Washed Clean
In the Hallway with Cynthia Voight's A Solitary Blue
Welcome, new subscribers! This post is the final chapter of my memoir, At Home with Books. It’s longer than my recent poetry readings and flash meditations, which will return next week. Paid subscribers can read the entire memoir here. The attic/cult and porch/autism chapters are available to all.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
– from Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”
Asheville, North Carolina . 2007
One night, as my Asheville life was drawing to a close, I stayed in the home of friends in a different part of town. They owned a rambling Victorian house with a sweeping staircase that rose openly from the front hall up to a wide-windowed landing before taking two more curves to arrive in the upstairs hallway. I was keeping their four-year-old daughter while the mother labored in the hospital to bring their son into the world.
“I’ll spend the night with her,” I committed, and they took me up on the offer. I was single, after all, and I had this flexibility. So I slept in the master bedroom across the hall from their golden-haired girl, asleep in her own bed. I didn’t sleep a wink. I was too aware. I heard every creak and crack in that house's old beams throughout the night and constantly wondered if the child was okay, if she would need me.
In the morning, the father returned and took us to breakfast. We sat in a diner booth, and there were pancakes on the table. I was a mere matter of weeks from moving down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, three hours and forty-five minutes away from my sibling-cousins, for that university job and the beginning of library school. Which is to say, I was on the precipice of leaving behind everything that mattered.
The father asked something simple–how I was doing, or were my plans coming along alright. I opened my mouth, looked down at the stack of pancakes, and burst into tears. His eyes grew round.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” I tried to explain, but the sobs came heavy and hard. I couldn’t explain anything, tears running hot down my cheeks and not stopping.
Sometime during the previous night in their house, I had stood on the landing midway up the stairs and gazed out the window. Asheville’s Town Mountain stood in the near distance, sprinkled with the lights of houses. The weather was cold, but no snow. The hill sketched a dark outline against a clear night sky, and I was swept up, called out of myself, and centered in a manner I still cannot explain. That mountain, those lights, the dark beauty and the landing itself were intensely mine.
I stood on the landing for centuries. Every moment in my life afterward seems to flow from that one. I knew it couldn’t last, so I drank deep, then turned up the last flight of stairs to bed, but not sleep. I didn’t know yet how the night would go.
Eastern Shore, Virginia . 2021
For one week each year, our family packs bathing suits and beach shoes, tosses bikes and a pop-up beach tent in the car, and heads for the same briny water, low woodland landscape, where sandy marsh bottoms toss up cordgrass through the water toward the sun behind weather-beaten farmhouses. We go to Virginia’s Eastern Shore.