Smith Essay
As a little girl I spent a lot of time down on the floor, with my head on my arms dreaming. I'd run my fingers down the seam between the wide maple planks in our front room, the place where the section of house from 1802 conjoined its more recent kin from 1816. We really only had one house total, but old farmer Bradley had one complete section of post and beam dragged by mule team from across the pasture and spliced neatly to the original home he built for himself and his small family near the turn of the century. I liked to speculate that it was for his daughter Julia Bradley, just married and ready to settle a cozy homestead of her own with all the creature comforts of never having to fully leave the original. I liked to think kindly of the first residents out on Whiteman Rd. I knew them all by name due to the small village cemetery a half-mile from the house and what was left of their family tree, encased behind glass at the top of our stairs. One winter night my older sister by marriage, Sarah, interrupted my dreaming and asked if I wanted to come camp out in her room, It was cold she said and it would be nice to have company. It was an unusual request since at the time she was an independent and somewhat aloof tween, and I was a gawky, spacey, "ankle biter", but I was eager as always for attention and jumped on her offer. I made ready, brushed the teeth, washed the face, and pulled on the nightshirt and shorts. I found her already in bed sans orthodontic retainer, which was a relief on my part, I am not ashamed to say that thing made her grimace so hard it was a little difficult not to imagine her as the macabre lead in Silence of the Lambs. In truth, I would have welcomed the time together to pick her brain and girl talk nonetheless. The girl talk was not to be, I could tell by the grim expression; grim, considered, and poised. She waited till I was under the covers to begin. "Julia, I need to tell you something, I love you and I want you to know, I'm leaving and I 'm not coming back. I already asked my mom and Rob, and they say I can live with them full time from now on instead of part time here with dad and your mom." I have no idea what I said at that point but I must have registered the sadness and loss I felt snaking down the center of my body out to every finger on both hands. Her face lost some of its poise and her voice was soft. "Julia, you are strong, I think you are going to be ok, you are smart and tough and funny. I want you to remember some things after I'm gone. I want you to remember to brush your teeth every night. I want you to do your homework from now on, even math. I want you to be more careful with your stuff and put it away after you use it. If you just get a grip on this stuff I think you are going to make it alright."
This may seem to you like strange advice for a twelve year old to give to an eight-year old younger sibling, but sometimes it felt to us like we were old women in little bodies. Unfortunately it just evolved that way, her father was a lapsed catholic, unemployed, "poet-machinist" with a bottomless prescription for lithium and a nasty habit of swinging from the fences when one of his bi-polar manias was detected and reported to Dr. Sobel his psychiatrist by my mother. Piggy bank quarters would disappear replaced by pints of malted drink, lamps would have to be replaced with dizzying frequency, mom could be found clamped yet again to the earpiece on the telephone lost to us and cocooned in prayer. There were days my mother and I were both "pieces of shit" and there were days when my mother was "the perfect wife" and I was destined to be a "future novelist" or "professional athlete".
After that conversation with Sarah I wish I could tell you I took her advice. Instead I kept dreaming. I dreamt my way through the next eight years of school and occupied as much of my waking life as possible with novels by a motley crew of authors including Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Hunter S. Thompson, and even for a brief period Voltaire and Camus. Candide by Voltaire was a chance discovery in the large print section of our high school library where I had gone to be alone. It was huge and perma-bound in this strange glossy cardboard like material. It had a grey background and what looked like a drunken marionette pope stenciled in crimson on the cover. I had no idea who Voltaire was and the closest thing to satire I'd experienced up to that point was the snarky commentary my friend Ethan would let fly behind Mr. Sink's back in civics class. I would come to love that book, I think I read it three times my sophomore year. Similarly I found The Stranger by Camus by happy accident. I had been into The Clash for a while, The Best of The Clash was one of the few tapes Sarah left behind in her exodus and I listened to it over and over. When I told my friend Penelope that I was into it she surprised me by offering up a tidbit about how a lyric to the song Stranger was actually a reference to the novel of the same title by Camus. That was enough to send me back to the library for my own copy. When I was at school everything was fine, I could concentrate, learn, vie for my teacher's attention with the rest of the class. I joined the cross-country running team, the school newspaper, and the drama club. I represented my class at Harvard Model Congress, there was just one hitch; my stepfather couldn't stay on his Lithium. Home remained a chaotic port fit only for eating and sleeping, the fighting and occasional random violence inspired an anxiety so profound it is difficult for me not to feel it now years and years away from then. I did very little schoolwork in those years; I confused a lot of teachers with the chasm between my perceived aptitude and the rate at which I completed my assignments.
Then a series of unanticipated events combined to take me far from home. I was stopped by security guards at a bus station while attempting to run away with my best friend to a relative's vacant cabin, I was released back into the custody of my parents and beaten so badly by my stepfather that I required hospitalization, and I was subsequently taken in by a friend's family in a neighboring town.
Somehow I was still not ready to take Sarah's advice and I did poorly in my new home. I was most likely suffering from a mild version of post-traumatic stress disorder, and I was just not able to shake a stubborn depression. I wanted badly to feel a sense of connection and love. I started skipping class with my girlfriend Mariasha and spending too much time with the wrong crowd. I met a boy from Northern California who had spent significant portions of his life living with his mother and four siblings in the back of a retrofitted school bus traveling from town to town. There was something about the lack of permanence in his life that mirrored my own and I felt understood, at the time that was somehow enough. I saved up just enough cash to go Dutch on a used Plymouth Reliant and we took off on a traveling adventure that included Portland Maine, Asheville North Carolina, Austin Texas, and our grand finale the Big Island of Hawaii.
I think it was in Hawaii that I started to understand how I could heed my sister's words. I'd arrived on the island with the clothes on my back and little more, and on our second day there I had this incredibly strong instinct to walk toward the mountainside to make camp. Sage tried to argue with me, but I can be pretty stubborn when push comes to shove and so we walked past the center of Kailua Kona, past the condos and beaches, further and further uphill along the side of the Highway. The early morning sun was at our backs, we had our thumbs out, and I was feeling optimistic. It wasn't long before a beat up Tacoma pulled up alongside and we were making our acquaintances with Donald Mitts. Donny turned out to be an upland produce farmer and just happened to be looking for two farmhands for the season on his forty-acre farm Ohana Mala.
I finally had few enough belongings so that each one could be easily put away after I was done with it, I had fresh mountain spring water to brush my teeth each night, and I was finally doing my homework, learning to identify the invasive species that could blight out Donny's Arugula.
I was healing; I was learning to work with my hands and every muscle in my arms, back, and legs. I was soaking up Donny's stories and plant lore like a sponge. He had piping hot Kona Coffe black and steaming waiting at our break table every morning, fresh from the farm. Everything a person could need was there; fresh eggs, greens, coffee, and camaraderie. So what that it was a ten mile hitch hike into town, I'd visit the library in Honaunau once a week to read the newspaper and check out the latest librarian recommended novel.
There was just one problem. While I was doing my homework in a sense, I felt that something was still missing; there was still unfulfilled promise in my life. I felt cut off from the potential that Sarah had etched in my mind that lonely night. There was also the matter of my grandmother. During the last half of my teens she had not fared well. She had been in and out of remission for a pernicious form of lung cancer. She'd learned too late along with many in her generation the perils of smoking. She was a special force in my life, port in the storm, high-octane intellect, and gatekeeper to an extensive library of great books. She was also the first woman in our family to earn a college diploma; it was a major goal for grandma Rachel that I do the same. In1944 in defiance of her father's wish that she become a housewife on an adjacent farm, my grandmother deployed to Camp Lejune, for Marine Corps training. She was one of the first waves of lady mechanics to support Marine air squadrons in her role as aviation mechanic. She came back from her service with the ambition to teach English literature and the skills to repair any toaster, radio, or circuit breaker with a pulse. She could and would do both. From my hide out in Hawaii I keenly felt my lack of measuring up to these goals. I badly wanted to make these women proud, and it was with this in mind that I packed it in and flew back home.
Well-makers lead the water wherever they like; fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves.
- The Dhammapada, v80
It was not an overnight transformation. I had to learn in fits and starts that there were limits to what I could achieve, and that nevertheless I had the capacity to shape myself. I had to take the sum of each experience and weigh the measure of what I could retain, and which lessons should inform my path. When you make anything from scratch it is imperative that the ingredients be the best you can find, there will be no artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers, or thickeners to hide behind and it was the same with my new life path. I took from my high school experience that original desire to listen to all the lyrics in my favorite songs and apply the metaphors to my reading and writing, basically the desire to independently seek out knowledge despite the distractions raging in the background. I took from my time on the road and in Hawaii the ability to relate well to the diverse assortment of people I come across in day-to-day life and the ethic to toil on through planting, culling, and harvesting to fruition. I took from my family life the knowledge that a positive attitude and high level of determination can help you develop your highest capacities even when put to a seemingly impossible test. From my childhood I also took the ability to identify, and come to the assistance of the emotionally fragile and hurting. In the past five years I've applied these lessons to an assortment of endeavors. I've done everything from farm mixed greens on Hawaii's Big Island to hold the post of narrative designer at a Los Angeles video game start up. For the past two years I've coupled my work as a full time student at the Community College of Vermont with my post as the Inn Keeper of an eight bedroom Country Inn. In this time I've watched the video game I helped develop earn the prestigious International Game Design Conference's award for best independent game of the year. Harvested five years of delicious fruits and vegetables in my garden, and made the Dean's list twice. Last year when a good friend needed help resettling herself and her young son after fleeing an abusive relationship I formed a group page on facebook to facilitate babysitting, apartment hunting, and trips to legal aid while she worked to become a nationalized citizen and retain custody of her son. These experiences and many more prove to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's nothing written in stone till you sign off on it, and you need not accept the statistical forecasts for your life no matter what the neighs sayers predict.
