SAFE SPACES (OLD ADDRESSES)

I was writing recently about a rental house we lived in on Mebane Street,

and was sort of sick of trying to capture the suffocating 

anxiety that walked beside me every moment we lived there,

surrounded by what felt like acres of pine panelling, pine trim, 

pine doors, pine cabinets.

It seems like every house I lived in growing up had

dark, knotted pine panelling creeping along the common spaces.

No matter how many windows a room has,

pine panelling soaks up the light, never shows stains or dust,

and blends the debris of humanity into the knots and veins.

You don't have to wonder about the walls showing evidence

of last night's bender or last year's starvation.

They're already dead, cured with clouds of nicotine

past the point of flexibility and lacking any facade you worry might chip away.

Both sets of my grandparents, my Dad and this rental

house had wall after wall of pine paneling.

Maybe at one time I loved this look, felt

safe and belonged with these deep dark walls.

The house on Mebane street corrupted all

the other spaces...or maybe it let me see

a little bit of the thing hiding in plain site

at all the other spaces in a way that I can't undo.

I wondered if maybe I could take a look at that rental house now,

if time or fashion or my own maturation would make me feel

less claustrophobic about the scene of some of my worst moments.

A google search showed me a virtual tour of a place

I could barely recognize. 

The deep red brick is now a creamy beige, the heavy awnings 

that used to obscure every window have been removed,

and the outside doors are all a refreshing shade of mineral blue.

Andy used to leap directly from the side door

to the paved drive below to prove he was alive,

dropping the full story with a smirk.

His signature move would be 

 impossible now because the porch is wrapped

securely with sturdy wood railing,

safety an apparent focus of this house's new incarnation.

The photos of the inside show that

the built-ins and pine panelling

are layered in six coats of white.

The insides of the doors are white, the cabinets

a pale gray and the chair rail is...you guessed it.

White.

This place of oppression 

has been whitewashed.

I spent long minutes rotating through the nineteen photos

trying to find my memories inside this space.

On the third pass, the feeling I had been waiting for

found me on a particular photo.

It's a weird photo right? 

The bottom half of several doors,

a vent cover,

a weird intersection of rooms that don't really paint

a story for the casual observer.

I'm sure the photographer was just trying to showcase

the house's gleaming hardwood floors,

a selling point for any buyer except me.

Those were the floors that were never clean enough,

that told us the temperature of the adults by

echoing of stomping work boots or slamming chairs and 

that caught bodies as they were slammed around.

Those floors were adept at telegraphing the location of bare feet,

trying to move silently from room to room like mice on the run.

Intellectually I know that this space doesn't

necessarily carry the same meaning for anyone else still walking

the planet alongside me.

I also know that nothing that happened then

can happen to me again.

I am safe from these particular demons.

I've done therapy, forgiven so much around this time,

and I have hard wood floors in my own, light filled home.

But those floors, the ones who bore witness to so much-

they haunt me just as much as pine panelling does.

Whitewashing the whole thing won't change that

but sometimes talking about it does.

In fact, the only way I've really found to reclaim spaces

(emotional and physical ones)

is to communicate about them.

The oak outside my grandparents house

The gravel drives that circled and connected my Dad's house with my grandparents' house on six acres in Mebane were as close as I came to understanding the idea of sanctuary as a young person.

Here I could be set apart, preferrably alone and outside, 

cataloguing flora and fauna that was tended by the hands

of people I cherished, who also called me precious.

Here I could remember myself, when the performance got to heavy

by walking barefoot over acorns and red clay until I 

had found some kind of rest.

This land was home or something like for all of my formative years.

I returned to it again and again until 

my family sold it almost twenty years ago.

I think we were all a little sad the day the moving vans came

but I remember a sense of light and optimism that whole morning.

My dad and stepmom were moving to a place in Lee county,

closer to the next generation of grandkids including my infant son.

My aunt and uncle were moving back to Virginia to be with their 

living sons and first-born grandson.

It was past time to leave this ground

and I think we all knew it.

On the last day before they moved away, I spent

several minutes photographing the two huge oak trees

that grew beside each house.  

These trees felt ancient and immovable,

forces of tension that watched over us below,

blocking the sky and protecting us from nightmares or daydreams.

The trunks were easily twenty feet around and the tops sixty feet up or more.

The branches covered the sky, their canopies almost touching in the area

across the line of demarcation between Daddy's ranch house

and my grandparents' two-story hodgepodge.

In summer, my Daddy would sit on his back stoop

during thunderstorms and watch the oaks sway slightly,

mesmerized that nothing-not even the fury of GOD

could bend them.

In college, I learned that oak trees create a natural herbicide-

killing most plants that dare to grow within their borders.

And yet, you'll see plants littering the area around an oak

too stubborn to die, to misplaced to thrive,

their faces pointed upwards as if worshipping the thing that is killing them.

These trees pour down acorns in the hope that the best and strongest

will find fertile ground away, out in the world.

To live at the foot of their parents is a long

slow poisoning, a failure to thrive.

Looking up from my Grandparents back porch

I remember my sweet uncle making fun of me

for taking so many pictures of these trees.

I shrugged and laughed alongside him,

snapping a whole roll of film in attempt to capture something

that lived within these sentinels that I knew I needed to remember

without understanding why I might need it.

I loved these trees, felt like they were mine

and I was theirs.

Our exodus from underneath their bower

felt like a relief to them too and I wanted a tangible memory

to hold onto.

Last Christmas, my Dad decided to have me chaffeur him

all around Alamance county to see friends and relatives

that he no longer lives that close to.

We were just going to head back to his house when he directed

me to go down the service road beside

the highway to those six acres that I used to return to so often. 

When we came around the bend 

and the service road dumped us back into the gravel drive,

my eyes started taking in the buildings-observing what had changed

and cataloguing the differences to my memory.

My grandparents house was rented out for years but now stands empty,

the hot water heater sits dry on the wide back porch

and the outbuildings are overrun with Virginia creeper.

My dad's old house was surrounded by cars, some of them functional

and there was a grill smoking out beside the back door in

the same place he used to cook up burgers.

The side yard between the houses were filled with detritus-

trash and appliances, insulation and toys-

peeking up above knee-high grass.

These houses are on borrowed time as developers circle this land,

hoping to turn it into a strip-mall or a hotel.

It's painful to see, impossible to look away once 

you get past the tree cover that separates them from the highway.

My dad mumbled something, his face remarkably pale.

'What?' I asked.

'The trees.  They've cut down the oak trees.' he answered.

I'm not sure how I missed it the first time.

The houses seemed so much larger and closer

together now than they ever did when I was 

still tucking my secrets using the rules I got when I was so tiny.

Your family loves you.

You were made to make them proud.

Be the good one, not the bad one.

You'll be safe here, from everything except the things

 we've decided to keep hidden from the sun.

The base of the oak by my Dad's house

There are no more giant oak trees hiding the mess

inside these houses from the light of day.

No more stewards of these houses' pine panelling,

carefully keeping all the private shame hidden from the picking

eyes of strangers and burning judgement of gossips.

All the insides have been turned out,

left to rot or blow away or decompose.

I suppose one day soon this space will become something else-

a different kind of space for different people or maybe

it'll just be reclaimed by the wild.

I was surprised at how little emotion I felt about those trees

but I remember that everyone who used to live underneath their

branches found something MORE once they stepped out from them.

It wasn't necessarily better but it was more.

So was it a safe place under those oaks?

I don't actually know and I think that's part of lesson too.

I'm out in the world now and I think I get too choose 

a little bit of how I grow.

Am I an oak, seeping my own poison into the world?

Am I a weed, high on the thing that's keeping me from thriving?

Am I something else that lives best within community like

elderberry or cattails?

My mind is a constant nit-picker and labels are 

an area where my rumination often runs into obsession.

Safe spaces are one of these labels that keep coming up for me lately

and while I can't quite define them, I have a few hypotheses.

Safe spaces require relentless editing.

Safe spaces require flexibility and light.

Safe spaces allow for questioning, even of elements

that are considered foundational

Safe spaces can have tension

when it's held with intention but they cannot cause pain,

or trap, even unintentionally.

Safe spaces have open doors with clearly defined

mechanisms to access them

and fair consequences when violence occurs.

Safe spaces give priority to forgiveness, have language and process

actively occurring with healing in mind but don't demand it.

Safe spaces are alive, evolving in creative and suprising ways

to reflect the variety of humans that share them.

It's remarkably hard to be a safe place, decorating trends be damned.

I'm going back to writing about pine panelling

and dealing out oppressive childhood memories in a way

that (I hope) retains the magic.

Keep playing y'all.

Most of the oak by my dad's house