Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,
We are dispossessed, my family and I. Finally at a point in our lives where home renovations are a plausible, if anxiety-inducing, reality, we are renting a cottage a fraction of the size of our home. That it’s by choice makes two adults, a teenage girl, two big dogs, and a cat sharing one bathroom no less inconvenient, but certainly makes it less sympathetic. Perspective is everything.
Frankly, that I am not the one swinging a hammer at my finger or cursing as the circular saw inevitably veers off the chalkline is a pretty new development for me. I find joy in looking at a task, sourcing the right tools from my garage, and completing a job myself. At minimum, I like to learn from someone else doing it for me. It’s not building fences or driving cattle, but for this suburbanite, a little sawdust smells like self-reliance. However, sometimes self-awareness matters more, and even without the many requests to which I can’t seem to say no, I would not be capable of the scope of the job we’ve undertaken.
The truth is, I can only tread water for so long, and there are times I think I am sinking.
As I type this on a plane 25,000 feet over the Chesapeake, the first big storm of the season is eyeballing us. The holes already cut in the side of my house feel portentous as I look at the cloud layer below me. There’s a better than average chance Imelda will turn away, but I cannot help but think of the piles of lumber at my home, situated within hollering distance of a tidal creek, turning into hurricane-driven missiles. At the house we are renting, sandwiched between a canal and the Atlantic Ocean, our roads flood so regularly that swing arm gates at intersections stand ready to close submerged roads. Add in mere tropical storm rain, and it could all get pretty interesting. I likely should have thought of that when scheduling major home renovations during storm season, but I didn’t.
Of course, that’s all before stay-at-home dad and husband obligations, work deadlines, and travel expectations. It's all a lot to think about. I expect you have your own list, equally overwhelming at times. So, we’re treading water.
But again, perspective is everything.
I like to tell my daughter we don’t have problems, we have inconveniences. No father worth the title doesn't want his child to have more than he did. But there’s a corresponding obligation to make that child understand it isn’t that way for everyone, and it might not always be that way for you.
We are living between two houses, out of our routines, and unsure exactly where things we need are, because we’re sufficiently blessed to be able to stay elsewhere while undertaking a project in a home we are fortunate to have. It is an inconvenience that is an unimaginable luxury in places I’ve been, places where families locked themselves into their homes at night with padlock and chain, hoping no one came for them in the night; places where people slept side-by-side on bamboo floors; places where death or mutilation by old, unaccounted-for explosives is an ever-present possibility.
We spend inordinate amounts of time on Wilmington, North Carolina’s three main arteries, crawling forward from traffic light to traffic light, because we’ve grown as a city, and when you’re bounded by a swamp to the north, an ocean to the southeast, and a river to the west, you can only expand roads so much. But that time in my truck is often accompanied by my daughter because I have the freedom to pick her up from school without asking a single soul’s permission to leave work early. Important conversations happen there. During her school hours, I suffer through traffic to get to the woods without ever checking whether I have PTO on the books. In fact, as long as the words get written, that and a back seat full of dogs are kind of expected of me.
My regular travel makes dealing with all the other obligations a challenge. But travel means joining my 95-year-old father-in-law at his wife’s grave up north or heading west to Georgia and my parents when they need me. Travel means hunting wild Sharp-tailed Grouse, Pheasant, and Prairie Chicken on 148,000 acres of South Dakota ranch or wild Carolina Bobwhites with people who put in the time and effort to make it possible and calling it work. All of them are logistical and time challenges, but psychological and experiential privileges I readily recognize.
Inconveniences, not problems.
As I contrasted my old life with my new, a writer friend said to me, “You’re feral now, you can’t ever go back inside.” That’s a truth I am increasingly coming to acknowledge. A writer’s life is hardly the road to the riches, but I’d rather wander behind my dogs, letting their noses tell us where to go, than always have my head up looking for the next rung on the ladder.
So I’ll keep treading, inconveniences be damned, thankful that my head somehow seems to always stay above water. As I say, perspective is everything.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe Field Journal
