On a whole, 2015 wasn't a bad year. I had to come to terms with some painful truths, but at the end of the day, I think I'm a little better for having acknowledged the hard realities. I made progress. I lay the ground work. In a lot of ways, it was a year of endings. When I was in the sweat lodge on New Year day, maybe having a cool heatstroke vision, that was the thing that came to me again and again. This fear of being left. I'm not good at saying goodbye, even when I should. It makes me feel alone and empty.
That said, I learned from that core of fear. In a lot of ways, that question became a lesson in identity. What's left over? If I'm stranded by myself, then what do I have here left in my hands?
January
Even a little would-be conquistador like me has to at some point acknowledge reality.
After spending a really fun new years eve with my brother, drinking at his bar in downtown Durham, my year began somewhat badly with a disastrous trip to Georgia for a wedding.
It's hard for me to go down there as an adult. I always fight with my mom, who is otherwise my strongest ally. But I can't pretend things aren't as they are, or that things don't change when we go down there.
I have to say: I will tell you a flaw about me. I am not one of those girls who desperately needs to speak her mind at any cost. I take that "turn the other cheek" shit as doctrine. I'm not a rude person, and nine times out of ten, if someone is being rude, I would rather politely nod than start an argument at the dinner table.
But my mother is the best woman I ever met and I think I hold her to a weird standard that is possibly a little unfair. I expect her to be my Joan of Arc all the time, fighting against injustice, speaking up and telling the truth, and when she can't be that, when she needs to be just as deferential as I am all the time, I am disappointed. And that's probably the plain truth of it. I want her to stick up for her--for us--and down there, among her people, she won't.
Another issue this month: Becky and her fawn got shot, which almost seemed to half-destroy my parents. I think part of it was the way she died: killed out of spite for revenge against one of my father's friends by a hateful neighbor. Who kills a tame deer in a little pink collar, the same little deer who would come up to hunters in the woods and literally lick the butts of their gun, looking for treats? It was such an act of anger and ignorance. I know it sounds stupid, but if you have ever had a pet killed maliciously, you might understand. Animals are so innocent. Becky only knew what we told her, which was that people were kind and would let her into their houses to tromp around and lay on the couch. Every single night that winter previous, my parents would go out and walk with her for hours together through the dark woods: talking, drinking, smoking, and feeding her Christmas cookies out of their coat pockets. My parents. I think it was the first voluntary time they'd spent together like that in ages. She was such a miracle.
And god, it made me so angry.
I hiked the month away. I was sad. As ever, being outside was some solace.
February
In February, I was a creature of exile. In February, it snowed. I was sick a lot of the time. My grandfather began the slow spiral of which he is now in the final stages. My family organized itself in wake of our patriarch's fall into long dying, like when a big tree goes down in the forest, and all the saplings and sucker roots rearrange to divvy up the light. (They aren't finished, even as I write this in 2016.)
I was so sad. I don't exactly know why. This is one rare instance where I can't quite read my own internal code for what is actually going on. I know there was something else, but I don't see it, or remember. I don't know who was wronging me or what about.
I do remember going out to Elkhorn with a very dear friend at one point: a belated Christmas/birthday exchange trip, just a lovely day. It was so icy that we all but tobogganed in, but then the day itself was strangely warm, misty as the ice in the ground evaporated. It was as pretty as I'd seen it, and the trip was so special, a gift, really, but a thing I most remember taking away from it was this sense of kinetic meaning. That doing something, even something as small as gathering wood or walking a downed tree trunk, could create meaning and real peace. At least for me. And I love that fucking shit.
I realized, in the grip of my depression that all I wanted for the year was to go back there again and see those great pines and hear the weird way the stones choked on the water. To make fire out of nothing, which is really a beautiful metaphor for the kind of bring-your-own light policy I try to subscribe to.
I didn't have the chance to go out there again with that same friend in 2015, but I did go out there to Elkhorn about 20 more times. And that made a huge difference in my year. I really learned something about myself out there.
Nature and physical work sustain me. That sounds corny as shit, but they do. Wild places are my church.
March
Comrades, whoever runs away,
He is a woman, they say;
Therefore, through many trials,
He is a woman, they say;
Therefore, through many trials,
My life is short!
-Sitting Bull's Fightsong
Oh March. March got real.
March we kept the river on the right and stayed to the left of the ridge, and we didn't get lost in Vanaheim's errant wilds. (Best you can hope for, really.)
I got better at not faking it in March. Doing stuff I like. I got really into researching about General Custer and the US vs the Sioux Lakota. I like the 19th century. America's answer to the garbage Victorians: the frontier. Men were exquisite, and everyone was so perfectly earnest and literate, but otherwise, it was almost exactly the same except you could speak to a full blood Indian in English and see a passenger pigeon. They even had the same curse words as we do. Same sense of humor.
In March, I went with my boys down to Roanoke and went to a cool bar called Lucky and had fancy cocktails. I said "I'm not scared of you" to Tinker Mountain.
Legends was the height of its staffing fun for me. The Errantry event was incredible, like nothing I'd ever done, and my confidence finally manifested creatively as a staff. Going back to a tiny, intimate camping event on our last year was important to me. Doing it as hard and as well as I could have was even more special. I still remember the final pell-mell chase fight back to camp. Travis and I took npc point, and we were running our guts out through thick woods, both finally using our agility and scrubby wood knowledge as well as we could, against PCs we knew would take it and come back at us screaming. We cut creeks, Travis snapping arrows off the top of little ridges, me jumping down out of trees for ambushes, just flying, giving them hell. It felt so alive. Afterward, my body was ruined in the best way.
April
April: a month of delirious blessings. After a world of looking, I found my first arrowhead in my parent's own backyard. I still half-can't believe it. I didn't think I'd ever find anything, let alone anything this spectacular. It's the prettiest point I've ever seen.
Arrowhead hunting was something I'd always dabbled in, but this year was special for it. Not just because I found my first point, but because the people involved came to mean something important to me. In particular, I got to be friends with a girl named Andrea. She specializes in finding a rare kind of arrowhead that are made of fossilized/agatized materials, so that the points are wild colors like pink and blue, and have little pieces of coral in them. She is also a sharks tooth expert. She is my age, and has long, thick brown hair, big liquid brown eyes, and wears glasses.
My favorite thing about Andrea is beyond her enthusiasm and intelligence for the artifact hunting, which is substantial. She is earnest, and when she decided to be my friend, she signed on hard. As an adult, it is easy to make light friendships, cool people you can make paper mache connections to but hope to never show your worst to: a girl you see sometimes when you go out, a shop clerk you make conversation with and tell stories to. But Andrea is my friend like when a new kid moves in next door when you're a kid, and you just know you two are gonna be playing ALL the time. Unconditional.
Back to arrowheads, briefly. My brother gave me his quartz point he found in Manassas when we were kids. I'm going to get his point and mine framed to hang side-by-side in my parent's kitchen. It feels good to me that they stay close to where they lay for thousands of years. Plus I like that my brother and I both found crystal points. There's a pleasing kind of symmetry to that.
May
if I put it in my mouth, it would melt.
I can tell April and May were gorgeous months, because I have not a lot posted for them, just some pictures and a rush. I was outside for a lot of that time, getting brown and skinny, and that was good for me. I will tell you one pretty, wild story to speak for May.
A special tradition I love is my spring camping trip to the meadow campsite. It's a big clearing in the woods with an archaic-looking ring of stones on the hilltop and pretty forest all around. There are hiking trails and a nice creek to dip in. Probably my favorite site out there. (Although I'd have a second place by the end of the summer.)
This May, the spring camping trip was particularly well-attended. Travis and I built a "hot tub" shoot in the creek and hollowed out a deep pool for sitting. There was some excellent cooking. Jay brought the largest tarp I ever saw, and shimmied up some of the 20-foot pines on either side of the meadow to string it over the whole campsite. We were lucky he did this, because Saturday night it absolutely poured. It was the kind of wild, drunk, blowout early summer thunderstorm that are so pleasant and make people say "I love thunderstorms." The air felt soaked and hot. Meanwhile, we tricky geniuses were all perfectly dry, sitting with our fire and beer under this story-high tarp, laughing and carrying on. A very good night to be young and alive in the forest.
And then, the next morning? Trying to untie the thing while we were all a little soggy and hungover? Well, the forest has many lessons.
June
I have to say: June was a fire-red month for me. I ran, I fucked, I created the most beautiful garden--my pride and joy, a garden so very lovely that passersby stopped to congratulate me on "what I had done to the place." I had enough flowers that I could make consistent bouquets for people I liked. I took to bringing my favorite bartender, Katie, a bouquet every time I went into her place. It felt really good to be able to text her "What colors are you in the mood for?" and to know I had more than enough flowers to create whatever she came up with. The key, it seems, was to just fill it up to the eaves, water every day, and let it go. I had a whole mess of consistently blooming annuals: cosmos, salvia, zinnia, dahlia, coneflowers, russian sage, catmint, moonflower, yarrow, marigold, false sunflower, real sunflower, snapdragons, morning glory, lobelia, euphorbia, lavender, violets, and petunia all just in the front beds.
I love flowers because they are so useless for almost anything besides making people happy. I love the way they change a space; they're transformative.
I also got a cool tattoo, which I like.
Staunton was kind to me. I started attending a local plant swap, which was fun. Everyone knew I was starting a new yard with a lot more space than I had before, and sometimes little boxes of plants would show up at my back patio unexpectedly.
July
July I spent so much time outside and camping and running around, arrowhead hunting, and generally having a time of it. I guess looking back this might have been a great summer. It had all of my favorite features. The weather was cool and pleasant. I felt very alive, and I liked my routines: getting home and watering my beautiful garden, cooking, and then going out on the front porch to sit and have a glass of white wine. Running late at night with the baseball lights up.
I drank too much bourbon with my friends on July 4th and watched the fireworks in my town from the top wall/tower of the Confederate memorial in the cemetery. Another strong memory was waking up early on a camping trip with a big bunch of friends and walking down alone to the wide creek. The branches along the bank were bleached white and there were blackberries I ate for breakfast. It was one of those perfect cool summer days and the blue of the sky reflected in the cold water in the creek and threw up lights on the leaves overhead. I was alone and perfectly happy, but as I walked back toward camp and heard my happy friends waking up, cleaning fish, and Joe building up the breakfast fires, I felt very content.
That month, Andrea and I went to West Virginia and picked trillobites and shell fossils out of stones that had once been a million year old coral reef. The walls were still purple, red, orange, and green from the degraded pigment of the corals, and we clung to them by our fingertips two stories up on a slagpile/cliff. We were close enough to hear the Lost River, a river named for the fact that at a certain point in its course, it goes abruptly underground and emerges out miles later.
August
Come on pretty violence.
Come on over to my passenger side.
August was hot, bright, blue and eventful. I went to Carolina beach with some friends. That was a bit of a calamitous trip for some of our friends, but there were some fun parts too. We found a lot of sharksteeth and some pieces of a 19th century shipwreck that washed up after a big storm.
I went out camping a few times and caught some beautiful little brook trout out of the stream behind our campsite. I skinnydipped in that stream. I even brought my parents out to Elkhorn. It was the first time my father had been out to see where I lived since I graduated college. He'd never been to Staunton, and we hadn't been camping as a family since we were kids. I can't begin to say how much it meant to me to be able to show my parents a place I loved so much as the valley and the national forest, or to see how much they enjoyed it. My dad especially. He loved my house. He liked my garden and my dumb bird of prey prints and wanted to look at my good rocks. Also, here are the aforementioned fuckton of nice trout we caught out of a tangle of sycamore roots on a flyline and a red hook, throwing the rod back and forth across the small span of the creek.
I ran a ton and wrote poetry. I got really into the Civil War?
I liked that because it was a period I didn't know almost anything about, and then I learned so much just this year. I read 3 books on Gettysburg, 2 books on generals, 2 on pre-war political climate, 1 on lady spies, 1 on the Lincoln assassination, and then a couple historical fiction pieces that were just set in the era. I could probably write several essays about what's interesting to me about the war, beyond just the very fantastic-seeming tactics and weapons employed there. (And the way I apply those battlefield tactics to my personal life?) That said, I really do my best Civil War talking when I'm two beers in and have a trapped audience, though, so I'll allow any reader of this to traverse those wild and long-winded moors of thought in person if they so wish.
The practical side of my research has been the genesis of a few little historic poems that I think are going to fit very neatly into an academic journal somewhere.
Oh, and at the very end of the month, I met my first bear. What do you even say to a bear?
September
look here, I won't deny it; I was there,
standing in the bar's bathroom mirror,
saying my name like I was somebody.
-Ada Limon "Nashville after hours"
September is such a fun month. It gets a little cooler, but everything's still all kinds of summer in the food and garden stuff. Perfect outside weather.
The month started with Legends, then we took a pretty amazing trip east to spend the weekend with Chris's mom (and Chris and Katie.) It was cool to me to see the homeland and good people of someone as important to me as Chris, and we attended a very nice oyster/wine festival at the former home of...Robert E. Lee? Not my favorite confederate (Mmmm James Longstreet mmm <3) but I very much enjoyed the history and company.
We also attended a very strange party with some friends at a mansion-castle. We experimented with the one-day camping trip; also a success.
October
This was the beginning of my pumpkin queen era.
No, but really, I did turn my whole yard into a pumpkin patch. My garden churned out food. I love pumpkins.
October also featured a wedding, a impromptu, insane Halloween party, and an ending I'd been tracking for a long time.
What was relevant to me and worth remarking about the end of Legends wasn't really my own participation in the activities of the final event, although I did have a wonderful time. I got to do everything I wanted to do. But my own things are easy--I'll never forget my own things. What I want to take away and remember were the things involving other people. It was an event of stepping back and observing for me. Getting to watch my beautiful friend fight again one last time in the October morning sunshine and leaves. Looking back to see my people problem-solving all by themselves. Seeing the final charge: two big lines of shields crashing across a field, scattering glowlights. Everyone coming back to rally for one last go.
I don't remember feeling very sad the whole time--that would come later. I was so busy, and I didn't want to sleep for anything. I didn't sleep. I think that was the cleanest I'd ever got that camp looking too, even after how exhausting the event was. When I was driving home the last time to my parent's house on the windy little backroad I'd come to know so well, I remember suddenly, abruptly, crying. I'm an emotional person. I cry sometimes. But it was strange--there was no thought attached to it. I felt like I was floating outside myself, I just happened to have tears running down my face.
I couldn't have asked for a better final event. I kept thinking there would be this thing that would ruin it, some calamity or fuck up, but it didn't. It all fell into place like running a game like that never does.
I'm going to miss Legends always, I think, playing and obviously the sentimental connections associated with that, but also very much staffing. It was such a unique creative enterprise. Profoundly challenging, rewarding, thankless, utterly exhausting, invigorating, and it taught me to rely on my confidence and to think on my feet in a way I don't think I would have gotten so quickly if I had been at home watching TV on my weekends.
I know I also posted a big whiny thing about how my experience with Yan is perfectly at odds with the real-life reality of how disappointing actually putting yourself out there and being vulnerable can be. I don't know that I was wrong about that. But I do miss the relentlessness and the risk of being in that emotional mindset.
November
"All I see is the Dark Fields. A dead land. A cursed place.”
The unseasonable warmth set off the month to an odd start. I went on night runs in tank tops. I spent hours and hours at night writing my weird Nithavellir story, which is kind of the thing I focus on when I need something to distract myself. It's utterly useless, a totally masturbatory exercise, but you know how much I like useless, masturbatory exercises.
I kind of wish I had some use for it. It's important to me.
December
She said I think you're getting too far from your family's house to find it
You should know if you're running away and I touch you
You freeze
I was doing good keeping up appearances for so long, but December I kind of lost that peace. I listened to a lot of El Vy and freaked out about my birthday. I felt confused and sad most of the time, and irrationally angry the rest. If I'm honest, I'm not sure I was doing as good a job at keeping my whole seasonal depression at bay, despite the outside factors that were making me unhappy. I wasn't as vigilant as I could have been at keeping up with my coping mechanisms.
That said: I worked my hobbies. I ran a good bit. I read about gentlemen. We went to hot springs. A friend of a friend out in TN sent me a beautiful box of arrowheads and paydirt and fossils. My house looked very nice.
We didn't go to the cabin this year, like we do sometimes for Travis and I's birthday. We did Yule, and then spent that weekend having a little dinner. Went north to see my family. Something of an odd Christmas. It was hot--hot enough for a girl to sit in her parent's garage in a skirt and drink her father's beer while it poured. The whole time I was trying to write like this goblin Yule scene so it was all very strange.
I made good friends with my dad's crow.
Then New Years was back to Staunton for a night out and then Beluga day.
*
I feel badly ending the year on a darker note of grief, hard realities, and letting go. There was a lot I learned about myself in 2015. Seeing them now here again after the first bright, optimistic 29 days of this new year is good for me. It's easy to get lost in feelings and little details and disappointments. But I'm fine, was what I learned. I'm a big girl now.
This was a year I accidentally made new friends. My hobbies flourished. I found some career direction. And I found that I don't need anything that I don't already have inside me. My pieces are there. I can build ways of being happy.
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