A Place to Hang My Hat

By Holly Spaulding
Sun staff writer

Not too long ago I ran into an acquaintance who said that she had heard I was back in the area. . . possibly for good. Whatever that means. I told her that Robert and I had just moved into our own home near the village of Cedar. “What happened, did your brain fall out of your head?” she queried in disbelief, as if my having done so was a defeat, a rejection of idyllic possibilities, and therefore a compromise that someone like me would be unlikely to make.
She meant well, half-serious and half-kidding; being familiar with my nomadic habits, she probably intuited how strange this decision must be for me. We run into each other infrequently between my trips away. She works in the office with one of my editors– the one who always asks where I’ve just blown in from, then hesitates, throws his hands in the air with exasperation, and says “I don’t even want to know because I can never keep track of you anyway.”
My acquaintance confided that her boyfriend is trying to convince her to move to Nashville, where he lives, but she has told him that she thinks this is a crazy idea, regardless of love, and she would never consider it–unless he happened to be living on a big lake. Despite ourselves, we recognize how special this part of Michigan really is.
Meanwhile, it’s been over three years since I’ve had a place to hang my hat
for more than just a few weeks at a time. Writing this, I am conscious that there is an element of this lifestyle that is both disconcerting and yet worthy of respect. The truth is, I enjoy the shifting scenery, the sense of adventure, and the ways movement and transition flesh out the person I am always becoming. I would not forfeit the experience of waiting out repairs on a decrepit ferry off the coast of western Thailand, for example, for the sense of place or home that I speak of when I say I want to hang my hat at last. I would not edit out the disorientation I felt when I suddenly knew very little about the prevailing cultural and intellectual climate as a graduate student in Ireland. I would not recognize myself for who I am if it weren’t for the books I read and the places I found myself as a result of having roommates in college who did not share the same background.
It seems that now is the time to be mobile and unpredictable. And this is the advice plenty of mothers and grandmothers have given me, knowing that as soon as children come into the picture it can be much more difficult to take off to New York, Cologne or Auckland on a whim. But it is also true that I am a nester, and this means that I’ll admit to entertaining the fantasies of someone who wants nothing more than to unpack the bags and unbox the books. For two years I have been wanting walls to hang my collection of beloved paintings and photographs on, and a well-equipped kitchen where I can finally learn some of the Indian recipes that I so love when others prepare them for me!
As a writer I know that I require the dynamic, life-changing perspectives that moving from place to place can offer. And yet as a writer I also want a desk and my library close at hand. For now I will attempt to achieve a fine balance of the two, and to do this I have chosen a place that has always been a source of peace and creativity. My family is close by, and for the first time in ten years we can spend time together, even work together, instead of only enjoying short visits throughout the year. My brother Peter is entering his senior year of High School and will soon be off to who knows where. So coming home to Michigan was not only a choice, it was an opportunity.
These days I begin my morning deep in the grasses of my overgrown yard. I make my way slowly to the small patch of vegetables and flowers that we have cultivated, and I take great pleasure in the arrival of mature broccoli heads, crisp lettuce. At the moment, we await the grapes that will soon fall from the overburdened arbors. Other thrills of the landed life have been the unanticipated perennials the last owners must have spent years planting around the homesite. I begin my morning looking at these, perhaps cutting a few blossoms to place around the house. I go into my kitchen-work table, or up to the porch, and I drink my coffee and read to the sounds of birds and insects.
In the years since graduating from high school I have watched dozens of friends move to one or the other of the coasts. I have taken advantage of my well-situated contacts in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere to visit and enjoy these places. I love the hum of activity and the immediacy of emergent thinking and activism that ripples out from these origins in concentric circles. I love the concentration of great minds and artists who milk the intensity of the moment. Daniel, a composer and musician and college friend, rang last week from New York. As usual he is in the thick of things: writing and performing music for some of the best dance companies and choreographers in the city, producing his own CDs, teaching kids at an art school in Harlem; one of his latest works premiered at Carnegie Hall in January. How can I listen to this and not think: “Ah, how I would love to be doing that, too!” Surrounded by other artists and an infinite number of collaborations and venues, Daniel would not think of being anywhere else. But despite my deep love for New York, I’m not sure if I could truly give up the woods, meadows and streams that always put things into perspective for me.
Then from the other coast comes a call from Kyle, who until last fall had been
working for an internet start-up firm. She left when she began suffering repetitive stress syndrome in her hands from typing, though not her own poems or articles as she would like. She has tried numerous physical therapies to treat the injury but is still in pain. For the time being she is a student and resident at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the Carmel Valley. She tells me that when she returned to the Bay area for a visit recently, she ran into a friend who still works for Kyle’s previous employer. When Kyle asked her friend if she was happy, the friend paused and said “Well, I suppose I am, about a third of the time.” She stays in the job because the money is good and the stock options are even better. Stock options!?
This is when I have the surreal sense that I am not a twenty-six year old adult, but rather the eighteen year old who lives paycheck to paycheck, satisfying immediate needs, but otherwise disinterested and naive to the big bad world of financial planning-or any kind of planning, for that matter. Kyle confided that she would rather get by on five dollars a day and have enough time to drink her coffee slowly in the morning, to play her guitar, to write songs, and to read, than to be slaving for any amount of money. I couldn’t agree more.
When people say to me “So, I hear you are settling down” I cringe at the phrase, as it brings to mind the whole suburban-nuclear family-mini van-I’ll travel when I retire-mentality. Then I remind myself of how happy I am, even without the boundless city or the internet economy. I still find myself rebelling against anything that puts me at risk of truly settling down. I’ve already marked my calendar for multiple excursions out of state and beyond, despite our being just three months in our house. But this is the fine balance I speak of: a home as a base, and a schedule that allows me to get away and to be spontaneous when that is where my heart pulls me. The sort of settling that many people choose at approximately my age is not an inevitability, and with this in
mind, I place my faith in a long tradition of making things up as I go, so that whatever is needed in the moment, it can be satisfied.
By now it is no secret that Leelanau offers a quality of life and an aesthetic experience (very close to the same thing in my mind) that is increasingly precious. While teaching in Detroit recently, I was reminded of how pervasive urban sprawl is, and how this has tremendous effects on how people get around (almost exclusively by car), the amount of free time they have (virtually none, since the commute to and from work is so consuming), and where they spend their time (basically indoors, often shopping).
When I finished work or had a day off, I would have liked to go for a long walk, or at the very least be in the fresh summer air somewhere away from asphalt or the interstate. Where does one do such a thing in the land of perpetual shopping malls? More importantly, where do kids play? If they are outdoors, it is among cars and noise; if indoors, my students showed a preference for television and playstations, despite their all being bright and artistically inclined. I know that given the option, many of them would love to be swimming, building forts, or fishing.
Robert and I may be in Nepal this winter, or South America, or by the ocean in one of our favorite campsites. But we will eventually come home to Cedar, and this will be good.