On St. Patrick’s Day,

I stole the peppermint extract.

I shuffled the tiny bottle

between potatoes

and laundry detergent.

I frazzled over coupons,

and fussed with plastic bags.

I practiced my lines

for the getting-caught-scenario.

But I wasn’t caught.

On the following Tuesday,

I turned myself in to you.

You put my shoulders in your hands

and asked me

to never steal

what we can one day afford.

I learned that you are not my Clyde,

You are my cop.

I wasn’t ready to be caught.

On two March’s plus one summer later,

I told you so.

I stole these words.

I stole these ones, too.

I stole the ones I used to love you,

I stole the ones I used to leave you.

I am stealing what I can afford.

On one month shy of St. Patrick’s Day,

two houses gone,

I don’t have you–

I have one small bottle

(minus three drips)

of peppermint extract.

…mind over matter mind over mattermindovermattermindovermatter...

I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I knew that the mantra seemed well equipped to help me press my feet forward with my chin up.  With any success, I would break into a trot before dinner time.  If I had really considered the ordeal, mind over matter would tell me to put on a damn pair of shoes and ride my bike or sidewalk chalk the kid equivalent of cave paintings over the abundance of concrete that rolled between the family compound yards.  But instead, I found myself practicing for the inevitable hostage situation I would one day find myself in, and– thanks to my early diligence– get out of myself.

It was a movie or a book or a comment taken out of context between adults or, likely, a lunch table know-it-all who tipped me off: the first thing taken from a hostage is his shoes.  I was alert to the information, but blase.  It wasn’t my strong sense of security in the world mostly being a good place, or the fact that I had the secret service protection of a divine creator that kept me cool.  I had spent more nights than I had years predicting my future entanglement with danger, where a prominent foreign leader or a years-on-the-lam Chicago mobster zero in on one blonde-headed Western Pennsylvanian girl as the precise victim who, with her teary brown doe eyes, could twist and play the heartstrings of people on a national scale, resulting in a bad man winning a ransom of more emeralds than 30 horses could carry.  Thankfully for the world, however, these masked-gun-slinging-illegal-treasure-seeking schmucks will have preyed on the wrong 9-year-old, what with my carefully planned mind games and keen-escape-route-finding eye and– if necessary, in a real pinch– my powerful tactic of stealing his gun when he accidentally falls asleep to the smooth sounds of my lullaby medley.  After my successful escape and the turning over of one of the world’s most infamous villains, Mr. President would award me and my family half of the emeralds they had to conjure for the ransom, and however many puppies I asked for.

The plan, of course, was flawless.  Kindly pardon my lack of crippling fear in light of this new trivia.  It was going to take a much bigger wrench than a couple of missing shoes to knock into my hostage escape know-how.

Maybe for some lesser experienced adolescent, being barefoot and afraid would be cause to reconsider their precise exit from captivity.  But for me, barefooted-ness was practically an inherited gene.  My mother was regularly pointed out by members of our church to first time visitors in post-Sunday-morning services as the-one-without-any-shoes.  She could be caught hustling from one Sunday school room to another, panty hose lined feet pattering around the red, thick carpet, searching for the simple closed-toed’s she’d abandoned two hours back in favor of freedom.  The message was clear: shoes were for suckers, and mine could be found strewn about with clasps wrenched open in a hustle to run faster and quieter on the third story balcony than my clunky foot-covered pals.

My secret woods witching gave me practice on forest floors and tall grasses, fancying myself a psychic; but my third eye blazed like my Christian conscience, and I promptly returned the shoes to my feet and my apologies to the Lord upon return from these barefooted expeditions.  The huntress-meets-medicine-woman allotted my stamina for cold, as the freezing stream water of the Allegheny River tributary at the foot of our cabin’s property ran across my feet, the thick silty mud oozing between my toes.  I turned rocks slowly from the stream bed, with the least amount of watery rustle, calling on the stillness of my ancient sisters to hold my blue-ing feet down for a few more moments until I spotted the awaited crayfish and scooped it up triumphant into the white 5 gallon bucket.

The bottoms of my un-sandled dogs burned until they calloused in the summer months, as I passed from warm white concrete to the boiling tar of black asphalt on an errand from my mother to my grandmother’s house in back of the compound.  There was also the option to avoid the asphalt and take on the damp, maple-shaded grass of Great Aunt Mildred’s yard in between, but the easier route came at the price of a treacherous 20 foot stretch of thick, gray gravel.  At this point in my barefooted expertise, I was accustomed to the smooth stones of garden beds and the wide rough tops of granite and sandstone, but the cool-cut edges of the gravel ranging from pea to walnut size, replaced before each winter, was an arena I avoided when I couldn’t stand to chicken out with shoes.

One afternoon, while taking the chance on the sharp gray lagoon for the satisfaction of plush green ease, my legs buckling with the jaggedness of the rocks occasional poking into the arch of my feet, it occurred to me: my captors will of course surround the house with gravel.  Why hadn’t I thought of it earlier?  All those country farmhouses and below ground prisons and strip malls where terrible things usually happen are always surrounded with gravel.  My current rate of 10 steps in 20 seconds wouldn’t suffice– I’d be a goner.

No more pussyfooting for me. …mindovermattermindovermatter… and I was practicing the nightly ritual of gravel walking with the sturdy dedication of any paranoid survivalist.  The spastic flail of my arms in reaction to sharp edges on my feet gradually subsided, and within a week I had advanced to a general stoicism as I trudged across the rocks upright and with full, natural motion.  The soles of my feet grew thicker, and my stride faster.  I began to consider a step into fire walking as a potential career path in case circus acrobat/animal handler didn’t work out.  One thing was certain: no mobster was going to keep me hostage for long.

When my mastery of walking over rocks eventually gave way to my obsession with learning my parents exact signature in the event that they might be murdered and I would have to feign their written consent on school permission slips until I could figure out whodunit so that I and my siblings would not somehow be framed, my ability to jaunt from one surface to a varied other came naturally, with no grimace, and with little thought to whether it would be a useful skill should I ever be captured.  In fact, I wasn’t so sure I’d be captured, anymore.  At least not by anyone important enough to gain national recognition.

I became properly obsessed with shoes post college, in deference to my gender stereotype, and have spent most of my adult life wearing them.  I am fastened in and secure for every heels-or-flats occasion.  It is when a summer day permits a quick run to the mailbox and back, the first step to the grass gives me the sensation that I’ve missed something.  The tenderness of my feet is a little alarming– all that training just to be another soft soled, hard hearted victim to an imagination held hostage, and miles of gravel to set it free.

 

 

 

 

I looked for you

yesterday in

the grey-brown geese,

in the plush steer

wandering back

and forth and back

unafraid or

unaware of

his grey-brown fence.

I looked for signs

of your leaving

or your blessing

that I will be

born and dead be-

fore you were born.

Yuma, Arizona

is a waiting jailbreak.

Before, there was Mesa.

After were the sand dunes–

a welcome to a home

you don’t know, anymore.

Nothing’s fit to take from

Yuma, Arizona.

Plastic plates filled with the

Sacred Heart of Jesus–

we scavenged the whole lot.

We never fought there in

Yuma, Arizona,

but should not have taken

that call from your mother

or from my ex-husband.

Yuma, Arizona

is a waiting jailbreak.

We thought we were jailers

And at once prisoners.

We were a pack of dogs,

We were its tumbleweeds.

The embarrassment didn’t settle on me as my treasure was secure and jangling in my hoodie’s pocket two blocks from home.  Seven shiny pennies would clink into my circus elephant bank in a matter of steps– seven!  Nearly a dime’s worth.  But better, because there are seven.  And there is something about the bronze-copper skin of Lincoln that is superior to a dimming silver in that from-the-shores-and-caves-of-Tortuga sort of way.  You know.  Pirate stuff.

But these gems weren’t procured after a fortnight’s voyage through the Caribbean.  These are the result of me bent head first into a stranger’s bright blue trash can, my 97 pound dog pulling the opposite direction with the mortification of a 16-year-old accompanying her institutionalized mother on a rare town outing.  Never mind the honking horns and slowing cop cars.  Never mind the disgusted look on the face of my now-ex when I explain where these most recent riches were found.  I’ve got seven pennies ringing like New Year’s Day because some fool misplaced their belief that all that glitters is gold.

Magpies and me?  We are like a regular Bonnie and Clyde of shiny objects.  These Eurasian-and-sometimes-Coloradan birds, best known in Scottish folklore for their role of bringing death to each household they window-perch, have a knack for everyday thieving that would earn them gainful employment for Bill Sykes himself.  They have a distinct advantage over me, of course, with their sky high getaway cars and bird’s eye views.  But I’m certain the delight in each acquisition of glistening garbage is evenly matched.

Before the onslaught of congratulations for holding the same values as a literal bird brain, it is important to note that magpies aren’t your common robin IQ.  These are the only birds who can recognize themselves in a mirror or a photograph.  These are the only birds who cut their food– and their babies’ food– to appropriate portions.  If you hold these feathered friends in captivity with bad housekeeping, they will literally build tools to clean it out (and likely complain to the general manager).  These creatures can take down predators of mass destruction with more tact and strategy than the US government.  And that’s just to get them through winter.

And despite all of their intellect, luck-and-death folklore, and general beauty (have I mentioned these birds are also gorgeous?  I took on a full about-face on my first encounter just to catch another glimpse), they are best known for their insatiable need to collect shiny objects.

Last weekend would have been my fourth anniversary had I decided to stay and work things out and hope that two angry birds could share one tiny nest.  Magpies mate for life.  Though usually the annoyingly chattery type, the men use the ancient secret of low sweet talking to lure their lady.  Once she is secured, they resume their cackling banter for the rest of their lives.  Or until one of them dies.

It is also common knowledge, however, that the sight of two magpies is the promise of good weather.  When the weather is fine, the magpies concede to hunt together.  But the moment a storm or cold scarce winter begins, the two separate, agreeing that it is better that they each scavenge and keep what they find for themselves so that they may both have a chance to survive, rather than splitting feathers over who gets the larger berry.  Practical birds, certainly, even if a little less than romantic.  This life lesson sponsored by Nature may not be one that I need in most situations, anymore.  But for occasions like the commemoration of what is lost, this bird is happy to have flown solo.

Autumn is playing its trickery, again, where the trees masquerade themselves with too much rouge and slowly lose layers like a well practiced show girl.  Even the gold of these Halloween leaves couldn’t persuade a magpie.  They would be more preoccupied with the coin I found today in the movie theater parking lot.  This puts me one beak up on the magpies, I think.  The end of the storm– if this is the end– may not have brought me back to an old once-smooth-talking-mate-for-life.  But I’ve got two eyes full of fall, one dime to thumb in my pocket, and more shiny objects than I can carry in one hand.

 

She was shocked to see it when her mother-in-law brought it down from Michigan.  It was dirtier than she remembered.  More beat up.  And it broke her heart.

When I asked Nicole to take part in the Overdressed series, it seemed that between her wild hesitation and the chronic scheduling conflict, this last piece would need to be left undone.  Upon my arrival that morning, though, the timing (as always) was perfect.  Nicole had spent our missed times warily walking past the guest bedroom where she had placed the dress after the initial reunion, and hadn’t had the courage to enter that room since.

“I just thought, if this looks this bad– so much worse than I remember– maybe the whole day was worse than I remember.  Maybe it wasn’t perfect.  Maybe I wasn’t,” she told me.

She feared the dress.  She had refused those days that it haunted her house to try it on, or even look at it again.  What if it didn’t fit?  She flashed to her grandmother’s dress, how so much money had been spent to preserve the dress and, still, how it fell apart in her hands years later as she took it from the box.  Not enough tissue paper and all was lost.  Her own dress felt like a different sort of loss, “I didn’t feel worthy to put it on again,” she admitted.  “For the first time in my life, I don’t feel completely comfortable in my own skin.  I’m scared.  And here’s this perfect picture staring back at me that I don’t fit in, anymore.”

This incubation process, stuck in her lovely home with this ghostly expectation, left her distraught even a couple days before the shoot.  She relayed that a friend of hers took her fear and unraveled it, reminding her that if she met her husband on this very day, he would still choose her.  Nicole seemed a little more reassured at this thought.  But it was Nicole herself who had the final say on the matter.  And she chose to walk into that back room and put on the dress, presenting herself boldly with a container of safety pins for me to use where the zipper failed.

The rest was left for her to hold up on her own, and she did so in her tiny backyard kingdom with the ease and grace and cheerfulness of Snow White– her chickens and dogs and flowers bending to her every movement.  Her caramel-lined back glowed as she wandered around the life she has grown and loves and fits into perfectly.

And she is more than a worthy picture.

“I hold on to them for when I get married,” Samantha told me as she opened the wooden chest in her one bedroom apartment, pulling out layers of plastic and fiber.  She smiled, delighted with her statement, and adds, “I guess I should find someone to marry, then.”

Sam has chosen her mother’s wedding dress, pulling the 1981 lacy, dramatic garment from its disguise of a black garbage bag and laying it out for display.  Unlike the smooth, sleek silk of the dress that belonged to her father’s mother, this matriarchal beast of a garment comes complete with a hat and a veil that must be secured with a pin– neither of which Sam intends to bother with this morning after a late shift bartending.  And, somehow, the moment she puts on the blast-from-the-past, the dress– and Sam– are transformed into a serene archetype of classic beauty.  “Cool,” says Sam, looking herself over in the mirror, “I’m not going to do my hair.  I’m hungry.  Want coffee?”

It should be noted that Sam isn’t a stranger to the camera or the spotlight.  A singer-songwriter in Nashville, Sam has been plucking away on various stages around the country for years, crooning lovesick and homesick country songs like someone destined for a cliche break:  a smoke-filled honky-tonk, dirty cowboy boots, and one important person who happens to be present and ready to bring her out of her ass-busting touring schedule and give her a proper chance to sing her songs under brighter lights.

That hasn’t happened, yet.  So she waits, in the constant transition of career, for a break or the right song.  It suits her.

It is here, in her prided apartment-for-one, with every room a different color, and every piece of furniture and artwork Sam-picked in a style that weds family heirlooms with stranger’s lost vintage treasure, that she recovers from her stints on the road.  Like every performer-homebody dichotomy, she confesses the need to force herself out of the house and see people instead of Netflix, all while getting her health back– pulling each piece of the road’s gravel from her skin until it’s time to go back out again.  This is Samantha of the Present.

Samantha of the Future talks about buying a house, something small, “I won’t need anything bigger.  It’s just me.”  But Just Me Samantha is making hints at Samantha of the Future to give a sign about a certain Mr. Samantha.  The moment is brief, though, and Sam is back to being happy just being Sam.  Friends and strangers often shake their heads and declare her too special to find someone right away.  I think they’re right.

While her encounters with Samantha of the Future seems brief– a quick Kramer-style drop-in– she also maintains a more consistent roommate.  Samantha of the Past has been entrusted with more family heirlooms than space to fit them.  She declares the framed old-timey pictures and two wedding dresses and knick knacks a default, “I’m sort of everyone’s historian.”  This hitch-a-ride roomie seems to be what is simultaneously driving her away and pulling her home.  Maybe it explains her need to perform– to be the one documented instead of the one documenting.  Or to have both at the same time.

Regardless, Samantha of the Present seemed well adjusted to the constant time travel– the pull of what was and what is and what’s to come.  She looked lovely in her mother’s dress as a photo of her mother in the same dress peered from the refrigerator with full approval.  In spite of Past and Future Sam, making breakfast seemed like a good enough occasion to wear it as any.

 

A lady named Tula sold it to her in a Russian dress shop in Canfield, Ohio.  When Megan got married, she didn’t want to wear her mother’s flowing, hippie thing– much to her mother’s relief.  And while her grandmother preferred that Megan wore her dress, years of maintaining a too-thin, 1950’s figure made her betrothal garment a modern day less-than-size-zero an impossible feat for a healthy human being.  So, just as with the last few years of Megan’s life, when faced with a decision that came detached from generational story and should-and-should-nots, she chose the lace-and-bustle of a perfect fit.

 

 

Megan is perpetually in a state of What-I-Chose-Instead, and being grateful for it.  Within seconds of the last corset loop and button being tethered, she was in a sincere state of reflection, remembering the life she had chosen over the life she didn’t want.  She recounted dreams of nightmarish quality in which her marriage to Daniel costed people their life’s happiness.  And then, as if waking again, she would turn herself to the dress and go about the business of living a life she favors.

 

 

 

In that morning’s light, in a house she bought years ago, she is aware and can accurately recall the moments that led her to where she is now.  She can name it down to the movie on TV (Audrey Hepburn) and what she was eating (ice cream, on the couch).

And always, she comes back to what she has now.  At the cost of what she left behind.  What she chose instead was to be happy and confident– at the expense of feeling like a pariah.  She is tired of apologizing for what and who she didn’t choose, and the dress is a smug reminder of how constricting the right choice can sometimes feel.  The choice to choose your own dress and not your mother’s.  The choice to accept you are not your grandmother’s size.  The choice to marry someone your friends weren’t expecting.  The choice to trust him with all of your collective baggage.  And the choice to carry it, too.

 

 

And today’s choice: what dress to wear.  There were more– one with tags still in tact that could be returned, though she’s never tried.  A couple of bridesmaid dresses.  Those stay, too.  Another too tight from a blue period of cigarettes and starving.  She won’t take it back.  She won’t get rid of it.  Maybe because it reminds her of all she’s chose since then– and all that’s better.

 

“Some people call it the Land of Enchantment, others call it the Land of Entrapment,” the long-time New Mexico resident told me yesterday.

I am currently perpetuating the image of Contemplative Writer in a Far From Home Cafe, one year after sitting at this same Albuquerque cafe, where I contemplated the speed in which one’s life can turn to shambles.  At this time last year, I had dropped the divorce papers at our previous stop in an Amarillo post office, and wept my way across West Texas.  This year, I travel backwards, with Amarillo waiting for me tonight, and Flagstaff already two sleeps past.

My great adventure West was well documented, my Instagram buckling under the wealth of desertscapes and sand dunes and Pacific ocean views.  I bought a new film camera and more rolls of film than I could afford, and snapped as many photos as emotional threads.  I posed, hands on my hips Wonder Woman style, my trusty security blanket dog by my side, daring anyone to tell me I was breaking, “Look at me! I am an amazing human being!  Look at all of these feelings I have and not a single one hurt!”

The Land of Entrapment wrapped me up like a blanket to the face, and I was gasping for breath by the time we hit Tennessee again.

In the year that followed, I meticulously concocted home remedies of drinking til I slept and chain smoking and other romantic Hollywood break up endeavors.  And as the grieving process goes, I switched to caffeine free teas and yoga.  Then attending public functions– and not just the dark movie theater kind when you’re two margaritas in with your sister and choose the most depressing film Julia Roberts has ever made (thanks, Devon).  And then, taking pictures.

The problem with depression is not just the general crisis of wondering whether or not to live or die, but that it is all that exists.  I baked Gluten Free Depression Biscuits and took Butter on sad walks in Depression Park and learned to play the Depression Accordion to accommodate all of the Depressingly Quirky Songs I was writing.  But then there was a time a few months in when I realized I still hadn’t offed myself, so I may as well keep trying.

The art of seeing is the first thing lost– before my feelings could catch up, I was staring at every Enchantment offered, and could only make out the fuzzy image of a lost moment in Entrapment.  And then, I would snap a photo.  Maybe I could see it later.  South Dakota.  Rhode Island.  Georgia.  A year’s worth of Enchantments captured for later hope on film and phone, while my vision stayed keenly square on What’s-The-Point-Of-It-All-Anyway.

When we started this year’s trip out West three weeks back, a paralyzing fear that all I had worked on to Keep Going would be squelched at the first sight of a cactus.  In the panic, I took up meditating under a couple friends’ suggestion, and found one word interrupting my usual whycan’tifeeldifferentwhycan’tIfeeldifferentwhycan’tIfeeldifferent mantra: SEE.

The instruction felt simple enough to follow, so I did.  In a letter I penned from Omaha to my friend Bryan in Nashville, the whole ordeal unraveled itself.  It turns out, Depression is just a giant spider monster who demands complete attention in order to survive.  And I had given it the attention it needed devoutly.  So it grew.  This new proposition, to SEE, caught me like a magpie’s eye on a shiny object, and suddenly, every object shined.  And it wasn’t just the friendliness of trees and all the other hippie nature shit, it was the way my dog’s slobber glimmered in the Nebraska sunset, and the humor of a cricket stowing away in my suitcase.  I remembered the feeling of the universe delighting in my delight.  And the spider monster, at least for a time, packed up its gigantic web and went to haunt some other divorcee’s corners.  As it left, it didn’t seem so big.  I don’t know for sure.  I was busy admiring the cacti in the Land of Enchantment.

She just has an ease about it.

Never mind that her life–in less than a month– has gone from cozy house-for-two, enviable to every local-goods-only hipster in the metropolitan area to a potentially haunted fixer-upper with a Dairy Queen around the corner.  The holes in the ceiling and the drywall on the floor, the peeling wallpaper and the lack of appliances doesn’t seem to weigh in against the previous owner’s care to plant enough variety of flowers so that something blooms in every season.

Dawn is better able to teeter along the discomfort of the Now-But-Not-Yet better than me– or most people I know.  Wandering around between each falling down room in a wedding dress she wore one year earlier, she is nearly giddy with the destruction.  Tools are already in use, progress is being made.  But the progress is so slow: one tiny nail in one giant rafter in one room of a dozen rooms each day.  And Dawn is just fine.  Thriving, in fact.

While the house gets into shape, Dawn and her husband live their time in a small portion of the house with two active cats and one lazy golden retriever.  It seems like a near-classic movie scenario: newlywed couple, broke down house, close quarters, ghost lady for comic relief.  And the lovely bride taking each set back and frustration with a can-do attitude and a smile.

The delight of Dawn becomes your delight.  Maybe there is something to having nothing together– to have everything completely falling apart around you and not one person there to judge you for it.  What Dawn has figured out is that the falling apart is not forever, so there is time to enjoy it.  No need to get it all together at once, either.  A clean bathroom and a dish-less kitchen sink can be just the peephole one needs to see what is Now… but Not Yet.

  In her bustley, heart topped, lattice-work backed wedding dress, complete and bejeweled, Dawn makes a lovely contrast.  The choice she made in that dress has brought her to this work-of-love-and-art house, and she is serenely enjoying every minute of it.  I believe that makes Dawn a lovely contrast anywhere, wedding dress or not.