all our construction issues.

(I mean really, don't we all, I mean all houses have issues.) 

I miss my husband as we discuss guardianship and Elias and the fact that someday not so far away he will turn eighteen. As we imagine the nest that might never be empty and all the decisions and paperwork, the never-ending-paperwork, ahead.

I look into Nick's sky-blue eyes and see the young man who climbed up Cody Pass with me all those years ago, still inside, shining bright, within the layers of regret-laden stress and grief that seem to roll across us like the fog descending upon the bay.

I see him. And he sees me.

 And in the end, that's what will carry us through all this grey weather to the next crisp blue day.

 

Smells Like Wet Dog

The last thing I want to do when the rain comes in sideways and drenches me on the short walk from my house to David’s is to stay outside in the storm.

But my dogs want to keep walking. And they’ve been inside for six hours, as have I.

So I zip my raincoat and pull my hood over my head and walk down the driveway towards our neighbors’ cabin to see how their road is fairing the onslaught of creek water spilling from its banks.

As I walk, my mood lightens, as it always does, regardless of the weather, something about consecutive steps and fresh air. I discover a trail behind their cabin and though I’m not dressed for a hike I find myself climbing through the mossy Spruce. My jeans begin to stick to my thighs as the rain falls even harder, but I am in it now, in the weather, not listening to it pound on our metal roof, not watching it slide down our windows, and as thick as the droplets fall, they are far less menacing here in the woods than they appeared from the inside looking out.

The trail I walk snakes along the cliffs parallel to Tonsina Trail, with views of Resurrection Bay so socked with grey that I can’t see a single mountain despite feeling their watchful presence, ancient and all-knowing, reminding me that the tears I shed yesterday are nothing but small waves in the ocean of global despair.

Why the tears you ask?

Oh, were do I begin.

For starters, all the windows in our new house leaked during the heavy rainfall last week, along with our roof and our stove pipe, which we since learned, despite hiring professionals, was not put in to code. This led to the revelation that our contractors made a handful of other mistakes, which means we can’t yet insulate and I’m feeling pretty darn done with trailer life after three and a half months of camping full time.

Its mid-September, and in Alaska that means Almost Winter and I’m almost gonna lose my mind as the seasons change and I don't have a dry place to call home. Just a dank box with dogs that don't have the curtesy to take their paws off and hang their coats at the door.

So there's that.

And then the phone call.

The one with the Neuropsych who spent a full day assessing Elias. A medical professional I respect who is human in her communications but still the deliverer of diagnoses. Of terms such as “significantly impaired” “well below average” and “mood disorder”.

And sure I know these details about my son.

But I also don’t.

I forget about all his disabilities in our daily doings as we drive around and over the potholes on the road between our house and town, laughing about the bumps along the way.

I just expect him to rally for the occasion and something about the language she used made me wonder if at times I set the bar too high. Am I not realizing that his disabilities impede him from making the social and intellectual connections I desire?

I don't know.

There is so much I don't know.

I don't know how to build a house from the foundation to the roof and I don't know how to raise a child from a baby to a man-- and so I find myself in the boundary waters between realizations, wondering what images to cling to and which mirages to release into the bay.

Stranded between the home we desire and the construction project before us, between the boy I love and the labels that follow him.

And so I walk in the rain, I step over the composted forest, as I peel off layers of clothing, layers of armor accumulated with each revelation of something gone wrong.

I pull my hood down and let the water run over my head, my face, like tears, but not mine-- as if the mountain’s sorrow can cleanse me, can hold me with the reminder that grace lies within the sorrow, hidden deep within the unknown, within the questions we carry, like crosses made of bones.

Its All You Got Sometimes

Some days it just rains. And rains for days. 

And you see images of the west on fire and want to blow the grey clouds southwards with the force of the winds of Irma, Jose, Harvey. 

And you feel overwhelmed as the earth shakes in Mexico, and families in Florida brace for a storm like no other, as folks in Houston attempt to recover.

And the honeymoon ended, a week ago Friday, with your "special needs" son and his start to the school year, it ended the moment his resource teacher called to tell you he hit her in the face, this after he had responded to your unoriginal question— how was your day?— with his generic answer: It was great.

Great.

I don’t think any of us feel truly great right now, not with North Korea striking poses, not with white supremacists gathering momentum, not with dreamers worried about deportation, not with the West in flames, Texas flooded, and I-95 carrying the biggest mass evacuation in US history along its northward spine.

And you live in a trailer, in a rainforest, in Alaska. 

And for every step forward you make towards the completion of your house, circumstances or errors (not all yours), throw you back another four.

And the snow slowly creeps down the mountains.

And your kids go to school un-showered with stains on their shirts, their hair uncombed, but with food in their bellies, and love, so much love, sending them through their classroom doors.

Love.

Its all you got sometimes. All you can return to when devastation and discrimination seem to rule the day. Just love more-- more openly, more inclusively, more freely, more.

Love.

Until you wake on a Friday morning, before the sunrise, to the sight of a moon not covered in clouds-- and as dawn turns to day you see small circles of blue, like love letters, sent to pierce the grey shield above this place you call home.

Hope-- lets not forget hope.