The Seasons of my Soul

If there were no Starbucks, I might freeze to death in New York City.

It was Tuesday, my New York City day, the air was bone-achingly cold, and I didn't have many classes. My teaching schedule tends to fall apart in December. And although I keep showing up faithfully, my students tend to get sick, flake out inexplicably or suddenly realize that, by golly, they are too busy at Christmas to study Spanish! Suddenly my schedule sprouts holes, unprepared lessons, confusions about billing, and other miscues of various sorts. So in the gaps between cancellations and hectic subway encounters in the frozen urban tundra, I seek refuge in Starbucks.

I am deeply thankful for free WiFi and hot tea.

FF and I are about to celebrate our second Christmas in Tiny Town and our first as husband and wife. This weekend, he helped me string up fir garland around the stone and timber walls of our pre-Revolutionary War living room, patiently looking for the nails I had driven with care into the old timbers last year. He hung the garland as I stood there holding the donut roll of connected fir boughs, fragrant like a sylvan feather boa. And as I stood watching him loop greenery around our cozy room, I suddenly had a mental picture of my Dad, now almost 11 years deceased, putting up the big old-style colored Christmas lights on the big yew outside Mom's kitchen window while she stood on the snow crackled lawn in her embroidered shearling coat giving him instructions.

That mental picture of Mom and Dad is one that surprised me. It was a "new" memory, if you will, one I don't remember ever having remembered before. Coming as it did in that moment of decking the halls of Casa Tiny Town, it showed me the continuity between my life now with FF and the world from which I come. For if there is a rhythm and logic to the life FF and I are building together, there is also another deeper logic that comes from our past and it provides a comforting synchronization between now and the other lives we lived when we were young trees. When I was a girl in the suburbs of Philadelphia, when I was still wondering who FF would be, I was watching this very scene unfold. Now here I am doing the Christmas decoration dance in another time and place, and it makes me feel as if I am living right.

There is a comfort to my life in Tiny Town with FF that is based on sameness. Our life has a schedule that involves our individual and cooperative activities: My Tuesdays in Manhattan, fish on Wednesdays, diner Fridays, welcome home notes, and countless small gestures and activities that through happy repetition make our life take shape and assume a form at once reliable and comforting. When we said our vows in August, the unspoken subtext was that for a long while now things are going to continue in basically the same way and that we two are really OK with that. This sameness is like a favorite record (yes, I wrote "record") that you've played hundreds of times before and, though the songs are always the same, the pleasure is new each time. In the soothing warmth of good love, I am finding out, the fun comes from observing the slight variations that emerge as we dance to the same old song.

Early on, before the wedding, the sameness of this rhythm here in Tiny Town irked me in a way I couldn't quite locate: I felt kind of jittery. Life was delightfully, annoyingly, enchantingly, maddeningly peaceful here! It was as if I were afraid that life would outrun me, as if there were something I was supposed to be doing but wasn't doing while I was here watching the leaves turn color and the river rise and fall. It was as if I could not feel truly engaged in Being writ large while quiet, as if I were going to miss my stop on the destiny train without the onslaught of the City's obstacles and energies. Constant change, of personnel and place, have been my life in New York City for the past 28 years. And constant change is not only inevitable, but also good, right? Keep pushing forward! Change keeps you young!

But I am no longer just about myself and my own quicksilver dreams: I am profoundly anchored to Love with a man who is himself as rock steady as a sustained G below middle C. Deep and kind, tired but tireless, he keeps a steady rhythm for me that quietens me. Is it this countryside or is it the man himself that soothes my heart so? No longer does the whim of change intrigue me, nor does it seem like the way towards any destiny worth having. I want to gather myself up like a thunderhead, like a great tree silently exploding from its roots in centennial slow motion towards the heavens. I want to feel my roots beneath me as I move with deliberate dawdle. I want to know the depth of my life, not just its speed, and see how it is always the same and ever-modulating in microscopic ways that I -- finally -- find worth noticing.

I no longer need a world tour to make me feel alive. I lose myself in the profundity of one single square foot of Right Here, Right Now.

Tradition, sings Tevya forever, tradition! I have discovered here in Tiny Town with FF that Tradition is not something that you do alone: You do it with other people, people you love. Tradition is not merely a series of parties and holiday shopping lists, but rather it is a conscious, cyclical exchange of feelings based on a continuity of identity and a shared passion with specific people. Now, in our first year of marriage and our third year of knowing each other, FF and I get to say, "Remember when...?" and we get to laugh together in a way that presages a future that will be equally, satisfyingly ours.

Somehow tradition never happened for me in New York City. People were coming and going too fast and they were too occupied with getting the project done, the better job, the invitation to the networking party, or whatever they were off trying to do. I, too, was coming and going too frantically to really know where I was headed. The spirit of strive and conquer, which is at the very heart of New York City's reason for being, discourages silent nights and it does not care about the quiet contemplation of one square foot of snow crackled ground.

Here in in Tiny Town, Christmas creeps upon us with a tree lighting in Revolutionary Square (our tree is about 15 times smaller than the one in Rockefeller Center), and a frozen hush that is so deep you can hear the very thoughts of the few passersby. When I shop on Main Street I get a 10% discount because I am a local, but I would shop here anyway just to share some encouraging smiles with the local merchants whom I now know by name and who continue to tough it out in this very contracted economy. The local weatherman promises a white Christmas, so I will pull a tarp over the short-cut logs from the old buttonwood tree we had to fell this autumn. Those logs will require some seasoning before we can burn them, I think. And I am satisfied that this pile will keep us warm. Next Christmas.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a very Happy New Year.

Exile in Paradise

Photo by John Dugdale

The Exile is woozy with happiness (and exhaustion) because she and FF just got married.

Our old-fashioned wedding on an private antique railroad train was marvelous, both by our own account and that of our guests. Some of the finest people in Tiny Town and well beyond took part in our celebration, and everyone at the nuptial shindig was sincerely happy. There is a strong feeling of Mission Accomplished going on in our hearts, not just because we pulled off a rather complex event and not just because we are finally Mr. and Mrs. FF: Rather, we are completed by the fact that our ritual brought joy into so many other hearts and brought our people closer to us. MUE was smiley, and SUE was the ultimate sister of the bride, throwing a top-notch rehearsal dinner with great panache.

In short, we left 'em laughing. That had been our hope and it was why we didn't just elope in the first place. So. Mission Accomplished.

After the wedding, FF and I packed lightly and drove 12 hours South. We spent the last two days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in a small log cabin where there was a nice feeling of privacy, despite the fact that the owners lived just across the way. Last night, a black bear placed his muddy paws on our back window and we feel it as a mountain blessing. Mission Accomplished, said Br'er Bear. I left my beautiful wedding bouquet of cream colored bunch roses, buplurum and royal purple snapdragons (which had survived the car journey pretty well) sitting in a hollow stump in the woods: blessings back to you, Woods. I imagine Br'er Bear's snuffin' my bouquet right now.

So at this writing Exile is on honeymoon with FF. I am sitting in the lobby of the historic Inn in Altamont waiting for FF to finish his tennis game at the Club. I am comfortably ensconced in an arts and crafts leather and wood sofa facing the Brobdignagian stone fireplace at the end of the Great Hall, tickled by the slight piney breeze from the nearby mountains, and I am taking a moment to dash off a note to you, dear Reader.

Does Mrs. FF feel different now that she and FF are really married? Yes, indeed she does! A keystone piece fell into place with a decisive whumph when we said our I do's, a keystone that's been waiting to fall for a good while and which is going to make our home hang together strong. Yes, Exile feels different now that we're married, but the words don't really come to describe it. Just whumph.

FF looked gorgeous this morning in his tennis whites and even more so because he's got a big old smile on his face all the time! I asked him today if he'd rather if I just drop him off, check us into the Royal Suites (where we are staying the next few days), and come pick him up later. He said, “No, it'll be fun to walk in together.” So we walked into the Club together and he introduced me to his pro: “Walter, this is my wife, Exile.” And I realized that it was the first time he had introduced me as his wife. I am absolutely sure we both got the same little jolt of pleasure from this fact. I have yet to have my debut, “This is my husband, FF”, so we have yet more newlywed cherries to pop. Oh, what fun!

Life at this moment is completely happy, and I can't imagine this good feeling ever going away. No matter what happens, he's my FF and I am his Exile. We are a family of two now in the eyes of the state of Pennsylvania, our friends, our family and, yes, ourselves too. It's real.

In all this blissful yumminess, New York City has faded almost completely from my mind. Yesterday, FF asked if I had heard anything from Kalim, our real estate agent, and I replied that I had not and did not expect to think at all about New York City until after our honeymoon. He agreed. New York City doesn't belong on this honeymoon with us.

I haven't gone so long without thinking about New York City in 28 years, and that is a really good sign. It means that with this wedding, with this step into the rest of my life, I thee dismiss, New York City. Get thee gone, big bad old town! New York City doesn't have that old voodoo hold on my mind like it used to. It's as if the words “I do” were the secret incantation I had always needed to break the spell the city has had on me all these years. The nostalgia and the confusion are gone and I can, to quote the song, see clearly now.

You see, for me to want to leave the biggest, baddest city in the world I had to believe that there was someplace worthwhile to go to. And when you're talking about the putative center of the world, that someplace couldn't just be another city: It had to be another heart.

Forest Blessing. Photo: Urban Exile

Love Makes the Earth Move

It's Sunday and I am staying in the country because of a strong urge not to face the city, and the dust balls and remaining apartment clutter that needs to either be boxed, or given or thrown away. I want to relax here, under the hot overcast Pennsylvania skies, to stay here in the little house in Tiny Town with FF and the AC turned way up.

I have to recognize that FF is a huge part of my wanting break up with New York. That is to say, I have not only a "moving away from" feeling, but also a really strong "moving towards" feeling in me. After two years and four months, I am still utterly smitten with FF: His kindness, his generosity, the sweet Central Pennsylvania music of his voice, and his graceful body that still makes a knot in my throat sometimes when I look at him, are just a few of the reasons that I draw close to this good man and to his comforting, slow-burning fire.

I met FF online via one of the better matching services in what felt like a last-ditch effort to try something different to find a mate. When I first saw his photo on the computer screen, in the solitude of my New York apartment I exclaimed loudly and to no one, "Now THAT'S what I'm talking about!" I then saw he lived in New Jersey, not far from Princeton, and I felt a little drop of disappointment. Too hard, I thought, to have a long-distance relationship. Odd that for me, a world traveler, New Jersey seemed like long-distance, but it did then. As we all know, there are Lower East Siders who boast that they never go above 14th Street, Upper West Siders who grimace at the thought of having friends on the East Side (where they have more closet space than bookshelves, as the saying goes). For a global city, we New Yorkers are a disturbingly super-provincial species, generally unwilling to roam outside our own chosen barrios.

But then I had a completely different, new thought: Perhaps a man who does not live anywhere near this over-stimulated city full of climbers and strivers is exactly what I need.

So I wrote to him. He was one of a very few potential suitors who I immediately hoped would write back to me after the first onslaught of 500 or so "matches". After we started "free communication", that is, not checking off boxes anymore, but rather exchanging unprompted thoughts, his first cascade of sentences had me hooked: I was starting to think of it as a Relationship, and I started to pray he wanted to meet me. You have to know that FF writes beautifully, with such sincerity and such a poetic sense, that I've kept just about every word he's ever sent me: emails, sms'es, and cards. Not long after we started writing, in the boyscout style of his that I have come to know well, he started a special email account just for our communications "in case of catastrophic server error". And so we started falling in love on the page, via our "squiggles".

When we finally met, on a snowy brick train platform in Metuchen, he felt so comfortable to be near, so right that my memories of that cold day are mostly warm and weightless. We walked up and down the Main Street of Metuchen (which is only four blocks long) countless times, until our frozen fingers forced us to enter a café where he drank hot tea out of a tea pot (for the first time, he told me). We talked about important things right from the start. He gave me two Moon Pies and a box of Earl Gray Oolong as a present, based upon a story I'd written him about a full eclipse of the moon that I had watched from a sidewalk in Harlem. He suggested I name my band "Tea and Moon".

When I got back on the train to New York, my mind emptied of all but one, long, humming Om of a thought: So this is how it happens.

Since then, I have wanted him as near me as possible as often as possible.

I knew in my gut that one of the big reasons this was working for me, besides that fact that FF is my soul mate and jewel of man, was what he was not: he was not a New York City man. I had figured out two years earlier I was not going to find my principe azul (Spanish for Prince Charming) in Germany. Then I realized I wasn't going to find him in New York City either. Finally there he was, on a train platform in Metuchen.

Place matters. Location counts, and not just in real estate, either. I never would have found FF buying fresh fish at Citarella or waiting in line at MoMA. It never would have happened. Because a shy, quiet, good, hard-working, Central Pennsylvania man like FF would simply never APPEAR in that spot, or at least with enough regularity to make a blip on my radar. You don't find deer in the desert. You don't find seagulls in cornfields. So figure out what kind of animal you seek, then go to where it grazes. It took an slick algorithm to help me find FF because, like many of the deracinated children of the striving American middle class, I had prioritized the unquantifiable virtues of career and achievement over the more fundamental joy of finding a lover who suited me, body and soul. Before meeting FF, I wasn't even conscious of what I had done to myself: I just thought I must be lacking in the womanhood department, or that artists never get to be happy. Or something.

Had the an algorithm not found FF for me, would I ever have understood that I needed to put New York City on notice to find him? Or would I simply have continued mistakenly grazing the same urban pastures and coming up hungry?

Love makes the earth move. I am going with it.

Photo of Metuchen train station on a snowy day by Grant Saff