Glad Tidings

Well, we’ve caught up with each other, us volunteers. We’ve been reading aloud our autobiographies to one another, and slowly those stories have begun to merge and twist. Now, we’re all on the same page, and the illustrations that had shown us on separate paths sketch us in the same clearing. Right on schedule I’d say, seeing as we’ve hit the four-month mark of living and working together. No longer are we unfolding origami marvels. We’ve splayed ourselves on the table, creases exposed, saying with a silent opening of palms, “It is what it is.”

Each of us comes from different parts of the country, different backgrounds, educations, family structures, all those elements that create and shape a life. And throughout these past four months, we’ve been unpacking this self luggage. Here’s a quilt of my family history. Here’s a sock of my morning routine. Here’s a g cleft of my mirthful laugh, a sharp sign for when I’m sad and overcompensating. Here’s a petal from my last relationship; it’s brittle, so let’s not handle it too often. Here’s the coin of my self worth, and here’s the vault of my values. Over weeks and mornings and dinners and walks to work and those rare car drives, we’ve unpacked these bags, gone through the show and tell. If you were to turn the suitcases upside down and shake them, other than faded boarding passes and particles of lint, only air molecules would rattle down.

So after decorating our identity around the house and office and each other and after filling with enough plaster the little figurine molds of ourselves that reside within each other’s minds, our inquiries have shifted. Question marks no longer attach to that time before encounter. Now, we latch such punctuation to the immediate future or to the just slipped present. “How was yoga?” or, “Will you pick up eggs at the store?” have replaced curiosities like, “What was your relationship like with your brother while growing up?"

Basically, after four months of living and working together and pulling each other’s underwear from the dryer and drinking coffee silently and unshowered at noon after just crawling out of bed, there’s just not much mystery left.

So when you reach this point of all standing in the same place, staring at one another, all your belongings sorted on the shelves, there’s the option to just get bored of each other. Honeymoon’s over, babe. And marriage’s thrills aren’t as flashy or as frequent.

But we can’t get bored of each other. And here’s why.

On Friday December 20, I go home for a late lunch. I eat, pour a cup of tea, and raising the mug to my mouth, I set it back on the counter. I walk to my room, close the door. And what has been building for the last two weeks releases.

I sob.

Body shaking. Bed shaking. Tears pooling the pillow. Air sucking in and out, gasps shattering. High and low pitches grating and cracking past one other. Snot smearing out my nose and down the back of my throat. My face distorted into something resembling a gargoyle, one of those stone ones atop old cathedrals.

It’s a rather ugly scene.

And I’m alone. And Christmas is next week. And all I can feel is the cold Alaskan wind swirling around me, shooting outwards in a million directions, and traveling thousands of miles before ever reaching my family and friends.

I can physically recall the sensation of every person I have ever hugged. I can feel their pressure, their bones, muscles, breath, fabric, etc. All those elements that compose one body enveloping another. I have turned to this ability often over the years. In times of celebration, in times of nostalgia, in times of need. I enter that space, remembering my parents, my siblings.

And I can’t do it.

Not because I have forgotten. But because the action seems so futile. And next week is Christmas. And mnemonic reconstruction cannot replace their far-away, beloved body.

The wind keeps swirling and searching, and in it I hear my voice from last year, the one vowing to never take another job that would separate me from my family at Christmas. And audible as a dripping faucet on a silent night, I hear the clock ticking, as Tennessee Williams wrote, “Loss, loss, loss.” Time, irreversible time, is passing, taking now and next week with it, swallowing a rare, irreplaceable opportunity to be with the ones who matter most.

And that’s why us volunteers cannot get bored of each other. Because we are all we have.

In this strange, distant, wondrous land, we…Well, I’ll speak for myself. They are the ones here who matter most. From a stack of applications and scrupulous interviews, we were thrown into a year of intimate quarters together. By accepting this job and traveling to this place and receiving each other without the demands of expectation, we became a family: learning each other, supporting each other, celebrating each other, yielding to one another. Often we’ll congregate around a counter, a table, a couch, perhaps talking, perhaps not, just to be within each other’s presence.

Every Sunday evening we have family dinner. And every Sunday, sitting down to a warm plate and lit candles, we take hands and say, “Thank you,” me to a God, the others to wherever they channel gratitude. And in that circle, at that table, surrounded by those people, I feel like the lucky one.

So to my fellow volunteers, my Nome family, thank you. Merry Christmas. Glad tidings. For I am glad to be spending this time with you. Often I feel like a prickly pinecone surrounded within a wreath of goodness, because all the things this season is supposed to bring—cheer, joy, generosity—you offer daily and freely. Whenever someone asks about my experience in Alaska, I say you all are the best part.

And though unpacked, we will continue to learn more about each other. Not just because time will continues scribbling its narrative. But because there are still bits of treasure left in our pockets, in the lining of our jackets, in the toe of that one unwore pair of shoes. And then there are the pieces that we carry closest—in the hollow of our pelvic bone, between the slot of our seventh and eighth rib, within the cradle of our left thumb and forefinger. And as we stretch and shake about and enter moments of quiet trust, these bits will fall out, dropping into each other’s palms, sometimes surprising even ourselves with fragments forgotten.

We have eight months ahead. Thank you for allowing me to share them with you.

Merry Christmas.

Born Free

Walking home Saturday night, my boots, which for the past three weeks have slipped across the road, now meet traction. The powdery snow, after weeks of falling and sifting and stirring, has created an almost grainy underlayer, burying the black ice that has twice smashed my body to my knees and has for weeks dripped every step with caution. I stop, skimming my sole over the street, friction scraping its track. I smile, and crawling into bed that night, my limbs tingle. My toes start bouncing, waving back and forth. I pull the covers up to my chin, giddy with the thought of tomorrow, feeling every bit my five-year-old self the night before Christmas. Sleep cannot pass through my body soon enough, and the sun cannot open its bright eye early enough. Blah. The clock moves so slowly, and I am too buzzy to rest.

But sleep does come, overstaying its welcome, in fact. I rise at 11am and pull back my curtain. The snow amplifies the sun’s feeble light, multiplying and spreading its few rays to illuminate this mid morning hour. After an oatmeal breakfast and a chance for digestion, I skip up the stairs, almost clapping. I pull on my black leggings and Texas Longhorns sweatshirt. And bounding back downstairs, I lace up my shoes.

“Where are you going?” Emily, my housemate, asks.

“Running,” I say, my chest swelling, loving the very word on my tongue. And turning on my heel, I’m out the door.

Pausing at the edge of the road, I reach out my arms and lift my chin to breathe in the cold, sharp air, releasing a silent paean. Then I’m off. Legs falling into their familiar cadence. Feet slightly sinking into the first fine layer of snow before finding the solid thickness beneath, then pushing off to stride ahead. My ears sting from cold, but I know another quarter mile, and I won’t be able to feel it. Same with my hands. Always beginning tucked into their sleeves until the steam from my body forces them outwards to the cool beyond.

I turn towards the airport. The slushy ocean on my left, steel gray with a strip of neon orange edging the horizon. Hills rise to my right, clouds blurring their tips. And all around me, snow. It’s been falling for a month, and I am still baffled by its enormousness. Coming from middle Tennessee where flurries melt by noon (and it's only ever flurries), until arriving in Alaska, I’d never seen the world stretch in unbroken whiteness. Like a giant whiteout bottle spilled over the earth. Turning down a hill, I increase my pace, passing multicolored figures tomcod fishing in the harbor. No cars pass and the silence is absolute, absorbing even breath and pace.

This motion of legs reaching and lungs expanding provides a continuity. The continuum began in seventh grade, jogging the humidity heavy streets of my Southern neighborhood. Then into high school cross-country. Then college, where like a midnight vigilante, I ran beneath the rose and amber streetlamps, roving over, through, and between every blade of grass and tree on that ever-revealing campus. It was there, where after years of resentfully stomping through the motions, I fell in love with this action. To the point where I’d have to force myself to stop after an hour of freedom to return to studying. Then abroad, running along the canal, when flowing and frozen, discovering neighborhoods every bit the English architectural monoculture. Then in California, around and around the tree-draped perimeter of McKinley Park, passing rose gardens, duck pond, playgrounds, and stretching lawns of every outdoor recreation. And now here in Alaska. A string attaching all these places, braiding into sinew and stitching their terrain through my limbs.

What I learned in those places holds true here. That I cannot know the curvature of the earth I stand on until I feel it pounding beneath my feet, separated only by a slip of fabric and a slab of rubber, inhaling its atoms into my lungs, mingling in the space between muscle and vein, learning the nuances of its incline in my cells as oxygen and carbon slip past each other through membrane. And in this process, anxiety tucks itself into bed. Worries sort themselves into drawers. Fear takes off its mask and watches it disintegrate to dust. And in at least one moment during every run, I hear my best friend yelling to me, “Born Free!” Like she did that day sophomore year of college when from on a hill, she saw me running below and called out to me, cheering me on.

Looking at the white hills of Nome, I remember the summer of 2010 when my family visited the Grand Canyon. Standing on the edge of phenomenon, I wished I had never seen a picture of that sculpted landscape. I wish I had never heard of that chasm. I wished I was a pioneer, heading west in a covered wagon, having just spanned the Great Plains, and now without tale or forewarning, happened upon that site. Jaw dropping. Eyes bulging. Breath forgotten.

Since that moment, I have wondered what the places I have run over looked like before something stronger than beak or claw or grip or less patient than water or sand or wind gouged and shifted the land. I’ve fantasized of witnessing terrain without expectation or industrial alteration. And looking at Nome’s white hills, the stretching tundra, the Bering Sea, I sense the endurance of my run connecting to the-- from the perspective of eyes that will only see a few decades-- timelessness of this topography. And though empowered by blood and endorphins, I suddenly see my small life flick like a mere snowflake in the wind. But dear God, caught on a gloved finger and examined, it’s close to majestic.

Returning to the corner outside my house, I begin my cool down. And like at the end of every run, I say a prayer of thanks. For returning home without injury. For the ability to run. For a safe place to ramble. For the example shown by my family that this action is valuable. And this time I add, for being in Nome. For the snow. For the few hours of daylight. And for the tiny molecules of Alaska now circulating through me, adding another link to this chain.