In the bathroom, the walls are now Shimmer Green and instead of vacuuming the debris out of all the registers (which Luke kindly suggested when he noticed my listlessness), I filled a glass of wine and I filled the tub and I slunk under the water where everything feels safe and close and thoughtful.

This was one of my foremost requirements of a home: it needed a bathtub. This, though, like everything in an older home, is also a problem. It’s a clawfoot tub with antique fixtures, which means there’s nowhere to buy a curtain rod or showerhead holder without ordering one online or paying a thousand dollars at a specialty store for a few arms of metal.

I went to Bed, Bath, & Beyond yesterday because when I searched for clawfoot fixtures online, it looked like they might have what I need. When I got there, the woman at Customer Service told me to go to the bathroom department and wait. She then called for assistance over the intercom. In the bathroom department, I couldn’t decide where to stand; stand in the aisle where they could confuse me with any other customer, or stand inside the maze of bathroom gadgets where I might not be found. When the employee finally came, she wanted to be helpful, but I had trouble articulating what exactly our tub is missing. It turns out that when I have to ask for help, I don’t have the right words for all the things we need.

Luckily, we do have a “telephone showerhead,” which is what I told the lady at BB&B (where is the “Beyond” in Bed, Bath, &Beyond?), although she gave me a funny look. This is what my brothers and I used to call the showerhead in Kentucky when we went to a convent during the summers to fish and pray and eat food on cafeteria plates. The guesthouse there had a clawfoot tub and a showerhead you could detach from its cradle and hold up to your ear or sprinkle over your shoulders for a self-given massage. This is where my love of baths and old houses began, I think—the personality of the odd fixture, the creaky conversation of floorboards in a home that knows more than its inhabitants.

For the time being, we shower by crouching down below where the curtains end. It’s awkward, but it beats traipsing all the way downstairs to the upright shower past the small piles of dirt from the nice guy, Nate, in a beard and bandana, who carried an entire truckload of concrete and wood up from the crawl space and damaged floor in the basement. The green in the upstairs bathroom was a nice choice. It looks like the green sherbet that floats around in a party bowl, and that’s what it feels like to be in the tub up there. A calm little island of melting.

My friend Libby said that after she and her husband first bought their house, they really felt at home when they could get up and make coffee in their own kitchen. That’s what I did today. In my new Cuisinart EXTREME Coffee Maker I got for Christmas. This is a new frontier for us since we’ve always made our coffee in the French press. (Not extreme.) I had to drive Sunflower Market on 38th to get milk (our neighborhood sounds like a Sesame Street episode: Megan who lives in Sunnyside drives to Sunflower Market for her milk and eggs). I got the milk and eggs, then I had to get gas, all the while thinking about how my coffee turned out on the black corian counters I have mixed feelings about. On the Save-a-Lot sign half-way home, the deal this week is pig’s feet and beef tripe for 99 cents a pound. I wonder how many people in Sunnyside eat swine feet and cow stomach.

I’d only been in the Sunnyside Save-a-Lot once a few weeks ago when Luke desperately needed a 5-hour energy, but all I could find there was bulk puffed cereal and juices in colorful jugs with Mexican names on them. In New Orleans, the Save-a-Lot on Carrolton was where we shopped after the storm hit, and the cans of beans were 29 cents each, bags of rice a dollar, and this all went on FEMA food stamps and we ate, if not in content, in the amounts of kings.

I would like to believe this neighborhood has similarities to New Orleans. There’s a new speakeasy on 32^nd we saw last night when we went out for burgers with some friends who bought their house up the street a year before we bought ours. I can’t decide if a speakeasy here is a cool thing or just another nostalgic trend to satisfy people who wish they had been alive when less was available and indulgences were more prohibited. Before eating my blue cheese covered burger, I did take interest in the speakeasy (though at that point I didn’t know what it was—the exterior walls of the place are black and there are books on shelves in the windows, leading me to think that it was a “late night bookstore” which I said to Luke, then realized of course it wasn’t.) A late night bookstore is one of many places I would like to open. There would be wine. There would be silence. A girl could go there alone on Friday night and not be a weirdo.

Also, I would like to invent a wall x-ray machine. I’m trying to find out which walls in this house are load-bearing and which have brick inside them, and there’s really no good way to do this besides beating the living hell out of the sheet rock and lathen plaster with a hammer. I know this must not be the right way to go about investigating, but there’s really no other way to do it. I have learned that if you go in the basement, the floor joists will run perpendicular to the supporting walls of the house. But this doesn’t help. In our crawl space, a brick wall runs north-south under the whole structure, while upstairs, after taking off an electrical plate on said wall, it appears that inside the upstairs portion of that wall, there’s only splintered wood and the fuzz of areas not meant to be seen. This does not help me as what I’m going for is either exposed brick (warm, reminds me of baking bread and cozying up by the fire, centipedes and poor insulation, be damned. (I have read that in some exterior brick walls, centipedes comes through the mortar when it’s warm out). GROSS!!!)

Anne, my friend since the age of 3, came over yesterday and had the same thought as me. Break down all the walls on the first floor! Luke told her to leave. She was right. After our last place, I think I might miss open space. Although, it is nice here to have a room for cooking and a room for sitting and a room for fireplacing, and to not wake up when your brother is staying with you and to have to make coffee in the same room where he is sleeping. Anne and I share the same Catholic school-girl heart. We will live beautiful lives! We will abide by stories of more importance than boring old reality! We will go to Paris! (Hence the dream).

Here is the difficulty: I have measured most lessons and mistakes according to the rooms of my past, and now here I am with the many rooms of my present (more so rooms of my own than any before), and I am not sure how to orient myself to this space or it to me. I know that moving in takes a long time, but the people who owned this place before made choices that are plaguing me. Mostly decorative, I admit, but still—textured walls throughout the house, a cat piss-smelling perfectly wasted pantry space (above), 80’s knobs on the kitchen cabinets, sheet rock that covers half the trim on the windows. I woke up this morning and looked at the ceiling fan (why do men love ceiling fans?), and I thought, what the hell? I look forward to the day that I do not wake up thinking this.

Quincy was crying at the foot of the bed because he refuses to walk on the laminate floors. He gets trapped upstairs and in the kitchen until I drag him out, all four legs going sideways and spinning in futility like a hamster in a wheel. This does not bode well for him as we intend to be here for the rest of his life. Here is a picture of his hourly dilemma: to cross or to not cross the slippery threshold. I am partially torturing him by putting his food on the slick floors so he learns his rewards for risk-taking.

I am generally not a vain person, but something about house design does make me feel like I am. I have become obsessed with magazines and blogs and DIY projects; color palettes dance through my head in the car, in bed, in church. We bought eight paint colors last night, and only two of them worked. I went a little overzealous on the green choice (Lemon Pepper looks like what ends up in the toilet when you’ve eaten only salad for a week) and Luke’s orange for the stairs resembles the curtains in my parents’ house in Aurora circa 1978. Luke mudded over two square feet of the textured wall, though, and it is so gloriously smooth and it will take so long to do all the rest, but I want that scratchy texture gone, so what do I do? This is the question: how do we spend our days, with all that needs to be done?

In K-Mart this week, my mom saw two women buying all the layaway toys for kids whose parents didn’t have money to buy them what they wanted for Christmas. I have to admit, redoing a house this time of year has two sides to it: we’ve been blessed to receive many gifts that are helping us immensely along the way, but I question how much of this is too much, and how much people need—the ones who are buying pig’s feet for 99 cents this morning, or the haggard woman who stumbled into the gas station on 38th for cigarettes. Still. On my way home aside my cage-free eggs, I thought about how appropriate Nocturnal Sea would be for the back entryway.

And, there are small victories in our new home even amidst all the debris; my Extreme Coffee tastes a little better than the electricity-free kind I’ve always made.

My friend Sara said that when she looked for houses, she imagined herself into every corner of the space and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Instead of writing, I look at paint colors. Instead of trying to be less materialistic since we’ll have less money soon (whether this is the house or not), I find myself wanting more and more things. I found a quote in someone else’s house online that says, “All I want to be is someone that makes new things and thinks about them,” and I can’t figure out if that’s an artistic or a selfish thing to say.

I hurt my back. I saw a chiropractor who took both of my hands in his. That rubbed me wrong. Then he cracked me wrong. He said the body is self-healing. But then he charged me $53. His assistant hooked up electrodes to my back and the current bounced through my muscles like tiny angry animals. I am not going back. Instead, I have a heating pad and have been only walking and slowly swimming.

Today at La Familia, there were only three of us in the pool: a man who always wears a Speedo and is pretty fit besides his paunch, a woman who never puts her head under the water while swimming freestyle, and the woman with the snorkel and a bubbly black butt that sticks up out of the surface of the water and who was at another Denver pool at the same time as me on Saturday. The lifeguard tonight was my favorite one–the one who breakdances on the pool deck and plays hip hop I can hear between sets.

When I got home, the neighbors were having cigarettes and PBRs on the hood of their car in the parking lot. They love living here. We do too. But we are leaving for somewhere with a garden and sloped floors (unless they fall down during the inspection) and a few more rooms that will hold a few more dreams.

Tonight, I did a load of laundry at my parents’ house and walked Quincy in the golden field where foxes howl late at night. We had barbecued chicken and corn, and then the neighbor came over and told me he has lost track of where I live.

When I got in bed, I heard my brother in the hallway, home after a three hour drive where he’s a priest in a small farming town, not unlike where I taught in Louisiana three years ago. He is plagued there by mistrust, by people who see the white in his collar and turn angry and irrational, the way blame makes someone turn when they don’t have anywhere to direct it. He stood in my doorway talking about the guys at the prison who do trust him and how that’s the place where there might be more reality than among the free. At least he gets homegrown tomatoes, though, from some old guy in town, and he knows to buy applewood-smoked bacon, and he puts this all on gluten-free bread with mayonnaise, and sometimes that’s enough to get you through the shit of the day that threatens to take away the goodness of a good sandwich but doesn’t.

A young boy is lost in the suburbs tonight. A 17 year-old with spinabiffida and a backpack full of medication. They sent out a reverse phone call and said everyone should check their cars for him. At the end of my walk today, I might have passed him. At the end of my walk today, I noticed they started emptying the water out of the pool. At the end of my walk today, the sky changed so fast it hurt my heart a little bit, knowing that there’s never enough summer. This is the time of year for change, for wondering what I haven’t changed yet.

In my brother’s hand tonight, I could see a silhouette: the scapular of Mary twisting tight then unwinding back to its natural laxity, a tiny square of hope separating then blending into his black pants, then disappearing when he said goodnight.

The other night, my friend Lizzy and I were talking in her car in a parking lot, and a car pulled up next to us with two strangers in it, a woman and a man. The woman had her hair piled on one side of her head. She shook it so it centered. Her tank top twinkled. He looked straight ahead. The woman looked like she had a little bit of that girl in the pool in her. She looked like a woman who was trying to get kissed.

“Isn’t it weird that those people have no idea who we are and they never will?” Lizzy asked. “To them, we are nothing. But they are probably important to everyone in their lives. We live so separately from the people we don’t know.”

Then the car pulled away.

That night there was rain and the leaves on the trees framing the parking lot were bowed and black. Sometimes if I look at Denver in the right light, it looks like a city I’m just visiting. I don’t do it on purpose, it just becomes a composite of other places–Seattle, maybe, or Boston in the spring. And sometimes when I look at strangers, I feel like I know more about them than I do. I play this game sometimes: knowing and un-knowing the things I don’t know and know. As though that might make unfamiliarity easier.

Tonight while I was swimming, the storm never came. It hovered over the pool and the shadow cast an illusion that the water was being pulled west. A man in long shorts snapped a cap over his head and started swimming laps. We were both doing breaststroke. Underwater, we looked at each other. Then we both swam away.

Theo, my neighbor who has not changed, told me that Crow’s landlord evicted him even though he’d been paying the rent. This is a slumlord, by all accounts, who only half-painted the house an unnatural, mortuary-esque chalk white, and failed to cover over the thick splatter of orange paint that was slung onto the north side of the house one night with such airborne force, the paint broke one of the windows. That window is still jagged with ribbons of opaque orange curtaining some dark room I look into whenever I walk by before quickly looking away. I found the house on zillow.com, and Crow’s apartment is renting for $600 a month and it still looks like the subterranean crack den that it probably always has been.

Some kid paid full rent for Crow’s place for the months of June, July, and August, and hasn’t yet moved in. The first week I was home, I heard Theo’s door opening and closing across the hallway and assumed it was Theo or his girlfriend who has a white dog named Dignan who, on his first visit across the hall to our place a year and a half ago, pooped a frozen yogurt soft serve swirl of brown right in the middle of our bedroom. But it wasn’t either of them, it was the kid whose rent the slumlord was holding. He was never given the go-ahead to move into Crow’s place, so Theo let him move in up here. Theo is bipolar and sometimes I can hear him yelling obscenities at the can crusher (his girlfriend told me on a walk that inanimate objects incur his rage, not her). Sometimes when Luke’s gone, it’s almost nice to hear them through the walls, to know that someone’s there, yelling and living. Theo is helping Crow find a lawyer so he can get what he’s owed.

Theo drives a hulking gold van and collects everything. Jars, guitars, antique desks, bottles, tables, kennels, metal rods, speakers, pots and pictures and pans. This has changed: when we talked in between our two apartments the other night, I could tell that the mountains behind him had grown. His studio is about half the size of our place, but I think he must have twice the amount of stuff. The containers for our comfort differ between us, but we need them anyways–a drug dealer who waves when you arrive any time of day or a ceiling fan taken from a stack of broken objects in the alley.

There’s a new neighbor, too, next door in the white house that has been abandoned for years. He has black glasses and tattoos and wears a red cotton tank top when he’s working in the backyard. He owns a salami company called Il Mondo Vecchio–The Old World. I like when he’s working on his shed when I get home. I’ve missed the presence of people outside ever since I left New Orleans. What do people do with their porches if they’re never on them? Why all these flowers if there’s no one looking at them? I asked Mark, the new neighbor, what he was going to put in his shed and he said “my stuff.”

Natalia wanted an afternoon of tea and Russian chocolates, so we went to get some at the Russian store in East Denver.  She goes there every week, but still chooses everything with careful scrutiny, leaning over the candy bins, and reading the labels before choosing each one she’ll purchase. Natalia is scrupulous about coupons and food prices. She believes in saving money and in bite-sized daily indulgences. After a brief exchange in Russian with the man behind the meat counter, she obtained her one selfish allowance for the week—a stout $14.99 jar of pink caviar.

While Lexi smooshed bags of raw almonds under her small hands, Natalia found one more thing—two tall cans of Kvass—her favorite drink growing up. In the hot car, we cracked one open and assessed it. Like beer. Like cold chocolate. Like coke without the feeling across the tongue of unshakeable sweetness. I wonder why every good thing feels like a revelation, why they don’t sell this stuff at American stores.

Outside, a blonde boy with wide-set Eastern European eyes approached me and started speaking Russian. Natalia interceded and spoke with him for a moment about the protestant CD’s he was pushing. I could listen to them all day, to be in this other-world within my own world, to roll the foreign words around in my head with all the images Natalia has given me of an older life—a life of more consideration where food might be scarce and a girl learns to ride a bike on the only bicycle that exists in her village.

Later, after Natalia has dropped me off and the house is quiet without Lexi’s maybes (Maybe I could have another sticky bun? Maybe I could draw houses and trees? Maybe I could walk Quincy all by myself?) I walk around the Denver Art Museum’s Marvelous Mud Exhibit with girls I have grown up with, here in this city, mentored by priests and dips in the road perfect for soaring over in our mom’s minivans and later in our own cars on Friday nights when there’s nothing to do but we feel we are made for everything. Sometimes I wonder what I am missing, looking back, looking at these girls who contain my past and send all my grade school sentiments unspooling into my present.

At the exhibit, there are cookie cutter clay puzzles put together on the floor that clink together like wine glasses when you walk on them; a strange peace from molded antlers strung between pickle-shaped lights; a room of red with foxes in flight, and there are these quotes on the wall from artists, that I feel were stolen from my psyche:

“I want to give people a place to let language and purpose slip away and to allow the senses to frolic.” –Martha Russo

“I want things I make, even though invited, to be as real and believable as any other familiar object in the everyday.” –Annabeth Rosen

“How is it that we have nostalgia for places we have never visited?” –Kim Dickey

Her voice bounced off the Denver Art Museum, then off the Mad Greens restaurant, then off the bull sculptures–a papa and its calf bedded down, huge and black-brown pewter-shiny, together about 1500 square feet. I know what 1500 square feet look like because I’ve been looking at houses. I know I shouldn’t be because my mind fills rooms before they’re mine, but there’s something in my hands that wants to paint a home of our own, something in my knees that wants to not walk up 16 stairs with my groceries, something in my nature that wants to fill kitchen cabinets that have doors, unlike ours. The woman shouted racist obscenities and hissed while I picked up my pace, and her voice rattled like a strangled can of uncooked beans.

When her voice had stopped coming off the buildings, I came to the lawn next to the library and ate half a grape jelly and bacon biscuit from the Denver Biscuit truck. I thought maybe I shouldn’t eat because she might have been homeless and how insensitive would that be, but I was hungry, and I couldn’t hear her voice anymore, so I did. Next to the library, there’s this statue:

This is not me in the photo. This statue confuses me. It is shiny and I like it, but I’m not sure why. I know it’s a play on smallness and point of view, because it’s outside the children’s area of the library. Another Lighthouse instructor named Terry was at the Biscuit Truck and he started raving about the statue, how much he loved it, how the original horse had so much hail damage, they had to put a second one up and the mayor (or someone locally famous, I’m not sure) now has horse #1 in his house.

I have never been good at understanding art. When I took an art history class in college, I was amazed at how much I didn’t know but then knew as soon as someone else told me it was true. On the DPL website, they explain the statue: “The scale of this work is meant to recall that time in life when even everyday objects seemed monumental.” So maybe that’s why I like it.

After I left the library, I drove by another homeless man with a Hollywood face, cinnamon brown hair pulled into a ponytail, and a beard like the thick strap of a hat around his chin. His sign said, “I need a miracle.” It gave me goosebumps. I wonder if miracles, I mean real miracles, really happen.

When I got to my neighborhood, I drove past the house for sale that I love, and there was an old man leaning into the doorway with a paint brush. I’ve been watching that house–how its windows went from streaked to silvery clean, how it had been emptied out then refilled with bland modern staging furniture, how purple flowers were standing straight up from red, wet-looking wood chip mounds one morning. The repairman invited me inside and told me to take my time. I went into the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the mudroom. I opened all the closet doors upstairs and I tried the master bathroom’s sink. My favorite part was the separate garage out back and my mind did what I told it not to–a dinner party started under paper lanterns strung in Z’s, and I laid a tray of pink salmon in between glasses and plates.

Frank, who has been working on the house for a few weeks, said he used to write short stories. Then he said he read some poetry some time ago and he thought it was something, so he started doing that, too. His parents came from Poland and settled in Wisconsin, and that’s where he learned to swim, he said, something they aren’t teaching kids anymore. I don’t remember why he brought up swimming and poetry, but I thought it was perfect, and he said it was a solid house, and he loved to have dinner under strung-up lanterns. I almost shook his hand when he said that (not that shaking his hand is something I would usually do, but a hug would have been awkward and anything I could have said in response would have been cliche–that’s exactly what I was thinking, or, you read my mind) so I thanked him a few times for letting me walk around and told him to have a nice day. Sometimes when I talk to people, I sound boring to myself.

It consoled me to think that Frank took pleasure in lanterns, too, and I wonder now, after learning what that statue means, if everyday objects aren’t still monumental to some people. Sometimes I feel materialistic, peeking into houses I’ll never buy or trolling for old tables in thrift stores and boutiques, but these searches are what bring meaning, too. I bought a table this afternoon. A man in a yarmulke named Isaac sold it to me in a musty antique store on Mississippi. “Looking’s free,” he said. And then when he ran into me in the hallway he said it again.

The table has an antique sewing machine built under the hinging lid, and when you angle the machine down into the dark, the head and arm of it disappear smoothly under the top like they never existed. Whoever owned it last left blue thread in the needle. I can picture the self-stitched hem of her dress, the music crackling from a slick record. Her feet pumping in matte Mary Janes.

I spent the last week in Anchorage, finishing my MFA degree. Some of my best friends are in the program. It’s hard to be there and it’s harder to leave. Being in a low-residency writing program is kind of like being in an in-patient therapy group. For two weeks of the year, the last four years, I have lived with and written with and listened with a small group of eight other nonfiction writers. We know stories about each other that our spouses haven’t even heard. We share bathrooms without fans, books scrawled with notes we’ve written to ourselves and would be too self-conscious to lend to anyone else. Some people have purposely not finished their coursework just so they can be in the program another year.

This time in Anchorage, I found a new pool. I have swum in Anchorage before, in the heavily chlorinated pool at UAA, but the pool I found on the Alaska Pacific University campus is even closer to the dorms and it’s a salt water pool. I don’t know much about how salt water chlorination works, but I do know that this kind of water stings less and my skin isn’t as dry after swimming salted laps.

And I also realize that the longer I struggle against the pain of weight-bearing knees, the more I need to swim. Last spring, returning to New Orleans, I found that the pool at Tulane had been converted to salt water, too. Both places where I’ve gotten degrees are places where I have found solace in salt, in those repetitions of free and fly, in thinking without speaking, and in contemplation without having to call it something as serious and uncertain as prayer or meditation.

Someone recently recommended that I read Lynne Cox’s essays on swimming. I consider her a hero–she broke the men’s and women’s world records for swimming the English Channel when she was 15 and 16 years old. She was the first person to swim the Bering Strait, separating the U.S. from Russia, thus opening the border between the two countries for the first time in 48 years when she swam without a shark cage or a wet suit or lanolin grease. I’ve only competed in open-water races a few times in Colorado when people have cheered from the sandy beaches of sun-warmed lakes. But I have jumped into the numbing water up here and felt that thrill of being part of a forbidden body of water, treading above deep black, limbs throwing water fast, and racing, not out of pride but out of instinct.

As I sit here in the library, the water pushes and pulls in and out of the cove a stone’s throw from the window. Luke drifts by in his boat, but doesn’t know I can see him in here as he shoves halibut carcasses off the swim step with a booted foot. I want to get in the water here, and I’ve been reading about how different the techniques are between pool swimming and open water swimming. Luke says if I swim in the ocean up here, we’ll have to tie a flag to my butt or I’ll have to haul a kayak behind me so ships know where I am.

I’m fine with that. It’s amazing how little I have known about stroke until I started looking it up–you can be graceful and have a long glide in a pool, but in open water, the chop can cut your forward motion in half. Hips drop, you miss your “catch” (the moment when your hand enters the water and should pull you ahead), you might over-rotate when you lift an arm to take a breath. I wonder what else I’ve been doing in isolation, in my own easy pools, without knowing that there are techniques for improvement.

It has been cold up here. Rain like a crappy showerhead that neither drenches nor consists. This is not swimming weather, people say, but to Lynne and to me, it is, it always is. “I knew this was a sea of dreams, almost a sacred place,” Lynne Cox writes in Swimming to Antarctica, upon arriving at a pool where she will learn to change everything about the way she swims. I think that looking out at the water here, its surface flickering like static on a screen this afternoon, the wake from Luke’s boat sending a white line towards these windows where I’m waiting.

I’ll be back in Colorado in a week, where it’s 100 degrees and I can swim 50 meters without stopping to turn around. I look forward to life in both places, but the coming and going never feels tide-like, natural. I wrench myself from each place, from the friends, from the sea, from the pool behind locked doors, and I know that I’ll miss it here too as soon as the islands spread out, bird’s eye view–my favorite way to see them–as I’m leaving. Right now, the cruise ship is pulling out of town and the fog is pulling in over Sealing Cove and I can look out this window and see what Lynne means.

I’ve been in Sitka for three days and have woken twice to the optimism brought here by the sun. Yesterday, Natalie and her two-year-old twins and I hiked up above town, stopping to yell “poop!” at dog poop and to sling rocks into a trickling stream. At the end of our hike, we walked to the pebbly beach and plucked tiny black crabs from where they hid under helmet-shaped rocks. Nat and her boys had just taken a trip to Colorado and the boys did the same thing there as they do here–peeled stones half their size from mucky riverbeds and screamed “CRABS!!!” whether they saw any or not. I love how they love what’s small, how their curiosity never stops them from stepping in shit or getting it wrong.

My favorite thing to watch them do is share things with each other. On the airplane coming to Sitka, Sage, the twin I was holding, wanted to give some dried mango to his brother, Stratton, who was sitting two rows behind us. “Give! Stratton!” he yelled, out of nowhere, through sticky orange teeth. Then he clambered up the front of me, popped his head over the back of my seat and stretched his little arm as far as it could possibly go until it the mango reached Natalie and then, at last, his smiling, expectant brother.

Before I left Colorado on that plane, I’d had a few meetings with literary agents. I pitched my book to them, I tried to tell them it was good without saying it was good. (Because who knows if it is.) I tried to explain the “narrative drive” of the book, but because I write creative nonfiction, narrative drive is an awkward thing to talk about. Narrative drive is the direction I have moved in my own life. It might be a quiet story, but it’s the story I have. I said this. I think that might have been considered flailing, but at least if I flailed, I did so inside the truth.

The agents told me two things. The one from New York said that his biggest regret was that he didn’t beat the shit out of his best friend who slept with his girlfriend. The second agent, the one I liked, said that he’d like to see my book in-full, but he also said that a lot of writers end up putting their first book in the drawer.

Which felt like a little bit of death.

I have worked on this project for almost ten years, and I don’t know if it is loud enough (would I want it to be?) to be sold to a big publishing house (would I want it to be?) or if it has narrative drive. But I do know that I will continue to work on what it still needs, and that I will not put this stack of pages inside some musty rectangular compartment, into some space that opens, then closes, and snuffs out contact and light. Because if I did not publish these pages, that is where they would go–inside the dresser where all my childhood journals went, the one with the Serenghetti lions on the front, the one made of cushy green felt, the three that have one line written on the first page and then nothing else.

I don’t journal anymore because I don’t write for myself.

To put this piece of work into a drawer would be saying that I wrote this book solely for me, and I didn’t. I wrote it for Kate and Ashley, for Michael and Brenda. I wrote it for everyone who has ever understood New Orleans and for everyone who hasn’t.

Crab! I am shouting.

Mango! See me reaching?

What disturbs me is that some of them can’t swim, so they strap sky-blue flotation belts–the kind the older ladies use in aqua-aerobics–around their rolly bellies. As the kids waddled in last week on their first day of summer break, dripping and shivering in speckles of water from the locker room showers, I tried to keep swimming laps. But the more kids that cannonballed into the pool, the more nervous I got. There must have been around 50 kids, mostly obese, mostly unsupervised.

Underwater, I could see their waving skin and the straps dangling from their floaty belts. What if one of those flotation devices slipped off? What if a strap wrapped itself around a 4-year-old neck? Each thunk I heard underwater, I feared a kid had gone off the slide in the deep end and hadn’t been able to push himself back up to the surface for air. I’d stop swimming, look up, and scan for possible corpses. I must be becoming my mother who worried when I wore hoodie sweatshirts to bed that the shoelace in the hood would strangle me to death while I slept.

No children drowned, but I’m also disturbed by the proliferation of mini-boobies on the boys in my neighborhood. I live in Baker. The people who free swim at La Familia are overweight and Hispanic. The people who wind through the water doing laps are white and slender and can swim. There’s something wrong with this picture. Sometimes, when I’m swimming, I want to apologize for my ability and all my years of swim team.

Instead, we share the water, and I think that regardless of our differences, being in water together is a healing thing for most people. I just discovered this month that Congress Park has an Olympic-sized outdoor lap pool, and on 80-degree afternoons, I love swimming in the extra-wide lane there, chatting with the triathletes and the elderly and the new-to-the-pool middle-aged ladies who enter tentatively and aren’t sure how circle swimming works. When it’s crowded, you swim counterclockwise, round and around each other until you know the warp and weft of someone else’s ripples pushing you as they pass.

Despite the nicer pools in Denver, I prefer La Familia. People in Baker seem to be nicer than the ones who swim at Wash Park or Congress Park or the Five Points Glenarm Rec Center. And funny things always happen at La Familia. There’s an old lady named Hilda who’s in her 90s and sends me a huge smile any time she catches my eye between breaths, and a kid named Michael who swims every day, all day, and doesn’t care how he lands so that by the time he leaves, his back is a prickled pink from landing on it the wrong way any time he tries to dive. He reminds me of myself before belly flops and jack-knives became faux pas, and he reminds me that swimming is fun even when I’m really tired of all the work it takes to be skinny.

And then there was this: About half-way through my workout last week, just as I was beginning to really be alarmed at the number of young swimmers in the water, the lifeguard blew the whistle and yelled, “EVERYONE OUT! THERE’S PUKE IN THE POOL!!!”

All the kids clambered out screaming and the lap swimmers snapped their caps off their heads and everyone tiptoed down to the deep end to get a closer look at the nebulous cloud of vomit floating around in the deep end. Most of the kids stayed on the side of the pool, but I got one quick look at the brown mess, then rushed out to nab one of two showers in the locker room. While I was soaping up, I started to smell something warm and buttery coming at my nose through the curtain.

I popped my head out. Two little boys and a little girl with black-black hair and quarter-sized, round black eyes were sitting on the bench, staring straight at me. They were about 3 or 4 years old. They were eating corn on the cob. “Hi!” I said. “Hi!” They all said back, corn moving from left to right between their small teeth. It was all over their faces, little nubs of dark yellow corn. “Yum,” I said. And the little girl held hers out to me and said, “Want some?”

I work with students who are ten years younger than me right now. Some of my favorites are graduating this year, and I remember that excitement of going forward but not quite wanting to leave. That’s how I feel this time of year, too. When people start eating on patios, I pack my down coat into a duffle bag and switch out shorts for fleece pants. In Alaska last night, Luke was eating homemade swordfish sushi at a friend’s house that overlooks Silver Bay while I was waiting for Draino to undo the hair clogging our shower. I emptied out my closet. My mom worked her magic on the wood floors. I wish we had one of those vacuum cleaners that pops out of a little house and does it’s own thing while you clean the sink. 

As I piled dresses I won’t wear this year into the closet in the study, the beginning of my book banged around inside my head.  Do I start it here in Denver, with swimming, or do I start it in New Orleans, with leaving? I am ready for the next book about neither. I haven’t written right here in so long because all I have time to write is different versions of the same thing–memories of coming and going, clothes in different closets, that start-of-summer feeling that no matter how hard I work, I’ll still run out of time. 

Every summer, when I talk to my mom from Alaska, I miss the freshly planted flowers and the privilege of the reappearing sun. When I talked to Luke last night, I longed for that last glance at the ocean, past 10pm and still white with sky.

While I was pushing the bubbles into stretchy mounds and reading about Pamuk’s hometown, I thought about this Alaskan town where my ferry docked for a half-day two summers ago. 90% of the residents in the town live in a single building; a communistic cement block of 20-or so stories. In those layers of rooms that rise out of fog and mountains,

generations of families live on top of each other. I forgot the name of the town almost as soon as I left it, and had to look it up just now. Whittier. I may have even written about it before, but it doesn’t stick–the whole place is like some eerie dream that leaves abruptly and reappears in flashes like some kind of acid-without-ever-having-done-acid flashback. When in Whittier, the hours slid past without speech. I wandered past abandoned buildings in spitting rain and wanted to both stay and leave.

To get from Whittier’s unloading dock to its Tower, you have to walk through a narrow tunnel lit from above by swinging yellow lights. I wanted to call someone to make sure they knew if I reached the other side, but phones didn’t work in Whittier, or at least not that day. People leaned diagonally across doorways of sad hotels and leaky markets. Sometimes I think of that place for no reason at all but its sadness. And then I really thought about it for a while today when I read the epigraph in Pamuk’s book from Ahmet Rasim:

“The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy.”

Sometimes I wonder what Denver would feel like to me if I had never left: would I think about living elsewhere or would I be like Pamuk who writes: “My imagination requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view.”

The view from here is of the streets turning the same sugar-white as the sky. Metal stovepipes pump out pinkish plumes, and the top halves of the branches outside our windows are white and getting whiter. Tomorrow, the high will be 3 degrees. This morning, I couldn’t get through the ice on the windshield so I sat inside the car breathing into my hands in shifts. I am ready for spring. This weather makes me want to eat and sleep and forget all responsibility. (Which is what I’m actually doing by writing this).

Today, a gift arrived in the mail today from a friend of a friend: cassette tapes coiled up with the rhythmic chants of a Russian choir. I put it on while the snow picked up in curvy gusts around the window and I read of buildings against buildings in Turkey, where it rains on the ruins, where Christianity is disappearing. Do you ever feel like you’re supposed to go somewhere and you’re not sure why? For some reason, even though I have no connection to the place, Turkey has felt that way to me–the oldness, the sense of echoes, the closeness of the sea.

In the meantime, in the last few weeks, I painted the largest wall in the living room a peacock bluish-teal, dragged Luke to two lumber yards to look for wavy, half-rotten wood for shelving. One night, I came home and he surprised me with the L-shaped floaters we’d talked about but not planned on constructing for another week.

Building book holders and painting are worthy (and maybe less melancholy) substitutions for Turkish travel. I love that uncertainty and risk right before the bristles pull back against the white wall, right before the screw burrows into the just-right yield of the plaster. When I stand back, I’m in a new room. I love this color–earthy and of-ocean, warm and cool, familiar and exotic at the same time–and it reminds me of somewhere I’ve never been.

Cloudy with a Chance of Crying