Today I woke up early; the alarm went off after less than 5 hours of sleep, and I crafted excuses in my head as I continued to fight my way in and out of dreaming, drafted conversations through the hour of pressing the snooze button, finally hurling myself from bed with the phrase fuck it on my tongue. I threw an assortment of random things into my suitcase: arugula, a bikini, 3 beers, 2 dresses, what else do I need? And boarded the bus for the coast. Today I learned the lineage of my family in a more deep and direct way, found this photo of my paternal grandmother’s maternal uncles. Yes, This is from whence I came.

I met my grandmother’s cousin today, on her 92nd birthday. She was a real spitfire in her youth, they tell me, and I see it in the twinkle in her eye. They remember her for her love of adventure when she came to live with them in St Croix, her wigs, her lovers. Yes, this woman is of my flesh and blood. Later, my father and I sort out family stories, immediate and extended. I am so grateful for this time here with him. I find myself closing my eyes, trying to draw out the family tree, connect the stories to the branches, sew in all of the connections.

This afternoon in my father’s old bread truck, the one that was once his brother’s, gutted and refitted like a boat—a place for everything, neat and tidy systems, a love and careful attention paid to each inch in a way that most homes never get—we drove in the screaming van, past flashing lights, a car plowed straight into the fence. That just happened, I say out loud to no-one in particular, meaning nothing in particular. I watch as people converge around the car. We are headed toward a lake we used to swim at when I was a child, a lake I have no recollection of. I expected that I might remember it when we arrive, but I don’t. We circle the parking lot, then turn back. When we pass by the accident site again, there is a swarm of ambulances and firetrucks, men in uniform. I look closer and the entire roof of the car has been peeled back. There are people working diligently and there are stretchers. In the time we are abstractly exploring memory, men had peeled the roof from the car, like a sardine can. In a moment, I am overcome with emotion. My hand flies to my chest; tears burn at my eyes; my breath catches in my throat. Death. I repeat something akin to prayer. Please let them be ok. Please let them be ok. Strangers. It wasn’t long ago I was having a conversation with a friend about the moments that everything changes, the moments where life will never be the same. What was playing on the radio moments before that car needed to be peeled open like a sardine can? What microdrama was being played out inside that car? Was someone in the backseat causing a disturbance? Was everyone lost in thought? Where were they headed? Was it someone travelling alone? Were they thinking about where they had just come from, where they were headed? Now, instead, a sea of flashing lights, stretchers, curled back white metal.

I hold my hand to my chest for a long time as we continue to drive, and then we arrive at dinner. I sit across the booth from my father and we don’t talk about it. We talk about family, about relationships, about the nature of knowing self, knowing other. In some way we are exactly talking about what we saw. We are talking about what it means, the fierceness and immediacy of life, the urgency. How do we navigate the ways we love each other, the ways we hurt each other, while holding firm to that there may not be a tomorrow? There may not be a tomorrow. I remember all of the times I thought I might lose the people who I love. I have received too many of those phone calls for how many years I have been here. I remember, too, that moment of spinning, on the road not too far from here, the car careening across the highway, my hot chocolate making an arc across the car, the fear and amazement in both of our eyes as we acknowledged our nearness to the edge of something, our powerlessness against it. In the end it was nothing. It was an encapsulated moment where we got to walk away with nothing to show for it but our stories, some scrapes on a car that wasn’t even mine. Still, the closeness to the edge stays with me.

Fragility has never been a hard concept for me to grasp.

So, when I look at my father, I remember what he looked like in a hospital bed as well as what he looked like with his hand on the tiller, the sea and the horizon behind him. Yes, we are all of these things, all of us. Today it is easy to remember how much I love humanity, how much we are all a part of one another, how lovely and poetic are our struggles. Today I love them—our struggles—yours and mine, the particular ones. Today I love this beachhouse, even the fights we had in that yard, along with the memories of my feet reaching just to the edge of that chair as my mother’s hands tied my shoes. I love every bit of it, the ways we loved each other, the ways we failed to, the ways we are all working and making it better now. Yes, today I love every last inch of it, and as for the people in that sardine can car, please let them be ok, let them have another day, let them find a day where they can love every last bit of it, every inch, and then sleep, in peace, and wake to another good day; let them have gratitude and peace. Let us all have that. Let us find a way to love unfettered, to see clearly, and to know how lucky we really are.

I spent the morning with my hands in the dirt—what little of it there is out back behind my apartment, the cracks of earth breaking through the concrete, enough for dandelions and morning glory to push their way skyward, enough for me to come upstairs with dirt under my nails. I miss having a garden, a yard, a place to feel like I really inhabit this world, a place to cultivate roots that dig their way deeper and deeper toward the center of something.

I am grieving today, feeling the loss for my hometown, for the world. Still, I know I am grieving in that privileged way where I can afford to abstract, where I can draw connections and think about things like love and nostalgia, where I can wonder why the ways we take care of ourselves and each other are all so tenuous, so grasping.  I never knew him well, not well enough, not as well as I wanted to. He worked at the record store when I was a teenager, and his smile was enough to make me stumble for words and blush. Later, we knew each other casually, a conversation here and there, a nod on the street, but the details of it don't really matter.

They found him floating in the harbor.

That detail shouldn't matter either, but it's all I can think of, his eyes, his smile, and the reduction to a body floating in the water, an article in the local paper. Short dry sentences, body of liveaboard man found floating. So I pull weeds this morning, under the beginning of the warmth of spring, and I think about how we are all so entangled with one another, but yet so far off, how life and living and moving through this world together are so messy. I think about how I'm pretty sure I'm doing it all wrong, but somehow I am alive and strong enough to be pulling weeds in the sunshine, how my own dark nights have always given way to morning, how I feel undeserving and grateful, and how cruel it seems that so much of this is just luck. And then I just feel sad, so deeply sad for this man, sad for those who loved him, sad for people I love who are feeling his absence deep in the marrow of their bones.

Hurricane

It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to 
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

--Mary Oliver

five minutes to five

His name was Bill. He was the second old man to approach me today. The first told me my pants remind him of a hot rod, so, when Bill approached, my defenses were up. He wore a baggy sweatshirt and a ballcap; he carried a cane. There was a tentativeness in his gait that made me understand the depth of his sincerity. I overheard the young woman at the counter tell him, no, we don't carry domestic beer, a subtle lilt of judgement or dismissiveness in her undertone. Alright, then I'll have a pale ale he says, and shudders a little when she tells him it'll be four dollars. He digs through his pocket, hands her a bill, and carefully refolds the change with trembling hands and tucks it back in his pocket.

His nose is purple; his hair is a subtly greasy white, his wrists are papery and bruised, his eyes far away and sad. He's come for the VA, he tells me—after asking me to move my purse and taking the seat next to me—but he got here too late, and now it's closed until Monday. He'll have to stay in a hotel all weekend. He had a heart attack on Wednesday, he says, and then they found a spot on his lung. His wife died recently, he tells me, and now he's sick too, a far-off sort of floundering in his eyes. He coughs; it is the quietest, deepest cough I have ever heard. It is like ice breaking a hundred miles beneath the surface of the earth.

I ask when his wife died. January twenty-second, he tells me, five minutes to five. For a moment his eye contact is piercing, but then he looks away; I get the sense that I couldn't reach him if I tried. He looks as if he is drowning. Slowly. He is drowning and he is not fighting it. He says something incomplete about not knowing what to do with his days, about spending too much money. All I can do is listen, offer my attention. I offer to look up directions to his hotel; I lecture him good-naturedly about allowing his worried son to take care of him. Allow him this, I say, It is his turn. He tells me he is 72. He talks of driving trucks all across the country. He does not get too deep—not beyond his five minutes to five. Of course, I can't really imagine anything deeper. He was between busses, he tells me, when he collapsed, on Wednesday, and woke up in the hospital. A heart attack. And then they found a spot on my lung, he tells me quietly, repeating his story. He is making it true, or untrue, scrambling to find the truth in it, grappling to take ownership of this, his story. I see it in his face, the struggle to make it his own, the distance from this new truth, from everything that's happened since five minutes to five on January twenty-second.

Official business

My art blog has taken a little trip and moved itself over here.  (http://shelleychamberlinblog.blogspot.com/)

Join me.

Printmaking with Portland Cocktail Week

Last month I had the privilege and pleasure of leading a t-shirt printing event for Portland Cocktail Week. Bartenders + ink + stencils + t-shirts = fun!

Today I woke up with that small sour lump lodged between my throat and my sinuses. After a brief foray out into the world to meet a friend and his lovely new lady, I retired to my apartment to hunker down and hibernate. But when my dinner plans fell through and all I wanted was chicken soup and ginger lemon tea, I donned my rubber boots, my goretex jacket, and my newly made fleece armwarmers, and rode my bike through the downpour to the grocery store.

Outside, the leaves glowed yellow and crimson under the looming grey sky, and squirrels darted back and forth across the slick streets gathering nuts. That's actually what brought me here today, the sentence assembling itself in my mind as I rode, the chuckle. I've gathered just about enough nuts, myself. Don't need anymore of those, thank you. Wishing as I pedaled, that it was spring, that it was time for planting, that the wild sloppy summer was splayed out in front of me. Wondering what, exactly, I have to harvest this season—everything I planted seemingly razed to the ground. But I thought of those squirrels, scurrying up trees, gathering nuts and seeds, tucking them away; this isn't exactly their harvest either. They've planted trees over the years, but not these ones. And that offered some solace, a flash of new perspective. I've been planting seeds all of my life. I can take my harvest from anywhere that has borne fruit; it doesn't have to be the new growth planted last spring. I don't have to have planted it at all.

The metaphor made my breath expand in the rain, and made my afternoon seem a little bit softer. So I brought home my goods from the store, and made soup in the glowing yellow light of my kitchen, curled up on my couch with my cup of tea, and listened with gratitude to the wind and rain outside my window, the soup bubbling on the stove.