Last night I fell asleep wondering about my last 15 years. How did I walk away from poetry when I so clearly and deeply adore it? What happened? It wasn't motherhood. I had closed my books long before Lily was born.
Ah. Then this morning a picture of a lovely abandoned house, three storied, Italianate lines.....peeling paint, five gables, a hybrid Stick, Queen Anne style beauty. I wondered about the balustrade inside.
I fell for architecture. When I graduated college the first time, BA in hand, wisdom my adviser had given me casually, haunted me.
Sure, you know how to write....but about what? What do you really know of the world? Don't write for a living, be a brick layer or farmer by day. Let the salt of the sweat of your days season the writing you do at night when the day slips away. Let writing be the mistress you run to, not the drudge of the mundane.
So, I fell forward into restoring houses. It was a family business but I am a solitary creature. We bought a three storied Victorian, plaster collapsing, floors unstable and moved in to live like homeless teenagers. It sometimes snowed and gathered drifts in the bedrooms. There were rooms we didn't know about when we bought it. Sometimes we would get lost inside the house. It was an amazing project. I interned at the State Historical Preservation Office. I got hired at a local museum. I spent my days and nights deeply immersed in old house restoration, history, and technology. I got so intensely involved in starting the restoration that I started taking graduate architecture classes. Then, easily slipped into the graduate programs for history, architecture, and non fiction writing. One thing flowed into another and I was in love.
Soon motherhood entered that world too. That was hard. Balancing my day job, a newborn, graduate school, and the house restoration. So very hard.
Why did I abandon poetry for the crumbling plaster and splintery fumes of the hard labour and physical work of house restoration? Because there is poetry in the grain of the wood, because the stories of the people who haunt these places with their lives are intoxicating, because the words of architecture filled my soul the way that Shakespeare and Leonard Cohen do. I was not without.
Even now, my heart quickens when I oil the hardwood of our old farmhouse. I mourn brokenhearted when I see an abandoned turn of the century barn that will soon fall with the seasons from neglect, slipping from our collective memories and memorialised with corn and bean chemical fields. Sometimes I break down and cry.
Now, as I re-open the poetry part of my mind, I have a life I can write from. That was not a waste, that time was not idle. I need not regret my chosen path, as sometimes I have in the dark when sleep is stolen by babies and frozen pipes.
Tell me, where is the poetry and beauty in your life?
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