On the first night I arrived in Ohio to stay, G gave me a tour of the house on the river—the former rectory—and all of the demolition work she had done in the month of my absence. A bat soared across the room vanishing into the darkness. 

A few days later I grabbed my work overalls that were hanging on the doorknob in the kitchen of our rental apartment, and the next thing I knew, a bat and I were both shrieking as it fled under the basement door back into the darkness. For a split second I saw its eyes and wondered whose terror was greater. What did it feel like to be him, no doubt calmly resting in the dark folds of denim until a few seconds prior? I saw him as a threat to me, but no doubt the feeling was mutual. A few days after that, the puppy found a dead bat under the tree beside the church. How many bats were trying to reach us and what were they trying to say? 

Being the person I am, I looked up bat spirit animals and found that they are messengers of true seeing, death and the underworld, walking between worlds, seeing in the dark, high sensitivity, major transitions. I learned also that they are gentle creatures. Just as I began to soak up an acceptance of bats, I stopped seeing them. But there is no doubt that this imagery approximates the seven months I have lived here.

Much of this time has been synonymous with letting go and new levels of non-attachment on this parenting ride. Things like G staying out late, for instance, that I found objectionable a number of years ago, now must be revised in light of her working the graveyard shift doing dispatch for the fire department and going out on calls at all hours. I have hit more than one wall of self-doubt, country-doubt, world-doubt. However, slowly but surely, I have been fascinated to observe myself from the outside. As if beyond my own consciousness, I have made a little home for myself in our rental apartment; notably I have invited more color than I ever have before.

Since our rental is one house away from the three properties where we are working, its location has been ideal. All of it is two blocks from the fire station. We park our cars on the river side of the church, and G reverses hers into position to be able to respond to a call most efficiently. There is a lag between the radio tones of an alert and the audio siren on top of the station; her goal is to make it to the station before the siren tells the village of the call. Most of the time she makes it unless she’s not in the village.

Hell hath no fury like G missing a call.

*

The rental’s kitchen windows look out on our property, and if you look carefully, you can see much of the activity of the parking lot. Several times a day I walk the dog around all the buildings: along the bricked sidewalk in front of the rectory that parallels the railroad tracks and river, turning right up the street toward town, turning right again on Main Street, spending some time sniffing the front area of the church, passing the convent, and completing the circle back to what we currently call home.

This is how I keep an eye on all of the windows and doors. I notice if a package is delivered—each carrier has a different idea of where to drop it—and if anything looks askew. Even though the church has been deconsecrated for over five years, it still received a package the other day. G’s new trousers were beside it. 

In the morning I unlock the doors I think we will need for the day, and at night I lock the doors that have functioning locks. 

Most of the time.

This is because sometimes G works late into the night. Sometimes she works and gets a fire call, leaving whatever she is doing mid-breath. She describes liking to leave all of her things just as she departed them, able to slip right back into an interrupted thought upon her return. 

This runs directly counter to my innate desire to put away, close and lock things up. 

As in much these days, I surrender to her point. This is, after all, her studio. 

*

A few days after the storming of the US capitol, someone walked into this studio, shot up, tossed the needle aside, and took off with as many tools as he could manage. He went home and put them on Facebook Marketplace. 

One of the people who works for us saw his post on Facebook and called me. We went on Facebook and saw that he was looking for a ride to a pawn shop. Offering $30 for a driver. Someone else said the guy has survived multiple overdoses and is well known in town. Within the hour, the police apprehended him and collected our tools. Then they—yes, the tools—went into custody. The perpetrator did not, because Covid. Apparently the governor only allows for the arrest of felons. 

I wrote on this day:

“We have lived here for almost six months. Building plans and lives. Making friends and an effort to build a better community. I feel numb. Maybe I feel nothing. Maybe I have lost my ability to feel, like taste and smell that are so attached to the pandemic. I went out and screwed down every piece of OSB, and put a board across one of the doors. Locked and relocked. As if it will make any difference.

I am thinking of bringing my childhood stuffed animals inside the rental. They are in the church among multiple bins and boxes, containers vastly less obvious for translating into a quick hit. My thoughts are not rational. 

No one was hurt. No one was in the building. 

I think we were cased. Someone knew and found us. This morning, a boy under eighteen I am sure, was standing by our garage. It felt off, but I didn’t know why. I wouldn’t know for another hour what had happened. Was he standing watch? He looked at me with wide glassy eyes, like an innocent. 

Like the slightly older boy, during the summer, whom I found snuggled up against the church wall with a light blanket over his shoulders, a Mountain Dew, a cigarette, and his phone, which he had plugged into the live exterior GFCI outlet. 

‘Just charging my phone,’ he said to me, again, with wide glassy eyes. Right. At 6AM. There was something filmic about it. He spoke with such reason and sense, such faith in the normalcy of what he was doing. Charging his phone, at dawn, on someone else’s property.

Who else knows this is a place where you can charge your phone? And with a Portapotty nearby, in decent weather it’s almost a B&B. 

Right now it is cold. You need to steal to be warm.

This will affect me at some point. I am not sure when.”

*

The convent now has a beautiful double-decker deck with views of rooftops and the river from the upstairs; insulation, exterior siding and drywall are all at least 75% complete. The church holds. Mary stands. The river works. Related to the latter, there is a tug and attached contraption that looks like something out of Armageddon. I have learned that it dredges the river so that it can work. There seems to be metaphor everywhere.

It begins to affect me when I see open doors. 

I respond in a way that defies reason. I get shaky. I ask G to please close the doors. She gets angry and does the opposite, taking down the boarded door. Open doors now make me feel infinitely vulnerable. Like an imminent threat. Some deliberate, some accidental. 

One day the convent’s front door was left open. The puppy and I walk by every day, several times a day. How did we miss this? Was it the wind? One day the convent’s side door was left unlocked. This more than one person checks. How did it get missed? One day there were five doors left open: two church doors and three at the big house. I cried, privately, big end-of-the-world, no-one-hears-me tears. 

But nothing had happened. I was responding to nothing, really.

I am trying to understand this place. I am told that we are really safe here. This tool incident was a complete one-off; the intruder has been threatened and will not repeat his foolishness, for it was indeed foolish: putting it on Facebook. Everyone laughs. 

*

I am thinking a lot about how this place got to where it is now. At its peak from the 1850s to the 1920s, the buildings speak to its prime, latent wealth. Presidents stopped here. People often speak of the former proliferation of businesses, even a jewelry store of renown with cabinets of quarter-sawn oak. When we got here, vines lived as much inside this space as out, and the roof had caved in, making it impassable. It was torn down by the town not long ago. At its demise, it was an antique store whose owner passed away, apparently the contents could not be removed safely. 

This feels analogous for the whole village. There are valuables within. People here work hard, and there are many genuinely good people. They look after each other, and they know how to survive. Many work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They once had jobs that paid handsomely until their employers sold out to lower costs overseas. Whole industries have been abandoned, businesses leaving one by one since the 1980s. Someone said his job in oil and gas has been on the chopping block for twenty years. It is easy to see how this community and others around it have been left behind with no replacement strategy. 

Sitting at a distance with purely an academic awareness of these changes, I imagined that our country would do better. As the move away from fossil fuels became an obvious necessity—assuming we wanted to keep the ice caps and the coral reefs, and Miami and the Netherlands and Venice above water—I thought we would have global think tanks and incentives and the whole machine would work toward where we go next. For our mutually assured survival.

I never imagined that the capitalist machine would be a bully, a sore loser, a selfish, self-indulged machine driven by immediate gratification. I thought it would care about 5, 10, 25, 50 year plans. I thought America would grow up. Instead I am starting to see part of what Trump is all about. On the one hand, feeding these greedy, incessantly-demanding capitalist junkies, and on the other, talking to people who are being raped by them and saying “we are all family.” “I hear you.” “I will bring back your jobs. I will bring back coal.” “Opportunity zones.” I really hurt for the members of the family. The junkies are the ones who are taking your jobs away, guys. The junkies are paying for the rallies you are attending so more regulations get removed. Removing regulations will not improve your lives or keep your jobs long-term. It will give you a hit. Enough time to take some things and try to sell them on Facebook. 

*

The bat seems to speak to all of this on a level I didn’t quite see until now. Seen as a threat, despite eating more mosquitoes than we can ever imagine. Seen as bringing rabies when he may be removing zika and other horrids brought about by bug bites. Seen as attacking when he may be tender. 

Nature’s presence here surprises me. This place functions like an industrial setting, while eagles soar over the river. On our morning walk, puppy and I are serenaded by incessant, abundant birdsong. A rabbit makes surprise appearances even in winter. 

People continue to ask us why we moved here, and I have no simple answer. I am realizing that I have now lived many lives in one; I have had many homes in many places and seen many points of view, all within this great country. Today’s is a perspective that feels essential, albeit uncomfortable at times. 

*

As a housewarming present, a friend sent me crocus bulbs. I took the package to a tree near the entrance to the church and planted the little bulbs beneath it. I cannot begin to tell you the delight I felt when I saw them emerge and then blossom. For many days recently, they opened for the sun and closed for the darkness, like some holy sort of ritual. Purple ones popped up in the middle of the patch of grass near our rental. We had been walking over them all winter, unknowingly, and yet they emerged, too. This reminds me of the determination of this village and these people. The ones who have lost 10% or more of their high school class to overdose; the many who have lost children similarly. 

Honoring these little blossoms with each walk, one evening I see two bulbs on the sidewalk a stone’s throw away. I hope it is wildlife that did it. A few days later, I see old plumbing pipes from G’s pile now under the tree, my crocuses beheaded and scattered far and wide. I am told it was children, trying to take an old nest out of the tree.  I am told it was harmless fun, better than other trouble they could be getting into. 

Again, it will take time for me to process what I feel.

*

Somehow this whole experience is being juxtaposed with my own self-reflection, perhaps due to the ongoing social restrictions and perhaps because of my ex patria experience here. As I told a friend, I feel isolated of body and spirit. I see myself differently, and one of the things coming up recently is the idea of boundaries and vulnerabilities. 

It speaks volumes to me that G feels most comfortable leaving the doors open. To me they represent a complete lack of protection and boundary against my most intimate self, the only part of me left to protect. 

I shared in the first blog on Ohio that over the past six years, G has encouraged me to travel far, far outside my comfort zone, most notably two times before. First, when she and I took a van around the country with our dog and cat, and second, when we moved to Crown Heights for the better part of a year, also with our dog and cat. Both experiences were terrifying and transformative for me, and I could not be more proud of them. I said I imagined this move to Ohio would be a third. 

Many people ask me, “what do you want? Where do you want to live right now? What do you want to do with your life?” I look back at the past thirty years and see that my journey was about pursuing X’s dreams for the first ten years, and my full conviction was behind that. For the second and third decades, it was about raising a child; again, my full conviction was behind that, too. I really wanted to be a full-time parent. But aside from moving to the east coast, most of those three questions were answered by the desires or needs of someone else.

The current self-help narrative suggests that this is wrong. I wonder sometimes if my journey is about following other people’s needs, desires or dreams. But then a voice whispers: shouldn’t you feel more appreciated then? If not, shouldn’t you start to make more space for your own vitality? Say “no” more often? Create boundaries to keep yourself from feeling forlorn about it?

I took a boundary quiz recently and got the answer, “push over.” And while I had to laugh, it also hit me between the eyes. I want so much to be my own person. I thought I just would be, by now. I thought my “turn” would manifest without work, just by following the open windows. While I am acknowledging my gross naiveté, I also thought that I would support X’s dreams, and he would support mine. I thought I would raise a child, and she would fly. I didn’t realize I might have to fight to be acknowledged as valued. I never thought that I would be an aircraft carrier. I never dreamed I wouldn’t be seen as the “best wife” for all that I did, or at least the “best mom.” This is its own form of reckoning within myself: accepting that the things I valued may not be the triumphs I assumed they would be. 

Within me, there is a wild sense of awakening and rebalancing happening right now. I am seeing things I don’t want to see both in myself and others, and it is unsettling. For whatever reason, there is resistance everywhere I turn. I feel lost and uncertain but not without grounding. As curious as I am to see how I reveal myself, I have a sense that I will, at some point; for now I need to keep being brave each day, until I do.