26. You, me, and the Sun.
My mother used to love to share her method of teaching a baby how to swim: on a day when the Georgia weather is right and the baby is somewhere between three and six months old—throw her in the deep end of the nearest swimming pool. At first, she will sputter and flail. But soon, she will buoy to the surface; she will gasp, wide-eyed, and then she will swim. After that, the theory goes, she will always take to the water happily, and, for the rest of her days, you won’t have to worry about her when she wanders alone near pools, rivers, lakes and streams.
“Haven't lost one yet!” she liked to joke.
And indeed, her doctrine of sink-or-swim was sound, at least in my case. In my childhood summers I spent more time in the water than out, and swimming strong in open water still gives me the greatest thrill of freedom.
But my son, Jasper, didn’t take to swimming right away. By the time he was four and still clinging to the side of the pool, my mother decided to stage an intervention. That summer—the summer I wrote my book Cake Ladies, the second summer of my separation from Duncan—my life had become a narrow, trembling tight rope over a vast chasm, and I, a drunken acrobat. My mother kept Jasper, sometimes for weeks at a time, so I could work, so I could write, so I could disappear. I was grateful.
That summer, she hired a private swim instructor, the best private swim instructor, who really gets results, to finally get this boy swimming with daily lessons at a neighbor’s pool. When I picked him up on my way back to Asheville from New Orleans or Charleston or Pine Apple, Alabama, he told me, tearfully, how the swim instructor had forced him to swim the length of the pool by threatening to break his arm. I was wrecked.
“Did you tell Mimi?” I asked. “Yes, but she said the teacher didn’t really mean it. But she did really mean it!” he cried. He was terrified. I promised him, profusely: no more swim lessons. He could learn to swim in his own time. I was so sorry this happened to him. This should never have happened to him. I will never let this happen to him again. I was livid, and heartbroken, and so angry at myself for not being there to protect him.
Years later he brought it up to my mother again. “Remember that swim teacher who said she was going to break my arm?”
“Oh Jasper!” she exclaimed, with shock and dismay. “Why in the world didn’t you tell me?!”
Before my maternal grandmother passed away at the age of 99, the women of my family made an annual Mother’s Day trip to Saint Simons Island, to eat seafood, play bridge, and get pedicures. One night out to dinner, my mom, my aunt, my great-aunt, my cousins, my second cousins, and my second cousins once removed all laughed as they recalled a different women’s trip, this one to Florida, where my grandmother had slipped and fallen in the shower and split open the back of her head, and all the hilarious antics they had to go through to keep this information from my notoriously ill-tempered grandfather—enlisting the hairstylist to hide the stitches, staging elaborate choreography to intercept the hospital bills in the mail. What a hoot.
I was confused, and then horrified, and probably at least a little bit tipsy, and before I knew it, words were coming out of my mouth:
“I don’t think that’s funny at all! Why should she have to hide the fact that she got hurt, from her husband of all people? Why do y’all think this is OK, much less funny?”
You could almost hear the needle scratch as everyone swiveled their heads and stared at me, incredulous. My cousin across the table looked at me like I had murdered her dog. The air turned to concrete. Another beat and then someone cleared her throat; a fork scraped against a plate, and a different conversation began. I didn’t go back to Saint Simons after that. Eventually, I didn’t go back to my family at all.
Last week I wrote about rolling my ankle and falling down on my way to work on my first day back from vacation. I described all the indignities in detail, except perhaps the one in which I landed on my side, squarely on top of my fanny pack, which was slung across my shoulder and torso, full of phones and keys and SEPTA cards and badges and whatnot. The pain in my right ribcage was quiet at first, but it got louder and louder, day by day, until, by midweek, I couldn’t turn over in bed, I couldn’t touch the skin over my ribs, I couldn’t hold back tears of pain at work.
On Thursday I took the day off, went to urgent care, and got an x-ray, which revealed that I had, indeed, fractured my rib, the fact of which made me sob: with the relief of knowing there was a reason I had been so distressed and exhausted, yes, but also with sadness for the me who, even after all this “self-care” and this “healing journey” and this “feeling my feelings” doesn’t even know when she’s been walking around with a broken rib for nine days; the me who doesn’t feel that I am allowed to be hurt, who feels that to have an injury is to inconvenience others, possibly even to be in trouble, the me who feels I must push through at all costs. Sink or swim, baby.
Some days after work, in this city where I know mostly no one, I change into my bathing suit, pack a tote bag with a book and a towel and walk by myself for a couple of blocks in my flip flops and wide-brim hat to the bus stop. I ride a mile up the hill to the public pool where Jasper works as a lifeguard, where I swim and read and read and swim as the sun sets over the city and a few elderly women cut steady, quiet strokes across the pool. My son and I ride the bus back home together with plenty of time to make dinner.
These moments fill me with an incredible solace and gratitude, a feeling of being in the right place, at the right time, a feeling of being safe and right-sized, of unlearning grandiosity and cunning and striving, an expansive feeling of peace.
This week Duncan and I will celebrate our 21st wedding anniversary. When Duncan and I got married, I had just turned 26 and we had 230 guests at the wedding: many of our friends, some of Duncan’s parents’ friends and family, and the rest a sprawling who’s who of my parents’ nearest and dearest. My mother expertly orchestrated and executed the whole affair: she even rented out an entire complex of cabins for our friends and installed towers of pizza and kegs of beer. It was grandiose and it was also wonderfully grand: cliché though it may be, I still remember my wedding day as the best, most beautiful, most wonderful day of my life—the food, the dancing, the twinkling lights, the ritual, wearing my grandmother’s 1939 ivory charmeuse silk wedding dress, every person who was there who has since passed away, every friendship since lost to time—the day where all my disparate selves integrated into one single self, the day where all my paths converged.
We chose this poem by the 14th century Persian mystic Hafiz, entitled “I want both of us,” to read at our wedding:
I want both of us
To start talking about this great love
As if you, I and the Sun were all married
And living in a tiny room,
Helping each other to cook,
Do the wash,
Weave and sew,
Care for our beautiful
Animals.
We all leave each morning
To labor on earth’s field.
No one does not lift a great pack.
I want both of us to start singing like two
Traveling minstrels
About this extraordinary existence
We share,
As if
You, I and God were all married
And living in
A tiny
Room.
I think about this poem every day, when I clean the litter box, when I leave for the train before dawn, when I scrape the pots and pans, when I come home to the dog, when I lay my head to sleep. When I remember to be thankful for every simple, mundane, miraculous thing, it feels like this: like a glowing, ineffable, radiant joy at the center of everything.
In a few weeks, Jasper will turn 18. Last week, he got his driver’s license. Duncan sent me a photo from the DMV: Jasper smiling, satisfied, only a small hint of “just take the picture, Dad” on his face. I hearted the picture, and saved it to my camera roll, and instinctively selected the “share” icon, but, then… to whom? Duncan would have already sent it to his parents. There’s only so many pictures of your kid you can text to your friends. I clicked the x and closed out the photo. My circle is so much smaller these days.
Just you, me, and the Sun.
Home
Late Summer Crisp
This weekend, I needed to rid my kitchen of all the accumulated piles of overripe fruit, so, with the help of my sis-in-law and my nephews, I put together a quick late summer fruit crisp.
The filling:
Wash and process (peel, core, chop, etc) the fruit. For us it was:
5-6 overripe nectarines
A clamshell of blackberries
A pint of foraged apples
A pint of foraged pears
A pint of concord grapes (yes grapes! first time baking grapes into a pie/cobbler type thing and I’m not mad about it!)
A pint of strawberries in the freezer leftover from strawberry season
Add:
juice and zest of one lemon
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
The topping:
1 cup all purpose (gluten free, if necessary) flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup oats
2 sticks cold salted butter, cut into pieces
1/2 cup pecans (or almonds, or no nuts at all!)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cardamom
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
Combine all topping ingredients and then use your fingers to pinch the butter into the dry mix until all the butter is combined and there are no pieces of butter larger than a pea remaining. Butter the bottom of a 4-quart casserole dish, then spread the fruit mixture evenly in the dish. Crumble the topping over the fruit, covering the top evenly. Bake at 375 degrees for about 45 minutes. Enjoy!
The Fool
This good and true friend just keeps on showing up. The Fool is so beloved. Look at him, just about to step off the cliff into the unknown, jauntily holding a white flower, little dog at his feet, not a care in the world, living on vibes. The Fool is number 0 of the Tarot, the very beginning of a brand new journey. He represents the jester, the holy fool, the one who finds favor, luck, and ease in life because of his innocence, humility, and purity of heart. The Fool is optimism, potential, freedom, and adventure, the luck and love of trusting in the journey; leap-and-the-net-will-appear. May you find the innocence and purity of heart to take the first step of your next beautiful journey. May you find favor, luck, and ease in all your new adventures.
Home + The World is a weekly newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
Loved this piece! You’re an introspective and creative writer. I’m always taken away when reading your pieces.
Wonderful!