On Choosing the Raven

We had been preparing for a move, a temporary one, in which we would spend our first summer sleeping on a raw 160 acres of newness, of mountains, of yarrow. And all was in tumult. Ken and I were juggling our own proverbial spheres – he, putting finishing touches on a rental property – me, talking to strangers about social media.

We were stretched, and sleepless, and at 4:30am on the morning my book launched, I sat upright in bed, fumbled in the dark for the car keys, and drove to church.

It was the only option that made sense, to steer myself to a candlelit chapel where I knew the doors would be open and the moon high, and I could sit in the dark and the quiet and await clarity to the fiddle of a cricket. It arrived (both clarity and cricket). After a morning spent on my knees, I came to the realization that launches mean little, legacy means much, and the choice was mine on which I would pour my limited energy for the season ahead.

I drove home for a nap on the sofa, asleep like a stone until mid-morning when the kids paraded in to announce they were starving and please, please, anything but eggs today.

It is worth noting here that the plan for today had not been this, eggs or otherwise. The kids and Ken were to be halfway across the country by now, somewhere in a long succession of campsites off I90, en route to the mountaintop I’d be meeting them after a week of press interviews. But, as the best things oft are, they were delayed.

And so, cancelations and banana pancakes.

A knock interrupts the ceremonial passing of the syrup, and flowers arrive from a dear friend and mentor with a penned note congratulating not me alone, but Ken, and the children, and the many sacrifices a family makes for one another. I call my friend, thank her for the sentiment while Bee sets to work making mini genista arrangements for us all.

I hang up, and see a string of texts from family friends, neighbors, kindred. Have they left yet? When’s the ETA? How’s launch? What do you need?

I will say that book launches are seldom as climactic as we hope they will be, and so, while many of us authors have grand visions of GMA appearances or Times Square billboards, a great many more of us simply settle in for another day of banana pancakes and wondering when it might be socially appropriate to shoo our children out the door so we can tame our inbox.

Knowing this, I resign myself to abandon my preconceived grandiose visions of a slow and languid bistro lunch, a simple walk in the woods, and a marathon session of Earl Grey + emails, and instead, I invite over a gaggle of my kids’ friends for a pre-summer hurrah with sprinklers under the trampoline and a box of popsicles.

The kids run around like banshees and my friend and I make plans to kayak over the weekend, our own last hurrah before I fly off to the mountain. We field snack requests and dodge Nerf bullets and bandage injured elbows and, before long, it’s mid-afternoon, and we’re both keenly aware I’m due for a radio interview from a landline in town. We rally the kids, give hugs and second hugs, and mid-goodbye, we realize Ken has taken the car to run last-minute errands and I have no means to get to the interview. So I climb into my friend’s van (third hugs) and am promptly dropped off (fourth hugs) just in time to make the producer’s call for a brief sound check and a water refill.

There is something to be said for a book launch – or a wedding, or a birthday, or a graduation, or any date of individual importance, really – in which we are called out of our best laid rhythms and into something larger at play. What we conjure up to be a day in which we plan and hope for measured perfection often means we are given something that falls just shy of it. As it turns out, the day is just a day – filled with faults and furies, minor stressors, inconvenient timelines. And as it turns out, that’s the point.

Just before the interview, a producer asks me how book release week is going, and I tell her of how I’d planned for a string of days at my desk, alone – plenty of time and space to “launch well” – but as it does, life threw a fork. My favorite utensil! she jokes, and I am grateful for her wisdom.

I hang up, and within the short hour of the interview, I see a slew of familiar faces that have congregated around the parking lot for a summer night of food trucks and live music. Friends ask about the family – they’re still here? – and the interviews, and, graciously, whether I need a ride home or would I like a bite of sourdough? I say yes to the sourdough and no thanks to the ride, and as I walk the few miles home under a glorious mid-June sunset, I am given a moment’s quiet to realize what needed realized:

This was, of course, the perfect book launch. It was a day spent opting out of the need to control the logistics, to manufacture a perfectly predictable outcome without interruption, of resisting the temptation to fall trap to the algorithm’s lure that everything lovely must be planned for, measured out, perfectly performed, maximized for “content”. It was a day of unmet expectations, of canceled plans, of surprise pivots and the delight that, if we allow it, comes with the unexpected.

It was a day spent with my family.

I walk into the darkened home to find restless children with droopy eyes and a diligent husband running back and forth with armfuls of bungee cords, towels, apples. I give baths and tuck heads and tell stories, and soon, sleep is near.

More texts: Everyone safely on the road?

They’re still here, I respond.

Still here, I say.

Right here, I smile.

Hours later, they’re off just before sunrise and I putter about making tea and answering emails. It is what I wanted, after all, this productive sense of domesticity. A sense of completion, of time to myself, just a moment to catch my breath, to drop my shoulders, to finish a sentence. Still, I find myself listless, wandering around checking off small tasks, arguing with my own self over the many possible definitions of futility.

And then, in a blink, the five of us find ourselves back together on the side of a mountain learning how to live without electricity, running water. The kids make seesaws from fallen logs, we bathe in lakes, we gather wild strawberries by the fistful. In a mere stretch of days, Ken installs enough solar panels to charge our side-by-side and we venture over to our “neighbors” to fill up gallon jugs with well water, to marvel again at the wonder of hot showers, to swap stories of mountain life.

The things that need done take a lot of time, someone tells me over huckleberry wine. But so do the things that don’t. Mountain life is really good at teaching you which is which.

—

My calendar tells me we’ve been here for six weeks, and I am just beginning to feel the truth in those words. I am learning to hold plans loosely. To be content with a fine layer of dust covering everything within reach. To welcome the interruptions, the distractions, the surprises, all with the knowledge that, in the grander scheme of a timeline, interruptions are life itself. I am learning to seek simple joys when the day feels frenzied, when you’re bathing a toddler in a Rubbermaid bin and the stove glass has shattered and the sleet arrives without warning. I am learning that trees make excellent clotheslines, that dead wildflowers are the best kindling, that, mostly, all we really need are a few toothbrushes, a crate of eggs, a stack of quilts, each other.

I have found that the inbox still beckons, but not quite as loud as the raven. I hear the Olympics are happening, but oh, the children are asking for a sunset splash in the lake, and why not break our own skip-counting record? There are fires and stories and homemade ice cream, and it’s not that productivity must wait as much as it’s that productivity must be redefined.

Sure, launching a book is productive. But I’m learning that, sometimes, when the sun is high and the family is restless and the water is turquoise, launching a kayak is, too.

And when I think of it that way, it seems we can either attempt to move mountains, or we can with hope, let the mountain move us.