About

Callings

Start with Swedish immigrants. Stocky and short women straight-eye-staring into the earliest camera lenses, hands on hips or holding babies or buried in pockets of voluminous black skirts. Swedish men, pastors and farmers, poets and fathers, tall and thin and many dead too young. Start with a windmill and a sunset and two people falling in love. Call it Hagstrand. Call it the star of her mother’s side.

Go south. Hit Bohemia. Find a woman whose name could be Aloise or Louise or Alouisa. Marry her to a German man and bring them to America. Move them to Kansas and give them children. Name one of them Olive and give her a boy with eyes so blue the sky is envious. Save him from a war he doesn’t understand and bring him home to the granddaughter of windmill love. A girl so kind and honest the birds sing her name each morning: Lin-da, Lin-da, Lin-da. Give them a girl and a boy of their own. Call them Draper.

Find a small house on an old street next to the house Olive brought the boy home to. Move in and paint the walls. Change the carpet. Put up bunk beds and then add a bathroom and another bedroom to the basement when the girl daughter is old enough to need her own space. Let her pick out the colors for everything, all shades of peach. Give her a lightbox with its own switch over the bed so she doesn’t have to hide under the covers with a flashlight anymore. Tell her books matter. Tell her she does. Call her Shannon.

Make her little brother a machine of sound. Give him a heartbeat so loud it echoes like a drum. Give him a talent as big as his heart and a dream of sharing his gift. Make him so funny the girl laughs until she cries even when he tries to feed her sand pies. Let him bring music and acceptance and joy to people all over the world. Call him her first best friend.

Move them to the country to an underground house. Give them space to dream. Add country kids who befriend them. Kids who know about wild things: a ravine, a swing, how to blow smoke rings. Watch her daydream about her first kiss. Fast forward to sad music and the same song playing over and over and her heart breaking over the first boy she thought she loved. Call it hindsight.

Send her to college and watch her drop out. Watch her grades fall and her future turn murky as Kanopolis Lake. Take her off the stage and bury her nose in a book again. Remind her words (and the way they move) are the only things she’s every really loved. Take her back to the beginning. To the children’s section of the public library where she’d stack books next to an old bathtub filled with pillows. Where she would climb in and bathe in the stories of somewhere else. Show her who she is. Call her a reader.

Give her a boyfriend and plane ticket to Florida. Show her the ocean. Remind her there is a sea inside her and that she loves when the season’s change and this state and this boyfriend aren’t the only things she wants. Watch her leave him for someone else. Watch him leave him for herself. Watch her leave for the chance to be something more than someone’s girl. For a bachelor’s degree. For the struggle and the study and the work that feels like home. Call her a student.

Take her to graduate school and put another man in her way. Let her cling to him and believe he makes her worthy. See them marry when they should break up. Study their falling apart for four years until she says no more. Touch the salt burns on her face where the tears momentarily scar her. Call her stronger than she realized.

See her teaching. See her reading and writing and breathing. See her remembering it is books and has always been books and will always be books. Put the words in her hands. Put her to work. Put every hour of reading everyone else into a bottle, shake the hours up, and pour her a glass of her own voice. Watch her drink it slowly, a smile on her wet lips. Call her a poet.

Bring her a love so big it needs a zip code. Make that love the only thing she sees. Make it the beginning and the end of everything. Add the way she sees herself inside that beginning and ending. A reflection of her deepest heart. The girl in on the swing across the ravine that she thought was gone for good. Give her safety and passion in a tall man with eyes like the river. A writer and teacher who listens to every single one of her stories no matter how many times he’s heard them. Call him Michael.

Read her words in the book she wrote; poems about trying to make it through the dark and twisted wilderness of living. Poems about going on. Look at the life she’s built that shines so brightly she can’t quite look directly at it without tears. Call her thankful.

Ask her who she is, and she will tell you. 

Start with Swedish immigrants.